Back in 2016, when the hype train was rolling in, I tempered my expectations for No Man’s Sky. Don’t get me wrong, I was super excited and even preordered it so I could play right at release. Unlike the general public, I got exactly what I was expecting and wanted. It just turns out that what I wanted didn’t happen to be all that entertaining. I whiled away some hours and then put it down never to be played again until this week.

That’s when the big multiplayer patch hit. I had been following the development of No Man’s Sky and every time I saw a patch I thought: wow that’s great but still no multiplayer. Those first few days after the initial release I was in a voice chat with a bunch of other friends just talking about what we were seeing as we played. It would have been so much better if we could have played together and now we can!

But the most striking thing I found when I loaded up No Man’s Sky was the third person view. Now this is exciting for a couple reasons. It gives the game a whole new perceptive (sorry I had too). It makes everything feel bigger with your character as a reference point and the world feels that much more huge and lonely. Also, third person view also allows for dress up and dress up is the most important thing after game play.

Now we haven’t gotten to delve that much into multiplayer but the hour or so we spent with it was fun. We decided to play survival mode because we wanted a challenge. Probably not the best idea after coming back to a game after 2 years. What I assume survival does is pick a barren wasteland of a planet, puts you in the middle of it, and says ok bye have fun now.

Our first planet was a frozen tundra of death. Our environmental protection was nothing and we ended up dying over and over again unable to find warmth anywhere. So we decided to try again with a new game. In a cruel twist of fate the game put us on a desert planet which is a cool 126 degrees at night. We survived long enough to find our ship and begin the tutorial, lucky us.

The next hour was spent fumbling around the menus trying to figure out exactly what we were suppose to do. It took us a few lives to figure out how to make charges for our life support and thermal protection. Then we spent a good chunk of time hording those resources because those meters don’t last very long with the current equipment. Once we had enough of that we started chipping away at the tutorial missions. The most harrowing part was trekking 700u away from the safety of our ship to get a analytics scanner in a little abandoned base. We almost didn’t have enough sodium to charge our thermal suit for the journey back. I’ll be glad once we get off this planet and out into space mostly because I’m tired of hearing “Thermal protection falling” over and over again.

We haven’t played around with the building aspect yet but I’m glad it’s been added to the game. One of the downsides of 7 Days to Die was when I was offline my friends couldn’t build in the game. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to work on a base while each other is offline in this game. I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far out of No Man’s Sky after a couple years. While it was fun for a while when it launched there didn’t feel like there was a lot to do. The game seems way more fleshed out these days.