Every Man's Sky

Alright, a whole lot of people have been talking during the last year or two about how No Man's Sky has actually turned into a great game now, as opposed to what it was at launch.

And I'll be damned if it hasn't actually done that.

Hell, it might've turned into my favourite game at the moment.

Let's back it up a little, though. In 2016, a company called Hello Games released a sci-fi survival game called No Man's Sky to great fanfare. That is, they provided the fanfare all by themselves, because the game was...nothing. It was basically interplanetary Minecraft with all the charm and flexibility carved out with a screwdriver and set on fire. Quality, however, wasn't the big problem.

Lies were. As mentioned, the developers hyped the game to the sky(No Man's Sky, presumably). Most famously, head of Hello Games, Sean Murray, did a long interview prior to release where he lied about some features that proved not to be in the game, and misled the public about others.

In spite of this, I bought the game, knowing its limitations. Fact of the matter is that I've got a soft spot for those types of games. So I played it for a good while. And it...sort of trickled down the drain. I like the game less and less as time went on, and there came a point where the game seemed completely and utterly devoid of quality. So I stopped playing.

Maybe I ought to note that I played the game in between sessions of ECT. No, I don't agree that getting electricity sent straight into your brain multiple times can have any impact whatsoever on one's enjoyment of a video game. So shut up!

Time went on, and now and then I heard murmurs about how the developers were intent on improving the game. I didn't put much stock in those rumours, to be frank. They couldn't release a good game from the start, what made people think Hello Games would be able to piece one together afterwards?

I think my attitude there was unfair. Most of the time, if developers release a shit game they just hunker down, pretend it's good, and maybe sue some people to push the blame over to them. Hello Games, meanwhile, decided to man up and make the game something that matched what the players expected.

Part of it, I can admit plainly now, was that I disliked them because they lied and released a crap game. And when I dislike someone for what they've done, my automatic instinct is to keep holding that against them. Unless they actually make amends, which is what Hello Games did.

In the end, I kept hearing so much talk about how great the game was now and how the developers had really pulled the game out of the gutter. So I decided to try it again.

This time, it was not the same game anymore. There were NPCs to interact with, interaction with other players, storylines, it just goes on and on. What impressed me the most, though, was that now the game had direction. You were taught things in quests, you developed your character with help from the game itself, it just flowed. It's still huge and completely free to explore, but now they've added the pieces that were missing.

Also, you can get a mech suit.