No Man’s Sky, developed by Hello Games, released in August of 2016 is a survival game that can be compared to Ready Player One.

When you first boot up the game, you fly though the stars for a while before spawning into an empty planet in an unknown system. 

Players slowly explore the planet, collecting the materials to repair one’s suit and ship in order to leave the planet. You start on a base planet in which you obviously crash landed. Starting off easy, the game has you simply run around collecting nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon-rich plants to repair your armor, so you can survive on the planet. With dust storms and high temperature it’s a dangerous planet to be on. As you go on the game gets far more complicated, dangerous and violent, with plants that fight back. Most players found this slightly confusing tutorial too hard and called it quits.  

The issue with quitting before finishing the tutorial is that it is impossible to see the true outreach and opportunities of the game. Once you repair your armor and start to repair your ship, you have the option to go through with a story or you can ignore it and leave the planet. Once you do, the possibilities are endless. 

The planet you land on is filled with weird plants and animals that will yield  different materials when you kill or harvest them. When exploring the plant most animals and plants are friendly, some will become angry if you get too close. The difficulty in defeating these  A large variety of different plants and animals can get confusing, so the game provides you with a scanner, where you can scan and document the different species and plants encountered in your journey. The starting planet can be explored, but many look to the sky instead. 

To fly to the stars and back is possible in this amazing masterpiece of coding; there are 18 quintillion worlds people can visit. The purpose of the game isn’t to finish it, it’s to explore. 

After its release, it was clear the game had amazing potential, but it also contained a lot of bugs. An open world RPG wasn’t new by any means to gamers. Many open world games have quests or side stories. Games like Red Dead Redemption and Destiny have these types of gameplay, where you can choose to follow the lore or simply play different game modes. 

The biggest difference between these games is size. No Man’s Sky is huge and the possibilities are endless, and, it gives the player a chance to truly feel like a pioneer.  It doesn’t have a finite end, like Minecraft–it is simply endless. No Man’s Sky has different planets and space stations where you can buy and sell things you harvest and have found on different planets. With such an amazing game, what’s the issue?

The idea of the game is phenomenal, but fans found it either too difficult or too boring, considering that moving from planet to planet takes time, and its actual time. Depending on where you’re going, it could take a few seconds, or a few hours. The ship is equipped with rocket boosters which helps cut down time but you still have to navigate asteroid fields and keep a sense of up and down in order to get to where you want to go. There were some bugs that caused lag, but it was a magnificently-coded game. The user interface itself was confusing at first, as almost all games in this genre are. 

No Man’s Sky is a game for those who like to explore and to create and find new things. It is the infinite possibilities of space without having to leave your bedroom. An unforgettable amazing game, No Man’s Sky is the game for the generation born too early to explore space, and too late to explore the world, and as a game, truly, for a generation of dreamers and explorers.