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On Tuesday, Murray and the rest of the Hello Games design team brought their game’s near-final build to a trippy Los Angeles studio space, intent on answering that very question. They were forthcoming with more gameplay and more details than ever before—including the announcement of a June 21 release date on both PlayStation 4 and Windows PCs—and they even handed controllers to us to explore the game however we saw fit.

Yet while our combined hour of chaperoned demos and free-to-roam gameplay was illustrative, it was also frustratingly distant. The more we learn about this game, the more questions we have.

Australia’s got (math) talent

Just like the last time we sat with Murray to talk about this game, we found it hard to reconcile the vast, seemingly limitless universe of No Man’s Sky and the awkward, approachable, low-key Aussie who created it.

Clad in a wrinkled flannel shirt, Murray shuffled nervously around the studio space reserved for this intimate press event, where he stood in front of a full-wall projection of the game. “This is a really surreal setup,” he told the small, gathered crowd. “Like I’m on some terrible version of America’s Got Talent, and you’re all the judges holding up cards at the end. Please don’t do that.”

Much of what he told us while introducing the game sounded familiar, since he already laid out the game’s basic foundation during an E3 2015 presentation. In particular, this universe has a heavy mathematics foundation, which he elaborated on in detail this time.

“This is a planet in No Man’s Sky—if none of my code worked,” Murray said as he made his character walk across a flat, badly textured world. “You can walk for days or weeks in every direction. That’s cool in terms of scale, but it’s super boring.”

Many more interesting planets followed in a special “solar system” created just for this presentation, to show us what it looks like when a No Man’s Sky planet is built “step-by-step.” The second planet had a single, repeating pattern of hills, which Murray said was essentially one of the simplest mathematical functions that we all learn about as kids.

“A sine wave has a parameter—and that’s a cool thing, that it’s parametric. It doesn’t need inputs apart from where you are on the graph… With a planet as simple as this, there’d be no loading times. Just call the sine function and know what the player should have under his feet.”

That’s the rub of it: math equations that define geography, water, textures, hazardous conditions, and on and on and have been placed in No Man’s Sky through the nerdiest virtual Big Bang possible. They repeat in every direction and collide with each other, which we get a taste of as Murray’s series of planets continue. Each pass adds more geographical details until we’re on a planet that’s smothered in all manner of incredible natural formations, not to mention dozens of otherworldly creatures, mechanical beings, industrial buildings, and generous swaths of vegetation and plant life.

“This is parametric but chaotic,” Murray said about one planet as the visual variety began to ramp up. “A human couldn’t necessarily predict it.”

“Sony told me not to say ‘boring’”

Murray was giddy about the look of the planet at the end of his solar-system demo—“it lives up to this fantasy I’ve always had of stepping into a science-fiction book cover”—but he then very quickly dismissed it, admitting that he’d shown off beautiful, other-worldly scenes at press events before. He said it was time to show off actual gameplay and asked for another planet to be queued up—politely yet flippantly, like he was Wonka asking for yet another candy bar.

Then he stopped himself as a sentence formed on his lips. “Sony PR told me not to say ‘boring.’ This here isn’t a boring planet, but it’s a more typical planet. We’ve purposefully shown something that’s not crazy-huge dinosaurs.”

As he took his first steps on an arctic planet, auto-named Balari V, Murray rattled off the game’s major gameplay touchstones: exploration, training, combat, and survival. Like other recent open-world adventures, No Man’s Sky asks you to endure dangerous conditions like scorching heat, toxic rain, torturous freezes, or other, even odder environmental perils. Unlike other games in the genre, though, the survival conditions tend to vary wildly just by flying one planet over.

Before Murray went into space to see what else an infinite universe might have to offer, he showed what it’s like to hang around on a single planet—and why players might opt to do so. A mix of running and jetpacking will let players navigate any planet on foot, where they can tap a button to bring up a very limited radar function, pointing to nearby resources, open spaceships that you can swipe for your own personal use, and the like. The demo—and our own gameplay test that followed—began with a limited inventory: a gun, a protective suit, and a blueprint we could use to turn certain resources into grenades. This was slightly more equipment than a normal player would start with... but not by much.

As Murray ran around, he encountered quite a few harmless creatures—which he quickly analyzed with a pair of binoculars. As he did, he was allowed to grant them whatever names he wanted, since he was the first person in the world to ever find that planet in the game. Anyone else who plays the game can do the same thing with their own discoveries. Most players will likely get first dibs on almost all the creatures they encounter; there are so many planets, and so many people starting in so many auto-generated distant spawn points, that Murray believes it’s all but impossible for two players to ever land on the same planet. If they did, though, the underlying mathematical formulas ensure that they’d see the exact same creature designs, terrain, structures, and so on.

(We were told the game’s profanity filter wasn’t yet turned on, so we were allowed to name creatures whatever we wanted. I chose to name a sausage-looking bipedal bear “Nintendo NX.”)

Fighting those creatures didn’t offer any food or loot, however. Murray and Hello Games would rather players make progress on a particular planet by making sense of its lore and language. This is done by stumbling across giant, Rosetta-stone-like monoliths or sometimes by running into helpful non-player characters. The more you explore a giant, Earth-sized planet, the more of a planet’s language you'll figure out. That's good, because when you strike up a conversation with a local creature, any unknown words will simply appear as gibberish.

In each of those conversations, you can pick from a lot of weird non-verbal options—like gesturing toward the sky and smiling, trying to initiate a trade, or sitting down and looking upward. If you understand a planet’s language well enough, you’ll know which actions will grant you loot, “recipes” (the game’s name for item and weapon blueprints), bonuses, or other unknown goodies.

“There’s no FAQ for this planet”

There appear to be many other instances in which knowing a language will help players accomplish something. When Murray stumbled upon a giant building with a security mechanism, he could shut the security protocols down and make out with the loot because he knew the local language. Murray said a lot of NPCs exist in the game, whether they’re residents, merchants, or traders flying around the galaxy. I didn’t experience too many interactions with those NPCs in my demo, though, so I don’t expect to see endless chains of fetch quests populating most of No Man’s Sky’s planets.

I actually was sad to see a lack of small-scale quest structure, honestly, because that leaves combat as a more "shoot at things if you want to" sort of system, as opposed to a well-defined exercise in sci-fi blasting. Sophisticated gunplay clearly isn't Hello Games' strong point, and while you can shoot at floating drones on a planet's surface or exchange laser blasts with other ships in deep space, the weapons systems we saw on display were pretty rudimentary. Murray didn't talk about any sort of procedurally generated weapons system that might lead to an arsenal as diverse as the game's planets. I guess that means Borderlands will probably retain the crown for "best random game guns."

Jetting off into space means players can skip from planet to planet at their leisure—or, at least, as far as their ship's current specs allow. As prior previews have indicated, the game is pretty structureless, save a singular drive to pilot your way to the center of the universe. To do that, you'll need to gather resources and recipes to improve your ship many times over, which will require mastering the language and resources of more than a few planets.

On a macro level, No Man's Sky feels like a dream game in terms of offering epic scope and diversity along the way. But I wasn't entirely convinced that the micro level will sustain a lot of players' interests—particularly the primary objective of picking through a planet’s procedurally generated crags and craters. In my own session, I only hopped along two planets, and their enormity and abundance of collectible resources sucked up a lot of my 30-minute gameplay allotment. In fact, I was jealous of Murray’s experience—his planet, in spite of his cry of “boring,” was pretty packed full of adventurous moments, along with crazy content like a beautiful underground cavern that he accidentally discovered by blowing up a hole in the ground and steampunk-looking factories being protected by floating drone robots.

My planets, conversely, had a whole lot of semi-open fields full of plain old FPS loot crates (giving the game an extremely low time-to-crate score). The fields were pretty, lined with trees and broken up by strange cracks in the ground, but they were still really just places that held crates. I could break those crates open and claim elements and resources, which I was told I'd use to eventually craft all kinds of stuff when I stumble upon some good “recipes.” A lot of my short demo was spent wondering when the cool stuff would start up.

That's a real issue for a procedurally generated game as big as this one. When a game can automatically build planets the exact size of our own Earth or bigger, and it relies on mathematical equations as opposed to artfully arranged level design, the result may very well be a planet that has incredibly boring expanses. The heartening thing about No Man's Sky is that its functional infinite galaxy does contain bursts of activity: proof of civilizations, or unbelievable "natural" formations appearing over the horizon, or incredible creature designs that appear out of nowhere. You may very well be the first and only person to ever see any of those elements.

"I know this planet because we did rehearsal, so I poked around it," Murray said during his own demonstration. "I know a small amount of it. But for normal players, there’s no YouTube video you can look up. There’s no FAQ for this planet. It’s a real place for you, one that you have to explore."

After my 30 minutes in No Man's Sky had run out, I truly felt ripped out of the game—robbed, even, of my chance to keep exploring. Once my game was over, I began walking around the trippy demonstration room, where TVs were placed in a circle in front of massive, egg-shaped chairs. Each TV had a different player—and a different planet. One was drenched in acid rain. On another, a woman was blasting grenades into the side of a mountain so that she could essentially walk through it. To her right was a guy piloting his spaceship just above a planet's atmosphere and engaging in a battle with a floating fortress.

This feeling of watching just a few people play the game felt exhilarating. I can't even imagine how intense an entire Twitch world's worth of No Man's Sky streams will feel in comparison. The only thing more intense, honestly, is Murray's admission of an existential crisis only his kind of creation could instill in its creator: the reality that almost all of No Man's Sky truly will be no man's sky.

"The cool thing about the game—or maybe the sad thing—is that all of these stars, each with their planets, NPCs, buildings, and languages to learn... 99.9 percent of them will never be visited. That scale is really important to our game. But it’s a really hard game to demo in half an hour."