No Man's Sky

No Man's Sky

Details:

Initial release date: August 9, 2016

Developer: Hello Games

Mode: Single-player video game

Platforms: PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows

Genres: Action-adventure game, Survival game

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No Man's Sky is a first-person, open world survival game that allows player to engage in four principal activities: exploration, survival, combat, and trading. Players take the role of a planetary explorer, called in game as the Traveller, in an uncharted universe. They start on a random planet near a crashed spacecraft at the edge of the galaxy, and are equipped with a survival exosuit with a jetpack, and a "multitool" that can be used to scan, mine and collect resources as well as to attack or defend oneself from creatures and hostile forces. The player can collect, repair, and refuel the craft, allowing them to travel about the planet, between other planets and space stations in the local solar system, engage in space combat with alien factions, or make hyperspace jumps to other star systems. While the game is open-ended, the player may follow the guidance of the entity known as the Atlas to head towards the center of the galaxy.

No Man's Sky allows players to explore planets with procedurally-generated flora and fauna.

No Man's Sky's defining feature is that nearly all parts of the galaxy, including stars, planets, flora and fauna on these planets, and sentient alien encounters, are created through procedural generation using deterministic algorithms and random number generators from a single seed number. This 64-bit value leads to there being over 18 quintillion planets to explore within the game. Very little data is stored on the game's servers, as all elements of the game are created through deterministic calculations when the player is near them, assuring that other players will see the same elements as another player by travelling to the same location in the galaxy. Players may make temporary changes on planets, such as mining out resources, but these changes are not tracked once the player leaves that vicinity. Only some "significant" changes, such as destroying a space station, are tracked for all players on the game's servers. The game uses different servers for the PlayStation 4 and Windows versions.

Through exploration, the player is credited with "units", the in-game currency, by observing yet-seen planets, alien bases, flora and fauna in their travels. If the player is first to discover one of these, they can earn additional units by uploading this information to the Atlas, as well as having their name credited with the discovery to be seen by other players through the game's servers. Players also have the opportunity to rename these features at this point within limits set by a content filter. No Man's Sky can be played offline, but interaction with the Atlas requires online connectivity.

The player must assure the survival of the Traveller, as many planets have dangerous atmospheres such as extreme temperatures, toxic gases, and dangerous storms. Though the player can seek shelter at alien bases or underground caves, these environments will wear away at the exosuit's sheilding and armor and can kill the Traveller. The player can collect resources and blueprints that allow them to craft upgrades to their exosuit, multitool, and spacecraft to make survival easier, with several of these upgrades working in synergistic manners to improve the survivability and capabilities of the Traveller. Each of these elements have a limited number of slots for both upgrades and resource space, requiring the player to manage their inventories and feature sets, though the player can either gain new slots for the exosuit or purchase new ships and multitools with more slots. Many features of the exosuit, multitool, and spacecraft need to be refueled after prolonged use, using collected resources as a fuel source. Better equipment, and the blueprints and resources to craft that equipment, are generally located closer to the center of the galaxy, providing a driver for the player.

While on a planet, the Traveller may be attacked by hostile creatures. They also may be attacked by Sentinels, a self-replicating robot force that patrols the planets and takes action against those that take the planet's resources. The player can fend these off using the weapons installed on the multitool. The game uses a "wanted level" similar to that of the Grand Theft Auto series; low wanted levels may cause small drones to appear which may be easily fought off, while giant walking machines can assault the player at higher wanted levels. While in space, the Traveller may be attacked by pirates seeking their ship's cargo, or by alien factions that they have a poor reputation with. Here, the player can use the ship's weapon systems to engage in these battles. Should the Traveller die on a planet, they will be respawned at their last save point, without their exosuit's inventory; they can recover these materials if they can reach the spot where they died. If the Traveller dies in space, they will similarly respawn at the local system's space station, but having lost all the goods aboard their ship.

Each star system has a space station where the Traveller can sell and buy resources, multitools, and ships, and interact with one or more aliens from three different races that populate the galaxy. The player may also find active or abandoned alien bases on planets that offer similar functions. Each alien race has their own language, presented as a word-for-word substitution which initially will be nonsense to the player. By frequent communications with that race, as well as finding monoliths scattered on planets that act as Rosetta stones, the player can better understand these languages and perform proper actions when interacting with the alien non-player characters, gaining favour from the alien and its race for future trading and combat. Consequentially, improper responses to aliens may cause them to dislike the Traveller, and their space-bound fleets may attack the Traveller on sight. The game includes a free market galactic store accessible at space stations or alien bases, where some resources and goods have higher values in some systems compared to others, enabling the player to profit on resource gathering.

No Man's Sky is primarily designed as a single-player game, though discoveries are shared to all players, and friends can track each other on the game's galactic map. Hello Games' Sean Murray stated that one might spend about forty hours of gametime to reach the center of the galaxy if they did not perform any side activities, but he also fully anticipated that players would play the game in a manner that suits them, such as having those that might try to catalog the flora and fauna in the universe, while others may attempt to set up trade routes between planets.

Hello Games has planned that No Man's Sky would include multiplayer elements, though the implementation would be far from traditional methods as one would see in a massive multiplayer online game, to the point where Murray has told players to not think of No Man's Sky as a multiplayer game. Because of the size of the game's universe, Hello Games estimated that more than 99.9% of the planets would never be explored by players, and that the likelihood of meeting another player through chance encounters is nearly zero. Murray had stated in a 2014 interview that No Man's Sky would include a matchmaking system that is similar to that used for Journey when such encounters do occur; each online player would have an "open lobby" that any players in their in-universe proximity would enter and leave. This approach was envisioned to provide "cool moments" for players as they encounter each other, but not meant to support gameplay like player versus environment or fully cooperative modes. Players can track friends on the galactic map and the system maps. Due to limited multiplayer aspects, Sony does not require PlayStation 4 users to have PlayStation Plus to play the game online.