I just researched and it seems that No Man’s Sky offers no rewards for killing other players. I just read that you can’t loot other player’s graves or get loot from their ships.

I just bought the game cause I was really, really hyped. I went to a featured base cause hey, it’s featured and it looks amazing!

I spend all my credits that I got from scrapping a couple A-Class ships I found into 150 navigational data (in order to find more ships to scrap) and a bunch of resources to build a base and upgrade my gear. I had no weapons other than the mining beam, and no shields.

I enter the base.

I see a player. I look at them. I prepare to do the hand waving emote. He kills me before I can do it. Chat says I died due to multi-tool combat.

No biggie, I can just grab my items from my grave.

The player searches for me at spawn. Kills me again. Then skedaddles out of there with their ship.

I grab my second grave. No items. I look for my first grave, the one that’s supposed to have my items in it. Not there. There’s random terrain there now. Did they add terrain in to de-spawn my grave? My entire inventory, gone.

Now I don’t even have 50 ferrite dust to repair my now broken multi-tool.

And according to a Google search, this player gained nothing from this.

Why does No Man’s Sky have PvP against everyone enabled by default without telling the players, with the possibility to lose your entire inventory, even though no one gains anything from it?

It just seems like No Man’s Sky is encouraging spawn-sniping and griefing for annoying-new-player’s sake. This is such a bizarre design decision!

I also play WoW and engage in world PvP, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, and even this game which does reward you from PvP has the following features:

1. Rewards for PvP. PvP isn’t guaranteed to be just in order to anger you.

2. Reward the winner, don’t delete the entire inventory of the loser.

3. PvP is disabled by default, and it’s an opt-in feature because not everyone likes PvP and when you are in PvP your player yells “For the Horde!”/”For the Alliance!” so that you very clearly know when PvP is on. You also get an in-game icon when PvP is on so that you know that hey, you could get attacked at any moment.

4. Since the game was built with PvP in mind, there are certain rules for when and how you can or can’t enable and disable PvP so that you can’t just disable it if you feel like you’re losing.

No Man’s Sky has none of these things, in fact has the opposite, and it just seems like they added PvP just cause, without giving much thought about the actual gameplay aspect and experience of PvP.

Isn’t it bizarre? Opt-out, inventory wipe, non-notified, un-asked for PvP.

As a new player, I shouldn’t have to google how to disable PvP, or whether or not the game has PvP, or whether or not you lose your items, and even worse, I shouldn’t have to discover the answer to these questions without even googling it, because it makes the game less enjoyable.

Imagine an alternate reailty where the original launch went well and all the promised features were in the game on day 1

I can’t shake the feeling that No Man’s Sky would still be a very polarizing game. No Man’s Sky was supposed to be a very lonely experience and everything seemed designed to make it clear to player that they were alone in this massive universe.

People at the time said they wanted the multiplayer that was promised, but when you actually look at what Sean had in mind, I’m really not sure that many would have enjoyed it even if was in the game on day 1

In a 2014 gameinformer interview Sean described a multiplayer that was influenced by the 2012 game Journey. In the same interview he specifically ruled out having players run around on planets together like Destiny and he wanted players to communicate with each other by leaving little messages on planets.

It’s clear that Sean originally wanted a very limited multiplayer that still kept the player feeling isolated and, I dont think a lot of people who preordered the game would have ever been happy with something like that. Base building was also not part of the original plan nor do I think Sean would have felt as much pressure add it had original launch went well. In fact, I don’t even think foundation update would have ever happened had the launch for no man sky been good at the start

The backlash from the original launch of No Man Sky had a profound impact on both Sean Murray and hello games. We cannot overstate the effect that those events had when it came to turning No Man Sky into the game that now is today