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1. Murray’s Original Vision Was Achieved Spectacularly
Let’s start here, with a quote from Sean Murray back when he was still beloved. When No Man’s Sky was first announced, Murray explained that the tech behind the game was something really special. It was an entire universe all crafted from one immensely complicated algorithm. In Murray’s universe, players could explore billions and billions of procedurally-generated, uncharted planets teeming with bizarre, alien life. The universe was so big that even Murray and his team at Hello Games would be unable to see every one.

Murray said at the time, “We wanted to create the feeling of landing on a planet and knowing that no one had ever been there before. That is the one thing that has been there since the very start of the game.” It’s the sensation of exploration that’s fueled the development of No Man’s Sky, folks, not sweet-ass space battles.

2. If You’re Listening to the Hype, You’re Listening to a Bunch of Crazy People
If you’re somehow a gamer who has yet to pick up the title and you’re still on the fence about it, don’t base your opinion on the people who are still railing against the title.

These guys are straight up fanatics, who began their time with No Man’s Sky by literally comparing Sean Murray to Jesus and now fill their days re-writing Eminem songs to capture their heartbreak. They’re a weird bunch, so you don’t want to go making big decisions based on their obsessions.

3. Solitude Is an Integral Part of the Journey
You have the option to share what you’d like to share, but if you want, No Man’s Sky can be a completely private experience. More private than any other title ever released. Because the universe is so huge, no one else who ever lives will ever play the game the same way as you do.

Huge is actually an understatement. It would take 585 million years to fully explore every single inch of No Man’s Sky. Even if someone wanted to mimic your footsteps, they couldn’t. The experience was built to foster a feeling that the individual sights and sounds you experience while playing are yours and yours alone.

4. Remember, It’s an Indie Game (They Just Charged $60 Because You Were Willing to Pay $60)
In the run up to the release of No Man’s Sky, the amount of hype surrounding the game helped a lot of gamers forget the fact that Hello Games has less than twenty employees. It is, by its very definition, an indie studio. Though No Man’s Sky was billed as a Triple-A title, it was - in reality - a very ambitious indie game.

In other words, the expectations for the title should have been firmly set at “indie,” a field of the gaming industry that’s imminently more forgiving and open to experimentation. Instead, the hype train put No Man's Sky in the same class as titles like Call of Duty, where it did not belong.

5. Drop Your Pre-Conceived Notions of an Online World
Initially, when Sean Murray explained that No Man’s Sky would all take place in the same, persistent Universe, people got excited. Even though Murray and Hello Games repeatedly told people not to expect a big multiplayer component to No Man’s Sky, players still began to wonder at the possibilities.

We should have listened, because No Man’s Sky isn’t World of Warcraft.

Days after the game released, two real world players actually did manage to find one another. The only catch was that they couldn’t see each other. The only way either player could confirm that they were occupying the same space was to chat outside the game.

Hanging out with other players wasn’t what Murray had in mind when he said “online” or “interaction among players.” Murray was building a universe for us to share with one another via our stories and pictures - our mementos. He wasn’t trying to put out yet another game where you can race your pal from Point A to Point B.

6. No Man’s Sky Is About the Journey
Rare is the game that’s truly about the time you spend inside it. When it comes right down to it, most major titles are about the endings. Even huge open-world games like Bethesda’s celebrated Elder Scrolls series - in which players can spend weeks of real-world time tromping through dungeons and fighting monsters - is still about getting to the end. Bethesda is just smart enough to provide lots of little endings to keep players moving forward: the end of the dungeon, the end of the quest, the end of the story, etc.

In No Man’s Sky, the end is but another beginning. The point of the experience is to travel, it’s to see the expanded universe and truly explore every nook and cranny. There aren’t any shiny baubles waiting for you, it’s exploration for exploration’s sake. If you’re going into No Man’s Sky looking for treasure, you came to the wrong game.

7. Maybe You’re Just Not High Enough
If you’re a frequent redditor, you may have run across r/NoMansSkyTheGame. On a social media platform where all manner of dubious activity takes place (including a popular subreddit devoted to saying nice things about Donald Trump), r/NoMansSkyTheGame is one mean place. What began as a subreddit devoted to extolling the virtues of the game soon turned into a poisonous exercise in abusing Hello Games. Take for example, this post titled: “I'm curious, is there anyone still unclear that NMS was a massively successful cash-grab and little else?”

Things are so bad on the official subreddit that some players have had to retreat to corners of their own to talk about how much they genuinely enjoy No Man’s Sky. Easily one of the best is r/NoMansHigh, which - in the creator's words - is “a chill place to talk about the game and share our experiences of it. I'd noticed attitudes in the main sub had changed and it was bumming me out, that's it.”

As a result, r/NoMansHigh has become a place where people who enjoy the game can actually post pictures and ask questions and generally engage in the kind of community Sean Murray intended.

8. Of Course Hello Games Lied, All Game Developers Lie (Seriously, All of Them)
It’d be foolish to try and suggest that Hello Games didn’t get caught up in the hype train itself. At various times throughout the production of No Man’s Sky the developers at Hello Games touted gameplay features that didn’t show up in the final game. Things like different classes of ships, more varied planetary physics, and the importance of interacting with different factions were all promised, and then abandoned as the developers worked to hone the core experience.

Here’s the thing, though. All game developers everywhere lie. Remember when Destiny was supposed to have more in it than just grinding through dungeons? Remember when Watch Dogs was going to be unlike any other video game before it?

Even hits like The Witcher 3 endure complaints from gamers who claim they lied about the final product. It’s rampant throughout the industry, people, so let’s not pretend that Hello Games invented exaggeration.

9. It’s Not Play How You Want to Play, It’s Proceed How You Want to Proceed
A few weeks before No Man’s Sky hit store shelves, Hello Games began to release a series of videos that highlighted the various gameplay aspects of No Man’s Sky. Released under the titles "Fight," "Explore," "Survive," and "Trade," these videos gave a hint at the various ways that people could proceed through the galaxy. A lot of gamers took these videos - quite understandably - as insight into how they’d play the game. To some extent that was true.

However, the various mechanics at the fringe of No Man’s Sky aren’t meant to fill up the entire gameplay experience. You can fight to earn the materials to further explore the galaxy or you can trade to earn them, but the core No Man's Sky experience always leads back to exploration. Sure, there are bells and whistles to break up traveling between planets, but these are just the means to continue your journey, not the point of the journey itself.