No Man's Sky

The game offers the player to explore an extremely large virtual universe consisting of 264, or 18 quintillion planets; possible activities for game characters include finding new interesting places, surviving against various dangers, fighting enemies and trading various items. To create a virtual world, the game makes extensive use of procedural content generation based on deterministic algorithms. The overall graphic style of the game is inspired by illustrations from the covers of various science fiction books, and many developers were also influenced by works related to the demo scene. The game was announced at the VGX ceremony in 2013.

In the years leading up to the release, No Man's Sky attracted a lot of attention from the press and players thanks to the loud promises of developers, as well as a noisy and expensive advertising campaign, unusual for indie games. Upon release, the game received mixed reviews from critics; although reviewers found the procedural

Gameplay

The gameplay of No Man's Sky involves the exploration of outer space and planets, some of which may interact with various forms of extraterrestrial life, the extraction of resources, battles in space in a variety of randomly generated areas of the galaxy, the development and improvement of their own ship, the performance of tasks for "bounty hunters" .

Each region of outer space and each planet is unique, procedurally generated by deterministic algorithms. Information about all star systems, planets and the types of life forms inhabiting them is opened and updated together with other players, while each object can have the nickname of its discoverer. The game begins on a randomly generated planet on the edge of the galaxy, where the player crashed his spaceship. This planet may be similar to Earth and have favorable conditions for life, or it may have a high level of radiation or a very low temperature that poses a danger to the player. At first, the player must repair his ship, collecting resources and creating the parts necessary for repair, and fly into space. The main goal of the game is to travel to the center of the galaxy.

The player has complete freedom to move around the many galaxies represented in the game. Wandering around the game world, the player can meet alien creatures, including intelligent ones, various space battles, settlements that he can freely own, space stations that act as their center in the structure of game star systems, various anomalies that randomly occur during the player's flights in space and many planetary buildings.

The developers also stated that after the release of the game they intend to continue its development and will eventually add new features , which they did immediately after the release, already at the end of November of the same year, providing the game with the "Foundation" update.

Initially, it was assumed that the game would not be multiplayer and the interaction between players would be limited only to general information about discoveries for everyone . However, in later interviews, the developers have already said that a meeting with another player would be a possible event, although very unlikely, since the size of the game universe is practically unlimited, but they did not rule out the possibility of implementing a mode of joint passage of the game, probably after the release . However, after the release, it became clear that the meeting and interaction of the two players has not yet been implemented. Multiplayer was added to the game only two years after its release, along with a major "NEXT" update. In addition, it is particularly noted that certain forms of life can be found only on 10% of the planets, considering that in the final product they were present on almost every planet. According to the developers, the game has more than 15 million options for the development of the plot.

Developers

No Man's Sky continues to be developed by Hello Games, a small indie studio in Guildford, UK. The studio is known for their work on the Joe Danger series. You can learn more about the developers on the Hello Games website. Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray based the game on a concept he had since he was a child, drawing inspiration from science fictions authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.