All I Want for No Man's Sky are Quenched Desires

Oh hey, welcome to my No Man's Sky rant. I was being colorful when I said I'm going full Karen in my 2nd, full review of No Man's Sky. These aren't complaints as much as they are ideas from my sleep deprived, coconut iced tea powered brain that could make No Man's Sky better. 

Get your popcorn and your white claw ready, 'cause boy this is a passionate wish list from a man who's entitlement knows no bound.

Cheers.

Vehicles

• The vehicles added to the game aren't more than a novelty. Add a variety of car stats we can change and designs. None of them should handle as poorly as they do, but each should have unique characteristics. And some, like real cars, should be great at everything. This of course can branch into sub-racing games at predetermined tracks and custom, player made tracks.

• We should be able to collect and customize the texture and colors of different starship parts. To keep the randomly generated ships relevant, make it so we much find the ship with the parts we like first before we add them to a design/parts inventory. The same should go for freighters and frigates.

• Oh, yeah, let us pilot our frigates and freighters in huge space battles that play like the ship battles from Assassin's Creed 4 for the frigates, and it should be a commander-style sub-game when piloting the freighter. Of course this should tie into multiplayer.

Multiplayer

• The space anomaly as a multiplayer hub makes little sense in it's current form because most people don't interact with others and are there to buy items for their own games. The only multiplayer aspects is the terminal to launch multiplayer missions that, again, hardly no one joins you on. Furthermore...

• Multiplayer missions need a real kick in the pants. They are boring as hell and nobody wants to talk online. To fix this, missions need to be more personal and involve the intelligent lifeforms. Tell personal, emotional stories so we can connect with those weird aliens and our friends. This should be done with in-game animations and maybe some cutscenes, and not with text.

• I should be able to more easily send waypoints to my friend when either in space or on foot. The current method of doing so is too basic to be useful.

• Sharing a base should be as easy as me walking up to my friend's base computer and pushing a couple of buttons. I should then be able to warp there, build there with whatever permissions I'm given, and complete any dumb, not fun at all, base-building missions as well.

• There should be more mini-games to play with friends or strangers. Think about the kooky stuff you can get up to in GTAV, but let us do that on the space anomaly space station. Speaking of..

• The space anomaly looks like an entire city but we can't visit the rest. Please flesh it out with cool minigames and, again, personal stories and missions surround the anomaly inhabitants. 

• Ya'll could even add a movie theatre room, ya' know, like a Netflix party so people can watch TV and shows together online but also in the game. The photo above is a movie theatre I've built into my freighter ship, yeah, that's right; it's a movie theatre and that's all it is.

• On foot control feels clunky and needs an update. Go play any modern first person shooter for ideas on how fluid control should feel. Honestly, combat needs an entire re-working. Also go play Red Faction: Guerilla for good measure

• Raids and missions that range from the narrative Mass Effect style to Monster Hunter style raids would be an incredible addition. This will get players actually communicating with each other online and add tons of replay value. Let us connect with the strange, alien NPCs and our friends in more emotional, personal ways. Like, why would anyone talk to each other if the mission only asks you to blast goofy-lookin', sock-puppet monsters on random planets?

• Narrative missions and the main story need to be shown and not told to me through walls of text. Like in the image above, where exactly are those workers trying to get a competitive edge? I'd like to meet them and their strange society that prioritizes profits over workers' rights.

Planets

• Newly formed, molten planets would offer unique views, resources, challenges, and missions.

• Run-away greenhouse gas affected planets with immense pressure, where you can see things crushed as you move about the surface, racing against the clock to find unique loot (Think custom, rare ship parts and textures).

• Gas-giants with insane storms and a creepy abyss where if you fly too low you cannot escape the gravity well and are pulverized to bits. Oi, these types could allow new air bases and atmosphere pharming.

• Planets where the entire floor is snakes. Hiss hiss ya'll.

• Give us water worlds complete with flotillas of civilization, villages, outposts, underwater towns, etc.

• Multiple biomes per planet. 

• Crazy day-to-night cycles.

• Planets in collision with their moons, asteroids, solar mass ejections, etc.

• Rogue planets without a sun, in the space between stars all alone and dark. Discovering the creepy creatures of the permanent dark after the planet was torn from it's host system would be half the fun.

• More interesting weather like typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, mudslides, volcanic eruptions, etc. Weather should match what he have on Earth but with twists and on different scales. Imagine that gas giant planet I mentioned early but with a frightening, huge tornado slamming into your sky base.

• Moons being stretched by tidal forces, causing geysers and eruptions. 

Flora

• The current plant selection is fine, but they could stand to have more personality. Right now, most are the same size and height and look perfect. Adding dead branches, split trees, and fallen logs would spruce 'em up some.

• Add actual forests please.

Bodies of Water

• The look of water in this game is complete garbage. There are too many great examples of water in other video games to list here, but ya'll know you messed up when the first Uncharted game has better water, looks, and physics than your game.

• Add rivers, creeks, pounds, and oceans that actually feel like distinct bodies. Right now, a pound looks and feels just like an ocean when ponds should be dirtier, have small creatures swimming about, and have different plants growing in and around them. What they shouldn't have is a sandy beach.

Fauna

• Animals should behave in a more alive fashion. Far Cry Primal is an excellent example of this. If I scan an aggressive predator, it shouldn't run around in a weird slow-mo animation towards an herbivore, do a dumb swatting animation, and then perform a cheesy head bob to indicate it's eating like a toddler playing pretend. It looks extremely old fashioned and unfinished. This ain't Pokémon Sword, Hello Games, ya'll can do better.

• Fauna should also have better variety. After ya'll reigned in the creature combinations to avoid dumb looking abominations, they've become super predictable as a result. A good middle ground would be to hire a team of artists to design a bunch of cool looking creatures, yeah? And then have that same team make up a bunch of combinations from those designs that also look cool. 
  
  Finally, ya'll can tweak the sizes and colors and textures to come up with a ton more animals to add to the current pool of creatures. This way, they'll still have an alien feel but will look interesting. 

• Also, not every planet needs to have fauna. As it is, just about every planet has 'em and that contributes to the aforementioned problem of predictable creatures.

• Creature taming needs an overhaul. While I appreciate the tiny nipple icon to indicate I can milk the alien deer, I wish taming creatures meant I could call for it later. I again refer you to Far Cry Primal's very good implementation of this mechanic. It super sucks that I can't keep any around for later as a pet or just to ride for fun. They should also be able to learn skills for fighting and treasure hunting. Also, the responsiveness when riding them is terrible. Fix that too.

Interplanetary Space

• Turn those space stations into cities. To make em unique, use the same method for the creature building. Each station should have specialized missions and quests, with people. Let players discover stories on those stations to add more life to the game. You could even turn 'em to properties for rent GTAV style, ya know, adding an entire realtor sub-game.

• Let us land our star ships on anything physical in space: asteroids, space stations, nearby freighters. Let us get out of our ships, boost around and just goof off. 

• When I'm playing with my friends there's no good reason why we all can't have our freighters and fleet in the same star system.

• You guys really need to change space combat. Don't make it Nintendo hard, but the current ease of it is not fun at all. Star Wars Battlefront II's space battles are a great place to get ideas.

• Add starship games, like a cool 3D rocket league or space tag with a space arena. Let players create their own fields, ya' know, and share them.

Interstellar Space

• Allow us to fly between the stars instead of just warping from system to system would allow players to discover the rogue planets I mentioned earlier and other oddities.

• This space can have giant nebula, strange, lost travelers, and fleets of ships decimated by the Sentinels.

• We should also be able to accompany our own fleet on missions, with side games where you must defend them from pirates. This should also include cool boarding mechanics like in Assassin's Creed Rogue. This would also work in interplanetary space as well.

• Add different kinds of star systems like twins, triplets, and quads. Let's not forget white dwarfs, brown dwarfs, neutron stars, supernovae (imagine getting caught in one of those), gamma ray bursts, etc. Each type can just be super pretty so players can take screenshots an use em as bragging rights, or they can each have their own missions where the type of star plays a role. Again these should involve the actual intelligent lifeforms in the galaxy so the game world feels alive.

Customization

• We just need more parts, really. Although I enjoyed using tricks to make the neat club-bar with robot staff, it'd be even better to have actual stools, a bar, and robot parts as an option. 

• Building on freighters should allow more options for decks, windows, elevators, escalators, larger rooms, corridors, and flourishes like arches and statues. 

• Let us customize the outside of our freighters, as well, and allow for space walks.

Phew

Now that's off my chest, I feel much better. Back to the review.