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18 Aug 2016 - 5 Nov 2016
After miraculously surviving a crash-landing, you look through the wreckage and find a mysterious red orb. It entices you with an offer: follow the Atlas path to the center of the galaxy, and understand ...
It's impossible to talk about this game without talking about the drama around it. Many have said that the marketing for this game was over the top, that everything was overhyped, that it was billed as the last game you would ever need, fantastic creatures and planets modeled down to a unique periodic table. Everything procedural, in a universe with trillions of stars.
So of course it fell off that pedastal. How could it not? Procedural generation has its limits. Those limits have expanded in recent years, but they are not limitless. Make a trillion worlds with an algorithm, and they will all start to look similar.
But the backlash has been tremendous. The game has an incredibly low score on Metacritic. The overall score on Steam isn't much better. The development team has practically gone into hiding. Supposedly they're working on a patch for the game to add some great new features, but they haven't released a statement about what that entails, and their main spokesperson has been completely silent.
So it goes.
But how's the actual game? It's a good walking simulator. It might have been sold as an exploration and survival game, but both of those elements are fairly muted. You do need to survive, but that can be done easily enough by collecting elements and applying them directly to the suit. You can explore, but the only reason to do that is to get "milestones," aka achievements, which are of marginal utility.
So, basically, the game mostly consists of you collecting various minerals to survive a little longer or go a little farther, and that means walking to various places and left-clicking for a bit.
Put that way, it seems like an incredibly simple game. But there is beauty here. Maybe not the incredible things the marketing department of Hello Games wanted to sell us, but beauty nonetheless. The same joy we can take in walking in the woods can be done here, in the comfort of our own homes. And, as in the woods, sometimes you can be jumped by a creature who would like to eat your face as a delicious snack.
But when I call this game a walking simulator, I think that's mostly accurate. Most of what you do in the game is walk from one point to another. Ostensibly, there's a pointer to the center of the galaxy, but all that will do is take you to another instance, another world for you to walk on. Your objectives are your own to devise, your goals are your own to set.
I did spend a while just coming up with my own goals. Get a ship with the maximum number of slots. Get the maximum number of slots on my exosuit. Create an optimal layout for my multi-tool. Get the milestone for x, then y, then z.
But there's only so much that procedural generation can do. Pretty soon, all the flowers and trees start to look the same. Extreme environments are but a sidenote in the larger journey - and, with mods, the limits of the inventory fall by the wayside.
Ah, the inventory system. I don't understand it, but I can appreciate the design decisions at the same time. Some things just don't stack in your inventory, and that just doesn't make any sense to me. You can carry 250 units of elements, from gold to copper to the heaviest element known to man, but in that same slot you can only carry one trade good. I don't get it. But then, I don't understand a any inventory management system, whether it's in Monkey Island, Diablo, or Elder Scrolls. Why does a sword weigh that much, but currency is weightless? Why does the trade good take up an entire slot? I don't know, and the game doesn't attempt to explain it. It just is.
So I used mods for most of the game, because it makes sense to me. If we have some kind of magical technology that allows us to walk around with 250 units of gold in every slot, then I should be able to compress the trade goods in the same way. Yes, that makes a lot of things very trivial - extreme environments are no match for a full stack of shielding sheets; enemy fire is no match for a fully charged shield; I can carry a million units in trade goods all in one stack. That's OK. It's largely a walking simulator anyway. All this other stuff is just ... stuff. Diversions.
And there should be both more and less of that. There should be more things to do with cash other than try to find more atlas stones (which I only used incorrectly because I didn't know any better). Money is pretty useless, as there's no reason to purchase a ship - just go out and find one that crash-landed, and repair it. Anything else you can buy is incredibly cheap, even at hundreds of thousands per unit. The money just piles up.
But there should be easier ways to find all the species on a planet, which is necessary for one of the milestones. I can walk for miles, but I can hardly ever seem to find the 12th and final species on a world. There should be an easier way, like tagging one of the specimens in the lab gives you either a hint or just credit for finding the last one on your list.
Factions mean little to nothing. It's difficult when starting out, but since almost any action gives you faction points, it's pretty simple to get to a point where you can demand anything of anyone and get it.
There's not enough technology. There are only three levels of any tech, and they're all obtained fairly early. I was in denial for a long time, as I obtained repeat after repeat of all things I had already learned, hoping that there was an advancement somewhere that I had missed. Nope. I had it all.
These are all the diversions in the walking simulator. But I feel the lack because the game has pointed these out to me as something I need. I need better tech, to survive longer in extreme environments. I need to survive longer because I need the special trade goods on that world, so I can sell for money, which I can use .. for what?
The "for what" is the problem that I think a lot of people ran into early, and that I didn't run into for a while. I like the game, I really do. It's relaxing just walking around a world. It can be fun roaming around a hostile world, being attacked at every turn. But in the end, it's somewhere between too large and not large enough.
The scale of the universe is fantastic. When you start out, you are 170,000 light years from the center of the galaxy. That means the galaxy is over twice the size of our own. That's too big.
Over the course of the series (at least until the final episode), I traveled approximately 30,000 light years. That's probably about the right distance. That was about eighty hours of play before I gave up.
If there was a little bit more tech (say twenty more blueprints and ten more recipes), a little more variety in planet type (maybe biomes), and far less actual space to travel, it would have been enough. And really, the distance is already way too much because it repeats anyway. When you get to the center, it starts all over. So why start in a galaxy that's far too large?
Tough call. I enjoyed it, but I can't recommend it, especially considering all of the drama. I had to move on to another game. I might come back to it, and that will be fun in small doses. As long as you realize that the game is a long walk with no real destination, you'll have fun for a while, too. But maybe pick it up during a sale.