I'm sad to say that my experience withso far aligns closely with the one Sam Machkovech recounted in our full review . The game's procedurally generated galaxy is beautiful to experience, but actually exploring that galaxy ends up being a mind-numbing grind. Faced with the need to give players something to do in an expansive, enchanting galaxy, developer Hello Games seems to have fallen back on creating very limited versions of the familiar types of gameplay we tend to see in much smaller, more hand-crafted games.

Thus, No Man's Sky features some perfunctory and unsatisfying space- and ground-based combat. There's a low-grade survival mechanic without much in the way of difficulty or appreciable stakes. There's a lot of mind-numbing resource collection and crafting to make minor improvements to your gear. There's a far-off "finish line" goal to work toward through a series of repetitive hyperdrive jumps. There's a lot of frustrating inventory management, made all the more frustrating because every second wasted juggling items in a menu is a second not spent looking at the interesting procedural scenery.

The problem with all of these systems is that they are all pretty antithetical to the core appeal of simply exploring a functionally infinite, non-repeating galaxy of planets. The overall effect is to transform these amazing planets into hunks of rock to be destroyed, threats to be survived, or collections of resources to be bartered rather than mathematical works of art to be admired from inside. The gameplay systems do encourage you to explore, but they don't in any particular way encourage you to enjoy or appreciate what you're exploring.

It didn't have to be this way. There's one gameplay system in particular that I think could form the core of a very different No Man's Sky; one that encourages the player to stop and really take a considered look at the amazing scenery constantly surrounding them in the game.

In short, No Man's Sky should be a game about photography.

Take your shot

I'm not usually the kind of player that likes to pretend he knows what the developers should have done after the fact. Nor am I the type to usually criticize a game for what it's not, rather than what it is (at least I try not to be). As I discussed last week , one of's biggest problems is that it can't possibly live up to the game people have imagined itbe for years now.

But the idea of taking photos as part of No Man's Sky's core gameplay loop is so good that I'm unreasonably angry it isn't already a major part of the game. I've felt this way ever since I saw someone suggest the idea offhandedly on Twitter last week ( I can no longer find this tweet, but here's a thank you to whoever first put this wondrous suggestion in my feed Update: I'm pretty sure this is the tweet in question).

To be clear, I'm not just talking about a "photo mode" that lets you get rid of the heads-up display and mission markers to share unencumbered views of various planets online. No, I mean there should be a core gameplay loop focused on taking and sharing photos of your surroundings as a baseline method of progressing in the game.

I'm envisioning two intertwined systems. The first would be a bit like the underappreciated N64 classic Pokemon Snap (coming to the Wii U Virtual Console this week, FYI) or the heavily delayed PS3 title Afrika if you prefer. In Snap, players were graded both on their ability to find as many hidden Pokémon as possible in the game's theme-park-style setting and on their ability to frame and compose those shots well. An in-game algorithm rated each shot based on the size and position of the Pokémon in the frame, the number of Pokémon in the shot, and the amount of interesting "action" going on when the shutter goes off.

It's easy to imagine a more expansive rating algorithm for No Man's Sky photos ranking shots based on positioning, angle, lighting, color composition, and even the overall uniqueness of the specific flora and fauna they contain (giving more in-game currency for better photos). If you wanted to get really fancy, an online neural network could do the grading instead, struggling to generatively learn what makes a "good" photograph as it goes.

The other photo system would involve uploading your favorite shots to an online clearinghouse, where other players and even non-playing lookie-loos would be encouraged to rank their favorites (with more votes translating to more in-game currency for each photo). Photo sharing systems integrated into the PS4 and Steam already allow players to do something like this, but integrating quasi-competitive photo-sharing and voting into the game would lead to an explosion of beautiful in-game images flooding the Internet.

Not only would this be an excellent way of introducing another passive "multiplayer" connection into No Man's Sky's lonely universe, but it would also serve as an instant viral attention generation engine. Players would be encouraged to spread their photos far and wide on social media in search of more votes (and probably creating more sales and new players in the process). Yes, there's the possibility of trolling and vote-brigading vaulting undeserving photos to the top of the photoboards, but careful moderation (possibly per-player vote limits) could limit this.

Players could use the in-game currency garnered from good photos not just to explore the galaxy more efficiently, but to buy Instagram-style filters and photo-modding stickers to help improve future photos. Heck, you could even buy toys like a photo-taking drone helicopter or a telescopic lens to take otherwise impossible shots.

If you build it, they will come

It might seem crass to use gameplay tricks to encourage what should be an innate desire to experience the wonder of No Man's Sky's algorithms. But the game already does something like this in its own clunky way by asking players to identify every new plant and animal they see through their binoculars (and rewarding them with in-game currency and naming rights for their troubles).

That existing system, though, asks players to simply glance at every animal or plant once before moving on to search for another new bit of life to monetize (seeing an already-discovered item actually gets a bit annoying under this schema). Plus, the only way to relive those discoveries is through a clunky menu system; you can't view a local flipbook of your favorites or look at discoveries uploaded by friends and strangers.

With the photo system in place, though, every unique new landscape and collection of plants and animals around the next corner becomes a new chance to capture, remember, and share something unique with the world. Encouraging in-game photos through gameplay systems could be just the push many players need to start looking at this limitless galaxy not as something to be survived and mined for profit but something to be reveled in and absorbed by. It's the kind of gameplay that would build on and reinforce what already makes No Man's Sky special, rather than simply layering unrelated "gamey" content on top of a near-infinite universe.

I really hope a future update or player-created mod can add something like the photo system described here to No Man's Sky. After all, when the core technology of a game practically ensures that every planet you see will never be seen by another human being, the core point of the game should be to find and share the most interesting planets you can with your fellow humans.