“If you place the sun on the edge of the horizon, it’s an instant sunset”
Photographing the cosmos in No Man ’s Sky
Like a lot of people, I gave up on NoMan’sSky. I liked it more than most, but its shallow loop of mining, crafting, and travelling between star systems wasn’t enough to hold my interest. But the latest update, dubbed Path Finder, has tempted me back to Hello Games’ colorful cosmos. This substantial expansion adds vehicles, a permadeath mode, and a dozen other features, but there’s one bullet-point in particular that caught my eye: Photo mode.
I love taking screenshots in games, especially if they involve spaceships of any kind, and this was enough to prompt a reinstall. Not to mention the fact that the mode was created in collaboration with virtual photography website Dead End Thrills. Immediately, I’m impressed. A lot of photo modes are light on features and overly restrictive, but this one offers a lot of fine control of the camera and, best of all, the environment itself.
The problem with virtual photography, and sometimes actual photography, is the sun. It’s never in the right place or giving you the light you desire. But here you can point anywhere in the sky, press a button, and the sun will appear there. So if you place it on the edge of the horizon, it’s an instant sunset. Or you can place it under the horizon to plunge the planet into darkness. It’s a photographer’s dream, and I hope more games steal the idea.
photo opportunities
In the Foundation update, a creative mode was added to the game. This gives you infinite resources and fuel, meaning you can hop easily between planets and star systems without having to point a laser at a rock for ten minutes. Which, combined with the new photo mode, turns NoMan’sSky into the space tourism game I think I always wanted it to be. And I ended up flying around the galaxy taking photos for just over eight hours. Photo modes are slowly becoming more common in games, but they’re still a rarity. Luckily on PC we have other options, whether it’s using Cheat Engine tables to wrestle control of the camera or Ansel on Nvidia GPUs. But having the mode actually built into the game is always more convenient, especially when it’s as good as the one in NoMan’s Sky. And it can’t hurt having thousands of people using accessible tools to make images of your game look as pretty as possible, can it?
Flying the camera around the vividly colorful spaceways of NoMan’sSky has given me a new appreciation for the game and its art design. It really is stunning at times, and has one of the boldest color palettes I’ve seen in a game, which makes pointing a virtual camera at its procedural planets, moons, asteroids, and nebulae a delight.
I doubt I’ll ever play NoMan’sSky properly again. I’m not sure why I’d ever spend hours gathering materials to craft warp cells when creative mode lets me explore at my leisure. Hello says the Path Finder update is paving the way for things to come, and I’m still intrigued to see how they expand the game further. But for now I’m happy just being a galactic tourist, without having to worry if I have enough space rocks to make it to the next star.
Flying the camera around has given me a new appreciation for the game and its art design