A week in, and the glitter’s fading from No Man’s Sky . While the good feelings are sticking around for a few, not everyone is so lucky. Broken promises are accumulating on a huge Reddit list. People are reaching the center of the universe and finding themselves disappointed with the result. The PC port is being plagued by problems. Instead of being an instant-buy, we’ve reached a point where people recommend waiting for sales or a used copy. Yet, a light at the end of the rainbow has appeared. Mods are appearing for the game. The thing is, they might not be enough.
No Man’s Sky has technical issues. The life support in your suit will start warning you its low, even if it’s at 75%. Your inventories are disorganized and constantly filling up. You have to hold and wait to select things, though that was actually a purposeful design decision. People who do make it to the same place can’t see each other. The PC version had framerate drops and crashes, and there have even been instances where save files were corrupted.
While mods have been known to fix these issues in games, with fans stepping up to fix some of Bandai Namco’s Tales ports, many of No Man’s Sky’ s problems are too big for the sorts of band aids we could apply. People can remove the suit warnings and speed up actions , but server issues and code problems are probably beyond us. They’re problems mods probably won’t be able to address.
They can’t perform miracles when it comes to No Man’s Sky features either. A lot of things that were supposed to be in the game aren’t. While mods have managed to provide the three-pronged reticle we saw in promotional videos, they aren’t going to be able to completely alter world generation to offer more unique planets. There certainly isn’t one yet that makes the factions more meaningful or interactions with intelligent aliens more impactful. And it seems like finding a way to improve what happens when people do make it to the center of the universe, to make it more meaningful, will have to fall into Hello Games’ hands. Most No Man’s Sky mods now are about improving our quality of life, not the quality of lifeforms within the game.
Besides, there isn’t official No Man’s Sky mod support. It isn’t a thing Hello Games has promised. And, given that the lead developer is suddenly backtracking on his “only free DLC” comment in a Daily Star story, you have to wonder how willing Hello Games will be to work on mod support when it could start making features on its own and charging for them. Without official support, mod creators can hit walls and find themselves bound by limitations. It also could mean more steps for players to jump through to even get the mods working.
No Man’s Sky isn’t a bad game. It just isn’t the game we thought it would be. It certainly has its flaws. People finding a way to mod it is great, but we should be prudent when it comes to expectations. This isn’t going to be the move that saves the game from itself. Some problems can’t be surmounted unless Hello Games does something about them.