Ars was treated to a closed-room demo of upcoming galaxy exploration game No Man's Sky on Tuesday at E3. There, packed in a tiny and extremely warm conference room with a dozen other journalists, lead designer Sean Murray showed off the current state of the game—starting off on an unexplored planet and eventually taking us up into the swirling colorful depths of space.

Honestly, the most fascinating thing about No Man’s Sky is Murray himself. Tall and thin, the Australian developer sometimes has trouble holding eye contact with the audience when we ask questions; he’s simultaneously aloof and brimming with excitement about being able to present the game. His passion is infectious—this is clearly a person who loves what he’s created and who can’t wait to share it. He answers questions at length, but not laboriously—he talks very quickly, almost breathlessly, giving in-depth but fast answers to the room and then turning back to the game and describing its features at the same fast pace. The only time he’s clearly at a loss is when one of the reporters in the room asks how many terabytes the procedural universe of No Man’s Sky takes up on Hello Games’ servers.

Murray pauses as if he's not quite sure where to start with the answer—procedural galaxy generation is one of the most well-covered aspects of the game, so asking this question is a lot like showing up to a dinner party and asking what food is—then he launches into a fast, very abbreviated explanation of how the entire galaxy is algorithmically generated and doesn’t exist as a complete dataset on a server somewhere. The reporter doesn't quite get it and asks the question again but a different way, this time asking how much storage space is used for each planet.

"It’s…it’s all just maths," responds Murray, stumbling over the response and frowning. "It’s just maths. There’s no storage." He waves at the PR handler in the room to take over answering the question, ducking his head back down and bowing out of the conversation. We only have thirty minutes in the demo room and this is taking away game time, and Murray seems almost baffled that the reporter doesn’t get it.

Though the E3 demo we were shown isn’t available online yet—Murray and his team did the demo off of a new build that they created the night before, with some special features added—it was very similar to the footage he showed off on stage at the Sony E3 press conference Monday night, which looked like this:

We got to see a bit more of the game mechanics—players can collect resources while on planetary surfaces, and use those resources to craft upgrades for their spacesuit and weapon and ship, or sell them for "units" (the in-game currency) which can be used to purchase new ships or new items. Shooting lifeforms or otherwise being antisocial can incur "wanted stars" that function essentially like Grand Theft Auto’s wanted level, causing at first small drones and then larger and larger defenses to mobilize and attack you.

As they wander, players can scan for new discoveries—life forms and minerals, mainly–which are documented in a journal-like interface that Murray called "your own personal Pokédex." As you explore, you’ll encounter beacons where you can upload your discoveries to the as-yet-unnamed galactic network; players can play offline as long as they like, but only through connecting to the Internet in real life and hitting a beacon to upload their discoveries can they get credit for them (and if another player discovers the same worlds or life forms and uploads them first, that other player gets the credit). This allows players to play offline, without an Internet connection, for as long as they like—though if you die in-game, you lose any un-uploaded discoveries, so the incentive is there to be online as much as possible.

Murray took off and flew to a randomly selected planet far, far away. He told us that in the press demo build, his hyperdrive had unlimited range so that he could show off the game without having to worry about refueling; in the release game, you’ll need to upgrade your ship’s hyperdrive to be able to visit far away worlds. In fact, he said that one very visible sign of "progress" in the game will be the range of a player’s hyperdrive. He warped us to a system about 500 light years away from his starting point, chosen totally at random, and he told us that he wasn’t sure there would be anything there—and when we dropped down from hyperspace, we were in the middle of a giant capital ship battle that looked a bit like something out of Battlestar Galactica or EVE Online.

This was apparently fortuitous happenstance—Murray explained as he headed for the nearest planet that while every system by necessity has a space station for players to dock at and buy fuel, not every system has life, or even planets. It’s a vast galaxy, and while life is in a lot of places, it’s not everywhere.

Games and metagames

The last thing Murray did was zoom dizzyingly out into the galactic map, which looks a lot less like Elite: Dangerous’ map and a lot more like the long deep zoom at the beginning of the 1997 film Contact. Thick multicolored clouds of stars filled the view in every direction, and off in the distance, a blinding light marked the center of the galaxy—the place, according to Murray, where the game wants you to eventually go. The place where No Man’s Sky ends.

How you get there, and how long it takes you, is entirely up to you—and that brings us to the part about No Man’s Sky that I think a lot of people are not going to like at all. Because while Murray promises a satisfying conclusion awaits the No Man’s Sky experience at the center of the galaxy (and also that you can continue playing after reaching the "end"), getting there is going to be the lion’s share of the fun.

After the demo was over, Murray talked a bit about not just his goals with making No Man’s Sky, but the gameplay experiences of his youth. He cited games like Ian Bell and David Braben’s Elite as central to his growing up, along with Mario games various and sundry, and while he has the same kinds of golden memories as I do of growing up gaming, he’s also very taken with the bottom-up revolution that games like Minecraft have forced on the industry.

In Super Mario Bros, for example, the player controls Mario and there’s a reason for playing: you need to complete levels to find and save the princess. But that kind of external motivation carries with it a lot of baggage—it imposes boundaries, however tenuous, on the story that the player can create in his or her own mind. As Murray puts it, "I’ve been Mario. I’ve been Mario a million times! I want to be something else."

No Man’s Sky is the game that Murray says he’s wanted to make since he was a little kid, and at its core it’s a book filled with blank pages. There are no classes. There are no predefined roles. Beyond your ship and your suit, there aren’t any stats or levels; beyond "get to the center of the galaxy" there is no goal. Your in-game character has no name or background or dialog or back story, and there’s no in-game dialog with NPCs or overly communicated moral decisions or choices to make to gain "light side" or "dark side" points.

What is your character doing in No Man’s Sky? To answer that, you have to decide what you’re doing in No Man’s Sky. Why is your character going to the center of the galaxy? You have to decide why you’re going there—or if you even want to go there at all.

Judging by some of the more vocal responses to Elite: Dangerous—which has a similar but much-toned-down plotless structure where players have to determine their own motivations and directions—this isn’t going to sit well with a lot of players. If you’re not comfortable making up a vast canvas of stories inside your own head, then No Man’s Sky might not be the kind of game that will hold your interest. If you’re frustrated that Minecraft doesn’t have more of an overly communicated "game" to it other than "dig and build," then you will have similar frustrations with No Man’s Sky.

The cadence of Murray’s speech gets faster as he gets more and more excited—we’re definitely a bit off-script as he gets into his feelings about games that let you tell your own story, and he’s clearly thrilled at being able to actually talk about the game to the public. I went into the demo with only a middling level of excitement about the game, but it’s hard to avoid catching at least a bit of Murray’s almost kid-like joy as he shows off what is clearly a game that comes straight from his heart. In a world of AAA sequels and franchises, passion-driven projects like No Man’s Sky are rare gems—and as silly as it sounds, Murray made a believer out of me.

No Man’s Sky has no release date, but we’re betting on 2016. It will launch simultaneously on PS4 and Windows PCs.