No Man's Sky: Massive Universe? Food For Thought!

No idea why Sean Murray would receive death threats over the development of a “Video Game” in the first place! and which he would like to speak of at twitter and not at the police station! Anyways lets get on with our review and assessment of what we have up till now relating to this odd setting in the gaming world!

Universe with laws, open world, relationships and reputation centered, trades and upgrades, information and resource collection, no story in particular, your arsenal your space ship and laser weapons and 18 quintillion planets to explore that’s more or less what we know of it for now.

PROCESSING

The project sounds interesting but I don’t have high hopes on how they will be able to deliver it!

Exploration capacity - 14 quintillion planets? Don’t let the number impress you it only indicates that the game will be all repeatative and boring after a couple of hours of gameplay, say 30 may be. Its really not practicable to design 14 quintillion planets unless you copy paste millions of them, but then whats the point of such a huge figure? Well its out there just to impress you like i said!

The setting reminds me of the game “Shadow of Colossus” in that you had to explore the outskirts, but you had an appealing objective in that and you had a mystery to unravel. No Man’s Sky appears to be plain open about its missions with an objective to collect information and reserve the resources and in that you may create enemies or friends.

Well it appears to me as a mix of GTA, Sim city, Shadow of colossus and Starwars, but what No Man’s Sky actually is, you will probably have to wait till its release (August 2016)

I have been following this game since last year and I'm still interested in buying No man's Sky for PS4 but I'll definitely keep an eye out for the reviews, all of them that I trust from the reviewers. so I'm hoping it turns out well.

i love how you've arbitrarily decided that 14 quintillion planets (it's actually 18 btw) will actually only be 30 planets copied and pasted lol.

what worries me are the stats that hello games have put out that say something along the lines of only 10% of all planets will contain primitive life, 1% will contain more advanced life and 1 in 100 million planets will contain some kind of advanced civilisations. i can't wrap my head around how that'll work from a gameplay perspective

@Macutchi: I mistyped i would correct that! and no it meant 30 hours not planets :D What you are refering to there i said roughly millions of planets copied and pasted!

Same here!. i mean the whole scenario begs you like "Oh gamer please be immersive in the game until you find a planet that you like to set out for a journey within" :D

@Macutchi: it's all about the joy of discovery. Besides, 10% of 18 quintillion is still a massive amount, so either way, you'll be able to find some habitable planets. I personally will be trying to find the theoretical habitable zones of each star system in order to find the ones with life. I'm just excited for a game where I don't have to feel some sort of pressure to do much.

@zintura: ah ok it was worded a little ambiguously ;) it has the potential to have 100s of hours of gameplay but it depends entirely on what there is to do. there's lots of speculation i..e be a trader, pirate, hunter, coloniser etc but i don't know how much of those have actually been confirmed by hello games.

@mastermetal777: 10% is indeed still a large number but at the risk of stating the obvious conversely 90% of planets being uninhabited is an even bigger one ;) plus that just means those planets have plants and flora and maybe some very primitive life. when you land on a new planet for the 50th time in a row just to find grass and trees how long before your enthusiasm for discovery starts to wane? particularly when only 1% have more advanced life or a civilisation. can you be smart about it and search for earth like planets that are in "goldilocks" zones? will some planets have been visited by advanced civilisations and leave clues to their whereabouts? i'm excited to find out, i just really hope it's fun and not a big let down after all this time

@Macutchi: lol okay! Yeah we dont know that much details. But then again havent we done that in simcity and in other games of this sort? I cant imagine how they might have tried to keep the game immersive! Lets wait till more is disclosed! :-)

I just hope it doesn't get boring, seems like it might, after just a day or 2 of gaming.

Just think of it like this: on average about 1 planet in each solar system you visit will have some kind of life. Assuming it doesn't take hours to jump solar systems, that really isn't bad and makes a lot of sense . Coincidentally, 10% is also very nearly the same percentage of habitable planets in our own solar system and I don't hear anyone complaining about that.

now just imagine when you happen upon an advanced civilization and you find everything from terrestrial cities to orbiting metropolises to lunar colonies and asteroid complexes...that's gonna be a special moment.

My major fear is travel time. I feel like we can science out a way to keep it reasonable.

lol that's true i can honestly say i've never heard anyone complain about that.

i guess you're assuming other solar systems follow a similar model to our own in terms of numbers of planets and that life found on one could be in some way comparable to life on ours, and not just micro biological. but let's not overlook the fact that there are 18 quintillion planets in the game, so that's a hell of a lot of solar systems to search for life within particularly as they've admitted only 10% of planets contain life, and only primitive life at that.

that would indeed be a special moment. truly mindblowing, particularly in how they react to your presence. i just worry by the sheer scale of the game that the odds of finding such a planet are so remote that it's going to be the equivalent of finding a single needle in a hundred million haystacks, particular as you say if travelling between systems takes considerable time. hello games must have factored all that into the game design though, surely. what's the point in burying some of the most potentially epic moments in a game to such a virtually unreachable depth.

i think this is the all part of the excitement in the build up to the game. if they pull it off it could be a game for the ages. if not it could be a legendary flop. i can't wait for the reviews

@Macutchi: i guess you're assuming other solar systems follow a similar model to our own in terms of numbers of planets and that life found on one could be in some way comparable to life on ours, and not just micro biological.

yeah, Copernican principle. Basically, "the earth occupies no special position in the universe." Also, chemistry is chemistry, so it's been proposed more than once that complex life in particular may be very similar to what we find here. It's the cultures that are going to vary, which is something I think Star Trek understood even as people made fun of it for its "uncreative" alien prosthetics.

@Ish_basic: well i hope that's true because that'd make exploration much more rewarding and fun. as good as flying around galaxies in and out of solar systems could potentially be i want to see something interesting on a regular basis and not just once in a blue moon (no pun intended ;) ). so what's your expectations for the game? are you willing to make any predictions?

@Macutchi: are you willing to make any predictions?

cautiously optimistic. It would help if I understood the basic game flow or if there's some goal...I remember last E3, them telling us there was something drawing players to the center of everything and there being some force (not be confused with the force) in play to really give everything meaning. But I can't help but feel I should know more about this game than I do, and it worries me a bit that maybe there's nothing to know.

Still, if they can make the exploration interesting that's probably all I need. I used to go around reading the individual planet info in Mass Effect. As long as traveling from point to point isn't a total time suck and they can truly create the variety of conditions that we know are out there

@Ish_basic: i'm pretty much in the same boat. really looking forward to reviews - it could deliver something really unique, memorable and fun but it wouldn't surprise me if it flopped hard

@Ish_basic: here's some info on the game.

https://blog.eu.playstation.com/2015/08/03/41-amazing-things-you-might-not-know-about-no-mans-sky/

really looking forward to it, almost pre-ordered it like five times lol.

It's just...I'm worried it's going to stretch too little content over too many things and dilute the experience, you know? Like you've seen 10 worlds, you've pretty much seen 18 trillion (or however many it is).

I know that kind of wandering, ambiguous gameplay appeals to certain gamers and I admit that kind of "turn-off-your-brain-and-wander" mechanic has it's place for relaxation, but personally I need a bit more focus in my games these days; my gaming time is limited, more so than ever before, I need to feel like I've accomplished something in an hour or two.

Still...I am hopeful. Definitely looks like the more arcade-like space-sim of my childhood, and less like the overly complex "realistic" sims we've become accustomed to (X3, Elite: Dangerous, and so forth). Tired of spending 80% of my time navigating; I want to set my destination, push a button, and be there 10 seconds later. It's the fricken' future, you telling me I have to commute to the next solar system?! Give me a break...

development of the game has officially been finished!

@Macutchi: finished?...

Oh no gentlemen, development hell has only just begun.

@Macutchi said:

development of the game has officially been finished!

Surprisingly, they didn't announce it went Gold and it's release date is August 9th.

When i first read 18 quintillion planets, the first thing that i started wondering about was how can they possibly make the exploration interesting. Obviously, since they spent years over the development of the game it will be safe to assume that the scope of exploration would be vast but not as big as 18 quintillion planets even though it would really have 18 quintillion planets in it lol.

I mean after you have discovered the appealing kinds of planets e.g. stone age, advanced and such your going to stick around with them until they deplete or more likely when your mission is complete because this game is seriously unlikely to have the same kind of setting such as sim city as i have understood! if i am right the game is going to be repeatative like hell and if i am wrong this game is going to be whole lot interesting and you will have to do sooo much in a single planet to get it depleted if you know what i mean (as in sim city sort of game setting)

@davillain-: they did dude, announced it yesterday on twitter with that pic

@Macutchi said:

development of the game has officially been finished!

I want to grab him (lovingly) by that beard and give him a big kiss.

Well...maybe a hug.

@mrbojangles25: he has the look of a guy that's just been let out of a room he's been locked away in for the past month and forced to code 24 / 7!

from what I've read of game development, whether on the small or large scale, that is apparently not an unrealistic thing to occur.

Minecraft in space. Even minecraft got boring after awhile & the game world was limitless their too.

So the word is out!....... the game is 6 GB!. hopes up or down?!

No Man Sky sounds awesome, but as a game Idk... Star Citizen makes more sense imo, but w/e, I'll get it anyways. On PC of course

@mordant221: Just on the theme of how few planets will have advanced life and the "chances" of us finding them, what about the upgrades to our ship that may allow us a better chance to find these planets. It would make sense for the more scientific ships to have this capability over the combat ships for example.

And on the game itself, I am seriously looking forward to it if for nothing else then to play in a game world that is to all intensive purposes, without limits.

@chrisfire77: Yeah with 6 GB as rumored, i hope it will feed your appetite ;p

and most of that is audio. so there'll probably be very few cut scenes or cinematics if any. maybe it unpacks to a much larger size. if it is just 6gb it doesn't bode too well for the graphical quality put under a microscope but i have no idea how the system they've created to generate the universe will handle textures, character models and framerates so if it still manages to look good despite the size that's some feat of engineering

@Macutchi: Where would the world be with without you?

@Starshine_M2A2: you tell me champ

@Macutchi: The exact same place it is now, champ.

@Starshine_M2A2: So if you knew the answer why ask me?

@Macutchi: http://examples.yourdictionary.com/rhetorical-question-examples.html

@Starshine_M2A2: thanks for the vocabulary lesson champ. i'm still waiting for the punchline

@Macutchi: There is no punchline, it wasn't a joke.

@Starshine_M2A2: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/anticlimax

@Macutchi: Your sexual problems are no concern of mine...

@Starshine_M2A2: good one champ

So finally we now have all the details more or less that we wanted to know and so our opinion about the game is.............. poop! I know i am definitely going to enjoy it but the enjoyment cant last long. After the long wait and all that hype i want to remark it as "NO MAN'S SKY IS NO MAN'S GAME" sadly.........

no real spoilers per se but avoid if you don't want to know details of the game (from the redditor who got the game early)

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4va7ve/the_spoilersleaks_megathread/d5yg3u9

Gameplay seems to be shooting a laser at rocks and other crap collecting minerals 24/7. Looks fun !

@Skarwolf: Sounds like you are bringing it down to the traditional android level gaming lol