I’ve spent years trying to get back into No Man’s Sky. Rather, I’ve spent years trying to get into it at all. When it first came out, I casually enjoyed the vast emptiness. Until I became bored by the vast emptiness. Over the years, the game has filled that emptiness with a lot of not emptiness. Huzzah.
But I still struggled. I thought playing on the original PSVR would do it, but I found the graphics muddy and slow and nauseating. I tried it on my PC VR and I found it buggy and messy and less than it was worth to set up properly.
No Man’s Sky has eluded me for years despite being exactly what I want from a game: The capability to do something interesting like building a base on an undiscovered planet - while also giving me the capability to do literally nothing, like walking around and scanning animals on an undiscovered planet. A lot of discovery going on here.
With all that in mind, I recently picked up the PSVR2, which is just an impossibly clunky abbreviation.
So far, I’m enjoying the PSVR2. Unlike the original’s complicated series of boxes and wires and extra power supplies, the PSVR2 works with one cable straight into the console. And thank fucking god the cable is long. The original PSVR’s cables had a “Don’t move or the console gets pulled off the shelf” energy. The screens are better. The eye tracking works. And it’s just comfortable. Except when it hurts my head from being too tight. Whatever.
No Man’s Sky.
I’ve decided to start again. Hopefully, I’ll keep up with this tiny journal of events and actually dig into what apparently is a pretty nice experience for the world.
I’ll also try to do a better job with screenshots in the future.
I woke up on a planet. A green planet. I’ve got no idea how I got to this planet, but a voice in my space suit (no idea where that came from either) tells me that the air is toxic and that my atmospheric filter is running out of energy. Or filter. Or something. The point is - it’s running low! The suit tells me I need to find sodium. I was like, “Na” and the suit was like, “Exactly.”
I reached behind my back and found a small laser gun. Or mining tool. It can be both based on who you’re shooting it at. I’m careful to only aim it at rocks my scanner says contain sodium and not the reptile-meets-goats that are roaming around me. They don’t seem angry I’m there, so let’s not make them angry I’m there.
After fixing my suit, I find a beacon for an abandoned ship. Possibly my ship although - again - I don’t remember anything. I scuttle over to the ship which seems familiar but is also broken down to hell. More repairs. My suit gives me instructions, which I follow. Carbon. Metals. Hydrogen. All things I can get from shooting at rocks and pulling up plants on this strange world.
I struggle with my wrist interface. It’s supposed to come up when I look at my wrist but I get frustrated when the little glowing box closes and opens. It takes me a while to figure out how to hold my hands so I can see things. This will continue to be a problem because I have an essential tremor which makes looking at interfaces connected to my wrists a nightmare. Just a screen shaking all about.
Ship is finally fixed and I get to give it a test ride. Which I’m terrible at because I’m supposed to use my hands to control multiple levers and boosters. My ship tumbles through the sky and naught but a miracle keeps me from crashing straight into the fucking planet like a moron.
Deciding to test things out, I land my ship. Okay, landing is good. I decide to do a little exploring. I have a scanning visor that lets me catalog animals and plants and whatnot and so forth. The visor and the mining gun use the same parts of my hands, so stay tuned for that Chekov’s gun.
While exploring, I came upon another beacon for some abandoned tech. Who doesn’t need tech? I make my way over to the site and find a few floating robotic probes. They’re not very big. In fact, they’re pretty cute. I scan them with my visor. Except I forgot I was actually holding my mining gun and blast the probe. “Shit, I’m sorry!” I scream as the probe turns red and begins firing right back.
And then its friends join. I run. They follow.
I run to my ship, get in the ship, and hit the throttle or rocket or whatever ships have.
Except now, star fighters that are somehow connected to the probe are shooting at me while I’m just trying to get the fuck off the planet. I’ve received a message asking me to go somewhere else, and I’d love to be that somewhere else rather than dead. So I take all my training from movies and try to spin my ship around and take down the drone planes. Or planes flown by people who like drones. I don’t know.
They shoot me down. It’s honestly embarrassing. I’m spinning through the air like a gyro just trying to figure out where these d-bags are while they’re taking shot after shot at my dumb ass. Imagine the most elegant space battle you’ve seen in a movie and then make it the opposite of that.
I crash and have to repair my ship again. At least I get a notification that the probes have given up their pursuit. Most likely because, for all intents and purposes, they killed me once.
After going through the rigmarole of repairing my ship again, I get off that green shit planet as fast as I can and blast towards space. Eventually, I reach the stars. Wow. They’re beautiful. You’ve heard of stars. They’re great stuff.
I could fly into the deep black nothingness. But there’s another beacon on a planet nearby and I feel like I should follow it.