Less than three weeks after the adventure exploration survival video game “No Man’s Sky” was officially released on the PlayStation 4 and the PC, it seems to have hit a major wall from most of its gamers and critics.
Some gamers think that “No Man’s Sky” does not seem to have a point, which is why many of them have stopped playing the game after a week or two of playing it.
Some are even asking whether “No Man’s Sky” is actually a game because it does not give players a reason for completing their tasks like upgrading their avatar’s abilities that change the gameplay, or pushing the advancement of the game’s narrative, details Vox.
They add that most games are bound by rules or a defined field of play, but “No Man’s Sky” does not have any of that because it is practically endless. It’s enormous size and scale makes it effectively infinite.
While the game does have available upgrades, they are often inconsequential and are merely slight improved versions of what the gamers already have.
The game does contain a loose narrative that players can pick up if they follow the right path but then it leads them back to the beginning, to the endless loop of crafting and exploring.
A tedious game
The vastness of “No Man’s Sky” is what actually makes it tedious to gamers. But if they make it a point to pause and appreciate its vastness, it can also be transfixing.
The biggest question actually for gamers is what do they do in its big and endless universe. When the game was released on the PlayStation 4 and the PC on August 9, the question still lingered among gamers.
In fact, on the day that it hit the video game retail stores, creator Sean Murray of Hello Games wrote in a blog what do gamers need to do in “No Man’s Sky” which he also honestly answered by saying not much.
“No Man’s Sky” revolves around exploring and crafting, with some trading and combat thrown in the mix for good measure. A gamer starts “No Man’s Sky” with a mining beam, which is the sci-fi equivalent of the pickaxe on “Minecraft.” The tool would allow him to destroy and harvest various resources beginning from basic elements like carbon and zinc to rare and weird stuff like omegon and murrine.
Critics believe that the game lacks the mission structure or well-developed connecting narrative that is normally found on exploration-based video games.
The game’s combat sequence in “No Man’s Sky” is also irritating rather than exciting, coming across distractions from the already brutal crafting grind.
A server bug that wipes discoveries
Meanwhile, one gamer of “No Man’s Sky” who previously reported that the game wipes his discoveries clarified that it is not actually the work of the game but likely a server bug, reports Geek.
The biggest selling point of “No Man’s Sky” to gamers is that they could name solar systems, planets, animals, plants, and regions within various worlds to whatever they wanted.
However, it turned out that such feature is not exactly what was promised as several players are reporting that after two weeks, their discoveries get erased from the game.
One gamer decided to return to the system where he started the game from. After many hours of travel, he finally made it back to where his journey had begun only to discover that all of the planet locations, plants, and animals he named were reset.
He traveled to some of the neighboring star systems and found that all of the names he created were wiped out too. His planet and star system names were still intact, but everything else was wiped out from existence.