Co-creators

Engage players to contribute to the game on a bigger scale

Early players of Ingress know very well the origin of Portals that form the landscape of how Ingress is played. Almost all portals around the world were manually submitted by Ingress players themselves. These 'Founders' — veteran Ingress players since 2012— bravely walked to the real-world locations, took pictures, wrote descriptions, and then submitted them to Niantic Labs for approval. Niantic then added the data into their database, and the portals became part of the game. Take note of this: adding the most vital resource in the game was crowdsourced. Niantic didn’t pay people to walk to these places and then submit them to the database. The players themselves did it with gusto. The global portal database is largely user-generated.

In No Man’s Sky, several things can be saved into the database. Star systems, planets, waypoints, stations, the flora and fauna can be uploaded to the Atlas database where they are saved and credits given to their discoverers.

Unfortunately, these saved items don’t do much for the game. It may add a certain ‘permanence’ to the game’s universe, in that other players will see the snarky name that you gave to a planet — but it means nothing for the mechanics of the game. I mean, so what if I discovered and named all these planets? And surely, these cute creatures I 'discuvered' must have a better purpose than for me to harvest their poop.

Hello Games should look into Ingress for the next chapter of their game. Factions would motivate me to roam more planets if, for example, I have to find and claim Monoliths to activate them as portals for my faction — then link them to our other portals on other planets. These linked portals will only allow faction members to pass through as shortcuts to colonize the universe faster. What’s better than teamwork in a single player setting, eh?

The main thing is that No Man’s Sky must subliminally engage players to become active co-creators of the game on a bigger scale. Even going to the point where the lore is affected by players' actions and choices. Will you geek out with the Geks? Pledge loyalty to the Vy’Keens? Or make music with the Korvax? Which faction will reign supreme in the universe? Players' actions should determine the answer.

Perhaps No Man’s Sky is already heading along those lines since they previously mentioned portals, factions and base-building.

And further down the road, Hello Games should start thinking of a way to repurpose or reuse the Atlas database in the same way that Niantic used the ingress database for the gyms and pokestops in Pokemon Go.

No Man’s Sky has a lot of potential because I see it as a platform. If Hello Games manages it correctly by engaging the players as active co-creators, then their platform will last a long time. Perhaps even as long as the universe itself!