james2025a

I have watched a few videos about this game and it looks very interesting. Reminds me of older games like Elite, Mercenary and Damocles. The ability to fly from planet to planet, walk around, interact. The size of the game sounds huge (reports say that if you were to spend just one second on each planet that it would take you 5 billion years to visit every planet just once. That's 18 quintillion possible planets.) Not sure if having such a large universe (quite literally it would seem) in the game will be a strength or weakness.

The fact that the game can be played offline as well is a bonus.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtmEjqzg7M

chess

Can a brother get an apostrophe?

If No Man's Sky delivers on everything it promises. Oh man...

james2025a

Just for you.

chess

Decker

No Man's Sky -

Infinite Possibilities
One Apostrophe

Groucho

This game sounds amazing, assuming it lives up to it's potenial.

Decker

I see what you did there.

james2025a

Yeah, i want to believe it will live up to the hype, but done that before and been let down. Still, worth keeping on the radar for sure.

K&AJones

I've been on board since this game was shown at E3

chess

I think I remember saying that it kind of stole E3...along with the Destiny Alpha.

Nausicaa

I think it looks great, but I'm not happy about the timed console exclusivity, which is pretty fuckin stupid. Already had to wait a year to play GTAV on PC, and now this!?

fumanstan

This stood out the most to me at E3, but now i'm wondering if i'd get bored fast and more of a pretty to look at, not much to do type of thing. But yeah, i'd be getting this on PC depending on reviews.

wlj

It sure looks promising, but I wouldn't get my hopes up of it delivering everything they claim it is going to deliver. Very few games do.

mhg83

How long till each planet starts to look the same? You can have thousands of worlds to explore but if they're all repetitive it'll get old really fast.

Decker

No Man’s Sky: A Whole Universe to Explore

+ Posted by Sean Murray on Aug 26, 2014 // Managing Director, Hello Games



Hello PlayStation.Blog! I’m Sean Murray, and I work at a little indie studio in the UK, making a game called No Man’s Sky on PS4. I’m writing this on a plane back from Gamescom, where we showed some press the game behind closed doors.

We’ve only done three days where we’ve talked to press about the game so far (two at E3 and one at the VGXs last year), but for an indie game we’ve had lots of interest and excitement. Something I’m still struggling to get my head around. So much so that I didn’t actually want to go to Gamescom! We’ve never actually shown any European press the game though, and we felt bad about that.

PlayStation provided a room and I gave a hundred press a demo of the game for an hour, together with a really rambling presentation… where I apparently never looked up at the crowd once.

I can’t really remember what I said, but I guess I wanted to share some stories from development, and I thought maybe you’d find them interesting, too.



We tell people No Man’s Sky is a science-fiction game, set in an infinite procedural universe. When I read sci-fi growing up, though, the thing I always wanted to experience was the feeling of touching down on a planet that no one had ever been to. To walk over the crest of an alien landscape and not know what I might find.

My favorite moment so far from making No Man’s Sky happened a few months back. David was adding four-legged creatures to the game (he insists on calling them ungulates), Hazel was adding a weather system, and Ryan was adding collision to all the trees (which is really hard when you have a whole forest full of them).

I hadn’t seen any of this, and I was flying around the universe, trying to take some screenshots. I neared the surface of a planet and suddenly it started to rain. As I was touching down I scared some deer who broke through the woods, dodging in and out of trees. Now this was jaw-dropping to me, because I’ve never seen any of these systems before, but also it felt like this was a real place I’d discovered. No one had been there before, and I didn’t know whether to shout excitedly, or just keep it to myself.



In a nutshell, moments like that are No Man’s Sky for me. Sure there is trading, combat, weapons, ships, and a core game, but really for me the quiet moments of discovery are what it’s all about.

The cool thing is that every planet has a single number, a random seed, that defines everything about that planet. A single random seed generates every blade of grass, tree, flower, creature. So as the developer I can note down the planet seed, and then just go back there any time I want. We demoed this at Gamescom, just jumping round the universe to different planets. There are no load times, because nothing needs to load, as the planets are entirely computer-generated.

Really this seed defines how many planets you can discover before things start to go a bit crazy and undefined. For us we choose a big number. We’re working to a 64-bit system, which is 2 to the power of 64… or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 possible planets. Even if a planet is discovered every second, it’ll take 585 billion years to find them all!

<iframe width="853" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/0APP5WcX8v8?list=UUGKx5XhGuf09VERiw_QIemA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Being a coder, I really enjoy the tech side of things, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is how interesting, varied, and exciting we can make this universe of ours. That’s what developing No Man’s Sky really is. It’s about filling the universe.

The procedural technology does lots of that for us, but we have to provide it with the sparks, like the patterns of spaceship design that we think look great, and different types of creature and the way they vary. We have to build the systems, the rules. We’ve shown so far creatures that you’ll be familiar with, but we’re thinking now about creatures that look far more alien, and they’re slowly changing the way even we’re perceiving the universe. It’s getting weirder, maybe not so friendly, and surprising us at every turn.

It’s been a joy to see the game boot every day as No Man’s Sky becomes richer and more varied and we see more surprising things, but it’s also sort of frustrating, because it’s so hard to share our excitement at what we’ve been creating. It has never felt right to just go and show off lots of a game that’s about discovery. It’s like that should be up to you when you finally get to play. I can’t wait for that, and it just makes me want to finish the game as soon as we can.

And my plane has just landed! Thanks again for everything, and we’ll talk again soon.

mndtrp

As far as gameplay, all I can find is talking about exploring planets and space battles. Is there something I'm missing, or has it just not been announced yet?

The videos do look cool, and I like the idea, but I guess I don't get what the point is beyond visiting planets to see what they are like.

slop101

I dunno... RPGs that have randomly generated dungeons are usually crap, when it comes to environments. They just don't have the uniqueness of something that was designed with a specific purpose. Compare those random dungeons to, say, the dungeons in a Zelda game. How are these planets going to be all that special when they're just randomly generated?

I'd much rather have a handful of awesomely designed planets rather than an infinite amount of random planets.

chess

So you want your planets to be artful then?

MoviePage

I think that is the point: exploration.

Although they've said that there's more to the overall story/goals than they're talking about just yet.

slop101

Like I've said, just because a game might have artistic elements, that doesn't make the game art. Regardless, I want my planets to have things on them for me to do. Otherwise, what's the point? What's the point of exploration without there being an end goal?

chess

I agree. Just a

I have more or less the same concerns for the game. There are supposedly antogonists and some sort of progression, but it all seems very unfocused and random from what I've seen so far. It's also a very small team who seem to be overpromising.

I would love to see something in between this game and Destiny, because at some point, I really thought Destiny was going to have more seamless exploration, but it all turned out to be a bunch of loading screens.

RichC2

I say the same about Minecraft.

Groucho

There's a new generation of gamers that prefer open, sandbox games (e.g. Minecraft, DayZ) over games with a more defined goal (e.g. levels and missions). This game definitely appeal's to the former.

K&AJones

I can remember the days where game critics and players would complain about games with the play thru being to short, not enough maps, boring, not enough to do, felt like a expansion,etc...I didn't think I'd see the day where the complaint was "it's to big". I'm still trying to figure out the idiots complaing Destiny is not big enough...

james2025a

I get the feeling that this will mirror Mercenary/Damocles/Mercenary III in scope. For those unaware of these games from the 80's and early 90's, they basically provided a planet (Mercenary) or an entire solar system (Damocles/Mercenary III) to fly around and trying to achieve a single main goal. In Mercenary that was simply to get off planet. In Damocles it was to stop an giant meteor (Damocles) from destroying the planet of Eris(?...been a while...name might be wrong). Whilst in Mercenary III you ad the same solar system as Damocles, but you had to depose the main villain from his seat as head of the galaxy. Damocles at the time (and actually still is) was incredibly impressive. On a single load from a 3.5 floppy disk you could walk, drive or fly on and between a multitude of planets. Some of the planets had cities, some were more barren, whilst one had several million individually named pyramids on it. You also had a home on the moon of Eris, you could find items around the galaxy to place in your house. It was an amazing feat to be achieved on the old Amiga and Atari St.

So i believe that there will be a single goal to the game, but like Damocles/Mercenary III, several ways in which to achieve said goal. One of the creators of the game said that at the center of the Universe in the game something is to be found....and it is certainly worth getting to.

I do agree that it would be cool to have a finite amount of really well crafted planets, but i am still remaining optimistic about this game. The games i tend to play the most these days are the ones i can simply load up and mess around in for a while, rather than really get invested for several hours.