With an important update accompanied by a promotional offer, No Man's Sky is giving itself a second wind in order to find favor in the eyes of its owners and to conquer other hearts. Did he manage to get hold of mine?
I never played No Man's Sky before the NEXT update. Like many, I followed the scandal around the time of its release, but wasn't that surprised. It was obvious that people expected too much from a title that did not have the team or the means of an AAA.
NEXT had to provide substantial content in order to relaunch the machine on the occasion of the second anniversary of NMS. On the program (which you can find in detail on the site):
- A multiplayer mode
- The ability to build bases anywhere, on any planet. In addition, many elements related to this component of the game have been added.
- A third person view.
- The ability to customize your character.
- The possibility of creating your own fleet and sending it on a mission.
- Improvement of resources on several points.
- New missions, improved graphics, scanner, UI, etc etc ...
When I go through the presentation of NEXT, I wonder what the players of No Man's Sky could do before this update. Everything seemed sketchy, limited before that. It should not be easy to find where to put your base and to build it and one had to feel good alone in the universe!
It took me 7 hours to stop completely disliking No Man's Sky, 15 to tell myself that it was actually not that bad and 30 to really enjoy the game. Perseverance paid off, but it's still a lot of hard work. hours of working hard for a game to reveal its potential.
Shortly after the release of NEXT and a small update I decided to go for it. It starts badly: the full windowed screen is farted and the game swears by the QWERTY. Add to that such a long loading time the first time you launch the game and that same loading screen not intuitive at all (Just having an E on the screen to imply "press key to load" while it loads according to the visual indications, NO, THAT'S HELPING ME NOT). Let’s keep calm.
In short, the time that I try the full screen or not and that I reconfigure the keys so that it is playable or almost, I died 3 times and the game crashed 2 times. What a laborious start ...
After my technical setbacks, I manage to embark on the adventure. I wake up on a planet with a big blackout. The scenario helps me to take my marks, guides me in my progress. The harvesting of resources is done using my multi-tool which, as the name suggests, is versatile. It therefore allows me to recover resources but also serves as a weapon. Subsequently, I can add new features to it, improve it to make it more efficient.
After a very basic first tool, this one already imposes more!
The game follows the classic sandbox scheme: harvest - build - improve. The pace is quite slow, you clearly won't stress out while playing NMS, but this little restful side is not to displease.
Another essential element: your ship! Millions of planets are waiting for you. You'll get one pretty quickly, but it's in terrible shape. You have to repair things before you can use them. It is also a component that we will systematically find when we recover a vessel: we must repair!
For this one, there is work ...
Besides, in NMS, there is no question of taking care of food and water. Here the survival side happens through the maintenance of your equipment. You have an oxygen gauge and a "protection" gauge, the one that guarantees you not to fry on an arid planet, not to die bombarded by radiation on a radioactive planet, etc. equipment using specific resources, such as oxygen, sodium, ion batteries, etc. As with the multi-tool, you will be able to improve your exo-suit so that it is more efficient. The only downside is that it takes up space and the inventory is a real challenge in this game.
After a very basic first tool, this one already imposes more!
And it will be for a while. Your only inventory at the beginning will be that of the exosuit. You can expand it as you visit space stations, where you can grab one location per station. What is not specified anywhere is that this location can be put in any part of the inventory. It would have been wise, during our first purchase, to let us know. So I would have a little less messy inventory as shown in my screenshot below. I would have put spaces in Cargaison in order to increase my storage capacity by items (we can make piles of 250 in the "general" part but much more in the "cargo" part ...)
In the end, you have to go through several systems to build up a correct inventory before being tempted by exploring them, at the risk of feeling a lot of frustration.
Never enough room with all these resources!
With the ship, you have additional inventory. The cool thing is that you can get away from your ship a bit, but still use its inventory once you've acquired "Teleport Receiver" technology. The distance for teleporting objects is not great but still practical.
The size of the inventory will depend on the ship. The better it is, the more room you will have. It also depends on the type of ship, as Azashar explained in his guide.
And then, still progressing in the story, I manage to recover a cargo ship. New issue for the inventory, but throughout the journey it will still remain a component to manage.
The freighter will give you access to new content: the missions for the frigates that you have previously enrolled. These can be found all over the place, at different prices. There are several types, like for your ship, which allows them to be specialized in areas such as exploration, trade, etc.
You will have to build a command post per frigate in your freighter to carry out the expeditions. To start the expeditions in question you will need fuel. When they are carried out, they will be able to bring you units, rare materials, goods to sell ... In short, if making money may seem a bit hassle at the beginning, it is subsequently more flexible. help from the frigates.
Purchase of a frigate
List of available missions
I enjoyed this system very much, impatiently waiting to see what an expedition would bring me! Of course, it does not always go as planned: an ambush, an asteroid field can severely damage your fleet, which will then have to be repaired by going to the crashed frigate. Warning ! Once placed on it, you are in space and an unfortunate jump is to sign your death warrant!
Last gameplay point to tackle: the base. Once you have found your planet or if you feel the urge to settle down, you will begin building your base. Here again the game guides you and will lead you to develop it by building terminals for example and by hiring staff. At the same time, you can decorate it a little, furnish it. Everything will depend on the plans you unlock. You can also build multiple bases.
No Man's Sky is not perfect and only needs to improve further to make the first hours of play less compartmentalized and more attractive. Other than that, its leisurely pace is perfect for relaxing and dreaming about what awaits us in space.
We also regret a handling that sulks the keyboard (even more if you are in AZERTY) and patch notes that arrive after the updates which can be very unsettling. When the design of the cargo storage containers was adapted, they were removed so that they could be rebuilt for free so that they appear with their new appearance. I'm not telling you the panic when I thought I had lost all my stock!
The arrival of a major new update, Abyss, gives pride of place to the underwater world. I haven't had the chance to try it yet, giving myself a little NMS break where, in the end, I'm not far from 80 hours of play!
