No Man's Sky: Boldly going...Somewhere (Gameplay)
3Space...And galaxy far far away....
No Man's Sky is an action-adventure survival video game developed and published by the indie studio Hello Games for PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows. The game was released worldwide in August 2016.
No Man's Sky's gameplay is built on four pillars β exploration, survival, combat, and trading. Players are free to perform within the entirety of a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion (1.8Γ1019) planets, many with their own sets of flora and fauna. By exploring, players gain information about the planets that they can submit to the Atlas, a universal database that can be shared with other players of the game. Players get compensated in in-game currency every time new information is uploaded to The Atlas. Players also gain materials and blueprints to upgrade their character's equipment and purchase a variety of starships, allowing them to travel deeper into the center of the galaxy, survive on planets with hostile environments, interact in friendly or hostile manners with computer-controlled space-faring factions, or trade with other ships. Some activities, such as killing too many lifeforms or draining too many resources from planets, will draw the attention of patrolling robotic Sentinels that will attempt to kill the player character.
Players participate in a shared universe, with the ability to exchange planet coordinates with friends, though the game is also fully playable offline; this is enabled by the procedural generation system that assures players find the same planet with the same features, lifeforms, and other aspects once given the planet coordinates, requiring no further data to be stored or retrieved from game servers. Nearly all elements of the game are procedurally generated, including star systems, planets and their ecosystems, flora, fauna and their behavioral patterns, artificial structures, and alien factions and their spacecraft. The game's engine employs several deterministic algorithms such as parameterised mathematical equations that can mimic a wide range of geometry and structure found in nature. Art elements created by human artists are used and altered as well. The game's audio, including ambient sounds and its underlying soundtrack, also uses procedural generation methods from base samples created by Paul Weir and the musical group 65daysofstatic.
No Man's Sky represents Hello Games' vision of a broad, attention-getting game that they wanted to pursue while they secured their financial well being through the Joe Danger series of games. The game's original prototype was worked on by Hello Games' Sean Murray who wanted to create a game about the spirit of exploration. Development expanded into a small four-person team prior to its first teaser in December 2013. About a dozen developers worked on the game in the three years leading up to its release, with Sony Interactive Entertainment providing promotional and marketing support. Sony formally announced the title during their press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2014, the first independently-developed game to be presented at the Expo's centrepiece events.
Significant attention and expectations were given to the title in the months leading to its release, which Murray and others journalists cautioned about the indie nature and niche appeal of the title, seeking to avoid the pitfalls that had previously occurred at the launch of Spore in 2008. At release, the game received a range of mixed reviews, praising the technical achievements of the procedurally-generated universe but considering the gameplay lackluster and repetitive. No Man's Sky also suffered several initial launch problems that further marred the players' experience with the game.