Super Pixels Episode 9 – No Man’s Sky

It’s time for the weekly collaborative article from Super Pixels Radio!

As we often like to do, we at Super Pixels Radio were joined by a friend of ours this week. As you can probably already tell, our main topic of discussion for this episode was No Man’s Sky.

I implore you to go and listen to it yourself, but there’s a short roundup of our stories and some of my own opinions in more detail in this article too.

Stuff and Things (News round-up)
Every week before we dive into the real meat of the episode each of us brings a news story to discuss. Here are this week’s offerings:

Team Ninja are offering players that complete the beta of their latest game, Nioh, free DLC once the game launches. I think this is a particularly interesting move because it’s literally win-win; the developers are giving players more reason to test out their game which means more bug-fixes and player data to utilise, and the players are getting free content for helping Team Ninja out. The rest of the world – take note!

Konami announced a new Metal Gear game in a surprise move at Gamescom. Unsurprisingly, it has not been well-received and fans of the series have been very vocal about their concerns. Metal Gear Survive, as it has been named, is a four-player co-operative game set during the events of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. Except that it features wormholes and hordes of zombies. I know that Metal Gear is known for being a bit kooky but this looks like an obvious cash grab and the outright opposite of what Konami’s plans were regarding the future of the series. Without Kojima at the helm I fear this game will not survive. Heh, geddit? Survive. Because… it’s in the title of the game.

Intel is working on a camera add-on for Virtual Reality headsets to track hand movements in a move that will blend the worlds of VR and AR (augmented reality). Currently, any game that involves hand movements in VR requires a controller or peripheral of some description, but Intel’s plan here is to be able to track real-time hand movements with the use of a camera which will then transfer the movements into whatever game you’re playing. It’s a neat idea and I really hope that VR developers jump onboard with this.

The Main Event – No Man’s Sky
At long last, No Man’s Sky is out. Shortly after its announcement in 2013, Sony (along with the rest of the world) took a lot of interest in this Indie title. Created by a small team of just 11 people, No Man’s Sky boasts maybe the largest game universe in existence. With an impressive 18 quintillion planets (that’s 1.8×1019) to explore, no two players will have the same game experience.

In this week’s episode we compared our first experiences of the game, as well as discussing some of the issues that people have had with the game and our overall impressions thus far.

Personally, No Man’s Sky is everything that I wanted from the game and I will happily play it for a long time to come. I understand people’s gripes with the game but I believe most of these issues have arisen from people’s expectations being set too high and Sony’s huge marketing campaign for what was really quite a niche game.