Originally published September 2016

No Man's Sky. If you haven't been paying attention to the gaming industry in the past couple of years, the words mean very little to you. However, to those who have been paying attention, No Man's Sky evokes endless discussions about the inherent problems with a game leading up to its release in regard to hype, disappointment, and misleading marketing. It's a game that has gotten a lot of attention since its initial reveal and has certainly gotten a lot more lately since its release. However, the type of attention it got pre-release and post-release are pretty much polar opposites of each other. No Man's Sky went from being the most anticipated and promising game to a public pariah in less than a week.

No Man's Sky is a game that was released about a month ago—so this article is obviously well-timed—and has been the center of controversy since then. The whole process leading up to this game's release and the inevitable fallout is pretty similar to plenty of other games, though two big examples immediately come to my mind: Spore and Destiny. For those familiar with all three of the games, you might know where this is going, but for those who somehow stumbled onto this blog and have no idea what No Man's Sky, Spore, or Destiny are, allow me to give some overviews.

In No Man's Sky, you play as a nameless, voiceless character out in the middle of a vast galaxy filled with stars, solar systems, planets, and aliens to discover. You wake up on a foreign planet with a damaged ship that you need to repair so you can, well, move on to the next objective, I guess. You gather the materials you need to craft ship pieces to repair it, refuel your ship, refuel your own life-support systems on the way, and finally leave this first world. After that, the universe is yours to explore! With the whole, seemingly endless universe at your fingertips, what will you do?

This is the question that the developers were often asked and consistently danced around: "What do you do in the game?" Yet, the answer given was rarely ever clear, beyond simply "explore the universe." There were a variety of answers given over the course of the game's development that were often vague or ambiguous. Most of the answers given were proven to be inaccurate or understated once the game finally came out. The "explore the universe" answer, however, was always succinct enough that I more or less knew what the game would entail. Leading up to the game's release, I listened to various game podcasts, like the Giant Bombcast, and my own expectations of No Man's Sky were only further justified by what they saw and knew. However, the rest of the world had a different idea about what No Man's Sky was and it sounded like the game was headed for disastrous disappointment.

No Man's Sky's marketing and the hype around it led many to believe that the game is about exploring a vast universe, with the ability to travel to over a quintillion different planets. From there, one could discover new secrets, new alien species, and ancient civilizations, and fight against space pirates.

The reality of it is No Man's Sky is actually a small game on a massive scale. What I mean is that it has some very basic mechanics and gameplay scenarios, of which you can see the entirety in a short amount of time. It uses the tricks of procedural generation to create the illusion of endless gameplay material and scale. There's actually not a whole lot here to this game. Just watch someone on YouTube play it for about 30 minutes and you'll see all there is to the game. It doesn't take long to notice the patterns at play and the mechanics at work.

So, what do you actually DO in No Man's Sky?

• Fly to a planet

• Scan the flora and fauna and add it to your Pokedex

• Gather materials to continuously fill meters and perpetuate your existence and space-fairing abilities

• Sell items you find through dialogue interactions with aliens that all use the same algorithms and patterns of interaction

• Buy a new ship that is not much better or different than your old one

• Occasionally shoot your space guns at hostiles

• Discover vocabulary words of alien languages you don't need because the interactions use obvious patterns

• Go to another solar system and do it all over again

Keep in mind: I have not played No Man's Sky. I have merely observed its gameplay on various YouTube channels and reviews on gaming websites; these statements are all based on those observations. Typically, when I watch other people play a game, there's often some degree of difference between the experiences for the same game, especially when viewing those experiences at different points in the game's progression. One person will have a particular experience (that may or may not be unique) at the beginning of the game, and the other will have a different experience much later in the game. Usually, when a game progresses, it gives you something of a different experience based on where you are in the game.

In all the videos I've seen of No Man's Sky, the experience is largely the same despite the "uniqueness" of each planet, its flora, and its fauna. The hype and the public interviews with the developers led many people to believe that this was going to be a truly endless experience. The game to end all games: you wouldn't need to play any other games ever again because the content was endless! The harsh reality, however, is that the breadth of the content can be experienced in less than an hour, the only difference is the way everything looks on the surface. The actual depth of No Man's Sky barely goes beyond skin deep.

To help drive my point home, here's a metaphor for the No Man's Sky experience. You drive to a birthday party where there's a piñata of a horse. You don't know anyone at the party, and they don't even speak the same language as you, so you don't know what they're saying, but they hand you a stick and you're allowed to play. You hit the piñata and it explodes to give you enough candy to live off until the next party. After you've taken pictures of all these people you don't know and will never see again, and learned a few words in their language, like "fun," you finally drive off to another piñata party. This time, the piñata is of a bird, the people are of a different ethnicity, and they're speaking a different language you don't understand. Still, you are allowed to hit the piñata and take its treasures while posing for pictures among these new people you don't know. They teach you their word for "fruit," and you leave. At some point you sell some of your candy, eat your candy to sustain yourself, or stop to get fuel for your car. Then you're off again to the next piñata party. The rules of the game never change, you just keep visiting a new party and beating a different piñata over and over again, collecting its rewards to further sustain your journey to the next piñata party. The only things that change are the way the piñatas look, the people, and the locations.

It's a dumb metaphor, I know, but essentially that's all No Man's Sky is. It's just the same crap over and over again with some different cosmetics to change it around. That's the magic of procedural generation in video games! Now, don't get me wrong. I like procedurally generated games. Rogue-likes have been using the tech forever and are built around it completely. Spelunky is a game that uses procedural generation to create new, unique levels every playthrough so that you never see the same map twice. Yet, there are rules and patterns in place that allow you to learn how to succeed in the game, despite the fact that every playthrough is different. However, while Spelunky allows you to explore its familiar and procedurally generated worlds, the main goals are still there to simply beat the game and make it to the end. Spelunky also never exceeded $15 on the console digital stores and Steam, while No Man's Sky is currently a $60 indie game. No Man's Sky barely even has a direction other than telling you to go to the center of the galaxy, where the answers await. Do you know what other game had a similar space experience? Spore.

Come back for part two of this No Man's Sky dissection where I'll discuss how it relates to some other space-game disappointments that have been released within the past decade.

• Part 2

• Part 3

If you enjoy reading my lengthy articles about video games, I recently wrote about stories in video games. You can read the story articles here:

• Part 1

• Part 2

• Part 3

• Part 4

• Part 5