<\/div>Polo is one of the very few named characters in the game. He and his partner Nada appear randomly along your journey. Sometimes you’ll warp to a system and there will be an “Anomaly”, which is what the game calls Nada and Polo’s brutalist styled doom sphere \/ space station. <\/p>\n
In a forum, some internet rando claimed the anomaly is scripted to appear about every two hours. I have no way to confirm that, but it feels about right. <\/p>\n
Polo has a series of 16 challenges for you to complete. Although in typical No Man’s Sky style, the game doesn’t tell you what the challenges are, what the rewards will be, or what order they come in. You just show up and talk to Polo. He’ll comment on your journey, and if you’ve completed the latest challenge he’ll give you a reward.<\/p>\n
This would be fine if Polo was just dispensing bonus items, but one of the things he gives out is the final tier of Warp reactor. There are four different colors of star systems in the game. In order these are Yellow, Green, Red, Blue. Each tier has new exotic resources to harvest, and each tier requires a warp drive upgrade. <\/p>\n
The final warp drive is Polo’s very last reward for his very last challenge. The game has three different overarching goals: The Atlas Quest, the journey to the center of the galaxy, and the (newly added) Artemis storyline. I don’t know about the last one, but to finish either of the first two you will need this warp reactor. Which means Polo is effectively part of the “main quest”. <\/p>\n
<\/div>Each time you randomly encounter Polo, he’ll require you to have reached some milestone on your journey. Kill X spaceships, destroy X robots, save up X galactic space-bucks, survive an accumulated X hours in extreme weather conditions, scan X alien animals, learn X alien vocabulary words, etc. He presents these milestones to you, in order, whenever you stumble onto one of his outposts. You don’t know what his next challenge will be, so you can’t prepare for your next encounter. If you run into him and discover you need to invest a bunch more time to meet the next goal, then you need to continue on your journey, grind out the requisite tasks, and then wait for him to show up againOr you can backtrack, depending on how your travels go. I’m a bit iffy on when his space station disappears and it’s not documented in the wiki.<\/span>. <\/p>\n As icing on the cake, his entire design is really goofy and dissonant. He’s written like he’s this peace and love idealist who hates violence, but literally half of his 16 rewards are weapons. The story is written in this unconventional first person as narrated by the player character, and tells how the player and Polo become fast friends. It feels so disconnected from everything else and the friendship feels so unearned I found it off-putting. The game keeps telling me I’m dear friends with this unhelpful little pain in the ass. I realize that the problems with this game are so profound that complaining about ludonarrative dissonance is really petty, but it really did stand out. <\/p>\n If this was part of some labor-of-love indie project with a shoestring budget I might call Polo an “interesting experiment” and a “worthy try”. But this is a $60 AAA gameAs of this writing, NMS is STILL $60. For contrast, Doom 2016 came out the same year and was better reviewed, and it’s come down to $30. But NMS is still asking launch-day prices.<\/span> and this is one of the main characters. I’m less eager to hand-wave shortcomings like this with the excuse of, “It’s an indie effort.” I’ll forgive wonky audio or amateurish lighting if I’m watching a student film on YouTube, but if I just paid $60 to take my family to the movie theater then I expect a certain level of professionalism for my money. Even ignoring the issue of presentation and production values, Polo suffers from a terminal case of needing to, “Show, don’t tell.”<\/p>\n This is a bizarre<\/em> way of doling out rewards in an open-universe sandbox.<\/strong> “Go anywhere! Do anything! Find things that are fun for you! But in order to make progress you have to jump through these specific hoops, in this specific order.<\/em>” Just… what? This is the antithesis of everything else the game is trying to do! It’s basically engineered to create frustration and bottleneck your progress on other tasks.<\/p>\n Polo only recognizes one achievement per visit, even if you’ve completed a bunch of them.<\/strong> If I’ve completed challenges 4, 5, 6, and 7 but got stuck on #3, then once I complete #3 I can’t turn in #3 through #7 all at once. I have to turn in #3, then wait a couple of hours for Polo to show up so I can turn in #4, then wait a couple more until another random encounter lets me turn in #5, and so on. And remember, you don’t have any way of knowing what’s coming (unless you read the wiki) so you’re more likely to “waste” one of these rare visits just figuring out what you need to do.<\/p>\n Many of his early gifts are a waste.<\/strong> He’s hard to find, the story doesn’t tell you he’s important, his challenges are often daunting, and his early rewards are often useless or underwhelming. It’s like the game is teaching you that this guy isn’t important and he’s not worth your time. <\/p>\n His reward doesn’t even make sense!<\/b> The final warp reactor is obviously not a rare secret super-technology in this universe. Why can’t I just go into the parts shop and buy this warp reactor like all the other technologies in this game? It’s clear there are literally billions of people living in these blue star systems. They come and go as they please. Apparently everyone has this warp reactor but me. So why do I have to jump through all of these hoops for this strange little taskmaster? <\/p>\n His milestones are dissonant.<\/strong> Like I said, he’s written as this lifeform that cherishes life, but he rewards you with guns and his tasks require you go out of your way to shoot down other ships. Alone this is a minor problem, but with everything else it sort of adds to the sensation that the whole thing was slapped together without any thought. For example, he could have given away shields instead of guns, and his ship combat milestones could have been swapped out for any of the other non-murder ones. <\/p>\n So the game inadvertently teaches you that Polo is a waste or that his rewards are optional and not very good, which means you might not spend time doing them. Which means you’ll run into a wall later when the game casually gives you a goal that can only be completed with a maxed-out hyperdrive. Maybe you’ll shop around for hours before giving up and looking at the wiki, only to discover you’ve got dozens of hours of Polo-grinding before you can return to the task at hand.<\/p>\n Polo is a microcosm of everything wrong with the overall design of No Man’s Sky. An undocumented linear progression of arbitrary tasks that bottleneck progress, glazed in a layer of earnest but sophomoric writing. <\/p>\n As bad as all of this is, you can deal with Polo by just keeping the Wiki open in the background and making sure you plan your activities so you don’t get stuck on any of his tasks for too long. That’s annoying, but it’s not enough to ruin the game. The task of ruining the game falls to…<\/p>\n You might remember my long tirades last year about the No Man’s Sky inventory system. The inventory wasn’t just annoying, it actively inhibited the one good thing the game had going for it. But in case you missed it, here’s a quickBy the overly verbose standards of this site, anyway.<\/span> overview…<\/p>\n Imagine you’re playing Skyrim or Fallout 4. You leave town, hike across an empty wilderness, and plunge into a dungeon. Halfway through looting the first room, your inventory is already full. Your first instinct is, “I’ll take what’s valuable.” Except, it’s all<\/strong> valuable. Every dungeon has a couple of rare resources that are hard to find. You know<\/em> you’ll need them later. You can ignore them now, but ten hours from now you’ll be able to forge yourself a sweet new weapon except you’ll need the thousand units of the Unobtainium that’s currently right in front of you. You won’t be able to find this particular dungeon again. You’ll have to voyage around for three hours to find the next batch of it, and the whole time you’ll be thinking back to the thousands of units you left on the floor of this dungeon because you couldn’t carry it.<\/p>\n Your inability to plan for the future aside, you also really need money. Which means you need to take some of this other<\/strong> loot with you. But your gear (and the materials to keep you going) take up 90% of your carry capacity. So what do you do? Excavate this dungeon a spoonful at a time, running between here and town to make some trivial amount each trip? If you do that, you will spend a vast majority of your time hiking back and forth (boring) and not exploring the dungeons, which is the one thing this game does right. <\/p>\n This was a game about exploring and collecting resources on vast worlds where your pockets were full two minutes after leaving your spaceship. <\/p>\n “No problem for me! I don’t have the reflexive hoarding instinct. I’ll just ignore the loot and do the dungeon anyway. I’ll still level up.”<\/p>\n That might work in a Bethesda game, except in No Man’s Sky building upgrades is how you level up<\/em>. Imagine doing the dungeon, except all the “loot” you’re leaving behind is actually piles of XP.<\/p>\n This is what made the game so maddening at launch. Almost every single system of the game tied into the inventory: Materials to build upgrades, items to sell for money, items to grind reputation with factions, quest items for the main storyline, and the half dozen or so materials needed just to fuel your suit, your tools, and your ship. They all took inventory space. It was the one thing everyone hated about the game at launch, and the one thing that needed to be fixed.<\/p>\n Well the designer addressed this problem, and the result is perfectly indicative of the weird-ass approach No Man’s Sky has always used with regards to game mechanics. The solution is awkward, convoluted, frustrating, and doesn’t actually solve the problem<\/em>.<\/p>\n Originally you had two and a half inventories: Your exosuitYour pockets.<\/span>, your starship, and your multi-toolWhich held upgrades, but not items.<\/span>. My original complaint was that all of your upgrades used inventory slots. So if I wanted to upgrade my exosuit with a radiation shield so I can explore an irradiated world, then I need to give up one of my too-few inventory slots to do it. The same thing applied to the spaceship. To solve this, Hello Games didn’t just give us more inventory. Instead they gave us more kinds<\/strong> of inventory. <\/p>\n Now, I’m going to suggest that you NOT read this next bit. This is long and it’s not totally required to understand what’s wrong. But I’m leaving it here for the curious. If you find yourself thinking, “It can’t be as silly as Shamus is making it sound”, then come back and read this. If you’re willing to take my word for it, then just jump down to the section titled What a Mess<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When people demanded “more inventory space!” I think Hello Games misunderstood. HG seems to think that what we really wanted was more different kinds<\/i> of inventory. The updates have added new inventory groups and sub-screens. Here is what they are and how they workOr don’t, in a few cases.<\/span>. <\/p>\n Single items still don’t stack. Materials are stored in stacks of 250. You can transfer items from here to your starship from anywhere in the game, but if you’re far away from your starship you can’t transfer them the other way.<\/p>\n In the wilderness you’ll sometimes find a single-use upgrade station that will let you buy one additional slot of space. The cost to do this increases every time. <\/p><\/div>\n You start off the game with no cargo slots. Then, thanks to a known<\/a> bug<\/a>, it stays that way. You walk up to an inventory upgrade machine, pay a huge pile of money, and then nothing happens. According to the forums, most people do this twice. The first time they assume they clicked on something wrong or selected the wrong kind of upgrade. The second time they realize they’ve been ripped off. <\/p>\n Like the exosuit, you can add one additional slot to this for an ever-increasing fee. (Assuming you’re not suffering from the ripoff bug.)<\/p><\/div>\nSo what’s wrong with Polo?<\/h3>\n
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<\/div>The Stupid Inventory System (Again.)<\/h3>\n
<\/div>An Explanation of the Five Different Kinds of Inventory, Their Sub-Inventories, How They Differ, How They’re Connected, and Holy Shit This is Already So Stupid.<\/h3>\n
Exosuit<\/h2>\n
<\/div>Exosuit Cargo<\/h2>\n
Exosuit Technology<\/h2>\n
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