No Man's Sky's Beyond Reveal The Game's Real Potential

No Man's Sky'S latest update, Beyond, makes the game both more complex and easier to play. What's amazing about Beyond is the new features, like the new hub for multiplayer that has been very much alive. It's all about the old things.

Last night I opened up No Man's Sky with the intention of milking an animal. It is, no joke, all I have wanted to talk to Sean Murray, co-founder of No Man's Sky Hello Games development studio. There are very few games that will let me create alien foods out of animal byproducts, and even though there are so many new things to do in No Man's Sky, being a space chef was one on the list. Despite making this my primary goal, I got badly distracted on my way to figuring out pet milking mechanics.

The first thing to catch my attention was the updated process of crafting items. Some recipes have been simplified, like the one for glass, which requires a little more Making pretty basics out of glass, looking at a nice platter is now easier, so my builds have gotten more ambitious, and my checklist of things to do has gotten even longer.

Before Beyond, I wanted to start a lot of credits and spruce up my base on a teal-grassed moon. Now I've started a new ground on an Earth-like planet that's surrounded by lakes, and I'm dreaming up to a blueprint for a base that winds around them. Maybe I can start the farm I wanted, because I wanted to buy a new ship and a new freighter so I could do some trade routes …

It's just the little things, like the revised menu showing your discoveries. If you select a planet, you can find more information at your disposal. The galaxy map, which shows you the systems you can warp, also feels easier to explore and control. That map has been unwieldy in the past because it has three dimensions, and it is a fine line to select the planet you want to see. Now zooming in on a particular system is smoother, and the way the cursor locks on planets is smarter. If you select a system other than the one you're in, you can see the details of the economy and the conflict levels before you visit (if you have the appropriate scanners on your ship). The information is presented in a much cleaner way. The recipe or resource lists I'm looking for shoulds be since it first came out.

At launch, No Man's Sky was mostly about the unique joy of discovery, but it had a lot of problems. The joy of discovery is still at the core of No Man's Sky, but what Beyond is living in the living world. Previous updates funded No Man's Sky into the game people thought it would be. Beyond takes No Man's Sky and shapes it into a game that can be built more coherently, because the systems make better internal sense.

Because the game is more smoothly together, I feel more in touch with my fellow travelers. When I see them in the Space Anomaly, I do not know how to work towards a common, unspoken goal of cataloging the universe. It's what the game guides, it's what it's all about, but it's what the game's systems lead to. I like to wave to the people in the Anomaly. Usually, they wave back. One day, I've checked a couple of things off my checklist, I hope I can offer them some fresh alien milk.