Today marks the 10-year anniversary of the launch of Hello Games’ space exploration survival game, No Man’s Sky. On August 9th, 2016 the game landed on the Playstation 4 (with the PC version arriving a few days later). I remember getting home from work that evening, firing up the PS4, and making the online purchase and download of the game I had been anxiously awaiting, but had no idea I would still be playing ten years later. But, here we are, over 5,000 hours in.
And what a ride it’s been.
I became aware of No Man’s Sky early in the summer of 2016, not very long before its release on the PS4. What I saw in previews looked quite compelling: an infinite universe to discover, with planets that could be approached from space, landed upon, explored, and left behind—all seamlessly. It sounded too good to be true…but that’s what the game delivered for me. I was instantly hooked and I became utterly immersed in the No Man’s Sky universe. I quickly began to consider it the best game I had ever played. (* I was not one of the many who were disappointed with the state of the game at launch; I loved the solitude as delivered and still truly miss some aspects of the very early versions.)
As I wrote a few weeks after jumping into the game,
All my life I have dreamed of exactly this in gaming — an interesting, alternate universe, massive in scale, in which I can freely wander and explore at my own pace. That is what No Man’s Sky is to me, and it’s my observation that many others are similarly moved by the game. The fact that the universe is procedurally generated and that even the game’s creators can’t describe everything that’s out there to be encountered adds to the incredible sense of the unexplored, the alien. There is a lovely feeling of solitude to the whole experience of discovering a world, leaving your mark on it, and moving on to the next.
In fact, I was so fond of the game from the start that I soon created what I believe is the only No Man’s Sky blog on the internet: NMSspot: A No Man’s Sky Travellers bLog. (You’re reading it now.) Detailing some of my exploration and discoveries and sharing game news, tips, and techniques along the way has been a lot of fun over the years, and remains so today.
Wanting to have more of a “cockpit” gaming experience than casually playing from the couch afforded me, I pulled the PS4 out of the entertainment center and put it on a desk with a large, curved monitor. That was a good move but, wanting to take things further (higher framerates, adjustable FoV, better visuals, mods as an option), after about three weeks in, I built a gaming PC to better explore the universe. That was another good move. It started out as an i7-6700K + GTX 1080 and has been upgraded over the years as the game grew in complexity and hardware demands steadily increased with consecutive updates, and it is now running a Ryzen 7 7700X + RTX 5080, with a Rift S headset to let me occasionally walk a world in VR.
I play almost entirely on that pretty much dedicated No Man’s Sky PC but, being mainly a Mac user, I also have the Mac version installed on an M2 MacBook Air to play when I travel. It plays the game quite well. I also have NMS on the Nintendo Switch, and still fire it up on the PS4 from time to time, but only to play the initial, unpatched DVD release from 2016 in order to wander a very different universe.
Speaking of No Man’s Sky’s updates, there have been 286 of them since launch. Hello Games has released 54 major updates as well as 232 smaller patch/updates across these ten years. That is a total of 286 updates—and every one has been free. Hello Games has never introduced paid DLC, microtransactions, loot boxes, or any such thing. Over the life of the game, they have been updating it at basically a fever pitch—and always for free, and free, the updates shall remain. This is pretty unheard of in the game industry.
About the recent and massive No Man’s Sky Worlds two-part update that brought dramatic improvements to the rendering of many aspects of the universe as well as an entirely new type of star system that added considerably to the proc-gen variation, Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter said,
Ok, so this kind of came out of nowhere and, what can I say, I think it’s pretty terrific. No Man’s Sky received a massive update this week and it looks like — the argument seems to be from Hello Games — that, it’s like, “Ok we’ve developed this fantastic new rendering technology for our brand new game that’s coming up [Light No Fire] but what we’ve actually done is to kind-of inject it into our old game, and it’s been transformed in the process.”
…and I think what’s fantastic about this particular update is that they didn’t really need to do it. All eyes are on the next game, right? But, they’ve turned what they’ve invested time-wise into this new game into an update for No Man’s Sky — and it’s just phenomenal. I just can’t quite get my head around it. Is this unprecedented?
Besides playing the game and blogging about it, I’ve had a lot of fun in a few other NMS-related ways over the years. I’ve been pretty active from the start over in the NMS Discord, being one of the OGs over there, I guess you could say. I also do a lot of posting on the No Man’s Sky subreddits, Facebook groups, and on Mastodon (@blakespot). I’ve met some truly awesome folks along the way.
I enjoyed taking part in the 2017 Waking Titan ARG and, though I didn’t end up getting an Atlas Pass IV in the mail, I did receive something I would say is much nicer—a signed poster from the Hello Games team along with a note of appreciation, sent to me from across the ocean. It’s my most cherished No Man’s Sky artifact, I think understandably. (Not only was I writing blog posts about my enjoyment of the game, but also actively filing detailed bug reports—and in the early days, there were quite a few—to help as I could.) It’s the king of the fairly sizable pile of NMS merch I’ve collected over the years.
Well, perhaps just after the lovely NMS Father’s Day card my daughter made for me a few years back…
Aside from No Man’s Sky, my other big hobby is retro computing (I run a blog about that too) and, early on, I tied these together in what I felt was an interesting way by creating a slideshow of some of my better screenshots (I believe I’ve taken about 35,000 shots over the years) on the Amiga 1000 computer from 1985, rendered in it’s at-the-time unparalleled 4096-color mode. It seems Hello Games chief Sean Murray also enjoyed the effort, based on a series of tweets he posted in reaction to it.
Beyond this, I’ve appeared on several video game podcasts to talk about No Man’s Sky, including a streamed tour of my Lighthouse base in the NMS Discord player hub—in VR—with VR Spaceman on his NMS Wonders show. Leo Laporte had me on This Week in Tech to discuss my NMS PC build, once upon a time. And, I was lucky enough to get a few nods from Hello Games in a few update pages’ Community Spotlight sections, one for a particularly dark Settlement screenshot shortly after they were added to the game, and another for a second Amiga-related work, this time a piece of original pixel art.
And, about all of those screenshots–in-game photography is one of my main pursuits in No Man’s Sky, so striking are the vistas encountered at every turn. I keep a public gallery of what I consider to be the best among them, ranging back to my first days in the game.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe that ten years have passed since I first stepped into the universe of No Man’s Sky. I would not have guessed way back then that, outside of just a handful of missed days, this is a game I would still be enjoying—and exploring—every day.
Thank you, Hello Games.