![]() The lack of a crosshair just makes it painfully frustrating to accurately pick what you want to tag on the horizon when icons are cluttered together. And targeting icons when using the Analysis Visor, something that was already tough to do in non-VR at times, is nearly impossible in VR. Quick gesture commands in place of hot keys could have helped a lot. UI navigation is mostly intuitive with lots of holographic menus that you point at to make selections, but it gets tedious after a few dozen hours. Other aspects like ship and exocraft controls feel very wonky and floaty in VR at first, taking some real getting used to. ![]() Obviously you can install new technologies on your exosuit and ship to get that sort of gradual advancement, but it’s rarely combat focused. There isn’t a stat-based progression system of any kind, no abilities you unlock, it’s just very basic. You point and shoot your mining beam for rudimentary attacks early on or point and shoot your boltcaster and other weapons you’ll eventually unlock later in the game. For example, combat is about a bare bones as it gets - especially on foot. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s as vast as an ocean and as deep as a puddle, but there are whiffs of that notion throughout. With that ambition though, to let No Man’s Sky offer a bit of everything, is the caveat that none of the individual pieces are as refined or as deep as they could be. The sense of discovery is so ingrained into No Man’s Sky’s DNA that players can rename everything they discover from planets and solar systems to animals and flora. This is basically, “it’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey” boiled down into a video game. While there is a main storyline about aliens, ancient civilizations, and solving mysteries, that’s far from the point of it all. Truth be told No Man’s Sky is a bit like several games jammed together into one package. It’s a connected universe that feels much larger than just a game. It’s the difference between wanting to finish the tutorial so you can get to the real game and wanting to find the necessary resources to keep surviving. Even though I could be considered a VR veteran at this point, it still caught me by surprise just how staggering the sense of scale was or the illusion of presence as I stood on my starting planet, stranded and alone. There is so much to do and see it will likely sour the taste of future experiences. I’m frankly envious of someone that can don a VR headset for the first time and experience a game like this as their introduction to the medium. And seeing it all from inside of a VR headset is a rare kind of escapism I haven’t seen executed this well before. This is a game in which you can explore a vast, massive planet full of unique flora and fauna, go mining, dig caves, explore underwater, terraform, build bases, and uncover ancient relics - then take off and fly to another planet or solar system and do it all over again without ever hitting a loading screen. ![]() The premise alone for No Man’s Sky is almost too good to be true, especially when you add VR support into the mix, and that’s probably why it’s taken over three years post-launch to get to this point. At least, the 1.0 edition of VR as Sean Murray from Hello Games puts it. With this update comes a revamped multiplayer experience, tons of new game mechanics like creature taming and expanded base building, and most importantly, complete VR support. Initially released three years ago, No Man’s Sky has evolved over the years and dramatically improved itself up until now, the Beyond Update, which is officially 2.0 for the non-VR version. You see, No Man’s Sky is built on top of Hello Games’ ambitious procedural generation system that crafts billions of planets across millions of star systems and simulates plants, animals, terrain, alien species, economies, and more throughout the entire universe as a whole. New players always awake on a strange, unfamiliar planet with nothing but a space suit and displaced spaceship awaiting repairs with the guidance to follow an identical set of instructions to get up and running - it’s the same, but different. Every game of No Man’s Sky begins both exactly the same and completely differently for each person.
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