8 Things You Need To Know Before Buying No Man's Sky

By Scott Tailford / August 13, 2016

Not since... well, anything in recent memory, has a game torn the general populace clean in half. On the one hand, you've got those of us who watched No Man's Sky's development like a hawk, knowing this was an indie project given wider exposure thanks to Sony's substantial coffers, and feeling a warm glow inside when developer Sean Murray appeared on Colbert to show the game off to more people.

Then there's the flip-side - the fairly wishy-washy explanations of just what constitutes 'multiplayer' in the game; the fact that features have been added only days before launch, and that until a month before release, there were barely any gameplay trailers for it whatsoever.

In fact, the version I bought on day one actually had stickers covering previously-confirmed game details (like multiplayer), denoting they'd been changed/clarified after the boxes were printed.

It's not great, any way you look at it.

What this amounts to is a game resolute in its original, experimental intent, versus what that can mutate into when the eyes of the world start picking it apart. I've sank around 30+ hours into Hello Games' creation so far, and it's time to be brutally honest about whether it's actually for you...

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8. The 'Boredom' Critics Are Talking About? It's Intentional

First it was Jim Sterling firing out the gates with a 5/10 score (ouch!) and now Videogamer have joined an emerging consensus - No Man's Sky's focus on exploration is 'boring' to some, and will be to the vast majority of players, too.

And that's okay - that's almost the point. The aim of No Man's Sky since day one has been to create something that would get across the sensation of just how endless space really is. Speaking to TechnologyReview, developer Sean Murray was spot on when he said, “I know players won’t like to be told that we don’t know what will happen, but that’s what is exciting to us: the game is a vast experiment.”

The game generates 99% of its content from a series of complex mathematical algorithms all constantly firing off one another, and this sensation of going from planet to planet, perhaps not finding anything to really write home about for half an hour or so at a time, is entirely the point.

You may need to visit five 'bad' worlds to find one goldmine, and such is the ethos behind something like archaeology; it's not a field built for quick thrills, but the reward you may or may not get after a hard day's digging through the dirt.