10 Things We Want Added to No Man's Sky

After several years of somewhat muddled marketing campaigns and runaway hype generation, No Man’s Sky is here, complete with all its flawed ambition. It’s not a bad game--we gave it a decent review--but it does have a number of contradictory mechanics and nonexistent capabilities that arguably should have been in there on day one.

After spending some time with it, we’ve created a list of things we’d love to see implemented, either in the future or in a potential sequel. Have any wishes of your own? We want to hear them!

Warp to Ship Exosuit Upgrade

This seems like a foregone conclusion. With No Man’s Sky’s heavy emphasis on exploring your surroundings and gathering resources, you’re likely to wander far in search of the next Heridium or Plutonium deposits. And then, just as you attempt to craft a Bypass Chip to access a bit of tech, all of a sudden you realize you need an item from your ship’s inventory, but the ship is too far away.

This usually means you get to trudge all the way back, going over your previous steps and re-treading the same path to get close enough to snag a bit of whatever element you may need. It’s tedious and unnecessary, all easily resolved by tethering a character to a ship and making it easy for them to quickly warp back to the ship for quick inventory management or sped-up ways off-planet.

Populated Planets

Once you’ve seen about ten to twenty planets, you’ve more or less seen all the digital Lego pieces No Man’s Sky is built out of. It usually includes rocks, rock formations, some flora, some fauna, and some variations on water, weather, temperature, and radiation.

The question eventually becomes “How will this be different from the last one?” rather than “I wonder what new, exciting thing I can explore here?” And easy way to remedy this would be to add populations to the universe-constructing algorithm. Give us planets occasionally filled with people and cities, allowing for more exploration beyond rocks and glued-together animal hybrid creatures. Think of it like Mass Effect. Sure, you can take the Mako out on planets to investigate them, but you can also visit the Citadel to see different alien races interacting with each other. No Man’s Sky is desperately in need of more life, and this could be a helpful step toward adding more.

Character Customization

No Man’s Sky is essentially a skeleton of a really great game, with a lot of room to improve and add on its original vision to more fully flesh it out. One of the best ways to start is to give the player character a bit more of a role, even if only giving them an actual, physical representation. Currently, there’s no way to see yourself or even have a type of physicality within the world, and this could be remedied by allowing players to customize their gender, race (human and alien), design colors, and exosuit types. Having a connection to a character is a great way to introduce more personal elements into a game, and No Man’s Sky would be better for it.

Photo Mode

One thing No Man’s Sky does well is its beautiful, varied color palette and sweeping alien vistas. It’s visually stunning, and each planet--despite how little the differences between each planet may be--will always be good for at least one calendar shot.

Adding a built-in photo mode would be helpful to capture scenes without the HUD present, and could even be a useful tool for quickly editing and uploading images as you go. It’s a small thing, but one that could really help to showcase this game’s visual assets.

Full Base Building

The ability to build bases is eventually coming to No Man’s Sky, although it’s not exactly clear what will be allowed or possible to do with it.

Ideally, it’d be neat to have a system similar to Minecraft; give players the tools to create basic structures for shelter, but allow them an open opportunity to build whatever they desire. Giving players this freedom makes room for the possibility of amazing structures being built on one of the many billions of planets in the galaxy of No Man’s Sky.

Set Your Own Homeworld

We’ve all been there. You’re out exploring and suddenly it hits you, you’re hurting for a resource and you think about that one planet you found with tons of it. There’s only one problem… You’ve warp jumped a few times since discovering that planet, and now you don’t remember where it was. That’s where a feature that allows you to set a “Homeworld” would come in handy. This would allow you to easily select a planet and mark it in your Galaxy Map, allowing you to easily jump back and forth between it and other systems. You could also use it to mark that one planet you almost completely discovered, too.

More NPCs

One of the biggest issues with No Man’s Sky is how empty the world feels. Sure, the game is a singleplayer experience, and loneliness is bound to set in, but what we’re talking about is the lack of NPCs scattered throughout the galaxy. Doesn’t it feel a little odd that only one alien is set up in each Space Station? Don’t they get lonely? Not only would additional NPCs make sense, but it would also help the world to feel more alive, by creating a population of different alien beings for players to interact with. We can’t be the only ones who wish there were more intelligent species to interact with, can we?

Starports

If you’ve ever found yourself starving for more ship inventory, then chances are you know how hard it can be to find and purchase new starships. Not only does the dialog take quite a while to sift through, but you also have to manage to catch NPCs before they take back off from landing pads and Space Stations. The solution? Startports or a Starship Vendor could easily rid the galaxy of this issue. Place one in each Space Station and let players travel to new systems for chances at new ships. The ship inventory size and other attributes could still be randomly generated, but it would allow a more natural way to purchase starships during your travels.

No Sprint Cooldown

Traveling on foot in No Man’s Sky can be pretty tedious. Sure, you can easily make use of the melee+jetpack leap, but why is your character so slow at everything? Not only does gravity never change on planets, but your character’s sprint isn’t ever actually that much faster than walking. Not to mention the cooldown when you first start the game is quite abysmal. We’d like to see the cooldown gone forever. Allow us to sprint indefinitely. Heck, you could even give sprinting for long periods of time a negative effect like a faster drain of our Life Support Systems. We just don’t want to have to stop so our characters can catch their breath every four seconds. It kind of makes us just want to stay in our ships and not explore, if we’re completely honest.

Multiplayer

Oh the dreaded ‘big deal’ that has left many fans and potential customers upset with Hello Games. Yes it is true that the information surrounding No Man’s Sky has always been vague, and yes Sean Murray did seem to ‘hint’ at the game featuring a multiplayer mode of sorts, but what No Man’s Sky has released with isn’t really multiplayer at all. Not unless you consider globally sharing information as a multiplayer experience, which some people do. We aren’t here to argue this issue, however, we’re just here to glow about how cool No Man’s Sky could be with a true multiplayer experience. The big issue here is server performance, which could easily be accounted for by limiting the amount of players in a session. We aren’t expecting a full blown MMO with hundreds of players in one big multiplayer world out of Hello Games’ small studio. But a coop experience with up to six of our friends would be pretty cool, just saying.

Shack Staff

Shack Staff stories are a collective effort with multiple staff members contributing. Many of our lists often involve entires from several editors, and our weekly Shack Chat is something we all contribute to as a group.