Year in Review 2018 Letter Series: No Man’s Sky-To No Man, Whom I Love

To No Man, Whom I Love,

It was the summer of 2016 when we met. I was fresh out of a week long relaxing stay at a facility for mental health at the insistence of a court order that I’ve been assured just had my best interests at heart. I spent the majority of my stay staring at a Burger King sign just outside my window, dreaming of escaping this prison of sporks and overcooked noodles and indulging in a BK Double Stacker and an Oreo shake.

The day I was released to the world just so happened to be the same day that particular Burger King’s shake machine broke. I got two burgers instead.

As I stared down the barrel of two months of mandated, three day per week, 3 hours per session group therapy, I knew a couple things: I was going to have some free time on my hands—I was still on leave from my tech support job—and I needed a win. I felt like I was going to just fall over and perish without some kind of injection of joy.

I’m not someone who’s ever closely followed video game news. I’ve fallen in and out of paying attention to the industry, but at this time I was firmly on the out. When a trusted friend of mine posted a trailer for an infinitely massive space exploration game, one that had some zillions of distinct worlds, all procedurally generated, I was in. I had 60 bucks, the game had just come out, and early impressions seemed solid, so I walked into a Game Stop and made my transaction.

It was fun. During the first few hours I sunk into the crafting and exploration gameplay loop nicely. The mining was monotonous, but it fed directly into the exploration, which is what I was there for. The survival elements were simple to navigate, and after learning from a couple missteps I found my journeys pretty much devoid of peril. I dipped into what story the game had. It was pretty shallow, mostly told by two or three characters through text boxes with little impact on the world of the game, and as the game reminded you over and over again, it was entirely optional. So I dipped. I zoomed around the galaxy, taking in the sights.

By hour 7 I had been to a few planets and I began to notice patterns, a little annoying, but to be expected. By hour 10 things were getting much more repetitive. I was starting to grow sick of seeing the same weird Sandshrew lookin’ thing on every single planet. The same shell rock formation. The same three plants. The exploration I cherished was turning into sour monotony.

By hour 20 I had discovered black holes and so had completely shirked any exploration or appreciation, and was instead madly dashing towards the center of the galaxy in the hopes that at some point deeper in something would break up the repetition.

It didn’t.

I was pissed. I put the game down and got really into the WWE 2k games for a few months. It was that kind of depression.

The promised update cycle for No Man’s Sky started a few months later. First, the Foundation update hit in November of 2016. Donald John Trump had just been elected to the highest office of the country. I had just moved from Texas to Washington to live in my dream city. On a whim, fearing changes in the fates of same-sex marriage law in the United States, I married my at-the-time fiancé inside of a Taco Bell. Things felt uncertain.

I was ready to let No Man’s Sky into my life again.

The update included base building, which I didn’t care for at all, as well as a few little quality of life improvements, some freighters to store things in, and the introduction of three game modes. Vanilla, Creative (where you have unlimited resources for the base building), and Survival, where the difficulty of the survival elements of the game are ramped up and resources are more rare.

I tried the Survival game mode out. It was fun for a few hours—I started to really feel like I was a lone wanderer out there in a galaxy that didn’t care whether I lived or died again. I had several treks out from the safety of my ship, carefully managing resources to keep my hazard protection and life support systems online. It became a balancing act of resource gathering and avoiding the elements until I made it back, my wit and guile having bested whatever bizarre elements the galaxy would throw at me. That, or I froze to death out in the expansive tundra because I thought I could kill just one more gold deposit before heading back to the ship and I had miscalculated my Zinc supplies. It was fucking thrilling.

Still, the world felt the same. The repetitive building blocks I had grown so weary of hadn’t changed. I felt alive out there in the cold depths of space but the world around me felt completely dead. I felt no desire to venture further into the galaxy, so again I put the game back on the shelf.

The update after that one just added little buggies you could build on your bases and use ‘em to drive around places. The disk stayed in its case.

After that, almost exactly a year after the initial release, came Atlas Rises and it was an absolute overhaul. The crafting was different, the missions were beefed up, new environmental objects like crashed freighters were added to planets, and a completely new single player campaign, with actual characters and an engaging story, was added in. It was like a whole new game built on the skeleton of the old one.

Early on, I found a massive downed ship. Almost everything on it was broken, and when I found it I could barely afford repairs. Even then, it was such a huge upgrade from what I had, I decided to get it just into flying shape and have it be my new chariot around the galaxy. I fell into a fiction with my character. She was a space trucker piloting a massive, rickety ship from star to star to make a living for herself. I dipped in and out out of the stories as my character felt fit. She was a wanderer, and usually the drama of other travelers lost in space was just a bit too much for her. The galaxy seemed glad to have me either way.

I sunk about 40 hours into it before life managed to get in the way. I was working full time again at the beginning of the year and the sprawling nature of the galaxy and the structuring of the missions just meant it was too easy to let whatever thread I was chasing get away from me and lose my investment in the game.

A few months later I was back on medical leave to deal with a nagging issue with my spine. My first cat had just died, my wife had decided to move back to Vancouver to be with her friends and family, and I was left with a lot more time on my hands in a city that had just become a lot lonelier. Then came the next update. Specifically, the NEXT update.

No Man’s Sky NEXT was another overhaul, and this one seemed to have made good on every pie-in-the-sky promise Sean Murray made in the lead-up to No Man’s Sky, the ones that had sunk the game’s reputation on its initial launch. Multiplayer, a once again retooled crafting system, and the ability to play in third person all sucked me right back in. I didn’t even have any friends to play with, but I could customize a character now and the possibility of just bumping into a stranger out of sheer coincidence made traveling an infinite universe all the more attractive. My space trucker had a face now, and even more of a reason to exist.

Since then, No Man’s Sky has pulled me back a few hours at a time infrequently and inconsistently, but I’m amazed every time. I’m not the kind of person who does several hour, several day video game deep dives anymore, I’m just not built like that. The story’s never had much pull over me, but every time I return the universe just seems to get weirder and wilder. The two major updates since NEXT, Abyss and Visions, both expanded the levels of variety on planets, so exploration just keeps getting more rewarding. Even the base building has nabbed my interest. The expanded teleportation system means that having a home base somewhere never means I have to hamstring my exploration to stay accessible, and having a sweet little pad to customize is nice.

So here I sit at the end of 2018. I’m single for the first time in several years. My dream city has soured on me permanently and as I’m typing this I prepare to tuck my tail and run back to my hometown to live with my mother early next year. My therapist would tell me right now is a bad time to fall in love again, particularly with someone who has spent so much time disappointing me. But No Man’s Sky, after all these years I’m finally ready to tell you I love you. I love you, you weird little-huge video game that could. I love your massive universe that manages to feel so rewarding even at the smallest scale. I love my character, a purple Vy’keen hauling her big rig from star to star blasting Ram Jam on Space-Spotify. I love your big, weird cryptic story that I’ve still only teased at the edges of. I love that there’s so much fucking game here that I can do so little in the story and still have spent 80+ hours on you. More than anything else, No Man’s Sky, I love your willingness to learn from your mistakes and improve. It’s the only thing any of us can ever do when we fuck up, and it’s the only way we’re going to get out of this mess.