No Man's Sky (1/5)

I'd you're unfamiliar, No Man's Sky is a sci-fi video game that released almost three weeks ago. Consider a few things about this game: the people at Hello Games are a very small development company, and this is one of the biggest-hyped games of 2016, so they had a lot of high expectations to live up to. There has been a public outcry from many gamers expecting something different from the game, and it has been so severe that many game stores and online sales outlets have been refunding the dissatisfied gamers' money. Many seem to have expected a multiplayer experience with lots of aliens, but it's not a space opera, and the universe is so vast that you are very unlikely to bump into a friend. Yet I had a lot of fun playing it while another friend of mine was playing it online at the same time—we started a private chat room and talked about the game as we explored, sharing discoveries and experiences as we had them. Personally, I think the public outcry against the game is because some came at it with totally different expectations about what it was—it definitely breaks the standard definition of a video game. However, if you look at it for what it is, there's a lot to consider. With a massive procedurally generated universe containing 100 billion realistic galaxies, completionist gamers need to set aside an estimated 5 billion years to fully explore the game. Yeah, it's THAT big. But as we gamers know, the ultimate question that needs to be answered is this: Is it fun?