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So, What Should Have Been In 'No Man's Sky's Galactic Center?

Paul Tassi
This article is more than 3 years old.

Photo: Hello Games

No Man’s Sky is currently vying for the “most hated game of the year” crown from fans and members of the press alike. Some are disappointed with the game’s lack of content and goals. Others are mad about promised features that never made it into the final release. But everyone is mad about the “ending” of the game, a massive disappointment and anti-climax like nothing else in recent memory.

Obviously in order to talk about this, we have to get into spoiler territory. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This is an ending you want spoiled. The crushing disappointment of experiencing it in-game is too much. Just get it out of the way now, and you’ll be better off for it.

Anyway, to recap, this is essentially the “ending” of No Man’s Sky:

• At the end of the Atlas quest, you’re asked for 10 Atlas Stones to create a star you can never see or go to and may not exist at all.

• Regardless of whether or not you do this, you’re told to continue on to the center of the galaxy, your only prize is being able to now see where black holes are.

• Upon reaching the center of the galaxy, you are warped to the edge of a new galaxy that is no different in any way than the one you just traveled through. You lose all your items and your ship is broken. Fix it, proceed to the center again, and repeat.

• The end. But not really, because there is no end. But it will probably be the end because you will say "this is stupid" and stop playing.

Needless to say, this sucks. But what if it didn’t? I’ve been thinking about what the “center of the galaxy” mystery could have revealed that wouldn’t have been a huge disappointment to fans, given how much it was hyped up. I’m not sure anything could satisfy everyone, but surely there had to be something better than what we got. I asked my followers on Twitter what they thought, and had a few of my own ideas as well. Here’s a combination of all of those, any of which would be better than the current ending:

The Multiplayer Solar System

One idea I heard a lot was that you arrive somewhere, a star system, presumably, where you can finally see and interact with other players. Multiplayer is probably the most-talked about feature in No Man’s Sky that was “promised” and eventually cut, and it could make for a neat reward. I wasn’t too keen on this to begin with, as if multiplayer did exist in the game, it should probably be available to everyone, not just the people who spend 30 hours to get to the center. But, if this “reward solar system” somehow had the ability to be its own server, and could actually “matchmake” other players together for co-op/PvP play, that might actually be a solution to the game’s problem. Letting other players find each other at last after a very lonely journey would also be a bit poetic, in a way. I like it.

Warp To A New Galaxy That’s Actually Different

I think there’s a contingent of players who wouldn’t actually mind warping to a new galaxy once you reach the center to start over for a sort of “New Game+” experience. But the problem is that each galaxy is exactly the same as all the others. Same landscapes, same wildlife, same ships, same alien races. If somehow the galaxies themselves could procedurally evolve over time, it would be motivation to keep pressing deeper and deeper into the game to see what could be found. Huge monsters. Undiscovered races. Water worlds. Sand planets. Coruscant. Etc. The problem is right now is that everyone knows that after the first 20 planets or so, the next quintillion are going to be 98% the same, so warping to a new galaxy doesn’t offer any sort of new exploration challenge whatsoever.

Gain The Ability To Backtrack To Discovered Planets

I think there’s some sort of a lore thing you could do here where once you reach the center, you discover some ultra-crazy tech that when installed in your ship, allows you to ignore all distance requirements and warp anywhere. This “dark matter core” (or whatever you want to call it) would allow you to gain the ability to travel back to any system you’ve been to previously, finally making all those named systems and treasure planets mean something, since you know you can always get back to them if you want. This is the kind of gameplay reward that would be useful for players, and make them want to keep playing past the center, rather than quitting after realizing what a letdown it is.

The Ship Graveyard

One of the main problems with the current center of the galaxy ending is that you get there and….see nothing. The map just zooms out for three minutes while some music plays and poof, you’re in a new galaxy with all your stuff broken. I think by making the center something at least sort of cool visually and loot-wise, that would have been enough for players to believe it wasn’t a massive middle finger. My idea is that the final system is full of crashed ships, taken out by the gravity of the massive black hole in the middle of the galaxy, but thanks to Atlas’s protection or whatever, your ship is able to cruise around as normal. You could go ship shopping for hours, and acquire some awesome finds. Crashed $80 million dollar vessels. Dead pilots clutching 30 slot multi-tools. Etc. etc. Then you could warp to a new galaxy (without losing that stuff) and see if there was even better stuff in the next center. And so on. Instead, you get nothing.

A Portal to Earth

This is probably my favorite “lore-wise,” an ending I concocted loosely basely on Battlestar Galactica. Once you reach the center, Atlas tells you that he’s found the perfect system to save your dying race, and opens up a black hole to….

Our solar system.

Rather than being procedurally generated, this would be the one system that was actually crafted by hand, and it would have all eight of our planets (and sure, Pluto can join too), including an empty Earth that’s at least vaguely topographically accurate. This could even be the multiplayer system I talked about in the first bullet point here, the lore implication being all you little pilots can populate the one planet in the galaxy perfectly suited for humanity’s needs. I mean we’d be ignoring evolution and all that, but if Battlestar got away with it, NMS can too. Personally, I think this would have been cool.

The point is anything would have been better than what we got. There are many things wrong with No Man’s Sky, but the only thing that makes me genuinely angry are the Atlas and center of the galaxy storylines that rank among the most disappointing “quests” in video game history. It may be too late to patch any of this in, but boy, it really could have used one of these ideas from the start.


