Intermezzo: The Summer of No Man's Sky
Well, this was unexpected. I never thought I would be writing two posts about a game I only dabble in, which is to say No Man's Sky. Back on July 28, I wrote a piece about how NMS was getting me to appreciate the less loathsome aspects of summer, the worst season of all. Now, as I sit on the precipice of Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer in America, I am once again compelled to write a piece, but this time about Hello Games' recent update, Voyagers —a content drop that is blowing up the internet as I write this.
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Voyagers is not the largest update Hello Games has ever released, but it might be the most consequential since base building was added to the game oh so long ago. Voyagers arrived with what is often considered the mic-drop of space games: incorporating spaceship interiors into the game for a maximum of immersion. In a game that long had spaceships only interactable from the face-forward perspective of a cockpit, no one suspected that Hello Games was quietly working on an update to radically expand on that limited vision (pun intended). Take a look:
If you are not a space game aficionado, you might wonder why the implementation of ship interiors is such a big deal that the player count on Steam, the preferred game store for PC gamers, has exploded to 93,195 peak players, an astounding figure for a nine-year-old game, and a figure that doesn't account for Xbox or PlayStation players.
I wish I had an answer! But I don't, at least, anything intellectually justifiable. It is just something space gamers crave, much as motor-heads crave chromed carburetors for reasons that never make sense to me, either.
Be that as it may, Hello Games has done a fantastic job with this update. It is a typical passion move by Hello Games, an addition to their magnum opus that isn't phoned-in, but is implemented with an eye for quality and detail. I mean, just look at this screenshot of my trial-and-error corvette build that I threw together in mere minutes. This ship has a staggering amount of detail, and I have just begun to create it!
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| It might be small but its mine! |
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| Cozy! |
Is it any wonder that Voyagers is proving to be such a hit? Hello Games delivered not just a new class of scratch-built ships, but also fully customizable ship interiors. And I haven't even mentioned the expanded gameplay this brings, such as the ability to do EVAs as well as skydiving over alien worlds!
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Back in February of 2020(!), I wrote a piece called Have Spacesuit - Will Travel. It was a post about how my favorite space game, Elite: Dangerous, was in serious jeopardy of losing its lead in the gaming space race to No Man's Sky. Well, I hate to say it, but with the Voyagers update, this prediction has now come to pass. I know this is the case because I perused the Elite: Dangerous reddit only to see many ED players showing their NMS corvette builds that were reproductions of ships found in Elite! When your most devoted fans are bringing their passion for Elite into a rival game, well, that has got to sting Frontier, Elite's developer and publisher.
Like many of the problems with Elite: Dangerous, this latest blow was largely self-inflicted as Frontier surrendered the spaceship interiors high ground years ago when they condescendingly told a community clamoring for ship interiors that they might think they wanted ship interiors, but they really didn't(!). Don't you love it when a company takes the "the customer is always wrong" approach? It was such a profoundly silly and shortsighted thing to say that I was not surprised to see the company teeter on the precipice of bankruptcy just a few short years later.
Well, as with much of Frontier's passive-aggressive design philosophy for Elite, this ill-considered decision has come home to roost in a very BIG way, so much so that even loyal Elite "commanders" are returning to NMS and leaving Elite, at least temporarily, behind.
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| My corvette comes in for a landing as my crab-friend photobombs the shot |
I don't mean to bash on Elite, and Frontier's long history of addle-brained decisions (albeit, under its new CEO, things have begun to improve in a commonsensical fashion). Rather, I just want to crow that I predicted this half a decade ago. 😁
Truth is, Elite and NMS are two very different interpretations of the life in space fantasy, one being grounded in realism (Elite Dangerous), the other being a surreal space-themed adventure (No Man's Sky), with the success of one not being directly detrimental to the longevity of the other as a result. It is telling that last evening I found myself enjoying Elite after playing NMS. Both are so distinct that there is little crossover in the Venn diagram.
Nonetheless, this tremendous surge in popularity for NMS with the addition of ship interiors must sting the Elite team. They could have added ship interiors years ago. Indeed, you could argue that the (botched) arrival of the Odyssey expansion primed the game for ship interiors with the arrival of "space legs." Instead, we got the preposterous suggestion that the community's long-standing desire for ship interiors was misguided, and that having to move through your ship repeatedly would get boring and annoying. (Apparently, forcing the player to repeatedly walk through a hangar, into an elevator, and through a station concourse just to take an Odyssey mission was thrilling gameplay for the Frontier braintrust.) The popularity of the NMS Voyagers update would seem to disprove that.
One could write a book about Frontier's missed opportunities over the years.
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| Sleek! |
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A new Steam player count for No Man's Sky has just been reached: 97,986 players online at once. The fame of the Voyagers update is growing. Here, I think it is important to point out something: this growth in popularity may be triggered by the recent update, but that is not the only reason. As someone who is an occasional NMS player, I can attest that every time I return to the game, I am stunned by the tremendous breadth of content that has been added over its near decade of existence: base building, freighters, archeology, cooking, pets, expeditions, settlements, ocean explorations, and so much more. You might jump into NMS because of the recent update, but you stay because of the firehose of content that greets you. NMS is, frankly, an embarrassment to much larger teams and their projects (I'm not just looking at Elite Dangerous but also Starfield). It is a true space adventure that provides a nearly limitless sandbox to play in.
With that in mind, I am curious where Hello Games next take NMS next. Sean Murray, the mad genius behind the meteoric rise of a once-tiny studio that was only known for publishing an obscure motorcycle stunt game known as Joe Danger, has recently remarked on how the arrival of ship interiors opens new gameplay avenues for the title. I couldn't agree more. In fact, if I were to criticize Voyagers, it would be to express my frustration about how the new corvettes feel like they are being underutilized in their current form. In other words, NMS is already replete with spaceships, just of a small, single-seater variety. Right now, corvettes aren't performing any function, outside of multicrewing, that the smaller ships can perform. This seems like a waste of gameplay potential for this new ship class, though one that Hello Games will no doubt address with future updates, if past experience is any indication. Be that as it may, I have no doubt that Voyagers will not be the last overflowing cup from Hello Games.
Whatever bright future awaits NMS, the release of the Voyagers update proves one thing: spaceship interiors are no longer an optional feature of space-themed games. As the exploding player numbers of NMS prove, ship interiors are now a requirement if a space game is going to be perennially popular with its targeted audience. This pixelated Rubicon has been crossed, and there is no going back.
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I recently came across a perceptive article, entitled The Desktop PC Is Close to Its End, by Sydney Butler. It is a piece well worth reading. Currently, my fellow PC gaming enthusiasts, colloquially known as the "PC Master Race", have been celebrating the news that the era of consoles and console-exclusive titles is coming to an end. The great gaming hardware race just isn't paying the dividends it once did for Microsoft and Sony (albeit, Nintendo is putting that theory to the test with its uber-popular Switch 2). However, what my fellow PC gamers fail to appreciate in this moment of PC gaming supremacy is that the same forces at work in killing console hardware are also coming for PCs. In an era of high-speed internet and cloud computing, very few people need a big box of expensive hardware sitting on their desk. This revolution, which has already transformed the PC as a workstation, is now eating away at the gaming side of things as cloud gaming services, such as GeForce Now and Luna, make owning a liquid-cooled box of tech for demanding PC games unnecessary. As Butler writes:
Games are generally designed for these [PC] platforms, and it seems we've hit a point of diminishing returns with graphics for most players. Cloud gaming is also on the rise, which can give people access to high-end PC hardware on-demand. These are all different factors that together exert a downward pressure on the demand for desktop PCs, even for gamers.
And I can prove it:
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| My refit corvette is parked outside of my adopted settlement with its new cooling tower |
I captured that screenshot while playing No Man’s Sky on a seven-year-old Chromebook, powered by nothing more than home Wi-Fi and GeForce Now. No hulking tower, no bleeding-edge GPU—just a cloud rig that, soon enough, will be running an RTX 5080. Meanwhile, my desktop PC is still chugging along with an RTX 3060 (the last, true bang-for-your-buck video card made by nVidia), now two generations behind. But why upgrade when the cloud already outruns my hardware? More to the point—how could I upgrade when the MSRP for a top-tier RTX 5080 GPU hovers around $999? This isn’t just a personal dilemma; it’s a flashing warning light for the future of PC gaming.
As Mr. Butler says:
I don't think the desktop tower computer will be gone tomorrow, but we're already at the point where they just aren't the best choice for the vast majority of people. As time goes by the list of reasons to own and operate a desktop tower will grow shorter and shorter, until it's just the hardcore among us keeping the desktop dream alive.
This is why I am convinced that just as video-on-demand killed DVD players, cloud gaming will kill local gaming hardware; the benefits simply far outweigh the negatives. Frankly, I have found it quite liberating. After a lifetime of being tethered to expensive RAM, GPUs, and CPUs, I can finally offload those concerns to someone else and just enjoy my games almost anywhere and on almost anything...Remember that 1979 hit, Video Killed the Radio Star? Well, don't look now, but cloud gaming might soon get a song of its own in the not-too-distant future as this technology is poised to shake up a hobby that has been technologically stagnant for far too long.
In a way, the Voyagers update and the rise of cloud gaming are two sides of the same cosmic coin: both represent a quiet revolution in how we experience digital worlds. One expands the depth of immersion—inviting us to walk the corridors of our ships, customize their interiors, and feel truly inside the adventure. The other expands the reach of that immersion—liberating us from hardware constraints and letting us explore galaxies from devices that were never meant to hold the stars. Together, they signal a future where the boundaries between player, platform, and play dissolve, and where the only real limit is imagination. Whether you’re building corvettes on a Chromebook or skydiving over alien worlds from a cloud server, the message is clear: the frontier isn’t just out there—it’s already here.
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