To a close approximation, everyone we've ever talked to about No Man's Sky is excited and wants to play it. They also have no idea what in the world the massive, open universe game from the tiny British developer actually is. You could count Polygon's staff among the hopeful clueless — or at least you could have before E3 2014. We met with the developers at Hello Games. We saw No Man's Sky in action. They made believers out of us.

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THE UNIVERSE The pink-orange grass sways in the wind as the unnamed character walks out of the cave. For an instant, the right wall flashes like rows of yellowish cubes, then returns to normal. Horned animals that might be deer if you don't pay too much attention sip from the aquamarine creek. An enormous orange brontosaurus looking monster stands atop the hill to the right. This is just one of a vast number of worlds in No Man's Sky, and Hello Games' Sean Murray is showing us around. He hops into a spaceship, points it to the sky and seconds later, he's in outer space shooting asteroids. The pace at which the scenery changes is striking, as he transitions seamlessly from planet to atmosphere to the cold vacuum of space. A minute or so later, after avoiding an armada of battleships that popped in from hyperspace, he's entering the atmosphere of another planet. He touches down. Its barren, rocky surface stands in stark contrast to the planet he left minutes ago. This, he explains, is No Man's Sky's 90/10 rule in action, and the best way to explain that is to talk about deer again. "It's actually pretty rare to come across a deer in the woods," Murray said "And if you fly into space, and you go and visit planets, most of them will be dead, they will be rocks. What we want to do is, 90 percent of the time that will probably be true in our game. A planet will be like this where it's barren. A lot of them won't have atmospheres. Actually finding something like the rainforest that we were down on, that's really rare — and even then, if you find a creature, most of the time it will be brown and have four legs and look a little bit earth-like." In other words, the universe of No Man's Sky — and it is a literal universe — won't be full of feathered orange dinosaurs. It'll be filled with rocks. It's up to you to find the diamonds in the rough. "We haven't shown any of the crazy creatures we're doing or how far we can mutate things or the crazier ships or anything like that," he said. "And we won't. We will hold that back, which means, say, only 10 percent of the worlds will have that full ecology. Only 10 percent of those will have something like a rainforest on it that has birds and fish and creatures and only 10 percent of those will have something like those dinosaurs we saw and 10 percent of those dinosaurs will be wild and crazy and really mutated." But before you do any of that, you have to leave home. And you can't — at least not yet.

THE GAME Everybody gets a planet. That's how No Man's Sky starts — with at least a planet and a ship. If you want to move skyward, you've got things to do. "You're going to start out with a ship that isn't even capable of interstellar travel," Murray said. "Your very first ship is only going to be able to go around the solar system, and you're going to have to upgrade the ship to be able to travel further and then upgrade your ship again and travel a little bit further than that and jump to the next little existence, get your hyper drive, upgrade to hyper drive." On the outer rings of the galaxy where you start, resources will be relatively plentiful. But as players inch their way lightyear by lightyear to the galaxy's center, resources become rarer and more valuable. There's a built-in economic incentive to travel. This is the gameplay loop. Or, to be more accurate, this is one possible gameplay loop. You don't have to do any of that. You can spend your time with your feet planted on terra firma. Become a botanist, if that's your thing. The world is yours, after all. Or you could become an interstellar explorer. Or a pirate. Or a zookeeper on Tralfamadore, a planet you discovered and named. Whatever boosts your rockets. Point is, you can make your own way and write your own story because that's what Hello Games wants you to do. It's not, Sean Murray explained, all that dissimilar from a roguelike, the genre known for its procedurally generated levels. Except that in No Man's Sky, Hello Games is procedurally generating a universe. "What we're trying to do is reasonably well traveled, which is, actually, the way I think the game is a roguelike," he said. "So you start out in a room and there are some enemies, and you kill the enemies and you get some loot and then you can progress to the next room, next room, next room and eventually you'll die and you go back to the start. And the rooms will regenerate themselves. They'll be in a different order and then you go through again." It's not a perfect comparison, he admits, but that same dungeon room framework sits in the empty space between the innumerable planets in No Man's Sky. "Our game isn't like that in loads of ways, but the way I pitch it is: imagine every possible permutation of those rooms generate themselves, and then you stitch them all together and you build the most incredibly huge infinite dungeon that you can imagine. And then you start everyone at the outside of that dungeon and people try to get into the center. And that is the game, and that's, in a very reductive way, that's that sort of broad brushstrokes of the game. "If you imagine planets and the space in between planets as rooms and everyone's starting from different places on the outside, and if you picture that dungeon game, that infinite roguelike. It's already kind of an interesting idea. I would play that game. That's what we're doing. You want everyone to have their unique story, everyone to have their unique journey through that." Most people, Murray figures, will take the exploration path. But Hello Games doesn't want to be prescriptive, and the beautifully obtuse gameplay trailers reflect that. "And so that's why, actually I think our gameplay trailers are a little bit vague," he said. "Because something I really want to resist is that dinosaur comes running out, kill it. I know that some people will play that way, but I don't want to say this is how you play the game."

















ENTER CARL SAGAN It was an aside, almost casually shared during our hour-long demonstration of No Man’s Sky. But it was the part of the presentation that stuck with me. Sean Murray was trying to explain how big the universe of the game is. He kept saying infinite, but that’s not quite what I wanted to know. I wanted to know about the scale, the distances involved, the size of the parts that made up the sprawl his programming was able to conjure. Would the game just be one short leap after another, and would players merely be doing touch-and-go landings, searching for the few new things to discover and then quickly leaping on to the next planet? So instead of a big analogy, he came up with a small one. Say there were a million players in the game, and that those million players were all placed equidistant from each other on a single planet. Murray said that those players would “still be pretty far apart.” Standing on the surface, looking out to the horizon in all directions, they might not even be able to even see one another. Just that single planet, with all its caves and floating islands and flora and fauna, is worthy of exploration. “We’re still finding things on Earth,” he said. “There’s 5 billion of us [or so] and we still haven’t gone to the deepest depths of the ocean.” Standing on the surface of that planet with him, looking out to the stars in the sky and knowing that each one was a sun, that each one had multiple planets to explore was inspiring. I felt like Carl Sagan was there demoing the game, not a soft-spoken, emotional young man from England. — Charlie Hall