Less Micro-Management
No Man’s Sky is a ton of fun, and the pure act of exploration and discovery has been a blast so far. If only I didn’t have to charge all of my gear every two minutes or so. While I understand the need to power up my ship’s Launch Thrusters every now again, it’s more than a little annoying to have the game remind you about the Life Support meter decreasing so often.
It’s not that players lack the resources to charge up the Life Support, but the fact that it goes down so quickly can make it a nuisance, because you have to keep stopping every couple of minutes to pull up your menu and charge it again. Not only that, you have to keep an eye on the charge levels for your Multi-tool, your offensive upgrades, and your ship’s fuels. The micro-management in this game sounds great in concept, but constantly gets in the way of exploration.
Oh, and if you don’t have enough Isotope stacks with you, you’ll have to hike back to your ship to get some from the cargo if you’re too far away from it.
Upgrades Shouldn’t Take Up Inventory Slots
Inventory management in No Man’s Sky can be very painful, especially during your early hours with the game. But honestly, it wouldn’t be so bad if your upgrades didn’t take up inventory slots on their own as well. It’s difficult to carry different types of minerals with you because of the limited space, and while you’ll want to save your slots for more valuable stuff that you can sell, most of your upgrades will require common minerals like oxides. Furthermore, why waste an inventory slot on an upgrade now, if you’re just going to be hunting for a better one later on down the line?
Starships are probably the worst offender of this – you can have a ship with 21 slots, but at least five or six of those slots will be used for mining and defensive upgrades, leaving you with almost the same number of inventory spaces as your previous ship. All this does is make me neglect upgrades simply because it’s just not worth it to waste a slot on a mod that won’t be as valuable to me as that stack of Gold.
Autopilot Function for Starships
Having to take your time to travel from one planet to another is really neat and immersive, but navigation also requires your attention. Given that it can take about 10 minutes to get to another planet with just normal fuel, it would make life a lot of easier if starships came packed with an autopilot function.
That way, if you want to conserve your jump drive fuel, you can just set your ship on autopilot, and sort out your inventory in the meantime. Of course, it should still be possible for space pirates to attack you even when you’re on autopilot, but it sure would be nice to be able to set the controller down when you have minutes of travel time ahead of you.
Ability to See Available Resources on Planets
Right now, No Man’s Sky allows you to check your discoveries, weather, and conditions of all the planets and star systems you’ve discovered so far. However, the game doesn’t seem to have an option or menu that lets you see what resources you’ve been able to harvest from that particular moon or planet. This makes it a little difficult for players who might want to go back to discovered planets to mine for minerals to sell.
Since the game already gives you information about your wildlife and base discoveries, why not add in another section that shows you the types of minerals and resources you’ve harvested from that planet so far?
Better Navigation on Galactic Map
The galactic map in No Man’s Sky is really cool, and it gives you a good sense of just how vast this galaxy is. However, it’s also a bit of a mess. When planning your route to the center of the universe, it can get a little difficult to count the number of star systems you have left to jump to. Not only that, it’s also surprisingly tricky to locate star systems that you’ve previously discovered.
For now, I’ve been relying on scanning for discoveries whenever I’m in the galactic map. The server takes quite a while to update, but it does make it easier to find previously discovered star systems if you ever want to go back to those for any reason. But if you’re trying to find a star system in Free Exploration mode, good luck with that.
Published: Aug 10, 2016 01:56 pm