'No Man's Sky' Aliens Have Discovered Spaceships Are Humpable

The aliens of No Man’s Sky have advanced to the intelligence level of your typical FPS player, having learned that they can ruthlessly hump their fellow players.

All gameplay grousing aside, one of the most common complaints about No Man’s Sky has been about a perceived lack of grandeur in the universe’s alien ecology. This was best captured in a video embedded in a tweet demanding an apology from the No Man’s Sky team. The video borrows the Jurassic Park music for the sake of grandeur, juxtaposing the lush, biologically coherent world showcased in the No Man’s Sky trailer with the reality: a lump of stupid galumphing around the planetary surface, its grotesque, pinched tyrannosaur head bobbing like an unloved Happy Meal toy.

Unfortunately, because our current copyright regime is antagonistic to fair use and wholly inadequate for internet standard practice (plus the DMCA/YouTube policy allows corporations a presumption of correctness when they spam takedown notices), the video is no longer available.

Anyway — flaring anger at the increasingly constrained discourse available to us online aside — many players feel No Man’s Sky has a splendor problem. Imgur is loaded with dippy looking alien critters created by the procedural generation algorithms. It’s a universe more malformed and fugly than sublime.

But is that really such a bad thing? Or, is it really even all that unrealistic? Scrutinize Earth for a moment. The vast majority of life here is repulsive and far-fetched. For every blue whale that cruises the high seas, smugly aware of its own majesty, there are tens of thousands of bloated, pimpled cane toads with goggle eyes and folded bulges of flesh. My naked body in a mirror is a pile of asymmetric imperfections, unfortunate geometries and dangling extrusions no aesthete would ever wish on a conscious and gentle mind. Yours is the same.

For every No Man’s Sky creature like this…

I though I had found the most majestic creature in the game...I was very very wrong.

… remember that just this planet alone has these gawky dumbasses:

AND critters so icky and repulsive our first reaction is often to squeal and stomp the life out of them with our biggest boots.

Which is to say that while we had hoped No Man’s Sky would offer us platonic forms of beauty and grace, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that the actual release has mostly given us gangly-limbed goof nards.

Once we’ve come to accept that life in No Man’s Sky is largely as dumb, illogical and obviously undesigned as life on Earth, what are we left with? Nothing more than the simple pleasures of the grotesque. These lumbering, stupid beasts are just as prone to humping everything as the dumb animals we castrate and keep around our homes to make us less sad.

Uh...

They’re just like us. It may not be sublimity, but it’ll do.