14 DAY TRIAL // No Man's Sky developer Hello Games has been slowly unveiling its upcoming exploration title, offering more information regarding the vast scale of the procedurally generated science fiction universe.
The simulation game is definitely one of the most ambitious and biggest games ever made, and one of its creators, Sean Murray, even said that the team had to send robots to explore planets in deep space and then bring them back screenshots of various planets.
"No game has made it possible to fly down to a planet, and for it to be planet-sized, and feature life, ecology, lakes, caves, waterfalls, and canyons, then seamlessly fly up through the stratosphere and take to space again. It's a tremendous challenge. If you were to visit one virtual planet every second then our own sun will have died before you'd have seen them all," he told MIT Technology Review.
The game focuses on maths and procedural generation to create its amazing vistas, rather than relying on the mighty pen of an army of artists, which is increasingly prevalent in newer video games.
No Man's Sky is far more complex than any other game out there though, with tens of millions of unique planets making up its universe. Each planet is generated when a user discovers it, and there is even erosion factored in, as well as full-fledged food chains and dynamically breeding animals.
This, of course, means that the authors have to face a ton of technical issues when it comes to testing such a humongous universe, this being the primary reason Hello Games is making use of automated virtual testers that wander around like tourists, taking screenshots and sending them back home for the team to explore.
In addition to this, as No Man's Sky potentially infinite universe will most surely have a very finite player base, the developers are also experimenting with how not to make gamers feel too lonely during the adventure.
One of the solutions that the team came up with is for every new player to start in the same galaxy, with a shared initial goal of making it to its center. The team says that they still don't know how the players will interact – whether they will fight, trade, mine together, congregate or disperse, but that it's all part of their great experiment, and they're as excited to find out as their fans are.
No Man's Sky features some snazzy visuals that enthralled the entire gaming community, and is now slated to launch at some unknown point in the future, for the PlayStation 4 platform. Stay tuned for more information regarding how incredibly big the game is, how pretty its blue dinosaurs and red grass are, and when you'll be able to step aboard a ship and explore the wonders of the universe for yourself.