I really enjoy No Man’s Sky. I’ve put in like a thousand hours across all saves, gotten every achievement, yada yada. I am a No Man’s Sky player. I love this game.
And that is why we really need to talk.
As is the case in every relationship, ignoring red flags will only compound the problems. You should face alarming issues and worries head-on, and I have ignored this one until it became a much much worse problem.
I am talking, of course, about combat events. We’ve recently recieved an update to the combat, which I thought could have used a little more depth and complexity, but no biggie. The space combat mechanic was servicable before, it has upgraded to pretty okay, and this is free update number five gazillion. Good on Hello Games and thank you for your continued effort and love for this title.
However…
It did turn some things that mildly annoyed me before into things that threaten to ruin my experience now.
My oldest fun-nemisis in this game, apart from the earliest days of inventory management-and-crafting-hell, is freighter battles.
Every three hours and six jumps or so, you run into a freighter battle. And irrespective of whether this is your first or five millionth freighter battle, you are faced with two choices: Swoop in and rescue the freighter or completely abandon the system you carefully picked from the space map and go somewhere else.
Sure, you can make a little detour to the space station, but that’s about it. Trade posts don’t spawn proper ships, the trade scanner doesn’t even work until you park at the space station, planets disappear from your ship’s little radar screen. The freighter captain will just straight up never stop calling you, ever.
I once scanned for a trade post on the station and reloaded the game there, hoping the freigther would leave me to shop ships in peace until I re-entered space. Instead, it respawned the freighter battle basically on the trade station, close enough to the atmosphere to cause glitches.
The game REALLY wants you to care about the fate of a random freighter every six jumps and it is happy to ruin every other experience until you deal with that, in the one and singluar way the game gives you to deal with that: rescue it.
The problem isn’t that the game throws combat at you when you didn’t expect to fight. I love that there is challenge and a sense of danger in this universe.
The problem is that the freigther is never really in any danger. It’s essentially immortal. It just wants your attention. If you ingore it, it will beg for the attention it seems to think you owe it for the entirety of time itself.
There’s no option for “I don’t care about you bro, I am a pirate myself and I just came to open a mold farm”. There’s not even a busy-button to keep your communicator from beeping. There is only rescuing it.
The ships don’t do damage to the freighter. The freighter doesn’t do damage to the ships. This is a truely orweilian war. You could wait a 1000 years and your phone would still ring, your radar would still be busted, your game would still be annoying, until you rescue it. Even your own squadron and combat frigates and whatever do virtually no damage.
There is no variety in any of these battles, either. It’s never just one ship or a whole horde. Never frigates vs frigates. Nothing interesting ever happens, it’s the exact same fight every time, and the game needs you to go through it, whether this is the first time or the millionth.
And I don’t understand why, either. Why does the game remove the planets from the radar? Why can’t I hang up on the captain and he dies and I lose some repuation points or whatever, or at least mute that annyoing beep? Why isn’t there a timer after which one faction wins? These things aren’t limitations the devs ran into, they are design choices, and they suck.
Now, with the update, you can’t basically two-click every ship with your rocket launcher anymore (which is especially fun since enemy ships still clip into freigther hulls and the RL was the only reliable way to fight them in that case), so actually biting the bullet and doing the combat has become a bigger chore while not making the fight any more interesting or diverse.
They also added more events of this nature.
They removed the ability to escape cargo-scans at a planet’s atmosphere’s border that was 100% reliable, and instead gave me a scan scrambler that seems to fail 40% of the time.
Trade station visits are now ruined by pirate attacks that never go anywhere until I give them attention either, and often float away far enough from the trade station that I have to scan for a new one, anyway, making having saved them useless and annoying.
Defence chits, squadrons, combat frigates, system authorities, the scrambling probe most of the time, all of those are useless remedies that come down to being decoration. And while the rewards from fights have gotten a little bit more interesting, they are still sorta negligible especially towards the end-game.
The update has really made exploring less relaxing and fun for me. I want to suggest some remedies and – if you feel the same way – invite you to join me in voicing these concerns so that the game can become even better.
So here’s what I would like the game to change, for your consideration:
- Freighters need to actually die if you don’t help them.
- There needs to be a “nope, this is a you problem” options to the freighter emergency comm dialog, after which the freighter crew, if not the pirates, leave you alone
- Other game functions like the damn planets on the radar need to return until the player actually makes the choice to join the battle
- Rescuing a freighter when you already have a freighter needs way better rewards, like bulkheads and cargo modules and, I don’t know, stacks of storm chrystals or somethething. Maybe a new frigate, if I have space.
- Let me join the pirates instead
- The cargo scan scrambler needs fuel source instead of being RNG
- My squadron and frigates need to do actual damage to enemy ships
- NPCs need to do actual damage to enemy ships
- If I save a fleet in a system they should come to my rescue in all subsequent fights
- On-planet combat events need to place a marker to where I was when I was so rudely interrupted so I can return after the fight
- Enemy ships need to either do wider circles around the player or have a longer phase until their shield recharges
- Enemy ships need to either stop clipping into big friendly ships or there needs to be an anti-shield homing weapon option
- and just while I’m complaining, let’s let us remove the photon cannon if we have other weapons
I apologize for the length of this post. I have rewritten it to make it shorter, but it still came out at the same length. I guess I ramble.
