I’ve been playing the game No Man’s Sky since it came out on PS4 yesterday. So far, it’s a fascinating game.

The basic idea is that you start out, crashed landed on a planet, and must find and extract the proper resources to fix your equipment and eventually your spaceship, before you zoom out into space or around the planet to do whatever you want. There are places of interest that either have items you can sell, use, or blueprints for new technology. There are a variety of ships you can have that range from more fighter types all the way to cargo ships.

While playing today, I thought of a few ideas and wanted to “quickly jot” them down here before I forget. I hope someone, somewhere will read my ideas and maybe implement them too. Or someone else will think the same things, see that I too think them, and be encouraged to share those ideas with more people. This is mostly meant to be a single player game with supposedly limitless scope (over a quintillion planets and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of galaxies. Chances of encountering other players is quite low.

I remember reading several people complaining about lack of multiplayer and lack of pvp combat. While it’s still early in the game’s release (it’s not even out on PC until August 12th), and I haven’t beat the game (heh) or discovered everything there is about it, I’ve had a few ideas on how to expand it. Of course, many of my ideas (I hope) will be redundant or (unavoidably) impractical.

Ship Types/Planet Types/Factions/Etc:

My first thought is that they should expand the ideas of planets, ships, and factions.

I think there should be exploration of not only planets, but the water, and perhaps even burrowing or going underground, possibly going into a planets core to obtain the most valuable prizes. Winter planets, volcano planets, poisonous planets, etc. Fortress planets, inhabited by various factions that fight for control over the planet.

It would be awesome if there’s factions on planets and if they fought incessantly. And if there was expanded interaction between ships planet-side and combat.

Expansion of ship types? I think there should be a new expanded system. I think there should be fighters, bombers, carriers, submarines, transports, and miners. For fighters and bombers, I think there should be versions that are meant for space flight and space combat and then fighters and bombers meant for combat in the air of a planet (to attack bases, planes, people planetside). Perhaps an ultimate tier of fighter bomber could be good in both environments but more on that later. Carriers I’d like to have so that one could have a ship that can carry multiple ships, so that you can own and operate different kinds of ships at different times.  Transports are self explanatory (carries a shit ton of goods), miners are meant for mining either asteroids or things on the planet and can burrow into ground on some versions, and submarines are good for water and naval warfare.

It would be great if one could build bases and even upgrade storage facilities for resources and ships, and build fortifications and artillery cannons.  Which can be attacked by hostile natives.

Multiplayer

So the basic premise of my idea is that for all the galaxies there are in the game, there will be designated multiplayer galaxies. They look the same to everyone, are located in the same place in everyone’s galaxy map. Nine, in fact, arranged in a grid pattern like below:

The red planets are PVP zones where anything goes. The green planets are multiplayer planets where people can interact, but no combat takes place. Each galaxy has about 5-20 planets and the middle galaxy has about 100. For now, we’ll just talk about PVP planets (red). Players can set up fortresses and trading posts on planets and compete for control of planets. In trading posts, people could post on bulletin boards: need X resource, will play Y amount. A person could read the bulletin, click offfer to take deal. The person who posted the bulletin can either hit agree or disagree. If agree is hit, then a certain amount of the buyer’s money is earmarked and can’t be spent. That leaves the seller (or guy who will get these resources) to obtain the materials and then send them to the buyer as soon as he has them. The transaction can be automatic without requiring two players to ever actually meet, because…alien technology.

People can sell ships, exosuit upgrades, multitool upgrades, ships for assembly (build a ship according to someone’s specifications). People can raid shops but then get marked with a bounty until they escape to a non-PVP galaxy (bounty can be contributed to and set by people who form factions (guilds)? Guilds can fight wars, forge alliances, and work towards common goals. Rare items can also be sold.

A lot of people may not like the possibility of PVP. To entice them, I’d make the planets in PVP settings to be rich resources that are twice to three times as effective and sell for two to three times as much on the market.

One could also arrange for rare weapons drops – only 1,000-10,00 available and people can fight over those.

Also is the possibility of stealth vs. unmasking stealth.

And that’s it for now. Sure – this is poor writing because it’s a brain dump and I’m starting to forget what I thought. But there it is.

-Wald