The Art of No Man's Sky Book Review

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No Man's Sky
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Duration: 7:47
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The Art of No Man’s Sky is an enormous book that has art from every stage of the design process, profound insight from the developers throughout the book, information about the different factions you can join, multiplayer, and you won’t BELIEVE what happens when you get to the end of the book! Overall, it’s the best video game art book in the known universe!

0:00 - Introduction
0:41 - Quality of the Physical Book
1:02 - Content
4:57 - Aesthetics
5:40 - Nostalgia
6:11 - Backstage
6:54 - Closing Remarks
7:24 - SPECIAL SURPRISE!


QUALITY OF PHYSICAL BOOK
-Small. 6.5x5 inches
-43 pages of actual art
-Decent hardcover, pages, and overall construction.


CONTENT/INNARDS
Variety of images and image types
-There is technically a variety of content, but it’s almost all final images or inspiration art. What I mean is, they didn’t show the iterations of really anything.

Organization, does it make sense
-The book starts with aspirational concept art, then moves through some categories, then shows a few screenshots and other art produced at what seems like the later end of the development cycle.
-There’s very little art in the book to even organize, yet what they chose to put in is disorganized.

Is there writing or insight from the artists and developers themselves?
-The words seem to be from a developer, and there’s a little blurb at the start from a developer, but it is so minimal that it offers no substantial benefit.

Quality of writing
-It’s not great. It feels kind of like an ad.
-It says that the ships and buildings have different design philosophies based on the type of alien, which seems true, but there is no further exposition. How are they different? How is this reflected in the alien race? We’re left to guess.

Does it have what you want it to have?
-It could have expounded on the content a lot more. For example, it shows one quadruped and about 20 variations of it. That’s fine. But the rest of the creature section is just an amalgam of random creatures. It would have been much better if they outlined “okay, here are the 15 different main types of creatures we programmed - quadruped, crab, dinosaur, bird, whale, etc.. Here are a few samples of the variations.” I also imagine that certain parts of the creatures were flagged for randomization, like having different kinds of tails. It would have been nice to have developer commentary about all of this, but instead we get essentially no commentary.
-The main attraction of the game was that it was an infinite universe, yet there was almost no discussion or explanation whatsoever of how the developers went about designing this from an artistic point of view.
-There are just some basic deficits to the book. For example, the text explains that there are six biome types, but then it only shows 5.
-Also, there are only three alien races in the whole game, and the book only shows 2. Really?! C’mon.


AESTHETICS
-Well, some of the larger landscape images are really nice.
-A lot of the book is like a kind of art spreadsheet.
-There are a few pages of full art, and they’re great.
-The start and end has about a dozen images that are wonderful. I can see how Sean Murray got carried away if he was looking at those images.
-A lot of the other art is literally things like rocks. I found a lot of it pretty bland.


NOSTALGIA/AFFINITY EVOKED FOR THE GAME
-Highly subjective in this case. For me the game was disappointing and the art book helped me understand why. A lot of the overall vision is amazing, but the individual pieces are a bit clunky and pasted in. The concept art is great, though, and it will always hearken to the best version of what the game could be.


BACKSTAGE
-Probably the only insight I gained was about how in a vast landscape, the silhouette of a building is most important.
-It seems like the art direction and style is solid, but somewhere along the line this didn’t totally translate into much of the game. It’s odd to look at some of the images and think of how far away they are from the gameplay experience at launch.


There are 17 book reviews in Season 1 of my series “Mike’s Video Game Art Book Reviews.” I hope you enjoy them!




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