Well here we are on the cusp of the one year anniversary of the release of No Man’s Sky, a game which I’ve loved right from the get-go. There’s been a huge amount of buzz going on amongst the community due to an ongoing ARG building up to an update which could drop literally any moment now. I’m not going to recap any of that since it’s already been covered in exhaustive detail elsewhere. There are a ton of interesting theories about what will happen next but I’d actually like to look backward at the last year of space exploration.
What pulled me in from the very start and what keeps me coming back to No Man’s Sky is very simple: the freedom to explore and be awed by the places you see. I have three close friends who also bought NMS; one refunded it shortly after launch and the other two lost interest after a short amount of time and no longer play. Then there’s me, a whopping 3,804 screenshots and 408 hours into it as of this writing. And I’m not sure if I can fully articulate why this game has such incredible appeal to me, but I do want to ruminate on it just a bit.
Something about it keeps pulling me back. The zen. The quietness. The open-endedness of it, which seems to confound everyone, is central to why I like it. There’s nothing keeping you anywhere. You can set down and explore a planet very deeply; go discover every species of animal and search the caves, scan all the flora and search for rare resources… OR NOT. At any second you can just say, you know what, this place sucks I’m ghostin’, hop in your spaceship and boom, you’re gone and that whole world is probably never going to be seen by anyone ever again. The weight of that thought does something for me. The thought that the only thing holding you here is you own decision that you want to be here to try to see something awesome.
And see awesome things I have.
I don’t know what’s next and I’m trying not to expect much since expectations ruin everything. But whatever awaits, I have relished the last year of getting lost and tinkering around in the infinite playground at my own pace. Of course it’s hard to say right now, but I do think NMS might go down as one of my all-time top 5 titles that I’ve really been obsessed with. We’ll see if I’m right back here in 2018 saying the same stuff. See you around explorers!
Tags: amusement, Games I Like, musings, my soapbox, No Man's Sky, our incredible universe, video games
