For this blog, I’m going to talk about No Man’s Sky.
No Man’s Sky is, in its majority, a space exploration game. You have a ship, you fly the ship, you explore space stations, planets, galaxies, etc. It’s a fantastic game, trust me.
In terms of mechanics, I’m going to list a few early game ones: ship flight, ship modules/upgrades, ship rank, ship HP/shield/attack/speed/maneuverability, planet landscape generation (it’s procedural), planet fauna and flora generation (also procedural), planet atmosphere entry/exiting, planet weather, distance between planets (thank God they don’t actually orbit their sun), and pulse engine travel.
All of these combine into a few dynamics: flying the actual spacecraft inside and outside of the planet’s atmosphere, the exploration of the planet itself, and interplanetary travel.
These three dynamics, finally, combine into a few kinds of “fun” which are mainly sense-pleasure (the graphics are genuinely insane), discovery (18 quintillion planets btw) and fantasy (obviously).
Of course, there are also tons of late game MDAs, including but not limited to: Derelict Freighters, outlaw stations, pirates, bounties, sentinels, sentinel outposts, sentinel capital ships, warship battles, etc. which mostly go into the combat and survival dynamics of the game, which is more fitting of the obstacle aesthetic.
The list of mechanics in this game could go on for tens of thousands of words, so I’ll just leave it at that. Thanks for reading!
