NO MAN'S SKY

I admit I'm easily impressed with half-decent graphics and decent gaming mechanics and by the "cute factor" that confirms my being a casual gamer. Then there's my distaste of any first-person game involving shooting. And I understand that as such I don't fully appreciate the furore with which gamers who play AAA titles lashed out at the studio behind the game for all the hype and clever marketing prior to its release.I feel their pain, I really do.

But this is every spacefaring child's greatest dream- becoming an explorer exploring a whole universe of worlds . So a lot of them  repeat, and a lot of them are boring, and a lot of stations should be brimming with life since they provide services that require considerable resources etc. But awaken your inner trekker and boldly go where no one has gone before for the simple pleasure of going. I would have made it even more abstract, resembling elaborate Universe simulations appearing nowadays (Illustris?) with even more modest gaming elements, but this is a remarkable feat in itself.

You have to applaud the nature of procedural/chance build-up of worlds, their flaura, fauna, surface, lifeforms, mechanical representations of their respective cultures etc. This aspect alone is sufficient enough to sparkle our imagination like very few gaming titles have so far. Hell, even the soundtrack (not talking about the 65daysofstatic's  ogt album) is procedurally generated by a uniquely designed system -how cool is that?

 No Man's Sky is based on four pillars: survival, combat, trading and exploration, and the three of four pillars may have crumbled. But the pillar of exploration will stand tall as a bold pioneering project for as long as there's gaming.