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Open world games such as Minecraft or No Man’s Sky are
sometimes overwhelming to those of us who like a little bit of structure in our
lives. After all, we are essentially given not just a blank canvas, but a
blank studio, gallery, and entire world in which to create. The level of
awareness of how big the world or universe is in regards to what your footprint
is could crush your mind. You start out at spawn, and immediately worry
about survival, so you cobble together a shelter or hide out where it’s safe
until you can fully prepare yourself to venture beyond the safety of your
immediate surroundings. As you gain experience and develop more survival
skills, you explore further and further. Your original base is no longer
something you need and you want to look for greener pastures or more advanced
resources. You want to move somewhere that your level of evolvement is
now at the bottom of the scale and you can work your way up to the master of
the domain. Rinse and repeat.
And especially, in a game like No Man’s Sky, you will shed
resources a lot. You will throw away things that seem so important or valuable
all because you need more room for consumables to build and survive. It’s
the equivalent of people who survive a shipwreck on an island with a case of
extremely expensive 100 year old scotch and they use it for fuel because
survival is more important than status or wealth. Many times, and I mean
maaaannnnnnnnyyyy times I have come across worlds, rich in valuable resources
that I would love to plunder, only to jump in, grab a small, totally unrelated
item, and then jump out. I may be tempted to grab a couple of high
quality items if they are close by, but usually inventory space doesn’t allow
for a profitable haul. The game actually forces you to play slow. It
hamstrings your efforts, even though you may be capable of higher functions
with items such as advanced mining lasers or hazmat gloves. And until you
progress far enough into the game, you won’t have access to more storage on
your person, at a base, or in a freighter. Probably the best option at
this point is to acquire a bunch of starships, park them in your freighter, and
use their inventory space to hold multiple stacks of resources you need.
You can always jump back to them and pick up what you need.
But that causes another issue. Travelling. How
many times have you gone somewhere, say in Skyrim, or Minecraft, or No Man’s
Sky and not had what you needed or the inventory space to carry what you came
for? Imagine it, you’ve landed your ship, walked over a mountain towards
an item or location and then realized I am missing something that I need or I
can’t even carry this. So, you have to hopefully have something you can
drop or you spend an hour creating something to recharge your tools or suit,
and then scrapping the rest to make room… A simple walk becomes a two hour
ordeal. And when you don’t have hours to play, it can be frustrating to
make very small moves towards a goal. So there you are, bebopping
around the universe looking for a handful of items because they can’t all be
readily available in the system you start out in. So, off I go to another
system, and another, and the explorer in me is conflicted with the
achiever. I want to search for all the species and all the plants.
I want to discover and catalog all the planets, not just a landing patch on
each one.
In the early days of No Man’s Sky, the idea was that you
could discover planets and creatures and name them, uploading them to the
servers which would retain that information for when the next player, who happens
to warp on by, can see your discovery. It was a multiplayer feature in a
single player instance. It meant “discover all the things” which had me
wondering that if the universe of No Man’s Sky was based on algorithms and is
procedurally generated, how does every player exist in the same space? But, of
course, with the advent of this new type of feature, mapping and discovery,
that meant that he/she gets to the end fastest, gets the spoils of being first
but misses a lot of stuff along the way, something I find annoying about people
who speed run in order to have arbitrary bragging rights.
But I learned to let go. I learned that no system is a
snowflake. For as unique and detailed as each system and all their
planets may be, the one thing I learned in No Man’s Sky and Minecraft is that I
can pick up, go somewhere else and find exactly what I need, albeit after maybe
a wasted day, looking over new planets. The stuff in my inventory can be
valuable but materialism in this game is almost as inconsequential as your own
physical existence in the game. It’s all data. There’s a pattern.
It’s repeatable. It happens once and it happens again. It took me
awhile to leave the worlds I was so accustomed to, so familiar with and enjoy
finding the next place that is somewhat new but somewhat the same. At one
point in my early travels, I gave up on the allure of trying to reach the
destination and worried more about the journey. I spent a lot of time
just hanging out in the third system I traveled to. I hopped all over the place
to max out my ship’s inventory. I maxed out my weapon. I maxed out
my exosuit. I linked all the upgrades. Everything was great… and
then it all changed. And I was reset in a way. Suddenly, all the bragging
rights and inventory and discoveries didn’t matter. I’m now playing
differently.
No Man’s Sky is meant to be enjoyed, experienced, not rushed
to conclusion. And unfortunately, you have competing in game
directives. Follow the path, but explore and build. So, you move
from place to place and keep building, leaving remnants of your existence
scattered about the universe. When in reality, what I want to do is
settle down and explore an area that holds so many possibilities. But I
have to continually put that desire on hold due to a requirement that forces me
to go somewhere else. There is no rooting yourself in the experience
because the ability to do so requires you to leave your immediate area and
after searching countless systems and countless worlds for that perfect paradise
to build and grow, your objective lies somewhere else, like a princess in
another castle. The main issue became tracing back over your steps.
After a few updates my progress was lost, planets changed, bases reverted or
became missing. And for me to travel back along my path trying to find
previous worlds and systems became annoying.
Luckily, the NEXT update somewhat reconciles this
quandary. I can explore any and every world. I can follow the path
as long and as far as I need to, but along the way, I need to leave
breadcrumbs. In every system that has an essential component or seemingly
perfect world, I place a base. Getting enough resources to plop down a
wood shack and a portal isn’t too hard. As I move further and further
along, it just means more names on my transporter list. Even if I don’t
put a portal down, at least I can get back to the space station and fly down to
where my base is located. Then, when I find the perfect place to park, I
can build my final base and connect a portal network to the essential locations
for resources needed to complete base quests. The main annoyance will be
teleportation times but that isn’t as bad as having to physically fly to
different systems.
I don’t have to leave.
