Games: No man's Sky Voyager update.

 

No Man's Sky had another huge update recently. As usual with me, there are a bunch of major improvements I won't really use but they are great additions to the game. Now you can make a ship you can walk around inside and basically have a flying home base. You can also invite other players along with you, not something I am likely to do but what a great thing for those who love online play with friends.

I noticed my graphics were better, it has been a little buggy. My character gets caught inside objects at times and game will open with the screen split into mirrored sides and I have to put the computer to sleep and wake it up to fix that. Overall it's pretty sweet.

Making your own "corvette class" ship is easy enough for the basics but you can get vert creative and some people have already made some incredible ships. I made one and then recently remade it with some tricks I learned. My original ship was massive. So much so I couldn't land it in many places. This new one is easier to land but all the corvette ships are much larger than the standard starships and they can't dock on landing pads or in your freighter, which is a little limiting. You can decorate the inside and set it up as a home base though you won't be able to fit some of the larger machines inside you might use on a planet bound base. 

There is a mutli stages mission with the new updates and they are better with multi-players I would guess. You can leave the spaceship while it's in space and fall to the planet surface or spacewalk. I have not tried either yet but, maybe. 

Game: No Man's Sky made by Hello Games

 

I was given No Man's Sky as a gift (thanks Mike!) after being very curious about it for a long time. One question I had about it was how "combat heavy" it was and most of what I saw about the game seemed to suggest  - a lot of it.  That turns out not to be the whole story. One reason I was given this game is it has a "creative mode" which lets you keep out of multi -player, combat and the ins and outs of trading and building things and lets you just explore and enjoys the created worlds. Totally my kind of thing.

I have learned how to play much better over the last 100 hours of play and really like it! I made a base near a lake and then put an underwater base in that lake that I can travel back and forth to. I did go on a couple "missions" that didn't involve contact with other players and I found them... interesting. I came across an abandoned ship underwater and went on a search for it's crew and I started to look for a lost alien named "Artemus" and  another named "Apollo" related to to finding the first alien but stopped actively pursuing it when I was told I needed to make space in my base and look for technicians etc to continue the search. Maybe someday. I completed... ? The Atlas station mission only to find it can't be completed definitively. 

Since starting a few months ago the game has had 2 huge updates, one for a mission I wasn't interest in and another mission involving collecting fossils. I wasn't interested in the mission group thing but I could still collect fossils, make and display specimens on my base and found that super fun. Hello Games seems pretty motivated to keep the game growing and changing. 

Problems? Sure there are. It can be buggy. Sometimes I sigh in and my character drops from orbit back to the place on the planet he was last. I don't like there doesn't seem to be a way to manually save or that while you collect ships to fly around in you really need to buy a freighter to keep them in. I was hoping to have several launchpads on my home base to pick and choose the ship I wanted but it doesn't work that way. There could be more building options and I think they will get added over time and some of the creatures and places are repetitive even though overall, the scenery is pretty stunning and fun to explore. The space station look amazing but inside they are all alike. I am sure these are from issues stemming from a game that is generated on the fly as you play. It takes a few minutes for the creatures to appear after landing. I also found some of the rooms in my underwater base had fish swimming freeing around in them.

None of this takes away from the game as I play it. maybe if I were interacting with others it would be annoying or hinder game play but it's easy for me to ignore since none of those things will affect my outcomes. If you are looking for multi-player action and combat or running a small village on strange planet, those options are open to you but I can't speak to how well that works or how involved it is. I am happy playing as I do!