Blaugust 2016 Day 11 No Man's Sky

It was late at night, several hours after the PC of launch of a game I have anticipated for years, No Man's Sky. I had wanted to buy it at launch but started reading reviews to get a feel for any issues that may have occurred, something anyone buying on the first day is aware of. It didn't look good. Steam reviews were mixed , with 51% being negative, lots of complaints of the game not launching or for those that did get in, terrible lag and stuttering even on high end systems. It didn't look good for me and my two year old machine with a GTX 555 graphics card.

I checked Twitter and the feed showed the same picture. Huge amounts of people complaining, warning people against wasting their money. I'd had a similar experience with Total War :Warhammer that took ages to get fixed. To add to that, I noticed a friend was playing on Steam so I hit him up and asked him how it was going. Not good came the response, Had been following all the suggested fixes and despite having a fairly high end machine, couldn't get it to run.

I wished him luck and went to play Diablo 3 as I've been doing the last couple of nights but it wouldn't load. I tried out the Battlefront Star Wars Trial that Origin are offering (first four hours for free, highly recommend it) but after finishing the tutorial, I glanced at my Steam friends list. Now four people playing No Man's Sky. So I buckled. I bought it, downloaded and started it up.

It loaded first time! And not only that, it ran incredibly smoothly. No lag, no hitching and damn, this game is beautiful! and the sound - just amazing. I was hooked and three hours later, at 2am I got my spaceship to fly to big black. I can't wait to get back in tonight. Here's a few screenshots from my first session.

My homeplanet, later renamed Knifesedge Alpha. Stranded with a broken spaceship

View across what is now known as the Knifesedge Badlands

We have liftoff!

A great feeling of achievement when you finally take off

Why does this Space Station AI remind me of Hal 9000?

This post is part of Blaugust 2016, an initiative to Blog throughout August. For more information visit the Tales of the Aggronaut Blog