‘No Man’s Sky’ Gameplay Details: The Journey is the Destination
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There’s still relatively little information available about Hello Games’ upcoming sci-fi adventure title No Man’s Sky , but that won’t stop the cascade of salivation every time a new snippet of gameplay footage gets released.
gets released. Putting the color and wonder back into games themed around space exploration, No Man’s Sky will drop players into a vast galaxy full of procedurally generated star systems and planets, and let them decide for themselves what they want to do in that galaxy.
It’s a hugely ambitious project that doesn’t really have any direct comparisons – the closest ones being perhaps Minecraft or Skyrim – but a lot of gamers are understandably confused about what they’ll be able to do, and what they’re expected to do, once they enter the world of No Man’s Sky .
Hello Games’ Sean Murray recently offered one key detail about the very loose goal of the game: players are encouraged to make a journey to the center of the galaxy. While that might sound like a relatively simple task, it’s also one that will end up taking a long time, since it will require upgrades to both the player’s suit and to their ship. Also, the galaxy is really, really big and you begin the game on its outer edge. In a new feature interview published by, Murray expanded a little upon the gameplay experience that No Man’s Sky will offer – though he remained pretty coy about some of the details.
One of the most important things to take away from the interview is the fact that while No Man’s Sky is technically a multiplayer game, it’s unlikely that players will run into one another very often. This is due to the sheer size of the game’s universe, which appears to scale with planets that are actually “planet-sized.” Last year it was revealed that the average Minecraft world has a surface area greater than that of Neptune, so there is some precedent for this, but it’s never been done on the same scale as No Man’s Sky is attempting.
Murray also dropped a few hints about the combat in No Man’s Sky , which can move seamlessly from outer space to a planet’s surface. Players will not have a wide selection of guns but instead will possess an extremely diverse multi-tool, which is capable of everything from shooting enemies to mining planets for raw materials. Murray was reluctant to talk about the primary antagonists that players will encounter, and he was also very careful about giving too much information regarding what players will find when they reach the center of the galaxy. You’ll have to go there and find out for yourself.
Another intriguing fact dropped by Murray is that game development will not end once Not Man’s Sky is on the shelves. Hello Games intends to continue adding things in for years after its initial release, and the game world will also expand as more and more players collaborate to map the galaxy by exploring it.
Until we get individual interstellar spaceships in real life, No Man’s Sky looks like a wonderful world to get lost in.
No Man’s Sky is coming to PS4, but no release date has been set.
Source: GameSpot