I have been playing since 2016 when it came out, but the realization didn’t hit me until today. There’s so much beauty in the game. The universe of this game created itself. Every flora, fauna, behavior of living creatures, the terrain, the cave systems, the oceans, the trees, almost everything if not everything, was generated by an engine. Not even the developers know what everything in NMS is. This is nothing new, of course, but with the added fact that there are 255 galaxies and 18 quintillion worlds in this game still puts me in awe. The people who did the math said it would take about 500 billion+ years to explore every galaxy, star system, planet, anomaly, and space station in the game.

You will never explore all of NMS. Your children will never explore all of NMS, nor your great grandchildren, nor your great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren and so on. If the game manages to live on for thousands of years and years to come (it likely won’t but for argument sake let’s say it does), it will likely still not be fully explored and people who find old bases (As it will likely be easier to find old player bases) from these previous and close following years will be as abandoned and relic like as the already implemented ruins we find on planets that we didn’t build. The visuals are insane. Warping into a new start system and seeing the sun (or suns!) with their glow and shine reflecting off the corners of solar system gets me every time. The faint glow of distant stars and the color of your star system are miraculous to see, even if you have been playing this game for about 6 years.

The music is another thing altogether, sometimes it sounds sad, sometimes it sounds fast and action packed, but for the most part there’s a common theme; loneliness and solitude in a vast universe. The music is the perfect mix between sad, ominous, and nostalgic that perfectly makes you realize: “Damn. I’m alone here in this void.” Of course Hello Games implemented ways to see other players and do missions with them, but just the normal feel of the game still makes you feel lonely. It’s great, and 65daysofstatic couldn’t have done a better job.

No Man’s Sky is not just a space exploration game, it’s an infinite feeling mysterious space exploration flight simulator survival economy trading game, with a great soundtrack, a overarching story that gives you an existential crisis, and a redemption story better than Avatar: The last Airbender.

The title may seem odd at a first glance, so let me explain.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love all the latest updates, and the new features are wonderful, and often include minor Quality-Of-Life (QOL)/Optimization updates of their own.

But I’m talking about an entire update on the same scale as the other new content updates, dedicated to just QOL updates alone. No new content persay, just improving and fixing/optimizing what we already have.

Some examples that come to my mind (I’ll edit this list with more as I think of them):

• Addressing bugs that have been in the game for a long time over several updates that haven’t been addressed yet. (Patchy grass rendering bugs on lush planets, Derelect Freighter teleporter issues, crashing issues with freighters, etc). Especially when it comes to quest bugs.
• Improvements to the user interface on both PC and Consoles.
• Additional options for PC players to remap hotkeys
• Rebalancing certain economic parts of the game to account for all the newest features added in over the past several content updates.
• Additional helpful features for the discoveries tab, such as a built-in search option to search and sort by name, system type, discovery date, system contents, etc.

Things like that. Things all about improving the things already in the game itself, while also creating a stronger foundation for future updates. A QOL/Optimization update would highly benefit long-term and frequent players. It’s especially important so that smaller bugs don’t add up over a long period of frequent content updates.

So yeah, Hello Games, if you’re reading this, I’d personally love an update like this where the focus is 100% on polishing everything released so far, and addressing minor issues and minor bugs that have been around for a while now. Minor bugs like these have been adding up, and will only cause potential problems for future updates with new content, so let’s (Gek)nip them in the bud, and the sooner the better. 🙂

This is just my two cents though. What do you guys think? Would you like to see a pure QOL/Optimization update like this?