The latest free expansion for No Man’s Sky, COSMOS, got me. Again. I think in the grand scheme of the video game industry, Hello Games doesn’t get anywhere near the amount of adulation that they deserve, while other companies release the third iteration of the same flagship MMO, and people lose their minds. But that’s none of my business.

COSMOS introduces space outposts that we can visit and own. A lot of the NPC run platforms tie into the previous releases which introduced and refined our ability to salvage materials from derelict vehicles in space as well as scrapyards and crashed ships on the ground. As with all NMS updates of this caliber, there’s too many bullet points to enumerate in prose, so I’ll simply say that I’m finding a whole lot of things in the game to keep me busy.

I had played NMS pretty hardcore for a while, building outposts with @CakedCrusader who always plays these games much harder than I do. Usually his progress far outstrips my own, so he often reaches the end-game sooner than I do, if I do at all. This disproportionate progress usually results in me feeling that I’ve got nothing to do — I can get all of my “progress” as hand-me-downs — and him burnt out and drifting off to another game.

As a result, the idea of returning to NMS is always difficult for me to stomach. I don’t like the fact that there’s no “free play” option that allows us to just progress without having to deal with the Atlas nonsense (though we can choose to ignore it). Creative mode takes he guardrails off and while I could work within the confines of some imposed stricture, the temptation to just build out massive corvettes and sprawling fortresses on a rainy Sunday is too much for me.

The good/bad news is that I’m playing on my “perpetual save”, the one I completed the original story with, which has been my go-to save slot for every time I return to the game. I have my fleet, my settlement, a compliment of ships, several Twitch drop perks, and some Quicksilver, though I rarely participate in community missions. I also don’t participate in Expeditions mainly because they have me starting from scratch with a new save and I cannot fathom having a stable of save games sitting at various points in the progression of the No Man’s Sky universe.

What I do have, the, is a mash-up of incomplete initiatives. I have my settlement which provided me with a storyline involving the Sentinels. I really don’t like the combat in NMS, so I had left my settlers to their own devices years ago while I went off to Points Unknown. I still have unfinished remnants of the original storyline in which I had to hire NPCs for my initial base, but they, too, want me to go shoot Sentinels. Every time Hello Games dropped a new free expansion, I was there…for a while. As a result, I find every return familiar in parts, but in a “I have no memory of this place” kind of way.

Something about COSMOS is making things click, though. This weekend I spent a lot of time figuring out how to build a corvette and while I’m not really pleased with the hoops I have to jump through in order to get non-stock parts to do so, I’m low-key keeping an eye out. I’m working with the outpost platforms to take on missions to collect scrap, and in the process am slowly obtaining ingredients for different projects. Feeling I was needing a break, though, I did go back to my settlement and I did take on the attacking Sentinel army, and that opened up a new chain of events which has me following a reprogrammed drone around the galaxy. While I’m not super thrilled to be doing a lot of combat, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt like I’ve been able to make this kind of progress in No Man’s Sky.

Since I haven’t touched Star Citizen in a while, this has become my go-to space game and I have no regrets. What I do have are some increasingly intense questions about Hello Games upcoming title, Light No Fire. Whereas NMS takes place in a procedurally generated universe, LNF supposedly takes place on a single planet, designed at scale, about the size of Earth. I was briefly talking about this with @Mindstrike last week and I said that I hope we don’t get fast-travel in LNF, because being stuck on one planet (for now, as far as we know), fast travel would make our stomping-grounds that much smaller.

I also wonder if LNF will fulfil the promise that Hello Games is making with NMS. The launch of No Man’s Sky was so disastrous, but the redemption arc has been epic. Not only do we all benefit from the persistence that Hello Games has shown, but I’m sure they themselves have learned how to avoid another debacle when they launch Light No Fire. If LNF launches in a good state, and contains even a fraction of what NMS offers, it’s going to be massive, such that I think my most anticipated game for the next so many years is not whatever the hell CIG is doing, but rather what Hello Games will be doing with Light No Fire.