The squad and I found ourselves playing No Man’s Sky this weekend. I’ve owned this game for a while on PC and even longer on PS4 but this is the first time I’ve played it with other people.
Previous attempts were made. Blades and I played the multiplayer once on PS4 when it first came out. I’ve owned the game on PC for a couple years now and the rest of the squad have acquired through Steam sales since then.
Last weekend we decided to give it a go. I had a character that was an hour in and had done a bit the tutorial already. The rest of the squad were at various points in their own saves. CC had been playing more than the rest of us and was out of the tutorial. Supertoast had a save that was in somewhat the same tutorial step as me. Blades had just purchased the game and was starting fresh.
Our session last weekend was all us figuring out how to play the game again. What controls do what, how do you scan, how do you access the menu, that sort of thing. No Man’s Sky is a console game that happens to have ended up on PC. This is apparent in the UI where there are menus that are meant for a controller and end up being awkward on a mouse and keyboard. The quick access menus were a particular offender. Pressing x brings up the menu, you scroll through with q and e, or the scroll wheel, press x to open the sub menu, press x again to do the thing. It’s going to take some getting used to.
But as awkward as the on ground controls can be sometimes; the flight controls are even worse. I’ll admit, I’ve been spoiled by my many hours in Elite: Dangerous with my HOTAS setup. I cannot stand the keyboard and mouse flight controls in No Man’s Sky. I feels like flying a spaceship through sludge. Thankfully, this is fixed by plugging in a controller.
As a side note, I’ve tried flying with my HOTAS set up in NMS and I can confidently say Elite has ruined that for me. It’s no where near as good.
This weekend’s adventures were more about getting everyone to the same point in the game. SuperToast and I were able to get caught up to each other since we were a mission or two out of sync. We’re both sitting on the mission to go to another star system. But we have to wait for Blades to get caught up to us.
I forgot how tedious the begging tutorial is. You start with nothing and have to make all your gear. Then once you do that you have to fix your ship, learn how to build a base, and a whole bunch of other stuff that prevents you from just playing the game. As far as I can tell, there’s not a great way to skip it but you can help another player through it by giving them the materials they need.
Blades set out to work on the tutorial while the rest of us went our separate ways in our Star System. What I quickly realized last night was four people can play NMS together without actually doing anything together. It’s a different multiplayer experience than I’m used to where everyone needs to be on the same page and to get anything done you have to work together. Not so in No Man’s Sky it would seem.
At least this is true on this first starting planet. As we get farther in to the game I’m sure there will be more for chances for us to work together.
For my own little adventure, I set out to find as many natural burial sites as I could while we were playing. These contain ancient bones which sell for a pretty penny at the galactic trade terminal. The price range anywhere from 60k to 700k depending on how old they were and the rarity. I started out the night with very little money to my name and ended the night with just over 5 million credits.
I manged to buy a ship with 4 extra storage slots for 660k. All the other ships with massive upgrades and storage had equally massive price tags. And here I thought I could afford most things with my 5 mil. Apparently, I’m not even close.
Many Welps 