History YMMV / NoMansSky

* MemeticBadass: After Sean Murray got his act together and started working on building the game into what had been initially promised, Sean Murray of all people has become this in the game's fandom. Rivaling Creator/MorganFreeman in terms of god like awesomeness. And it's all thanks to the game's many [[WinBackTheCrowd updates]]. Ditto for the rest of Hello Games.

* MoralEventHorizon: [[spoiler:-null- crossed this by resetting their iteration of the universe and doing ''something'' to the Atlas (implied to have at least contributed to its impending demise), in the process killing everyone in the universe, solely to [[ItsAllAboutMe try and become immortal]] and see everything there is to see.]]]] The player has the option to [[YouMonster rightly call them despicable]] for this.

[[folder: Trailers, pre-release, and launch era (2013-2016)]]

[[folder:Post-launch era (2017 to present)]]

[[folder: Tropes in-game and in general]]

[[folder: Post-launch era (2017 to present)]]

* SuspiciouslySimilarSong: The lush planet song has some parts that sound suspiciously to one from ''VisualNovel/TheHouseInFataMorgana'', right down to the song cutting out at the same part for a few seconds before resuming.

** Frigates suffering damage on expeditions. There's no way to reliable prevent this from happening, and neither is there an expedient way to repair them from the fleet management screen. Instead you have to personally fly to each damaged vessel, land on it, navigate a maze of corridors and walkways and finally spend a bunch of resources to repair up to half a dozen damaged components ''per ship''. And if you don't have the necessary resources in your inventory, you have to leave, scrounge them up and repeat the whole procedure from scratch. It's a cool feature the first time it happens, but gets old real fast.

** "Starbirth", the questline that unlocks your first Living Ship, is much, ''much'' worse than Extreme Survival, though mainly for the same reason: it takes ludicrously long to complete. For starters, grinding enough quicksilver to purchase a Void Egg in the first place takes a minimum of 6 real-life days, not counting the time you need to actually do the quests that reward the quicksilver. Then you receive a quest that sends you to a random planet but doesn't give you the exact target location. Instead you're given a random set of imprecise coordinates you must chase down by watching a display you can only see [[InterfaceScrew in the highly restrictive cockpit view of your ship]], and the nature of this rudimentary navigation system makes this one of the most frustrating tasks in the entire game. When (if) you finally find your target, you must collect a bunch of unique resources, craft a piece of your future ship and then... wait for ~24 real-life hours for it to mature. The whole shebang then repeats no less than four times, so when you claim the fourth component you've spent at least 10 days on this quest alone, [[{{Padding}} which is much longer than it takes to complete the game itself]]. If your patience held out this far, try to decipher the nebulous portal coordinates you receive next, jump to the target planet (usually one with extreme weather) and chase down another three sets of coordinates for the final ship component until you can finally claim the damn ship. Everything about this quest appears to be deliberately designed to make players RageQuit long before they make it anywhere near their Living Ship, which is only exacerbated by how ridiculously buggy the whole quest chain is.

** "Starbirth", the questline that unlocks your first Living Ship, is much, ''much'' worse than Extreme Survival, though mainly for the same reason: it takes ludicrously long to complete. For starters, grinding enough quicksilver to purchase a Void Egg in the first place takes a minimum of 6 real-life days, not counting the time you need to actually do the quests that reward the quicksilver. Then you receive a quest that sends you to a random planet but doesn't give you the exact target location. Instead you're given a random set of imprecise coordinates you must chase down by watching a display you can only see [[InterfaceScrew in the highly restrictive cockpit view of your ship]], and the nature of this rudimentary navigation system makes this one of the most frustrating tasks in the entire game. When (if) you finally find your target, you must collect a bunch of unique resources, craft a piece of your future ship and then... wait for ~24 real-life hours for it to mature. The whole shebang then repeats no less than four times, so when you claim the fourth component you've spent at least 10 days on this quest alone, which is much longer than it takes to complete the entire game. If your patience held out this far, try to decipher the nebulous portal coordinates you receive next, jump to the target planet (usually one with extreme weather) and chase down another three sets of coordinates for the final ship component until you can finally claim the damn ship. Everything about this quest appears to be deliberately designed to make players RageQuit long before they make it anywhere near their Living Ship, which is only exacerbated by how ridiculously buggy the whole quest chain is.

* ThatOneSidequest: To get the Extreme Survival milestones, you have to stay on a planet with extreme weather conditions for 32 "Sols" (in-game days, which last 30 minutes each). And if you leave the planet for any reason, that timer will reset, so don't expect to get the milestone by just stopping off on your way to the center. Depending on the planet's day-night cycle it can take up to 16 hours to reach level 10 for Extreme Survival! The only saving grace is that you just have to be on a planet with extreme conditions, you don't actually have to be out and about, so you can just find some shelter and camp out for a while. Later versions make this achievement more lenient by counting the total time spent on any planet with extreme conditions; you don't have to stay on only one planet continuously. It does reset if you die for any reason, however.

* BrokenBase: While many have forgiven Sean Murray and company for their initial missteps, and sales have increased, there are still some who are bitter, and don't wish to give the game another chance when they messed it up so bad initially. Another faction appreciates and even supports the continued support and patches, but worries that this could set a precedent for game developers releasing broken games and then simply patching them in post instead of delivering a properly finished product.

** The way achievements are implemented. The announcements take up a good chunk of the interface and take away much of your control; it will almost certainly get you killed more than once. Later versions allowed you to skip this by holding down a button or key.

** The scaling of ship prices as you increase available inventory slots is so expansive that the only viable option to max ship inventory space is to play the crash site trading game. An early game vessel can run from 1 to 2 million units, which isn't that hard to make. A ship that has around 20-25 inventory slots may be around 12 to 15 million - steep, but doable. Ships with more than 40 inventory slots can set you back 60 million units. A ship with the maximum of 48 slots can cost over 100 million units, which can be more than a low-tier freighter is sold for in some cases.

* ThatOneSidequest: To get the Extreme Survival milestones, you have to stay on a planet with extreme weather conditions for 32 "Sols" (in-game days). And if you leave the planet for any reason, that timer will reset, so don't expect to get the milestone by just stopping off on your way to the center. Depending on the planet's day-night cycle it can take up to 16 hours to reach level 10 for Extreme Survival! The only saving grace is that you just have to be on a planet with extreme conditions, you don't actually have to be out and about, so you can just find some shelter and camp out for a while. Later versions make this achievement more lenient by counting the total time spent on any planet with extreme conditions; you don't have to stay on only one planet continuously. It does reset if you die for any reason, however.

*** Another issue with inventory management is the lack of interconnectivity between different inventories. If you're trying to refine some materials aboard your freighter, the materials you need might be stored in your exosuit's main inventory, its cargo inventory, your starship's inventory, your freighter's inventory, any of your six exocrafts' inventories, or any of the up to ten separate storage containers, and only the ones in your exosuit inventory can be accessed directly. Crafting high-level products thus often boils down to running back and forth between two dozen inventories just to find the stuff you need. There are also some very harebrained limitations, like being unable to construct freighter upgrades from components stored ''in the freighter's own inventory''.

** Another problem that is near universal among players is the poor inventory system, which is not only difficult to use and manage, but also incredibly small, and upgrades take up inventory slots as well, further limiting what you can and can't carry. It also doesn't help that there's absolutely no way to increase your inventory space other than buying a ship with more inventory slots. However, this only increases the ship inventory and not your personal inventory, which are both separate.
** In previous versions, additional personal inventory slots were available for purchase only at drop pods, which are fairly common across most planets. The first extra slot is free, [[AdamSmithHatesYourGuts but each additional slot past that one costs an additional 10,000 units.]] By the time you've maxed your inventory at 48 slots, you will have shelled out a cool 6.3 ''million'' units. That's more money than you would likely pay for a decent-sized ship! This was averted in later versions by making drop pods on planets give you inventory space upgrades for free, provided you have the materials on hand to repair the damaged drop pods. You can still purchase inventory slots on space stations near the exosuit upgrades vendor.

[[folder: Post-launch era (2017 onwards)]]

* MemeticLoser: ...unless you aren't a part of the fanbase, in which case you see that while it's respectable that Hello Games is actually working on the game well after its launch, Sean Murray still hyped what he knew was a steaming pile of garbage and released it unfinished. That the game eventually became what he said it would be is seen more as being the start of being able to be given good will, rather than deserving of any.

** During the game's disastrous launch, as the game suffered backlash, plenty of names rhyming with and mocking the title came out such as "No Man's Buy" or "No Man's Lie".

* YouKeepUsingThatWord: "Unexplored" planets with multiple trading posts and random outpost buildings filled with aliens, and dozens of ships flying overhead.

* SugarWiki/FunnyMoments: During the game's disastrous launch, people made fun of the game and its developers. Hilarity ensued:
** In a meta example: Website/YouTube cracked down on videos of leaked copies being uploaded, so the leakers turned to another video hosting site. What site? ''Pornhub''.
** One Youtuber [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVbV5A_MYeg uploaded a montage]] mixing his reaction to the game's ending with fragments from an interview to Sean Murray. Everything is just hilarious, from his comments about what's happening to the $5 donation with the text accompanying it saying [[spoiler:"You've been Rick Rolled".]]
** A famous [=YouTube=] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik clip]] which shows the footage from the 2014 E3 demo while playing the majestic ''Film/JurassicPark'' film's score, [[spoiler: then switching to the actual in-game footage of a goofy-looking animal while changing the music to a very off-key rendition of that film's theme]].

* SugarWiki/CrowningMomentOfAwesome: ''That they stuck with the game.'' As pointed out by WebVideo/InternetHistorian, Hello Games could have easily just taken the money and ran, or gone about repairing the game in a manner similar to more morally bankrupt groups like Bethesda or EA. But instead, right after launch, Sean and the team went radio silent on social media, put their heads down and began working around the clock to restore content. By the end of 2017, goodwill had been restored, and since then the game has gone on to win a slew of technical awards. ''No Man's Sky'' has since been seen as one of the better cases of a fall and rise in modern gaming.

* CrowningMomentOfAwesome: ''That they stuck with the game.'' As pointed out by Internet Historian, Hello Games and the team could have easily just taken the money and ran, or gone about repairing the game in a manner similar to more morally bankrupt groups like Bethesda or EA. But instead, right after launch, Sean and the team went radio silent on social media, put their heads down and began working around the clock to restore content. By the end of 2017 goodwill had been restored, and since then the game has gone on to win a slew of technical awards, and now ''No Man's Sky'' is seen as one of the better cases of a fall and rise in modern gaming.

* RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap: Two years after a disastrous launch, the "NEXT" update gave the game a much-needed shot in the arm. The addition of multiplayer, in addition to other quality of life improvements, helped to win back many disenfranchised players and even [[https://www.techspot.com/news/75716-no-man-sky-update-pushes-game-top-steam.html shot the game to the top of Steam's sales charts]].

** Most of the achievements in the game are named after classic science fiction novels such as ''Literature/AScannerDarkly'', ''Literature/{{Foundation}}'', or ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy''.

* DarthWiki/MostAnnoyingSound:
** "[[CriticalAnnoyance Life Support Power: Low]]". Considering your exosuit's life support system depletes anytime you're planetside, you can expect to hear this every time you're down one quarter of your life support.
** "Inventory full" is another one you're quickly going to hate. The only one that's worse is "No free slots in suit inventory" meaning you just picked something up, but it [[PermanentlyMissableContent vanished into nothingness]] simply because you didn't have enough inventory space.
** "Warning: Sentinel drones activated" pops up every single time you break into a secured building, collect a gravitino ball or albumen pearl, mine a large amount of resources, or [[DisproportionateRetribution get spotted walking outside on a high security planet]].

* MostAnnoyingSound:

*** [[https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/9a01jr/log_entry_4194/ This log entry]].

** The ''[[https://www.nomanssky.com/2019/03/no-mans-sky-beyond/ Beyond]]'' update, released in the summer of 2019, continued the trend of free content updates, bringing a vastly enhanced online multiplayer system, called ''No Man's Sky Online''. It brought an MMO-style social and online experience to the game while not including {{Microtransactions}} or subscription fees. Another new component in the ''Beyond'' update is ''[[https://www.nomanssky.com/2019/03/no-mans-sky-beyond-vr/ No Man's Sky Virtual Reality]]'', adding VR support and increasing the immersive experience while flying in your starship and allowing for more intricate terrain manipulation.

* BrokenBase: While many have forgiven Sean Murray and company for their initial missteps, and sales have increased, there are still some who are bitter, and don't wish to give the game another chance when they messed it up so bad initially.