Space. The final frontier. This is the voyage of the starship… er, “Fishy Cracker,” and the adventures of its one solitary crewman… me. Well, my seven-year-old was with me when I named the ship, but other than that, it’s me, a faster-than-light capable starship and 18 quintillion worlds to explore.
Yes, that’s right – 18 quintillion. At least that’s what video game developer Hello Games promises with its new universe sandbox game called No Man’s Sky.
This space is usually reserved for my observations about current and upcoming tech, and how it affects our lives. I tend to shy away from reviewing video games, as that’s more of a niche of the whole technology world. However, No Man’s Sky does deserve to come to the average Joe’s attention, if only for how far we’ve come in creating digital worlds, and how far this game promises to take us.
The game begins with you, crashed on some alien world, rooting around to find resources with which to repair your ship, so you can be on your way to explore new worlds and the centre of the galaxy. The game is based on four pillars – explore, survive, trade and combat – and sees you flying from world to world, jumping from star system to star system, and exploring strange worlds populated with stranger creatures.
But it is how it creates these worlds that is so amazing. Everything in the universe – planets, moons, suns, galaxies – is all “procedurally created” which is just a $10-word for “randomly generated.” The game has mathematical algorithms that create planets with vastly different flora, fauna, rotations, weather, gravity and atmospheres. On one world, it was minus 300 C at night, while another was a balmy plus 200!
Luckily, you’re equipped with a survival suit that allows you to withstand the rigours of these planets; however, you do need to continuously recharge the suit’s defenses. This takes resources, which you find and mine on the different planets, as well. You can buy and sell these resources on a galactic market, in exchange for things to help you craft more warp fuel for your ship, and upgrades for your suit and mining tool. As you discover these star systems, planets, moons and life forms, you also get to name them (within reason of course) and upload that data to an atlas.
Other players can access that data when playing, and perhaps eventually visit a world you’ve named. Apparently “Planety McPlanetFace” has already been taken.
But considering everyone starts off in a different corner of the universe, and the developers have said most people won’t see 99 per cent of the game’s procedurally generated content, I wouldn’t count on seeing anyone else in this great big universe of a game.
But you are certainly not alone. Three different and distinct alien races have set up outposts, and various buildings on the planets. Unfortunately, you don’t know how to speak any of their languages at first, so trading or communicating is out of the question. However, over time you can discover ancient monoliths that teach you one word of an alien language at a time. I’ll let you know what our alien friends have to say once I learn more. They probably want us to stop giving the planets stupid names.
Even if video games are not particularly your thing, it is hard not to at least appreciate the incredible scope of No Man’s Sky. Many games boast about the vastness of their game worlds; however, so far, the majority of those games have offered merely a city to explore, or perhaps a whole medieval province. But with No Man’s Sky, you actually have an entire universe to explore, freely, and however you choose.
If your computer is beefy enough to meet the game’s hefty minimum specs, it is certainly worth the price of the game to have such a vastness in which to play, and it speaks volumes to what kinds of experiences we can expect in the future, especially when paired and integrated with some of the newer virtual reality hardware and headsets out there on the market.
I’ve played about 10 hours in the game so far, and barely scratched the surface of what it has to offer. It remains to be seen if the game can continue to hold my attention (apparently despite its size, some players have said the game loses its lustre after a few dozen worlds), but for now you can find me aboard the Fishy Cracker, exploring strange new worlds and lifeforms… and boldly going where no man has gone before.
