Sean Murray of Hello Games, developer and publisher of No Man's Sky, made an appearance at GDC on Thursday (after having been relatively quiet since No Man’s Sky’s contentious launch) to give a talk entitled "Building Worlds Using Math(s)." Between describing the complex procedural generation methods used to create No Man’s Sky's multitude of planets, Murray also spoke about the early days of development, when it was just him working on the engine in his spare time.
“I just wanted to sit down and write something completely different. Mainly, selfishly, because I just thought of the things I wanted to learn about, and then I started to write an engine that had those things in, I guess."
I was coming home from coding all day and I would write my little engine, and it was really fun.
Sean Murray
Murray described engine writing as a "real craft" and hoped others would continue to build their own engines it rather than adopting available ones. "I would hate to see us all use Unreal,” he said.
While working on his engine was initially a pleasant hobby for Murray, things changed drastically for Hello Games' small team when the public got their first look at No Man's Sky.
“And that was fun, that was really fun, and a really fun period in my life where every evening and weekend, I was coming home from coding all day and I would write my little engine, and it was really fun.
“Then we showed it, we showed the first trailer, and from then on it was like, it was like we were building a rocketship on the way up, like, to the sun, being fired into the sun with the skin burning from our faces, right? It was like, it was a bit of a rollercoaster ride from then on. But at the start it was genuinely just a hobby and something super enjoyable.”
Murray also described the challenge—the impossibility, really—of testing a game that contained so many procedurally generated planets that no one, not even all its future players combined, could ever visit them all. The best Hello Games could do prior to launch was try to estimate how many players they might have at launch, and run tests based on those numbers. The team looked at two popular releases from that year: Playdead's Inside and Ubisoft's Far Cry Primal, though neither would be a good comparison for No Man's Sky, as it turned out.
According to Murray, Inside's peak concurrent player count was around 3,000 players, and Primal's was 14,000. When it launched on PC, No Man's Sky had a concurrent player count of around 250,000, with another quarter million still playing on Playstation, where the game had launched a few days earlier. In other words, in terms of estimating player count, Murray's math was light years off.
Murray didn't reveal anything about upcoming Foundation features during his talk, though he did say Hello Games is still working on tweaking the procedural generation for the game's terrain. Hello Games is also launching a program called Hello Labs, which plans to fund and support the development of experimental projects that use procedural generation. According to Murray, they already have one such project under development and are currently looking for another.
I approached Murray after his talk but he politely declined my offer of an interview. I asked if he ever planned to talk to the media again, and he said "I'm sure, I'm sure, when there's something interesting to say." Even though he had just spent an hour saying interesting things, and despite my assurance that I had some interesting questions for him, he wasn't swayed.
"I think loads has been written about the game," Murray told me, "so I think in terms of us chatting, when I think there's something new to add, when the time is right, I think we'll do a bunch of press then and we'll make sure to be in touch."
In the meantime, I've sent a request to Hello about their Labs project, and will let you know when we have more information about it.
Overwatch was crowned Game of the Year at last night's annual Game Developer's Choice Awards 2017—held as part of this year's Game Developer's Conference currently being held in San Francisco.
Up against Sony and Naughty Dog's Uncharted 4, Playdead's indie darling Inside, Arkane and Bethesda's Dishonored, and Campo Santo's Firewatch, Blizzard's team-based shooter triumphed in the ceremony's top offering; and also grabbed Best Design on the night.
No Man's Sky also picked up the event's Innovation Award, ahead of Pokemon Go, Inside, Firewatch, and The Witness. Hello Games' Innes McKendrick took to Twitter to express he and his team's surprise.
McKendrick then confessed the Hello Games crew were eating dinner and "talking about how [they] definitely wouldn't win an award."
Here's a rundown of the finalists and winners in their entirety:
Game of the Year
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment)—WINNER
Inside (Playdead)
Dishonored 2 (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
Firewatch (Campo Santo/Panic)
Best Audio
Battlefield 1 (EA DICE/Electronic Arts)
Thumper (Drool)
DOOM (id Software/Bethesda Softworks)
Inside (Playdead)—WINNER
Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment)
Best Debut
Heart Machine (Hyper Light Drifter)
Campo Santo (Firewatch)—WINNER
ConcernedApe (Stardew Valley)
Drool (Thumper)
Night School Studio (Oxenfree)
Best Design
Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment)—WINNER
Dishonored 2 (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
The Witness (Thekla)
Inside (Playdead)
DOOM (id Software/Bethesda Softworks)
Best Mobile/Handheld Game
Super Mario Run (Nintendo EPD/Nintendo)
Clash Royale (Supercell)
Pokémon Go (Niantic)—WINNER
Reigns (Nerial/Devolver Digital)
Pokémon Sun/Moon (Game Freak/The Pokémon Company)
Innovation Award
The Witness (Thekla)
Inside (Playdead)
No Man’s Sky (Hello Games)—WINNER
Firewatch (Campo Santo/Panic)
Pokémon Go (Niantic)
Best Narrative
The Last Guardian (JAPAN Studio/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Oxenfree (Night School Studio)
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Inside (Playdead)
Firewatch (Campo Santo/Panic)—WINNER
Best Technology
Battlefield 1 (DICE/Electronic Arts)
No Man’s Sky (Hello Games)
Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment)
DOOM (id Software/Bethesda Softworks)
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (Naughty Dog)—WINNER
Best Visual Art
Firewatch (Campo Santo/Panic)
The Last Guardian (JAPAN Studio/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment)
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Inside (Playdead)—WINNER
Best VR/AR Game
Rez Infinite (Monstars/Enhance Games)
Superhot VR (SUPERHOT Team)
Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives (Owlchemy Labs)—WINNER
If you've spent any time on the No Man's Sky subreddit, you've no doubt seen near-daily posts from customers who ordered the $150 Explorer's Edition of the game from iam8bit asking if anyone else had received theirs and wondering if they would ever arrive. For those who pre-ordered back in the spring and summer before the game's launch, it's been a long wait as the months slowly unspooled into 2017. The edition, which included a hand-painted model ship and other items, has been a complete no-show, and it seemed as every month passed iam8bit would move the expected shipping date a little further into the future.
Well, here we are in the future, and it appears that those ships have finally begun to ship. Players are reporting they have received their Explorer's Edition, posting pictures and giving their impressions.
I don't have an Explorer's Edition myself to judge the quality of the items included, but as is the case with pretty much everything, some players seem perfectly pleased with the end result (if not the lengthy wait) while others are disappointed.
At the very least, if you pre-ordered the boxed Explorer's Edition, you'v got a reason to begin checking your mailbox again, as (hopefully) you'll be receiving it soon. Heck, even one person who says they cancelled their order a few months ago wound up getting one, so I'm putting good odds on you getting yours.
Gamers hold a very particular vision of the future of entertainment. We were born too early to untangle dark matter and eclipse Alpha Centauri in our own intergalactic freighters, and while those fantasies can be teased and inflated by Star Wars or Star Trek, videogames are the only thing that can simulate them. A pure representation of life between the stars—docking on space stations, exploring planets, carving out a subsistence on the bleeding edge of reality—requires a profound amount of processing power, so for decades we settled for half-steps. Star Wars Galaxies, FreeSpace, Eve Online—all capable games, all leaving us with a desire for something more.
No Man’s Sky was supposed to be that game. A limitless, psychedelic vision of space, promising a dynamic universe with hours of mystery and curiosity spread across the void. It generated a massive amount of grassroots buzz centered on a few killer trailers, but when the faithful got their hands on the product, they found a nice, low-key procedurally generated survival game. Not bad, but it wasn’t going to carry anyone through the looking glass. 10 years ago, or even five years ago, No Man’s Sky probably would’ve been lauded, but in a moment where videogames seem so mouthwateringly close to delivering a singular, second reality (and the way the development team leaned into those hopes), disappointment was inevitable.
Like most people, a gamer and Reddit poster named Chris got interested in No Man’s Sky following its stellar showing at E3, and followed the development for a year before its 2016 release. "With each video and interview it appeared that the game was going to live up to the original trailer," says Chris. "That E3 trailer, and the hints of multiplayer dropped by Sean Murray in various interviews, was really the only bar I had personally set for the game. I figured I would get about 100 hours out of No Mans Sky."
NMS actually felt like a Wii version of a space exploration game.
Chris was equipped with a middling PC and an Xbox One, and decided to make the investment into a $600 Alienware Alpha to be ready for release day. After 20 hours with the game, he started having some serious doubts.
"The art assets were getting old: repetitive building design, lifeless NPC’s, repetitive flora, bizarre fauna—random mixes of reptile and mammal parts—the same terrain and single biomes," he says. "I never really felt like an explorer because over every horizon there was a landing pad, observatory, or trading post with several NPC’s casually glued to their chairs. Exploring the game was no longer fun for me. I can honestly say that it's not a horrible game, it was just marketed wrong, I think most people would agree with that. As I posted on Reddit, NMS actually felt like a Wii version of a space exploration game."
$600 to power a Wii survival game would probably leave me pretty annoyed. But Chris did now have a powerful PC lying around, and he decided to throw his weight behind Star Citizen—the other super ambitious, controversial space sim on the horizon. In a Reddit post he made three months ago titled "If I hadn’t met NMS, I probably wouldn’t have fallen in love with SC," he lays out his reasoning.
"After a few underwhelming weeks of NMS' ‘chill’ gameplay, I immediately started looking for something more to satisfy this craving for an awesome space sim that's been growing within me these past few years... and that's when I came across the [Star Citizen] 3.0 Demo. It was everything I thought I wanted from a space sim," he wrote. "Even in Alpha I am having a lot of fun and I'm excited to hop inside my Avenger each night and blast off into the 'Verse! So this is it, I think I've finally found the game; it took me a little longer than most, and I lost $60 along the way, but at least I made it!"
Hell, I took my family to a movie the other night which cost $40 in tickets and $30 in food, and the movie sucked.
To be clear, Chris is only invested into Star Citizen for $80. He might not be nearly as optimistic if he had to plunk down the cash for a new machine like he did for No Man’s Sky. But it’s still interesting that he’s willing to risk disappointment on such a similar project. The dreams of Chris Roberts are cached in more experience, a larger team, and a different business model, but they aren’t that different from the hopes of Sean Murray. The logical reasons are all sound—Chris states he’s attracted to the lore, multiplayer, and the open-ended gameplay that No Man’s Sky lacks—but he still admits that this breed of hype is a little bit destructive.
"At the end of the day, gaming is one of my hobbies. I don’t mind spending money on my hobby, and I recognize that not every game is going to be great—that goes with anything in life," he says. "Hell, I took my family to a movie the other night which cost $40 in tickets and $30 in food, and the movie sucked. That was $70 for two hours of dissatisfaction. Needless to say, I don’t get worked up over ‘wasting’ money on videogames. I’m fortunate enough to say that losing $60 on a bad game won’t ruin my day."
However, there are other people who’ve migrated from No Man’s Sky to Star Citizen who won’t be quite as satisfied if Cloud Imperium Games fails to deliver. Another gamer named Jules has been playing PC games since the first Ultima and has dealt with more heartbreaks than the average dejected No Man’s Sky fan. Like Chris, he was drawn to Star Citizen late last year after Hello Games left him cold, but he’s not going to pull any punches if it fails to deliver.
I want to explore, that's my main motivation for a good space game.
"If Star Citizen does fail, I think it might finally make me hesitate to back games of that magnitude early on in the development cycle," he says. "Buying your way in is a new concept and I'm not sure it's all that positive in helping developers achieve their goals. If you can easily get funded but then still fall flat because you just didn't have a good game concept then there's something wrong with the new trend of funding games via buy-ins, crowd-funding and early access systems. I do think Star Citizen has a winner though and I hope they succeed!"
Jules and Chris have been chasing this fantasy for a long time. All they want to do is explore without any evidence of the machine behind the curtain. No invisible walls, no repetitive landscapes, no cut-corners or processor shortcomings to disturb the dream.
"I want to explore, that's my main motivation for a good space game," says Jules. "I'm actually not that enthusiastic about dozens of ship types and dog-fight PvP and all that. But I am very interested in a community of players interacting within a given universe with an economy and story unfolding. I was an old-school Star Wars Galaxies player and in its beginning it was an amazing game until they changed the fundamental way it worked. I hope for another game with that sort of expansive dynamics and gameplay where traders, explorers, and fighter pilots all have a place to share in the game's universe."
With No Man's Sky's recent Foundation update delivering a fairly robust base-building feature, players have not been idle (except for me—I haven't built a damn thing). With planets now covered in towering skyscrapers and mountain hideaways and replicas of Star Wars ships, No Man's Sky has wound up looking a little bit like Minecraft recently.
Here's a collection of the best player-made bases we've seen so far.
Monarch of the Park created this loving tribute to the R-series astromech and 3PO protocol droids from Star Wars—which we'll just go ahead and assume are specifically R2-D2 and C-3PO. Cleverly, R-2D2 was even built at a slight angle, just how he looks when he's rolling around in the films. Nicely done.
What happens when an architect builds a No Man's Sky base? You're about to find out in this series of amazing images. While I haven't fact-checked that OftRepeated1136 is actually an architect (I'm lazy like that), this base could easily go in an impressive portfolio.
Sometimes a base's location is just as important as the base itself, and a great example of that is AeliosZero's mountainside getaway. Not only does the base have a great view, it is itself a great view, crafted right into the side of the cliffs. There are more pictures here.
If you've had your fill of Star Wars, how about a little Star Trek? Monarch of the Park again, this time with a Borg cube. All things considered, it doesn't look like a terrible way to be assimilated.
I don't know how practical this base by burNINJAlapeno is, but going off the fact that everything in the future will hover it makes a certain amount of sense. If massive chunks of copper can float above the ground in No Man's Sky, I don't see why a bunch of buildings can't. Just watch your step.
There's a height limit on bases, but it can be gotten around. Meaning you can make your base tall. Real tall. The above gif, posted by onlyFPSplayer demonstrates just how tall. One can only wonder how long it takes to climb back up to the top.
The openness of PC gaming allows anyone to contribute, from modders, Twitch streamers, and two-man dev teams to the biggest game studios in the world. But with no real regulator at the helm to set and enforce standards, it also means that everyone has shared ownership of the platform, opening the door to abuse, troublemakers, and scandal.
Pour a glass of dramamine and revisit the finest flubs that graced PC gaming this year. From least-most controversial to most-most controversial, these are the stories that drew the greatest negative reaction from the PC gaming community in 2016.
Scorched Earth added a ton of new stuff: new creatures like the deathworm and the mantis, new features, over 50 new items, and the centerpiece, six desert biomes.
ARK: Scorched Earth
The pressure on Steam's Early Access program has only increased since its introduction in March 2013. Although Early Access has yielded excellent games like Darkest Dungeon, Don't Starve, Offworld Trading Company, Subnautica, Divinity: Original Sin, Infinifactory, RimWorld, and Kerbal Space Program, some PC gamers remain reluctant to buy into unfinished games and the uncertainty that the Early Access label sometimes carries.
In September, Studio Wildcard dealt a blow to Early Access' reputation when it released Scorched Earth, the first paid expansion for Ark: Survival Evolved. At $20, it was two-thirds the cost of the base game. Many fans were unhappy to see a game that was by definition unfinished getting post-release content. On the third most-popular post on the Ark subreddit ever, one fan criticized: "We paid for the developers to finish Ark: Survival Evolved, instead they took our money and made another game with it." Studio Wildcard defended its decision saying that implementing an expansion early would make the technical process easier for future expansions.
Nostalrius could accommodate as many as 11,000 concurrent players.
Nostalrius
Vanilla WoW (that is, a pre-expansion version of World of Warcraft) has remained a popular way to play the most popular MMO of all time. As Angus wrote in April, "Nostalrius is a time capsule: a beautifully nostalgic record of what a living world used to look like. It's a museum piece created by passionate fans with no official alternative."
But it's against WoW's terms of service to operate an independent game server, even if that server takes no money from its community. In April Blizzard issued a cease-and-desist against Nostalrius, WoW's biggest vanilla server, which boasted 150,000 active players. The forecast was grim: Blizzard had shut down other vanilla servers before, and it felt unlikely that the internet petition that sprung up in response was going to reverse the action against Nostalrius.
The server owners complied, shutting down Nostalrius in April, but the fight wasn't done. Shortly after, they managed a face-to-face meeting with Blizzard to press their case for the value of vanilla WoW. "After this meeting, we can affirm that these guys WANT to have legacy WoW servers, that is for sure," wrote a Nostalrius admin.
The story continued to develop as members of the Nostalrius team, seemingly uncontent with Blizzard's lack of discussion about the issue at BlizzCon, announced their plans to bring back the server under a new banner, Elysium. Barring some change of heart by Blizzard, Elysium itself stands a decent chance of also getting shut down. But the resurrection of Nostalrius puts greater pressure on Blizzard to permit vanilla servers, lest it be embroiled in another battle with a big piece of the WoW community.
Debate about the portrayal of videogame butts came to a head in 2016 when, in a lengthy post on the Battle.net forums, player Fipps complained about a victory pose for Tracer, Overwatch's speedy and spunky attacker.
“I have a young daughter that everyday when I wake up wants to watch the Recall trailer again," Fipps wrote. "She knows who Tracer is, and as she grows up, she can grow up alongside these characters. What I'm asking is that as you continue to add to the Overwatch cast and investment elements, you double down on your commitment to create strong female characters. You've been doing a good job so far, but shipping with a tracer pose like this undermines so much of the good you've already done.”
Blizzard agreed, and promised to amend the pose. “We want *everyone* to feel strong and heroic in our community. The last thing we want to do is make someone feel uncomfortable, under-appreciated or misrepresented,” game director Jeff Kaplan wrote.
Then came criticism that Kaplan was caving to criticism, or worse 'censoring' Overwatch in response to a complaint. "We understand that not everyone will agree with our decision, and that’s okay," he wrote in a second update. "That’s what these kinds of public tests are for. This wasn’t pandering or caving, though. This was the right call from our perspective, and we think the game will be just as fun the next time you play it."
Lost in the pile of this was how civil the original critique was. "My main complaint is that there is no facet of Tracer's silly/spunky/kind personality in the pose. It's just a generic butt shot. I don't see how that's positive for the game," wrote Fipps in the original post. I continue to agree that the pose wasn't Blizzard's best. Really, the reaction to the reaction was bigger, as it fed into a wider conversation around sexualized characters, feminism, inclusiveness, player criticism and other issues in games.
We loved Forza Horizon 3, but not the UWP strings it's attached to.
Microsoft's UWP
Microsoft's latest courtship of PC gaming continues to be a mixture of good and bad. We loved Forza Horizon 3, liked Gears 4, and found Halo 5: Forge to be surprisingly great. But on the operating system side, things weren't all blue skies and green fields for PC gamers in 2016.
In March, Microsoft asserted its plan to bring its biggest games to Windows through its Universal Windows Platform, a set of standards and restrictions meant to, in Microsoft's eyes, make it easier to publish applications across multiple Windows devices, improve security, and help developers write code under a more unified platform. Those modest benefits are outweighed massively by the danger of Windows becoming more of a closed platform.
Among game companies, Epic Games CEO and co-founder Tim Sweeney was the most outspoken critic of UWP. In March, Sweeney labeled the initiative "a closed, Microsoft-controlled distribution and commerce monopoly," and called for others in the industry to oppose it. Sweeney didn't miss the opportunity to level more harsh words later in 2016. "Slowly, over the next five years, they will force-patch Windows 10 to make Steam progressively worse and more broken," he warned in July.
The stage for 2016's skin gambling debacle was set three years earlier, when Valve rolled out cosmetic microtransactions for CS:GO. These items could be traded, sold, and bought through Steam for as much as $400—the maximum listing price on the Steam Community Market. It didn't take long for questionable, unlicensed third-party websites to realize they could use Steam bot accounts to automate item winnings and losings, and it didn't take long for dozens of flavors of skin gambling to spring up as CS:GO peaked in popularity.
The lowest point so far in a story that continues to develop, though, was the revelation that two very popular YouTubers showed themselves winning thousands of dollars of items on a site called CSGO Lotto without mentioning or indicating in any way that they were the creators of CSGO Lotto. Oops. Exposed, TmarTn offered a pitiful apology, saying that his relationship with had been "been a matter of public record since the company was first organized in December of 2015," presumably meaning that a public record existed of his co-ownership of the shady gambling website for someone else to uncover.
There's no definitive verdict on the legality of in-game item gambling at this time, but you can expect the issue to continue to be explored in 2017.
A beautiful alien dinosaur that existed only as marketing.
No Man's Sky
It was a perfect, ugly storm of some of the least-appealing trends in modern gaming: unchecked hype, unfinished games, last-minute review code, bland procedural generation, and misleading marketing.
Before that, though, heavy, sincere anticipation had formed around No Man's Sky. Here was a game from a small studio with an impossible promise: 18 quintillion planets, procedurally-generated wildlife, infinite exploration. In trailers, it looked like a massive step forward for the stagnating survival genre. To help Hello Games achieve these lofty designs, it had the backing of a major publisher in Sony. And No Man's Sky was delightfully mysterious, so much so that we were still answering fundamental questions about the game a month before launch, thanks to limited access to code. At a preview event, Chris was allowed to play for less than an hour.
Concerning signs came in the days before release. A significant day-one patch was on the way to fix major exploits. The PC release date itself wasn't announced until very late. A player who acquired a leaked copy of the game was able to reach the center of this allegedly near-infinite galaxy very quickly. And in a strange move, Hello Games wrote a blog warning players about the game one day before its launch on PlayStation 4. "This maybe isn’t the game you *imagined* from those trailers," wrote Sean Murray in a blog post that outlined, from his perspective, what the space game was and was not. "I expect it to be super divisive."
It was more than that. But initially, No Man's Sky became the biggest launch on Steam of 2016, hitting 212,620 concurrent players on PC. That's more than double the all-time peak of 2015 phenomenon Rocket League. In short order, the mystery unraveled. Two players, livestreaming simultaneously on launch day, could not see one another despite reaching the same location. The limitations of the game's procedural generation were revealed, as players shared screens and video of samey-looking aliens. And the hope that somewhere, cool, custom snake monsters were prowling the universe, disappeared. Players urged other players to seek refunds, and No Man's Sky's concurrent players sunk. Hello Games went quiet.
Our reviewer, Chris Livingston, recaps the rest of the saga perfectly in our lows of the year:
And then there was the reaction to the reaction: Hello Games went utterly silent for a couple of months. While I understand the reasoning—when everything you've ever said is suddenly under intense scrutiny, it makes sense to be careful saying anything else—the impenetrable silence only made matters worse, as fans felt they had been completely abandoned and ignored. At least things have gotten better recently, with new features added in the Foundation update, and the promise of more changes to come in the future.
There are lessons to be learned on all sides. Devs: keep in mind that no one ever forgets what you say during development, and while it's fine to talk about the elements you hope to put in your game, you're going to hear about it if those things aren't actually there when you release it. Plus, completely shutting off all communication with the people who have bought your game is a terrible idea. As customers, we need to remain skeptical of early E3 trailers, bullshots, pre-launch hype, and be especially cautious about pre-ordering games. And, we need to be patient. Even if developers aren't talking, they're listening, and adding new features to a game takes time.
Ultimately, it was a pleasantly chill, but underwhelming neon planet generator that became the poster child of many of the things we dislike. The lingering thought is how differently things would've gone if No Man's Sky had released in Early Access as a $20 or $30 beta.
Videogame music has its classics, and they’re usually easy to pinpoint as they trickle out every few months, and previously, every few years—but now, we can hardly keep up. To help sift through all the (lovely) noise, we put together a collection of our favorite soundtracks of the year. If you don’t see your favorite here, share it with us in the comments and let us know why it stands out. If you like the music, be sure to let the artist know—maybe buy a few records on vinyl, invite some friends over, sip some fancy wine and let a track like “Yellow Furry Mushroom Tune” take you where it will.
Thumper
Brian GibsonListen hereThumper’s music isn’t comforting, it’s not easy to bob your head to, it doesn’t have delicious hooks that’ll pop up in your mind hours later for easy listening. It’s music designed to suffocate and overwhelm, composed around the violent, rhythmic game design, not as separate thematic entity. Completely intertwined with how Thumper plays and feels, it’s easily one of the best soundtracks this side of the fourth dimension. —James
No Man's Sky
65daysofstaticListen hereSay what you will about how No Man’s Sky plays, but from a purely aesthetic point of view, it’s a vast, gorgeous collection of sci-fi paperback book covers. 65daysofstatic’s soundtrack works as a musical stand-in for the wonder one feels ripping through the pages. It’s not a huge departure from their usual sound—distorted guitars, swinging dynamics, crisp percussion, and eerie electronics samples—but it’s all a perfect fit, like they were composing a soundtrack for space exploration this entire time. —James
Owlboy
Jonathan GreerListen hereAbove the jovial plucking of strings, another set sways in and out of a sad, mysterious melody. It feels like there’s a history to Strato, one that betrays the colorful pixel art and buoyant floating fantasy setting. Owlboy is spilling over with gorgeous, playful, and energetic musical motifs for every character and setting that would make classic Disney movies turn their head and stare. —James
Slayer Shock
Dave PittmanListen here‘Thirst’, appropriately enough, reminds of walking around after a few too many drinks. Like the rest of the soundtrack, it places a twangy bass front and center, and it walks around each sparse song, in and out of corners, scurrying across darkened dirt roads, all the while barely keeping itself together. It might be short, but Pittman’s score is a potent dose of whimsy and danger, one that can sustain as much supernatural sleuthing as you’re capable of. —James
Abzû
Austin WintoryListen hereAs lovely a venture as Abzû is, without Austin Wintory’s reverberating, mysterious, and invigorating score, its best moments would fall entirely flat. The psychedelic underwater visuals and music split the work of directing the player, emotionally and physically, through Abzû’s inspirational aquatic set pieces. You’ll never look at a shark without humming its motif again. Unless it’s about to eat you. Stay safe out there. —James
Okhlos
A Shell in the PitListen hereA good selection of the best game music of the last few years has all come from A Shell in the Pit, serving up lovely soundtracks for the likes of Duelyst, Rogue Legacy, Parkitect, and more. Okhlos’ tunes are another notch in the belt, an intense, fluid combination of modern chiptune headbangers and classic instrumentation. It’s the rare soundtrack that makes me want to sit around all day to play games and dance until I pass out. —James
Furi
Carpenter Brut, Danger, The Toxic Avenger, Lorn, Scattle, Waveshaper, Kn1ghtListen hereFeaturing host of talented electronic artists, Furi’s soundtrack sounds like John Carpenter reimagined for the dancefloor. It’s an energetic and indulgent synthesizer parade that stays glassy and mysterious through every Roxbury headbob. —James
Doom
Mick GordonListen hereDoom’s music is beaming with the same charm and energy as its brutal combat, both a tongue-in-cheek yet tasteful overexertion. The guitar has enough feedback to keep a family full for months and the double bass drum pedals might register as an earthquake in certain regions. This is some greasy, chewy metal with industrial influences. The main title incorporates the 1993 theme from Doom’s E1M1, while “Flesh and Metal” pulls riffs from Chris Vrenna’s Doom 3 theme. Listen to “BFG Division.” Turn it up loud enough to get grounded. —James
Samorost 3
Tomáš DvořákListen here The best of the year, for me. Captivating and unpredictable, one moment Tomáš Dvořák’s music fills the room like a dramatic film score, then pivots to being grounded, Bohemian, and playful. These songs match and elevate the spirit of Samorost 3, but they stand alone surprisingly well. “This is the first time that an album has inspired me to play a video game,” a Bandcamp review admits. Start with “Prenatal Hunters.” —Evan
Hyper Light Drifter
DisasterpeaceListen here Disasterpeace (Fez, It Follows) uses lo-fi digital audio to evoke history, mood, and place with surprising effect. Imagine unearthing a centuries old chiptune soundtrack, the analog decay turning otherwise clean digital frequencies into tired, weather worn instrumentation. Like the whole of Hyper Light Drifter, the music feels like an artifact from a distant future’s past. —James
Oxenfree
SCNTFCListen here SCNTFC’s Oxenfree OST is a dense collection of electronic music with a dark edge, like it’s being played through an analog boombox that’s been dropped a few times too many. Smooth synthetic tones give way to warbled distortion that, no matter how bright the melody, feel aged and mysterious. Boards of Canada definitely come to mind. Start with “Cold Comfort.” —James
Dark Souls 3
Motoi Sakuraba(OST included with game purchase)It takes 10 seconds to understand what kind of place Firelink Shrine is, all thanks to its theme. Before you talk to anyone or explore its space, the strings tell a sad story, wavering in and out of silence while the soft, somber vocals of a lone woman leave a quiet trace of hope. It’s an interpretive characterization of the world and its inhabitants rarely executed in games with such precision. —James
The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human
Karl FlodinListen here Aquatic Adventure’s soundtrack layers chiptune minimalism with some atmospheric underwater distortion to give each song a clear identity with a strong melody or theme. I can hear a tune and immediately recall the location or boss fight it’s tied to. Start near the surface with “Seaweed Forest” before diving deep into “The Heart of the City.” —James
The Banner Saga 2
Austin WintoryListen here With The Banner Saga 2, Austin Wintory (Journey, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate) scores his first sequel. His pieces swell and climax, but don’t give way to a massive orchestral crescendo. Instead, they stay sparse, even as bright brass instrumentation takes the lead, backing instruments fall out. The world is breaking apart, it’s cold, everyone is dying, and all the pride and hope in the world can hardly make a dent. —James
Brigador
Makeup and Vanity SetListen here Synthesizers operated by ski mask-wearing cyberpunks. It’s terrific to see the talent of Makeup and Vanity Set lended to this independent game, and their sound is a perfect fit. The second track, “There Is No Law Here,” says it all. If you really enjoyed the movie Drive, get in here. —Evan
Poly Bridge
Adrian TalensListen here Soothing and mellow acoustic guitar is the perfect match for building rickety, collapsing bridges. When you send busloads of tiny passengers plunging into a river amidst splintering wood and steel beams, you'll barely even care because the music is just so damn relaxing. You can buy the Poly Bridge soundtrack as DLC on Steam (it also comes with the Deluxe Edition of the game, which just left early access in July). The composer even invites you to learn to play songs from the soundtrack yourself. —Chris L
Since Hello Games surprised us all with a major new No Man's Sky patch, players have been poking at it to see if it'll do anything strange. A tweak to the game's files has resulted in limitless vertical base-building, but the latest quirk is undeniably a bug, albeit a cool one.
YouTuber Sirian Gaming has managed to land his freighter – those gargantuan floating space vessels you can now purchase and own – on a planet. To do so you have to have good reflexes and an abundance of patience. Basically, you need to call your freighter in the very second you enter a planet's atmosphere.
The video below demonstrates how it's done, and also shows you how cool it is to have a freighter wedged into the side of your home planet. Hopefully one day, we'll be able to do this for real. I don't care if the science doesn't make sense.
Another No Man Sky's patch has appeared on Steam, this one relatively minor in most aspects but significant in one particular way: Responding to complaints from players who experienced trouble with the game while using unsupported mods, Hello Games has added a "mod detection" function that will display a loading screen warning when mods are detected. The update also features a new method for installing mods that should prevent future updates from breaking the game.
The patch notes in full:
Following reports of some people experiencing issues with the game while unsupported mods are installed, we’ve added mod detection which will show a warning screen on loading when mods are detected. A mouse click or button press will dismiss this screen. We have also introduced a new method for mod installation which should prevent player’s games from breaking when a new update is released. For details please see the ‘DISABLEMODS.TXT’ file in the \GAMEDATA\PCBANKS folder.
Allowed remapping of the build menu and quick menu commands to support Azerty keyboards.
We’ve enabled a temporary workaround for the SLI issues people are experiencing. If you are running in SLI, please disable TAA and the game should run. We are looking into a more permanent solution to this issue.
Fixed an issue which, in some rare cases, prevented NPCs from giving you mission critical dialogue.
Fixed a bug which could cause core items to be transferred from exosuit inventory to starship inventory.
Fixed a number of rare crashes (if you continue to experience crashes, please send a crash report and include your crash dumps).
Fix for monitor detection on PCs with 3rd party remote desktop or screen sharing applications.
Running the game via the .exe file should no longer give Steam Init errors.
Fixed an issue where underwater buildings could spawn without doors which in rare cases would mean the NPC missions could not be completed. (Note: If you are still being pointed to missing facilities during the NPC questlines, you can either claim a new base and re-build the NPC terminal, or if you have a Freighter, remove the NPC terminal from your base and rebuild it in the Freighter. The NPC should then give you new coordinates. We are still working on a more permanent fix for this issue).
After long stretches of silence about the state of No Man's Sky, which led many players to assume it had been abandoned outright, it still feels strange to see these updates coming so frequently. But it's also a big step in the right direction. No Man's Sky may have been disappointing, but I think a lot of the unhappiness had as much to do with Hello Games' unwillingness to acknowledge and address complaints as it did with the game itself.
There's still a lot of ground to make up, but if Hello Games can continue to bring NMS closer to what was originally promised—and keep players in the loop while it does—then maybe there's still hope for a comparatively happy ending.
12 units of zinc. That's all I need to repair my busted spaceship and blast off this crummy, baking hot, godforsaken planet forever. 12 measly units of zinc. I've gathered tons of iron to repair my launch thrusters, and tons more iron—plus an acre of heridium—to get my pulse drive back online. All I need now is 12 more units of zinc. And, after nearly an hour of wandering, I still can't find them.
No Man's Sky's Foundation update provided a couple new ways to play the space exploration game. As I said when I experimented with base-building, I appreciate what Foundation adds though it's not what I was looking for. This is doubly true of survival mode, which I've been struggling with the past few days. I'm glad it's here, because I know people enjoy the challenges it presents. I do not enjoy the challenges it presents. I do not enjoy anything about it. I'm completely miserable.
When you begin a new game of Survival, you don't wake up next to your broken ship. I've started survival over four different times now, and each time the ship has been a good 10 to 15 minute walk away from where I spawn. Starter planets are always disagreeable—one was bitterly cold, one suffered a constant downpour of toxic rain, and the one I'm on now is dangerously hot, though at nighttime it cools off to safe levels. This means that long walk to reach my ship also requires spending a lot of time recuperating in caves or any shelters I'm lucky enough to come across. I haven't been very lucky in either case.
To fend off the nasty environments, you need to keep your suit and life support charged, which means harvesting resources while you make the trip to your ship. Spending hours scouring for resources is nothing new to No Man's Sky, though in the base game it's typically spent hunting for rare metals or exotic metals. Now, everything except for iron and carbon is rare. Often, scans only show one or two resources in the vicinity. I've hit the scan button several times and found absolutely nothing.
As you're baked or frozen or eaten away by acid rain, all you have with you is the nagging electronic voice telling you just how screwed you are. "Thermal protection falling," it harps. I know. "Shields down." Yes, I can see that. "Critical damage taken." You don't say! "Life support system at 25%." No shit. "Thermal protection offline." It's like spending a weekend on Mars with a dying iPhone and Debbie Downer.
Amidst the helpful voice constantly telling you you're doomed, you get the standard journey milestones, which I supposed are intended to be uplifting. It's hard to take them that way, though. Lost and trudging through a cave with my life support below 10% and still stinging from the attack of one of those angry whip-like plants, my screen letterboxes and the music swells and I get a celebratory notice that I've traveled 5,000u on foot. Fuck you, I whisper.
The side effect of all this is that I've become completely disinterested in scanning alien critters, something I tended to enjoy in the game. I have zero time for it now, and even when they're waddling right in front of me I couldn't care less. Unless you're made of zinc, get out of my way, you undiscovered six-legged goat-dog.
Zinc. Zinc! Where are you? Zinc, like everything else is now precious. I'm mainly looking for it visually, desperately trying to spot the telltale yellow flower, because my suit's scanner takes ages to recharge, along with my jetpack and sprint meter and pretty much everything else. I reach my ship at last and climb in, grateful to use it as a save point but irritated because I have to leave it immediately and continue walking around looking for zinc. Possibly for the rest of my life.
Finally, having tramped in ever-widening circles, I scan and see a notification that zinc is nearby. One stinking zinc plant in over an hour of walking. Thank god. I nab it just as I'm told my suit's protection is dangerously low. I can charge it—but I'd need to use my precious zinc. My life support is also dwindling, and I can't spend time looking for the resource I need to recharge it without then having to use zinc to recharge my environmental protection. The ship is four minutes away, and I've got maybe four minutes left of life. I just barely make it back, climbing in just as everything reaches 0% at the same time.
I admit, it is damn satisfying to blast off this horrible planet, but not quite satisfying enough to make the long, slow, painful slog I just undertook worth it. I'm in such bad shape that even when I reach the space station and talk to a couple aliens—milestone!—my vision is still red and murky. I buy enough resources to put myself back together, leave the station, and am immediately shot down by space pirates.
Respawning, I leave the station again and find there's one other planet in this system. I land to find it atmospherically safe—no freezing or boiling temperatures, and no toxic rain—but the sentinels here are listed as high security. So, once again, I can only walk for a bit without taking damage, this time from angry hovering robots instead of the sun. I also can't take off again: in addition to plutonium being rare, it doesn't provide much fuel for thrusters. In fact, a single lift-off completely depletes the supply.
More wandering in circles, more scanning for elements that aren't there, more slowly dying while a voice constantly nags me. Maybe there's something satisfying about overcoming this kind of torture, but I don't think I'm going to last long enough to find out.
