No Man’s Sky is a vast and unimaginably large universe, and there are quintillions of planets. You could spend the rest of your life exploring and not even see 1% of the universe. But you know who has seen it all? The damn space cops.
Also known as The Sentinels, these little robots fly around every planet and moon scanning and watching. Scanning what? Everything. Watching what? You.
For example, you’ll just be minding your own business when suddenly a space cop comes flying over to you and just stops. They just stop and watch. It could be in the middle of a radioactive wasteland, it doesn’t matter.
These flying robots have no fear of death and no need for food, water or sleep. Odds are that you were busy doing something, like mining some plutonium. Now in No Man’s Sky plutonium is a very useful element, one of the most useful in fact! So you might really need some, otherwise you are trapped on this planet.
Sorry, space cops don’t care.
The man doesn’t care that you need to mine to survive. The man doesn’t care that you are an explorer trying to find new life and planets. All these damn space cops care about is that you don’t touch anything on any planet or they will call backup.
You ever get pulled over by the police for speeding, or maybe your headlight isn’t working? Something trivial like that? Something that could probably be solved with a simple “Hey, stop” or “Hey, fix that ASAP” but instead, for some reason, the officer decides to take a long time to walk up to you.
He sits in the patrol car messing with stuff, and meanwhile you start thinking about anything you did that might have caused you to earn a warrant. Like that one time when you went through two red lights — maybe they finally caught you for that?
Eventually the cop walks up to the window and it seems like he was just wasting your time, but a few moments later another cop car pulls up. It turns out he called some backup.
For you.
I get it though, cops get shot at and attacked and the job is dangerous, but it always feels like overkill to a single person sitting in a shitty Honda wondering if he can smell the week-old Taco Bell in the backseat.
In No Man’s Sky, calling for backup makes no sense.
I’m just grabbing some iron, my little robot friend! There are literally MILLIONS of iron deposits in this system alone. I really doubt taking a few pieces of iron will cause any issues.
But no, it doesn’t matter.
After a few seconds of watching you mine, the sentinel starts calling for backup and following you. Now you suddenly have a wanted level, when all you really wanted to do was explore a universe and take screenshots of funny-looking animals.
I’ve had to kill a fair share of space cops because they just wouldn’t let me be.
Now? I’ve gotten to a point where I stop doing anything the moment I hear the whirl of a sentinel engine. I spin around and look for the little floaty bastard, and when I find him, I lock eyes with him. (I’m saying him and eyes, but really they’re just genderless floating robot balls — the point is that we have a stare-off.) It can last a few seconds or even a minute or two. Eventually they float on by, but they always seem smug when they do it. Like they won.
Screw you, space cops.
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I would take just one of Halos Monitor – Who is not a well written character – then trillions of NMS sentinels. A NMS Monitor like, if they put the work in, could postit to you philosophical questions, tell some jokes, tell the history of the planet their patrolling, Point you in the direction of an artifact or historical discovery…instead of annoying you Endlessly with awful combat when you’re just trying to survive. There could even be a conflict between Monitors and Sentinals that you can observe or take sides in. Not that I’m expecting any of that from no… Read more »