No Man's Sky
Alright, this is me rambling about my first few hours into the game while the experience is still fresh in my mind as well as an assurance that, so far at least, the game is living up to what it advertised.
To anyone just wondering if the game is worth it, I'll skip to that right now. If you like games that are heavily focused on resource hunting/management and crafting and exploration (i.e vanilla minecraft or similar styled survival games) then No Man's sky is right up your alley. If you're the kind of person that prefers a bit more structure or purpose in a game, I reccommend giving no man's sky a pass until the price drops.
All you're in for in No Man's sky is exploring random, pretty looking planets that may or may not have things trying to kill you. That's what I was expecting and what I got so I'm having a good time. Everyone else may want to think twice before rushing out to get it based on hype.
Anyway, on to my actual experience. Gonna put in under spoilers for length.
[spoilers]
I woke up in a crater on some dustball with a busted ship, crates scattered about, and some weird red orb thing. I interact with the red orb and agree to start the tutorial and gather what I can out of the crates to get the materials to repair my mining tool. I then use said mining tool to mine the crap out of everything around me to repair my suit and get started on repairing my ship.
I get over-eager and quickly earn the ire of the local sentinels who proceed to take potshots at me for mining too much. I ended up hiding behind a rock until they lost interest before mining in a more controlled pace. Most of the materials are easy enough to acquire except for an element called heredium which, while not rare, did require me to wander quite a bit before I managed to find a big enough deposit to fix my ships thrusters. The heredium dilemma will come back later in this story
During my travels, I also discovered my first outpost. My sense of wonder turned to disturbance as I find the interior of the outpost covered in some red fungus/mold that kind of reminds me of the stuff from war of the worlds film. I loot everything quickly and head back to the ship. Thinking that whatever made that mold would eventually reveal itself, I immediately take off to the stars and discover that I am part of a solar system with 4 planets. I also discover my planet was a much larger planet's satellite.
I eventually figure out the controls for pulse jumping, the games version of fast travel (not "instant" travel) and head to a nearby space station. The only room available to me was a small bar with a trade kiosk. Additional ships piloted by small reptilian creatures also make their way to the space station. After interacting with the local yokels, I get a signal that tells me to come to the planet closest to the station.
After landing on said planet, I quickly discover the whole place is radioactive and beeline it to the outpost to which I was summoned. The reptilian creature inside hands me the blueprints for a hyperdrive which will allow me to cross star systems instead of just planets. The blueprint says I need more heredium to build it so it means more exploration. I didn't have the gear to take the atmosphere of the planet as it was so I left and went for a different planet.
The 3rd planet was a planet mostly covered in water but had a toxic atmosphere and hostile bug things so no mining there either. I now had 2 options. One was to go to the planet I started on or explore the one undiscovered world I had left. Since my previous 2 adventures had poor results, I decided to play it safe and go with familiar territory and go to my starting world. While it took some doing, I managed to mine the heredium I needed to build my hyperdrive. With the major stuff done, I decide to pay a visit to the last uncharted world in the system before moving on.
This is the punchline to the whole story. All 3 worlds that I had been to so far had useful resources either really spread out or were too dangerous to go exploring. This last world, the larger one my starting planet was orbiting, was chock full of the stuff. They had pillars of heredium just waiting for me to mine the crap out of. If I had just gone here first, I would've cut maybe and hour out of the time it took to build the hyperdrive. anyway, after that, I realized I also needed to get fuel to power my ship to blast off to other stars and it cost quite a pretty penny. So now I'm just sitting and figuring out how to get the fuel I need to make it to the next star system.
To be continued...? Probably not, but I just thought I'd give an example of how the first few minutes CAN go for someone.
[/spoilers]
To anyone just wondering if the game is worth it, I'll skip to that right now. If you like games that are heavily focused on resource hunting/management and crafting and exploration (i.e vanilla minecraft or similar styled survival games) then No Man's sky is right up your alley. If you're the kind of person that prefers a bit more structure or purpose in a game, I reccommend giving no man's sky a pass until the price drops.
All you're in for in No Man's sky is exploring random, pretty looking planets that may or may not have things trying to kill you. That's what I was expecting and what I got so I'm having a good time. Everyone else may want to think twice before rushing out to get it based on hype.
Anyway, on to my actual experience. Gonna put in under spoilers for length.
[spoilers]
I woke up in a crater on some dustball with a busted ship, crates scattered about, and some weird red orb thing. I interact with the red orb and agree to start the tutorial and gather what I can out of the crates to get the materials to repair my mining tool. I then use said mining tool to mine the crap out of everything around me to repair my suit and get started on repairing my ship.
I get over-eager and quickly earn the ire of the local sentinels who proceed to take potshots at me for mining too much. I ended up hiding behind a rock until they lost interest before mining in a more controlled pace. Most of the materials are easy enough to acquire except for an element called heredium which, while not rare, did require me to wander quite a bit before I managed to find a big enough deposit to fix my ships thrusters. The heredium dilemma will come back later in this story
During my travels, I also discovered my first outpost. My sense of wonder turned to disturbance as I find the interior of the outpost covered in some red fungus/mold that kind of reminds me of the stuff from war of the worlds film. I loot everything quickly and head back to the ship. Thinking that whatever made that mold would eventually reveal itself, I immediately take off to the stars and discover that I am part of a solar system with 4 planets. I also discover my planet was a much larger planet's satellite.
I eventually figure out the controls for pulse jumping, the games version of fast travel (not "instant" travel) and head to a nearby space station. The only room available to me was a small bar with a trade kiosk. Additional ships piloted by small reptilian creatures also make their way to the space station. After interacting with the local yokels, I get a signal that tells me to come to the planet closest to the station.
After landing on said planet, I quickly discover the whole place is radioactive and beeline it to the outpost to which I was summoned. The reptilian creature inside hands me the blueprints for a hyperdrive which will allow me to cross star systems instead of just planets. The blueprint says I need more heredium to build it so it means more exploration. I didn't have the gear to take the atmosphere of the planet as it was so I left and went for a different planet.
The 3rd planet was a planet mostly covered in water but had a toxic atmosphere and hostile bug things so no mining there either. I now had 2 options. One was to go to the planet I started on or explore the one undiscovered world I had left. Since my previous 2 adventures had poor results, I decided to play it safe and go with familiar territory and go to my starting world. While it took some doing, I managed to mine the heredium I needed to build my hyperdrive. With the major stuff done, I decide to pay a visit to the last uncharted world in the system before moving on.
This is the punchline to the whole story. All 3 worlds that I had been to so far had useful resources either really spread out or were too dangerous to go exploring. This last world, the larger one my starting planet was orbiting, was chock full of the stuff. They had pillars of heredium just waiting for me to mine the crap out of. If I had just gone here first, I would've cut maybe and hour out of the time it took to build the hyperdrive. anyway, after that, I realized I also needed to get fuel to power my ship to blast off to other stars and it cost quite a pretty penny. So now I'm just sitting and figuring out how to get the fuel I need to make it to the next star system.
To be continued...? Probably not, but I just thought I'd give an example of how the first few minutes CAN go for someone.
[/spoilers]
