No Man’s Sky – Greetings from the Hilbert Dimension

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 29, 2016

Before its release, I once said that I’d be happy with No Man’s Sky even if all it did was provide me with some cool, inspirational screen-shots that reminded me of vintage sci-fi covers. It did. In spades. In fact, it was pretty easy to get jaded to that style after a while. Since its release, I think I put about 100 hours into it (aside from Rocksmith, I haven’t really had time to play anything else). I got pretty used to it pretty quickly.

Lots of people have expressed hate and fury over unkept promises and overblown hype surrounding the game. I admit, I would like it to be more than it is. I finally “won” the game a couple of weeks ago, making my way to the center of the universe (or galaxy? The game kinda interchanges the two…) the “hard way.” Yay, success, and then I found myself tossed out into the Hilbert Dimension.

I was going to write a final post about the relative emptiness of the feel of the game (which is still probably applicable) and sort of my “last words” on the subject, having apparently put more time into it than most of the army of disappointed gamers. But… this article has been stuck on the shelf for a couple of weeks, and now I hear that a mega-patch has just come out that adds a whole bunch to the game. So… ummmm….. this half-written article has been mostly scrapped. At least I only had to scrap half.

Anyway – so the new patch offers a whole bunch of new stuff to the game, and I won’t be able to check it out until next week. I somehow doubt it’s going to win over the people who felt misled by the hype, because NO GAME EVER could have satisfied the hype. Seriously. Now, I could agree they should have managed it better, and Murray did say some things that turned out to be untrue… an amateur mistake that indies make when they have BIG IDEAS that they honestly expect to see come to fruition that doesn’t survive the harsh realities of schedule and budget. But I feel like gamers let their imaginations run away with them. Maybe I’m just too jaded after decades of playing games with procedural content. They always end up feeling… procedurally generated. Random. Go figure.

Not that I wouldn’t like more. And maybe there’ll be more. After finally “finishing” the game after way more hours than I expected to put into it, I can’t say I’m super-enthusiastic to jump back in and try the different play-modes. Maybe when I get back from my trip (and fix my new GTX 1070 cared, which started getting all stuttery on me a few days before I left).

In the meantime… this article was originally entitled “Final Thoughts from the Hilbert Dimension.” Now… well, maybe not final. Aside from the magenta core, I can’t see anything different from the Hilbert Dimension as from the original Euclid Galaxy. But since I can still take the Atlas shortcut (I deliberately avoided it on my first play-through), maybe things aren’t as final there as I thought.

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