On the same day that I was thinking of Battlezone as being the exceedingly rare example of a “let’s throw everything in there!” game design that actually ends up working, I was reminded of No Man’s Sky.
It’s just passed its 10th anniversary, and it’s celebrated with yet another free patch. The new one is called Cosmos and promises to have more exploration opportunities in space, instead of just hopping from planet to planet.
For the last several years, No Man’s Sky has baffled me, since they’ve just kept on adding more and more stuff, and it’s all included as a patch on the game I’ve already bought. It’s reminded me of those shops you see along the main street in tourist towns, the ones that are so boutique that you can’t understand how they possibly manage to stay in business, and if you’re at all cynical-minded, you have to conclude that they’re some kind of cheugy money-laundering scheme.
I know nothing about what’s actually going on inside Hello Games, and to be clear I’m not actually accusing them of money-laundering or anything nearly as nefarious. I think it’s just as likely that they’ve sold metric shittons of the game, and it was such a success that they’ve managed to fund it as a decade-long master work. I’ve even got multiple copies, since I bought it for at least one console, on top of my Steam copy.
That doesn’t seem unlikely or naive, either, since that first teaser video for the game made it seem absolutely miraculous. A literally infinite number of planets, with varying biomes, and an infinite number of creatures and plants living on them, of varying sizes and behaviors from skittering insects to dinosaur-sized behemoths. And at any moment, you could hop into your (completely customizable) spaceship, launch into space, and fly to an entirely new planet, or jump to a completely different solar system.
Just the teaser made it seem so ludicrously impossible that they had to be lying. But we bought the game and immediately realized that no, they’d actually pulled it off.
It is a gorgeous game, a 1980s-era science fiction novel cover brought to life. It’s like exploring a combination of your formative science-fiction memories and a prog rock album. You keep finding yourself in the middle of one of the most gorgeous and evocative alien vistas you’ve ever seen, and the fact that it’s mostly procedurally generated drives home the feeling that you really are seeing something that no one else has ever seen before.
The initial release was almost entirely about exploration, but it did have an evocative if somewhat bare-bones level of storytelling and world-building. You were an amnesiac compelled to follow mysterious signals that would take you to some kind of master intelligence at the center of the universe. It all felt perfectly in tone with the overall vibe of the game, an ominous red orb that was calling to you in dreams and speaking to you through ancient artifacts.
There’s an astounding level of artistry in this game. Not just well executed, but so opinionated and specifically evocative, and all intended to work in concert with everything else. And it vibes so much with the feel and tone that I like most in science fiction. It feels nostalgic even as you’re aware that you’re seeing things that nobody has seen before.
It’s also a showcase of the potential of procedural generation, since you can only deliver on a universe of infinite planets with infinite creatures and infinite biomes if you have ingenious ways to remix and recombine pre-generated components to create variety without breaking them. By that measure, it’s a marvel that it manages to feel so artistic and opinionated at all, since it could’ve felt absurdly empty.
But it still does manage to feel strangely empty, because procedural generation is, in my opinion, something of a dead end. At least when it’s made the focus of the experience, instead of an adjunct or something happening in the background.
The reason is that it short-circuits the most basic communication loop between the artist and the audience. Early on, I put a ton of qualifiers onto that, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve extended that to more and more. It’s gone from “in narrative-based video games,” to “video games,” and eventually to “art.” With the only qualifier remaining being the crucial “in my opinion.”
Yesterday, I was motivated to start No Man’s Sky up on the Steam Machine, because it had been a while since I’d played it, and I wanted to check out the new stuff.1I happened to get a ton of near identical screenshots, since the default controller configuration maps the “open inventory” button to the “take screenshot” button, and it took me forever to dig through all the menus to make the inventory actually work. I’d thought that I’d played for a while but fairly quickly lost interest, but I saw that I had five saves already, at various levels of progress. And Steam reported my playtime as being over 110 hours.
So I’m not at all saying that the game isn’t compelling, since it obviously is. And I got sucked in again yesterday, spending almost the entire day just playing No Man’s Sky again, even though the experience felt largely identical to what I’d done before. They’ve streamlined it a lot over the various expansions, and it no longer feels as if you’re spending quite as long in tutorial mode before getting to the good stuff. Which is good and bad, since the moment it opens so many of the world, the tools, and the toys to you is the moment that it loses that sense of progression, that feeling that you’re working towards something intriguing.
These days, there’s a real novelty to being able to lose an entire day to a video game. It feels indulgent. I’m not supposed to be doing this, I could be so much more productive with my time. And No Man’s Sky is perfect for that. There’s just enough of a challenge to make it feel as if you weren’t dropped into a completely open-ended playset, but not so much challenge that you ever feel frustrated enough to rage quit.
But it also still feels empty. Even with whatever expansion it was that added the potential to run into other live players at random. Even with the potential of encountering planets and systems that have already been discovered by other players, which was technically always possible, but seemed mathematically impossible before years’ worth of players exploring everything. And even with more storylines and a few established characters, which are all well-written and thoughtful.
It still feels like the developers giving me a big play set of tools to work with to make my own story, and then mostly leaving me alone. Who am I sharing this with? What’s it for? I expect that the existing storylines have satisfying conclusions, and I just haven’t reached them yet (as far as I recall), but there’s also that feeling of an Elder Scrolls game where I’m overloaded with side quests and have mostly lost interest.
And now, 10 years later, I’ve been presented with all of these options to build elaborate bases, vehicles to travel around on the planet, huge shipping frigates, and even gigantic space stations, but there’s not much sense of it working towards something. It’s all about the act of doing it. Hopping into a cool-looking ATV to go four-wheeling around an exotic alien planet. Where are we headed? Not my problem, man, just be in the moment for once!
I don’t want to come across as too disparaging of the game, since I really do think it’s a design worthy of praise, even if it weren’t something that I’d spent so much time in that it more than justified however little I’ve paid for it. It’s remarkable that it manages to make its vision come through at all. It’s even more remarkable that it’s such a positive vision. There’s combat, but it’s pretty minimal in my experience, and you can almost always avoid it entirely. Instead, it’s a game that’s entirely about exploration and discovery. Your whole game loop is about finding new things, new beings, new places, and figuring out how to coexist with them. You’re rewarded for learning languages and finding more about the societies you encounter. At every step, they could’ve turned this into a more crass and cynical experience for the sake of chasing a stereotypical demographic of video game players, but Hello Games stuck to their guns. Mostly by not sticking to their guns.
But it’s also like another game series that I’ve sunk obscene amounts of time into, which is full of some great art and a real vision for what the experience should be: The Sims series. They are undeniably compelling, and I’d be lying not to include them as some of my favorite games of all time. But the only moments of real connection I feel with anyone else do not come from that promise of “a ghost in the machine” of emergent behavior, but from the bits that do feel hand-crafted and intentional. Otherwise, they’ve given me a fantastic game to explore and become engrossed in, and then told me that they’re not particularly interested in what I choose to do with it. They’ve put me in a room with a bunch of toys and told me to play with myself.
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