Tweet
"Undiscovered." This word, appearing in tooltips that hover by waypoints, moons, planets and star systems, is No Man's Sky's sales pitch in a nutshell. In this remarkable game of space exploration, a universe has been born by algorithm, and it's so incomprehensibly vast that the chances of seeing anything another player has seen are vanishingly small. Your starting position is randomly selected. Even the wildlife is generated from an unthinkable number of variations. Every discovery you make is logged to the game servers and reported in those tooltips, so if anyone has been there before you, you'll know.That little colony of knee-high, cat-eared Ewok-things scampering about on a dusty hillside? They're just for you; you can name them if you like. No-one else has ever laid eyes on the azure dell of Oximo Dale, sloping down to the ocean under the jade skies of Iotsud Siunnin. It's quite probable that no-one else ever will, and when you leave this star system behind, it will likely never be seen again. Drink in the sight of that silver-edged moon setting behind silhouetted mountains, because this glowering, scarlet sky is yours and yours alone.
The surprise is that it takes quite a long time - dozens of hours and star systems and planets, hundreds of light years - before a true appreciation of this sets in. To begin with, your sense of wonder is inspired by the sheer aesthetic bravura of the developers at Hello Games. They set out to create an entire universe of airbrushed sci-fi book covers and succeeded to an extent you wouldn't think possible. Even as beholden as it is to the vagaries of the algorithm, No Man's Sky is exotically gorgeous. That's thanks in large part to the spectrum of richly saturated colours used. Space glows with shimmering nebulae and planets are lush and strange. It can be a very lonely game, but it's never cold or drab.
Read more…
More...