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Old 06-10-2014, 07:17 PM   #21
Mavrick Mavrick is offline
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Original thread was started December 2013, but the search function here brings up nothing when you look for it

Google did a better job

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=232833
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Old 06-10-2014, 07:18 PM   #22
Elandyll Elandyll is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GeneticMutation View Post
Seriously though, what is the aim of this game?
As far as we know so far, exploration and possibly crafting to reach some areas.
It has been confirmed that you have/ can do some gathering, and build things going from weapons (so possibly threats from Fauna/ flora?), suits (hostile environments?) and ships (to access near/ far space regions?).

I imagine also that the game will be chock full of trophies, as you can also catalog worlds/ fauna and flora.

There are also those hostile ships (which to my knowledge aren't other players invading, the game is not mp to my knowledge, you just share the same universe and can see the name of who discovered a world for the first time) which might tie into a meta story, not sure.
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Old 06-10-2014, 07:43 PM   #23
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SethRex View Post
Okay who here, when they first saw the ship thought STAR WARS?
I was thinking Star Fox.
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Old 06-10-2014, 07:46 PM   #24
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This got my attention, I loved it. I'll be keeping an eye on this, shame there is no release date.

If you're interested the music is called Debutante, by 65 days of static
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Old 06-10-2014, 09:22 PM   #25
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Elandyll View Post
As far as we know so far, exploration and possibly crafting to reach some areas.
It has been confirmed that you have/ can do some gathering, and build things going from weapons (so possibly threats from Fauna/ flora?), suits (hostile environments?) and ships (to access near/ far space regions?).

I imagine also that the game will be chock full of trophies, as you can also catalog worlds/ fauna and flora.

There are also those hostile ships (which to my knowledge aren't other players invading, the game is not mp to my knowledge, you just share the same universe and can see the name of who discovered a world for the first time) which might tie into a meta story, not sure.
Thanks for that, it sounds pretty ambitious. Doesn't seem my kind of game whether you can call it a game? It looks to be more of an experience than a game.

Hope it does well so we can see where the developers go next.

Also, as it's not MP does that mean you will never bump into another player on another planet or anywhere?
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Old 06-12-2014, 03:17 PM   #26
Elandyll Elandyll is offline
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http://no-mans-sky.com/press/sheet.p...7s_sky#credits

Quote:
Description

No Man’s Sky is a game about exploration and survival in an infinite procedurally generated universe.

History

No Man's Sky has been in our heads for a very long time. In fact, it has its roots in Sean Murray's experiences growing up on a ranch in the Australian outback. It was the true middle of nowhere, where if something went wrong you were told to just stay where you were and light a fire at an exact time every day, and hope that someone would find you. The night sky was filled with more stars than you’ve ever seen, and we've all thought that this is exactly where videogames would go, videogames that contained the whole universe, and you’d be able to visit it all. No Man's Sky takes that jump - it's the game we've always wanted to make.

Features

*A TRULY OPEN UNIVERSE If you can see it, you can go there. You can fly seamlessly from the surface of a planet to another, and every star in the sky is a sun that you can visit.

*EXPLORATION IS SEEING THINGS THAT NO-ONE ELSE HAS EVER SEEN BEFORE Every creature, geological formation, plant and spaceship is unique.
SURVIVE ON A DANGEROUS FRONTIER You are alone and vulnerable, and will face threat everywhere, from deep space to thick forests, barren deserts to dark oceans.

*BUILD FOR AN EPIC JOURNEY Collect precious materials and trade them for better spacecraft and upgrades for your suit and equipment.

*PARALLEL UNIVERSES Choose to share your discoveries with other players, or not. You will never see another player, but you could make your mark on their worlds as well as your own.
So SURVIVAL is a goal, so things will try to kill you, and environments are going to be hostile (hence crafting suits/ weapons/ ships?).


As per goals, a very interesting interview revealed this a few months ago:

http://www.idigitaltimes.com/article...hings-know.htm

Quote:
No Man's Sky Is Next-Gen For A Reason
When you view the trailer, you aren't blown away by the graphics of No Man's Sky. This isn't a game that is about making hyper realistic facial animations and lighting effects. Instead, Hello Games is going to utilize the power of the next-gen console to process the algorithms that will be driving the procedural generation. No Man's Sky is a game about going places.

"So if you were stood on a mountain and you can see a tree three miles away you can go and you can walk and you can see that tree and what's under it," Murray told Polygon. "But also if you look into the sky and you see that classic science fiction crescent planet on the horizon, you can go there as well. And if you see a star that's in the sky, given enough time you can go and look at that as well. You can look at the night sky and all of those stars are actually real things, they are real places, and you can have visited some of them but not visited others."

The reason so much horsepower is required is because all of those worlds and stars and mountains are shared by EVERYONE. You start No Man's Sky with basically a blank map of the universe and as you explore and name things so, too, will other players. So where does the action come into play? There's more to No Man's Sky than just sightseeing.

"The universe as such will be a really dangerous place for you," Murray said. "It will start out not so dangerous, but as you try to journey to the centre of the galaxy, things will mutate a lot more and will make your gameplay experience much more dangerous. Undertaking that trip will require lots of preparation. It will require you to, without going into too much detail, build up your character, build up your ship. I don't know how much I want to say about how you go about doing that, but you will have to co-operate with other people to make that journey."
Some of my goals will be

- find an ocean planet with abyssal depths to see truly gigantic creatures (hopefully)
- Probably specialize in ocean exploring in as many planets as I'll can during my journey, and cataloging as many oceanic speices as possible
- find the center of the galaxy to see how crazy things are and if there really is a superGiant Blackhole there, and if I can go along with Neil deGrasse Tyson inside it to access a whole new Universe through it.

I hope it'll be a 2014 title, I really do

Last edited by Elandyll; 06-12-2014 at 04:34 PM.
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Old 06-12-2014, 03:27 PM   #27
Steelmaker Steelmaker is offline
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This honestly was my E3 Game of the Show. It just looks amazing!

More than just this game, it makes me excited for what games could potentially become.

Just imagine a Star Wars game where you're on Dagobah and you hop into your X-Wing and fly to Hoth and go wampa hunting. Then after that you could fly to Tatooine and enter a Pod Race or fight a krait dragon. Then you could fly to Coruscant and visit the Jedi Temple!
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Old 06-12-2014, 03:33 PM   #28
Mavrick Mavrick is offline
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Amazing considering the team consists of just 10 staff not all of which work on the actual game
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Old 06-25-2014, 04:55 PM   #29
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Big Article / Interview today on 6axis

http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2014/06/...f-no-mans-sky/

Quote:
Crafting The Endless Cosmos Of No Man's Sky: A look at the technology behind the skies.
Blair Inglis


There are ten people working at Hello Games, managing director Sean Murray tells us, eager to dispel an often misquoted number of four. While that was the magic number for Joe Danger, it’s clear from the outset that No Man’s Sky is a much bigger task, and therefore requires a bigger development team. But ten is still not really big, is it? The game looks as though it might be more vast than anything before it – almost infinite in fact – and the fact that ten people are managing that is still quite incredible.

So, just how are they doing it? While showing us a preview of the gameplay Sean Murray told us that, due to its nature, it’s “the worst game in the world to demo” and instead took us on a tour of the depths of their engine – an engine of their own creation, this wouldn’t be achievable through Unity, UDK or another third party system – and went into detail about the procedurally generated foliage, enemies, worlds and universe of No Man’s Sky.

Upon reaching a planet, Sean tells us that “Everything that you see is being generated when you get there. Nothing exists on disk, or in the cloud, or anything like that.” Of course, these aren’t coming from nothing: Hello Games have many complicated formulas and algorithms in place, as well as “prototypes for certain types of trees, and certain types of creatures, and fish… and robots and things like that, and they exist on disk.”

“But most things don’t” continues Sean, saying that “they just kind of happen” when you reach a planet, and although they’re “thrown away” when you leave, they’ll be cached, so when you return they’ll be as you’d expect them, and you won’t return to an entirely different planet in the place of the one you had previously explored. It’s a very complex system, and more “like a formula” as Sean puts it. It’s a formula which will always come up with the same results, so there’s no need to store it locally, or even in the cloud.

Of course, you’d wonder that if there’s no help from servers or your local storage, how the game manages to load each planet as you approach at speed. It’s all about the detail: as we approach for landing, Sean says “This is the planet, and the entire planet is generated. The entire sphere, just really low detail.” The specific details aren’t quite there, they haven’t loaded yet, but upon landing and subsequently looking back up into the sky, we’re once again surprised, as Sean tells us:

“That’s the planet that we flew from – that’s the rainforest planet. You can still make out mountains and canyons, just like you would seeing Earth from space. And this whole planet that we’re stood on is generated to that level as well, so when I’m stood on a really tall mountain I could see the curvature of the earth.”

David from Hello Games presses a few buttons on the keyboard and takes us out of a full screen experience, into their debug view. “This isn’t the game, these are just the tools; no one’s ever going to see these” says Sean, which we can assume means “no one but us”, of course, and he can fly the camera around in free mode. “I can fly around and you can see this being generated around me. I can travel at a couple of thousand miles an hour if I press a button, and I can try to outrun it but I won’t be able to.”

It generates at a startling rate – the technology behind this is optimised phenomenally well. And although the detail hadn’t loaded fully as the ship descended, now that we’re floating just above the surface, zooming in reveals “tiny little rocks, bits of bushes, and stuff like that” with extreme detail.

Now, the next question on my mind is whether the procedural generation made development easier or harder for them. ”It’s hard to create this system, but then once it’s created, we’re kind of freed from content. We don’t have to worry about levels, or building light boxes, or whatever.” says Sean. It definitely seems as though they’re over the biggest hurdle, then, but it seems as though there’s an even bigger one on the way: the testing of the game.

If everything is generated, and there are infinite combinations, then how are they going to test it easily? Well, Hello Games once again prove their ingenuity with a sublime solution: ”So, what we have is actually a server, and a set of bots, basically. They fly around planets and take screenshots and animated GIFs, and then we have a little website – internally – and we can just look at these animated GIFs and it will just play it. You can zoom in and out from that: you can see the planet full screen, or zoom right out and see a hundred by hundred grid of planets.”

And then, if there’s “too much blue” in one of those grids, or “too many rocks”, or just something that looks entirely out of place, they can change that. They’re going to have to expand it as they go through development though: they’ll need to make these AI bots react like normal players, even to the point where they can fly ships, to test it properly. But they’ve definitely got a smart solution to a problem with their current system. They’re aware that people will try to break it – and someone will break it – but “that’s half the fun” in existing games of a similar vein, such as Minecraft and DayZ, Sean assures us.

The skies may be impressive in themselves, but the planets need to be filled with content. Starting with perhaps the most banal (yet still important) of items in trees, they explain how they manage that. While traditional artists would have to create several types of tree to populate a forest, and then more for a different forest, Hello Games don’t have to do that.

They compare their system to any MMO or RPG character creator. You know, the ones where “you have a whole bunch of sliders, and you change skin colour, weight, and facial features and all those sort of things”? Sean’s spent forever in those things in other games, and now they use them as part of theirs, but for every prop in the universe of No Man’s Sky. And it’s not by player choice, either – you won’t see them – it’s all randomly, procedurally generated in the background.

They show us a tree, click the button to bring up its variants, and thousands (perhaps millions) are created on the fly. It’s effectively based on a number of variable sliders then, but understands the structure of trees, “so it knows there’s trunk, and there’s bushes or foliage at the top, it knows that it can bend the trunk in various different ways.”

“A tree is a sort of boring way to show that” Sean concedes. “So, if we pick a ship… this is more interesting. You get effectively an infinite number of ships” continues Sean, interrupted by the colourful array of ships on screen. And at this point we’ve only been shown one model – there will be lots of different ones in the game, with an infinite number of variations, and they’ll naturally all be able to be piloted. Different models will have different attributes – bigger wings for better handling, a bigger engine for further or faster travel – and of course, it comes down to what individual players want their ship to look like, too.

Where it gets really interesting is with the creatures. Once again, Sean brings up another model. It’s a dinosaur this time, and hitting the “show variants” command reveals a huge selection of differently shaped, multi-coloured beasts. But all of them look acceptable – there’s nothing out of place here. Every time the team click onto another page of variants, they’ll find something that they haven’t seen before. They won’t just be dinosaurs, either: “there’ll be everything from really boring to really alien. So you can have males, females, or even little baby ones.”

A game which surprises the developers due to their own brilliance is really quite an exciting prospect. And Sean, taking a brief break from his usual humility, delivers one final line which highlights the true brilliance of No Man’s Sky, and the key point behind this infinite number of creatures, props and vehicles:

“It’s easy for us to do that. Well, not easy, but easier to do that, because we’re not constrained by content, which a lot of people are.”
God, this can't come fast enough (but I want them to polish the hell out of it, so take your time to get it right!)
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Old 06-25-2014, 05:44 PM   #30
CasualKiller CasualKiller is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Elandyll View Post

God, this can't come fast enough (but I want them to polish the hell out of it, so take your time to get it right!)


Saw a cool video on it where they basically said "we provide you the universe, you make your own game".

One of my top 3 most anticipated games for PS4, (Bloodborne and the Witcher 3 are the other two).
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Old 06-25-2014, 06:05 PM   #31
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I am excited for this game's potential but I do still have a lot of questions about it. So far this is really all we know about the game...

1.) The planets and all that is contained within those planets are procedurally generated on the fly

2.) We will have the freedom to take off and land on each planet and explore each planet (though it's still unclear of just how much exploration we'll be allowed. Will there eventually be an invisible wall that we run into? Can we traverse the entire planet? )

3.) There is an element of combat involved as we've seen in the videos where you can fire upon other space ships, blast meteors, etc. We've also seen laser guns being fired while on foot as well.


That's pretty much it. That's all we really know about this thing. I have so many more questions that still aren't answered such as...


1.) Is there at least a general narrative to this? Is there going to at least be some kind of summary at the beginning telling us who our character is what we're supposed to be doing? Is there any purpose to what we do or is it just wandering around aimlessly?

2.) Can we colonize planets? Can we create societies? Can we cultivate, mine, build, hunt, forge, invent etc?

3.) Can we form alliances with neighboring planets or go to war against them?

4.) Does this game allow you to create your own character or are you just a nameless/faceless drone who's identity is non-essential to the game?

5.) Is there ANY kind of multi player element to this game?

If there is nothing more to this game than just exploring, I'm afraid it's going to get boring rather fast.
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Old 06-25-2014, 06:23 PM   #32
CasualKiller CasualKiller is offline
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The universe is infinite, there are no "invisible walls"
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Old 06-25-2014, 08:07 PM   #33
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Steelmaker View Post
I am excited for this game's potential but I do still have a lot of questions about it. So far this is really all we know about the game...

1.) The planets and all that is contained within those planets are procedurally generated on the fly

2.) We will have the freedom to take off and land on each planet and explore each planet (though it's still unclear of just how much exploration we'll be allowed. Will there eventually be an invisible wall that we run into? Can we traverse the entire planet? )
No invisible walls. You can go on land, in the ocean's depths, or fly in the atmosphere. How challenging would mountains be to cross on foot is unknown.

Quote:
3.) There is an element of combat involved as we've seen in the videos where you can fire upon other space ships, blast meteors, etc. We've also seen laser guns being fired while on foot as well.


That's pretty much it. That's all we really know about this thing. I have so many more questions that still aren't answered such as...


1.) Is there at least a general narrative to this? Is there going to at least be some kind of summary at the beginning telling us who our character is what we're supposed to be doing? Is there any purpose to what we do or is it just wandering around aimlessly?
Narrative is unknown, but unlikely. What we have seen is dynamic content such as convoys attacked by pirates, which you can then chose to join in on the attack, defend, or ignore.
The general "goal" of the game hasn't been plainly stated yet afaik, but a hint in an interview was that players should try to reach the "center of the galaxy", and that things would get far more bizarre (and hard) as we progress.
Dying to hostile forces/ environement is definitely possible.
Another stated goal is to discover as much as possible (planets, species...). Whoever discovers a planet first has their ID tagged to said place/ species I believe.


Quote:
2.) Can we colonize planets? Can we create societies? Can we cultivate, mine, build, hunt, forge, invent etc?
Afaik we can harvest and craft.

Quote:
3.) Can we form alliances with neighboring planets or go to war against them?
Unknown, but unlikely. Content seem to be generated on the fly based on both partially random and present (once discovered) numers/formulas.

Quote:
4.) Does this game allow you to create your own character or are you just a nameless/faceless drone who's identity is non-essential to the game?
Unknown, but it's in first person view. As there seems to be no back story beside you waking up on a planet surface...

Quote:
5.) Is there ANY kind of multi player element to this game?

If there is nothing more to this game than just exploring, I'm afraid it's going to get boring rather fast.
In some way. All the players share the same universe (I'm guessing via updates, but it is uknown if the title is online only), but they do not coexist at the same place in the same time.
Once you discover a planet/ species, your Game ID is then assoicated as the "discoverer". If you harvest a planet to hell, it will then be depleted, and any player showing up on that planet after you will not find ressources there.

Last edited by Elandyll; 06-25-2014 at 08:12 PM.
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Old 06-27-2014, 04:23 PM   #34
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New video about how NMS came to be


Starting at 6'30 he adresses Steelmaker's concern (paraphrasing):
Quote:
"This is not a blank canvas. There is a lore, the universe has a personality that we put in. There are fleets of freighters, other races, galactic police, and they all interact. Now each player starts on a different planet at the edge of the galaxy. I expect most people will try to reach the center of that galaxy, and there is a good reason to do so. There is also a game beyond that if you want and you can continue playing, but I expect most people to aim for that.
Now to do so you will need better equipment, better ships, and be rather smart about it. You will also have to collaborate with other players to some extent.
Then you'll look back and tell yourself, I started with the crapiest ship and equipment, and look where I am now. The Universe is also quite dangerous, as it should be in SciFi. It's not just a utopia where you can go anywhere you please right from the get go and nothing happens."
I really get where Sean Murray comes from, having grown up in the 70s and early 80s with the classic illustrations of artists like Chris Moore, Bob Layzell, Colin Hay, Ralph McQuarrie, Angus McKie, Chris Foss and specially Peter Elson (whose designs I'm sure influenced games such as Homeworld very heavily). The book covers/ Sci Fi compendiums where they were featured made me dream of possibly one day adventuring in those universes.

Can't wait


Peter Elson classic illustrations
[Show spoiler]














Last edited by Elandyll; 06-27-2014 at 07:02 PM.
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Old 06-27-2014, 05:12 PM   #35
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Originally Posted by Elandyll View Post
Stuff like this is why at 43 I still play video games.
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Old 06-27-2014, 07:01 PM   #36
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this is kind of what I wanted Destiny to be. I'm all in.
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Old 06-27-2014, 07:07 PM   #37
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This has the potential to be really amazing, or absolutely boring. I don't think there will be a middle ground on this one.
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Old 07-01-2014, 06:44 PM   #38
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Evolve (PS4, XB1, PC) got the big awards at E3 (Best Game of Show, Best Console Game, Best Action Game, Best Online Multiplayer),
but No Man's Sky was no slouch:

- Best Original Game
- Best Independant Game
- Special Commendation for Innovation



PS: Not sure how Inquisition beat Witcher 3 for best RPG, or The Crew as best racer over DC or FH2 but

PPS: Apparently Witcher 3 was not elligible because not playable at E3...

Last edited by Elandyll; 07-01-2014 at 06:46 PM.
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Old 07-02-2014, 04:22 PM   #39
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New article at TheVerge.com yesterday.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/1/586...of-no-mans-sky

Very interesting tidbits, I'll bold he ones I find the most relevant as "new information" imo. Tosn of cool photos of the studio too.



Sounds now like you can actually get to meet another player in game, but it would be incredibly rare (supposedly).

Quote:
Behind the scenes at Hello Games, makers of 'No Man's Sky'
One tiny studio is building the biggest universe gaming's ever known

By Vlad Savov on July 1, 2014

If you'd heard of Hello Games before this year's E3, it'd have been through playing the small indie studio's motorcycle stuntman sim, Joe Danger. But a quick visit to Sony's keynote stage by company founder Sean Murray has thrust Hello Games into the spotlight. It's all thanks to the ambitious new game that Murray and his small band of merry coders are working on. No Man's Sky proposes an infinite universe for players to explore, replete with all the hallmarks of sci-fi lore: fantastic creatures, intense space battles, and an intrepid curiosity for the unknown.

On a recent visit to the small Hello Games studio, I got to see how the 10-person team is going about its monumental task. The entire development crew works from inside just one big room, which resides next to a taxi company's offices. It's an unglamorous but friendly setting, decorated with Asteroid stickers on the walls and lots of vibrant color throughout. Scattered all around are various testing computers and consoles, including PlayStation and Xbox controllers and the recently arrived Sony Morpheus headset. The first-person No Man's Sky would seem to be an ideal candidate for being used with a VR headset like the Morpheus or the Oculus Rift, though Hello Games won't promise anything just yet. You'll find photos from the studio below and our early preview of the game right here.

Summon up every great space-exploration fantasy of the past century — from mining exotic planets in uncharted space to watching attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion — and convert that compendium of awesome into a game of unprecedented size and scale. That, in rough terms, is the motivation behind No Man’s Sky. This game doesn’t just aim for the moon or the stars; it wants to deliver an infinite universe filled with all types of celestial bodies and an endless variety of possible adventures. It’s one of the most ambitious projects in gaming today and it’s being created by a 10-person team working next door to a taxi company.

Founded in 2008 by a group of four friends leaving big game companies, Hello Games enjoyed success with its first title, 2010’s Joe Danger, before being thrust into the E3 spotlight this year with a gameplay demo of the refreshingly original No Man’s Sky. In a show overrun by predictable sequels and violent antics, its more peaceful exploration stirred up widespread acclaim and anticipation. This past week, fresh off his appearance on gaming’s biggest stage, Hello Games founder Sean Murray sat down with me to discuss the unique universe his company is trying to build and the challenge of doing so with a team small enough to fit into a single room. Plus, he let me try it out for myself.

"Games are incredibly bad at making the rare feel rare," says Murray. "Call of Duty is so worried about you not seeing an explosion every 15 seconds, that there’s never a quiet moment, there’s never a buildup. We’ve lost that ability to have even a feeling of ‘am I going the right way’ that we’re quite used to from real life."

No Man’s Sky spurns the conventional structures of pre-written narratives, set-piece action sequences, and discrete levels. There are no quests in this game. You don’t go planet-hopping to find a damsel or a merchant in distress and then fetch them three healing salves and four wolf pelts of varying colors. In fact, at the outset, you can’t hop very far at all. Each player is handed only the bare necessities for survival, dropped onto a planet on the rim of a galaxy, and left to his or her own devices. A basic life pod will putter you up to the nearest space station where you can begin to figure out how to get such devices, upgrade them, and do something useful or interesting with your life. Most people will start by either mining resources or trying their luck as a bounty hunter or freight security guard. What career paths lie beyond those basic professions is part of the exploration you’ll have to do.

Having to come up with your own objectives and measures for success will be a bewildering premise for a generation of players habituated to receiving explicit directions followed by a pat on the back for every small achievement in a game. Mario jumps and a shiny gold coin pops into the air. The only thing that happens in No Man’s Sky when you jump is that you land back down. Manually piloting your spaceship from the ground to the nearest space station isn’t just the scenic route to leaving the planetary surface, it’s the only way into space. There’s a pervasive insistence on the plausible realism of space exploration that distinguishes this game from most in its genre.

A single universe will be shared by all players of No Man’s Sky, though they’ll be so distant from one another that coming across some other player-controlled spaceship will feel like a truly noteworthy event. As Murray explains, "people underestimate how vast our (in-game) universe is. If we were lucky enough to have a million players and started them all on one planet, they would still be really far apart." So the enormous cluster battles of EVE Online are unlikely to ever materialize in No Man's Sky.

The other name that No Man’s Sky inevitably brings to mind is Spore, the genre-bending game from SimCity creator Will Wright that first introduced procedurally generated games — which dynamically create their worlds through algorithms rather than human design — to the mainstream. Murray describes that Maxis title as a millstone around his neck that gave games like the one he is building a bad name. It made everything fantastical. Every planet was lush, with a thriving ecosystem of spectacular and weird creatures. That’s what the trailer for No Man’s Sky depicts too — with fluorescent dinosaurs grazing alongside space antelopes — but Murray says that will be a very uncommon sight in his game.

The developers have set themselves a 90–10 rule. 90 percent of all the planets will not be habitable and won’t have any life on them. Of the 10 percent that do, 90 percent of that life will be primitive and boring. The tiny fraction of garden worlds with more evolved life forms on them will thus be almost as rare in the game universe as they ought to be in the real one. This scarcity is part of the delicate balance that Hello Games is trying to strike between its idealistic commitment to the science of sci-fi and the inherent need to keep players entertained.

This is, after all, still a game, and there are a number of subversive ways in which players are nudged to keep going and exploring. While you can’t level up your hero, you can equip him or her with a jetpack to make those gravity-bound jumps last longer or buy a hyper drive to allow for interstellar travel. There’s an infinite diversity of spaceships you can obtain in the game, but you can’t build them yourself and can only buy the ones docked at space stations. To find the perfect one, you might well have to leave your solar system and see what else is out there.

Ultimately, whether acting as a peaceful trader or a marauding raider, every explorer begins to get drawn in to the center of the universe. Riskier and more lucrative opportunities await travelers of all creeds. Effective cooperation, says Murray, will then be important to achieving each individual’s goals. "The reality is we don’t know what people will do — will they create spokes of a wheel where they cooperate to try and get to the center, or will it be totally chaotic and everyone will go off in different directions?" The crowd dynamics of No Man’s Sky are as excitingly unknowable as the vast expanses of its universe. And Hello Games is as curious to find out where it all leads as the rest of us, with Murray admitting that "we don’t actually know everything that’s out there in this universe we are creating."

Hello Games works around the innate conflict between the scale of its new game and the small size of the team building it by using procedural generation. As Murray puts it, the heart of this game is "a big black box full of math that generates everything on the fly." Instead of having an artist draw every in-game asset or landscape, No Man’s Sky uses a library of base prototypes, randomizes their parameters along a set of rules for internal coherence, and produces a form of organized, infinitely diverse chaos. Those rules are crucial to making the universe believable, and the color, size, geology, and even moisture of each planet will be affected by its distance and relation to the nearest star.

No Man’s Sky already has the skeletal structure to be a cosmically sized playground that we all can share in. The game’s still in development, however, and numerous questions remain to be answered. There are buildings visible on some planets, but how much can the player build? And, on the other side of the same coin, how much will you be able to destroy? A Han Solo simulator can’t be complete without the possibility of a dimpled Death Star to fight against.

Or maybe it can. Sean Murray isn’t ready to promise anything he’s not certain he can deliver in the final game, but he’s okay with it seeming to lack features and options when it’s released. He sees a trend — borne of the success of open-world games like Minecraft and the buggy but beloved DayZ — that shows people actively engaging with games before they are complete so as to provide their input and participate in their creation. Some gamers prefer to invent their own meaning and purpose, and No Man’s Sky wants to be the most epic canvas for their expression. Where the game’s development goes, what criteria are used to determine success within it, and the ultimate reason for its existence are all things that the players themselves will have to figure out.

Finally, before concluding my visit to the Hello Games studio, I was handed a PS4 controller and allowed to take my own tour of No Man’s Sky. Exploring the colorful planet from the company’s demo reel, I scanned a mossy cave for resources, scared away a few deer scampering about bright-orange underbrush, and got carried away with my jetpack. There wasn’t any point to it other than sheer curiosity, but nothing more was needed. The dreamy sci-fi ambience made the experience of exploring rewarding enough by itself. No Man’s Sky is not a game that you can win or lose, but it certainly won me over at the first attempt. Look for it on PC and the PS4 at an appropriately indeterminate point in the unexplored future.

Last edited by Elandyll; 07-02-2014 at 04:25 PM.
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Old 07-02-2014, 04:57 PM   #40
GeneticMutation GeneticMutation is offline
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Why do the PS4 controllers differ to the actual retail versions? Are those dev kit specific?
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