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?!

I think it’s a more immersive experience to go on pilgrimages to different parts of the universe you want to explore, maybe documenting black holes or using documented black holes to travel millions of light years instead (The black holes are like intergalactic snakes and ladders)

I feel like a super instant fast travel method like portals really takes away from No Man’s Sky’s huge universe by making everything only 16 glyphs away. It makes the game feels smaller to me when I use them.

I know many won’t agree (and you’re entitled to that opinion), but it’s something I wanted to start a discussion about.