No Man’s Sky first stunned audiences at VGX 2013, showing vast interplanetary exploration, with worlds randomly created within a procedurally generated open universe. Space battles, unique planet life, deep oceans and predators are all left for player discovery, being randomly generated on the fly as the player explores to their hearts content. It was a young childs dream come true, being able to jump into your spaceship and seemingly fly off to an entire other world and discover the mysteries that lay within.
No Man’s Sky features an incredibly seamless transition from space exploration to breaking through an orbit and landing in an unknown world. The players view is engulfed with clouds and air, before being whisked away with beautiful skies and the new planets unique landscape and terrain. The game manages this all without load screens, while the player gets to experience it all in realtime.
Audiences were once again universally impressed with No Man’s Sky’s tech and presentation during E3 2014, where many people agreed it “stole the show”. It’s no doubt that No Man’s Sky’s demos and presentation have been exceptional and insanely engrossing, however one questioned was still seemingly hovering above everyone’s head – besides flying around to planets, what exactly do you do?
Enter Sean Murray, founder of Hello Games and spokesperson for No Man’s Sky. At E3 2014 Sean Murray faced these questions, and many more, only to reassure fans that what they were seeing was in fact real and the No Man’s Sky would be released in tact. In response to people’s curiosity on main objectives or player focus Sean responded by describing No Man’s Sky as a “Hans Solo simulator” and that his team at Hello Games started the project with that in mind. Sean also added that the teams main focus was on creating a “science fiction” game and said “Sci-fi, to me, it’s about going on adventures in a universe that is unknown. It’s landing on a planet and realizing that no one has ever been here before. That was entirely the idea. That emotion you would get from exploring, and there’s kinda no other way to create that, so the technology came second.”
Although the technology driving the game is impressive, Sean said that the team didn’t build the tech to build a game around it, they built the game around the idea of exploring space. “We don’t really get excited about the tech, and I didn’t even really want to show it,” he said. “I don’t want people to be excited about this tech — I want them to be excited about the emotion they will get from this Han Solo simulator experience where they get to live out their fantasy.”
Murray reinstated that you chose how to play the game, it’s isn’t a linear or narrative experience, the player embarks and decides from there what they want to do. In similar fashion to games like “Minecraft” or “DayZ” – there is no objective, only player curiosity and imagination.
The game will feature objectives, but players will not be forced to pursue them to further a narrative or be “successful”. “No Man’s Sky is about going on adventures,” said Murray. “And hopefully, when you describe your adventures to your friends, they will sound like stories from a sci-fi novel. That’s all we’ve ever wanted.”
Whether you’re the type of person who wants to get into epic space battles and hunt bounties, the type who wants to explore and discover, or just the type who wants to fly through the endless bounds of space No Man’s Sky should have you covered. I couldn’t be more excited and am looking forward to hearing more of this game in the near future.
No Man’s Sky is slated for release on Playstation 4 and PC sometime in the future with other platforms being a high possibility.
– Ben Morphy
Follow me on twitter @xPolyMorphic
