So, I’m trying to stay unspoiled and slowly play through No Man’s Sky at my own pace for the first play through or so. I jump into a new system and start looking at the planets and see one labeled, “Cabled.” And I’m like, “Wat.” I just gotta go look. I’m thinking, “It’s really close to the star, maybe that has to do with it…?”

I swoop down and I instantly get goosebumps. WTF ARE THOSE?! The balls, the war of the world looking walker-ish things. So many ball looking things! I’m instantly getting flash backs to The Matrix and how the surface looked then. ARE THERE PEOPLE IN THOSE BALLS?!

I just fly along the surface, too scared to land. There’s little nodules on the sides of some of those balls, are they lasers? If I land, are they gonna cut my ship to ribbons?

Finally, it cuts over from night to day and I get up the courage to land. I’m terrified that I’m going to like, wake up the planet and the entire thing is going to blast me into smithereens for daring to land on the planet of the balls. However, I land without issue and quickly start scanning the balls. “Inorganic material” and “Plantlife” and I’m like… “Huh. Okay. Well, maybe that’s just a limitation of the game engine. It could still like, wake the giant war-of-the-worlds looking MFs if I poke one.”

Eventually, I do get up the courage to poke one. It’s at this point my relief washes over me as I’m not immediately incinerated. Just a funny looking rock as far as the game is concerned. Okay. Fair enough.

Though, now, in my head I’m inventing lore upon lore about how that world came to be. I still steer clear of it, just because it’s still creepy AF but it’s been a while since a game has triggered my imagination so hard that I legitimately felt fear.

I still wonder… Could that be a Korvax hive world? A world given over completely to computation and memory storage? When I mined that one ball, did I incinerate the stored memories of millions of Korvax? Did I kill digital Korvax babies?!

Sometimes the loneliness the game makes me feel is incredibly wild, I will go from happily exploring and building, to suddenly being hyper aware of how I’m bascially on a life sized planet populated by a bunch of npcs with the intellectual capacity of a tamagotchi. The nearest person probably a billion km away..

Kinda flowing between loving and hating it the feeling. I have found myself many times, just shutting the game down if it feels too intense!

Just want to say that adding the ability to toggle power to your shields/weapons etc.. while basic in comparison to other space Sims. It’s a massive step in the right direction.

I used to play a lot of elite dangerous and this is something I missed from space combat. I often felt like no man’s sky was a glorified version of space invaders where I was battling the equivalent to space gnats. A mediocre distraction at best.

Being able to engage in huge space battles, battle and destoy pirate freighters and have to think about it a bit more while having to tactically assign power to your systems is the first time I’ve seen Hello Games add genuine depth to one of the core systems. It’s a massive step forward for players who want expanded deeper gameplay.

I’m hoping this continues into exploration.. crafting and deeper mechanics for the other systems.