(Image: Hello Games)

“So, what exactly do you do?”

That’s the question every single person asks me when I tell them I’ve played No Man’s Sky, the upcoming space adventure game from indie developer Hello Games.

It’s a perfectly fair thing to ask, because no one seems to know what exactly you’re supposed to do in No Man’s Sky. There is a vague, overarching goal. (Make your way to the center of the universe.) But in the year and a half since the game was first announced at the 2013 Spike VGX Awards, it’s been unclear what that really means.

That hasn’t stopped the game from capturing the imaginations of millions of gamers. It features a universe boasting over 18 quintillion planets. (Yes, that’s a real number.) Players fly spaceships, land them on mysterious worlds, get out, walk around, take pictures of creatures, and occasionally shoot things. The game’s technical chutzpah is so outlandish that it earned a spread in the New Yorker, of all places. It’s the most hyped video game in years, a fact that isn’t lost on Hello Games founder and somewhat reluctant No Man’s Sky spokesman Sean Murray.

“Hopefully people feel a real, justified sense of excitement rather than ‘hype,’ which to me says, ‘I know I’m going to feel let down,’” Murray told me at the recent E3 convention in Los Angeles. “It’s a level of excitement that’s impossible to reach.”

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(Image: Hello Games)



He looked vaguely worried when he said this, and you couldn’t blame him. Having put the game front and center on stage at two consecutive E3 press conferences, Sony has made it clear that it’s a major priority for the PS4 (never mind that it’s also coming to the PC). It still has no formal release date, but with the surefire blockbuster Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End getting delayed into 2016, Sony would love to get No Man’s Sky on store shelves during this year’s holiday season. No Man’s Sky is riding shotgun on the video game hype train, putting a tremendous amount of pressure on its tiny, 10-person production team in Guildford, England.

With all the hype and expectation surrounding the game, I was actually a little nervous when Murray handed me the controller and let me fly around his complicated sandbox for 10 minutes. Was it going to be tons of fun, or was I getting a front row seat to an impending disaster?

Honestly, I’m still not entirely sure. But I feel much more confident that it’s capable of delivering on its grandiose promise.

I started off inside a small spacecraft and immediately headed over to a nearby planet to test out if, indeed, you can fly through the atmosphere and seamlessly land your ship on a planet. It took about a minute, but it worked. I got out of my ship and walked around on a lush, green field. I saw some water. I dove in and swam around. That also worked.

I found my way back to solid ground and tried my hand at gunplay by firing at a few large, chunky rocks. This is the No Man’s Sky version of mining, and sure enough, I accumulated a bunch of orange something or other, which was just enough to create a new weapon.

The bulk of No Man’s Sky is procedurally generated — that is to say it’s created by the game’s top-secret algorithmic code. Hello Games didn’t, after all, handcraft 18 quintillion planets; instead, the game generates those using some seriously awesome math and a wealth of variables. It doesn’t stop at planets, either: Pretty much everything is procedurally generated, from the creatures you encounter to the weapons you can build when you mine enough orange something or other.

The gun I crafted was unique: a weird, reddish laser pistol not entirely unlike the sort of thing Marvin the Martian might wave at Bugs Bunny. It boasted several expansion slots, each of which could be equipped with upgrades. It also boosted my mining capabilities, allowing me to mine some red something or other from a previously unminable rock.



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