No Man’s Sky Is Already Great, But These 6 Features Would Make It Even Better

It’s been a few weeks since the release of No Man’s Sky’s most ambitious update titled NEXT, which included a slew of features and improvements to the base game. Without getting too deep into the controversy of the initial release, NEXT was Hello Games’ second chance at winning fans back and from the update’s critical reception, it seems to have worked! Sure, there will always be naysayers or players that just can’t be won back, but Hello Games did the admirable thing by sticking with it and attempting to right most of the wrongs.

Although NEXT provides us with many much-needed improvements, there are still lots of things we’d love to see from a future update to Hello Games’ expansive, nearly infinite space sandbox.

Smaller-Scale Missions Featuring More Memorable Characters

6 No Man’s Sky Improvements

While the main focus of No Man’s Sky is to explore and find resources to use for crafting, being able to partake in smaller bite-sized missions could add some variety to spice things up. Think of how interesting it would be to land on a planet and stumble upon a family of aliens that need your assistance with something. It wouldn’t drastically change the foundation of the game, but if this were a recurring instance, it could give No Man’s Sky some more life.

If you’ve played something like The Witcher III, you’ll know how integral the sidequests are. Arguably, the sidequests are more memorable than a lot of the main quests. If No Man’s Sky had this, there are numerous avenues it could take. A quirky NPC could, at first, be apprehensive to give you a rare and coveted resource, but if you build him or her (do aliens have genders?) a new house, you may be in luck.

On top of that, the quest could be even more unique if the NPC had some personality. As it stands, the NPCs are largely forgettable and don’t do much to differentiate from one another. It makes interacting with them seem meaningless, for the most part. Imagine if this quirky NPC was kind of mean and grumpy, and hated other species, but was desperate for a new home. If you stepped in and helped out by using the base-building mechanics, there could be an interesting heartfelt moment in which the alien NPC would learn that not all other living beings are so bad. This is a wildly specific example, but it would be really cool to see complex characters that have emotions and depth.