14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that you won't get to explore the galaxy together with your friends in No Man's Sky, due to the universe's sheer size.
Hello Games boss Sean Murray made some interesting reveals during a recent interview, clarifying some of the issues that the community waiting for the game was wondering about.
No Man's Sky is not a massively multiplayer online game, and it doesn't even use multiplayer connections in the traditional sense, even though other gamers will play an important role in your adventure.
The title uses a looser notion of multiplayer interactions, kind of like From Software's action role-playing game, Dark Souls 2, does it. Multiplayer is not a direct focus of the action and the interactions are limited, but it adds to the overall experience, making it more well-rounded.
In No Man's Sky, you will take on the bold mission of exploring the galaxy and navigating to its center. All the planets and environments are going to be procedurally generated, making sure that no two planets look and feel the same.
The huge scale of the undertaking means that most of the time you won't know the other people you will come across, and that meeting with your friends will be almost impossible.
Conquering the virtual universe
In Hello Games' upcoming adventure, players will all explore the same universe, starting at random points near its edge, slowly making their way toward the center. The universe will be immense. That means that, if you don't know where your friends are, it's highly unlikely that you'll run into them.
Even if you do know where your friends are, it's still going to be a long journey, and actually finding them on the surface of the planet will prove to be a daunting task.
Murray tells GameInformer that people don't yet fully realize what it means to be so far away from someone else playing the game, and that Hello Games embraces the fact that this makes No Man's Sky an experience that's different from other games.
Multiplayer will function through open lobbies, just like in many other games that focus on the single-player experience but also feature some sort of multiplayer connectivity. How this works effectively is that players will join your discrete space, and while you won't have giant crowds on your screen, you'll get the occasional fellow explorer flying past you in the game, or landing beside you on a new planet.
No Man's Sky is expected to come to the PlayStation 4 home console sometime in 2015, and to PC later on.
