Everyone figured that the reason Sean Murray, director of the space-travel/exploration/combat game No Man's Sky, was announced as a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was to give a launch date for the highly anticipated title. Nope. Colbert himself tried to cut to the chase in the first question, but got bupkis.

Doing a talk show with a game developer about an unreleased game is a lot less dynamic than doing a segment with an actor plugging an upcoming movie. Colbert still hangs in there, getting off a couple strong lines while still getting the bottom of what will — or should — make No Man's Sky unique, which is the application of big things like evolution and physics.

There is, at least, a demo beginning around 2:40, showing a landing on one of the game's 18 quintillion planets (can such a figure even be verifiable?) and how space explorers employ the privilege of naming the beasts they discover. In this case, Colbert becomes the namesake for the planet "Colbert Prime," and the creatures "Colbison," "Molebert," "Codbert" and a "Colbertasaurus." No word if these creatures will persist in the final game when it launches.

If you excuse the indulgence of Colbert's ego with all the naming, it's a pretty sizeable look at gameplay in No Man's Sky but, again, not what we were really hoping for. No Man's Sky will launch on PlayStation 4 and Windows PC, but when that is, no one knows.