Well…it’s getting there.

No Man’s Sky recently celebrated its first birthday. And according to the game’s most recent update, there it may just be something worth celebrating. You may recall that last year at this very same time, No Man’s Sky was in the midst of nothing short of a debacle, with players decrying the game as nothing remotely like the game they were readily and repeatedly promised.  It would be months before the game’s negative buzz quietly fizzled away. But even as the fizzling was, well, fizzling, Hello Games had an ace up its sleeve – namely, updates. A quick search reveals that since August 2016, the game has received over a dozen updates, three of which (“Foundation,” “Pathfinder” and the latest “Atlas Rises”) added significantly to the game’s core experience.

While I’ve still not laid hands on the game myself, having preferred to watch other players, I’ve been interested in the game’s evolution nonetheless. Because rather than become a forgotten footnote, Hello Games has done quite a bit of work in keeping players invested. And in a rather miraculous way, No Man’s Sky has gone from being the end of a bad joke to the start of a good conversation. If we can use Steam for a moment as a litmus test, the game’s recent reviews there have been “mostly positive.” That’s quite a switch from the “mostly negative” reviews that held the capture captive for some time. Even just looking online generally, not only are people playing No Man’s Sky again, but they’re saying generally good things about it.

And I had to admit that after seeing this latest update, “Atlas Rises,” the game hardly looks like the things that we loaded onto our PS4 a year ago.

It’s hard for me to quantify the changes, but, the fact is that now, the game looks good. Not that it necessarily looked “bad” before, but the planets look much more lush and inviting. Character interactions seem much more fulfilling, and there seem to be better paths to uncovering the game’s lore. And the new updates, “Atlas Rises” included, appear to build greatly upon the simple notion of giving players things to do, from crafting homes to completing actual missions. Certainly, the game isn’t perfect – slow progression is still a problem, dreadful inventory management remains, and promised in-game multiplayer has yet to be realized – but the fact remains that No Man’s Sky on August 2017 is a far cry from No Man’s Sky of August 2016. And it’s likely that Hello Games isn’t done yet, so who knows that No Man’s Sky of August 2018 will look like!

It’s clear now that Hello Games had a perfect vision of No Man’s Sky a year ago but wasn’t able to truly deliver on it then. With time and effort, the game has evolved into something closer to what everyone was promised, but it still has plenty of road to travel. If you’ve been playing it since day one, what do you think of the game now? If you avoided the game like the plague last year, might it be looking more enticing this year? Let us know in the comments!

(Article source: The Guardian)

Lede image by Flickr user Eric Schweichler (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)