NO MAN’S SKY
In a gaming world that’s seeing the resurgence of the space simulator with the likes of Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen, No Man’s Sky dares to soar against the solar wind with an accessible starry-eyed offering.
16 quintillion planets await
No Man’s Sky is a tricky game to pitch. It looks like a space simulator, but it’s not. It lends itself to multiplayer, but that’s not really there. Procedural generation should result in an overwhelming amount of amazing things but, by design, there’s a lot of the mundane in No Man’s Sky universe. Even if you’re abiding by developer Hello Games’ simplified No Man’s Sky gameplay equation – exploring, fighting, trading and survival – it doesn’t help to sell the interconnected nature of those pillars, nor the gameplay mechanics outside of them. Hell, even after an exclusive half-hour presentation and half an hour of hands-on time with No Man’s Sky’s starry second heaven, plus a chat with Hello Games founder and lead developer Sean Murray, it’s all still a bit blurry. Despite this blur, here’s what Murray helped us to discover as we made the tiniest of scratches on the surface of No Man’s Sky daring and expansive game universe.
BILLIONS OF LIGHT-HOURS
The term “game universe” has never been more fitting, given the breadth of content in No Man’s Sky. It will reportedly take players billions of years to find all of the planets in the game, and that doesn’t even take into consideration the scores of hours it’d take to explore the mammoth surface of each of these space rocks.
It’s the kind of scope you’d expect from a bigname studio working with a AAA budget, but it’s not the case. Hello Games, a UK-posited indie studio, has around 10 developers working on the ambitious space explorer.
Given the scope of No Man’s Sky compared to the size of the team, Hello Games has, understandably, had to rely on some clever smoke and mirrors to produce such a visionary game. To this end, Hello Games has implemented a procedurally generated universe that relies heavily on back-end mathematics to do a lot of the leg work.
For right-brain-dominant gamers, the concept of mathematics may read as boring, but that’s kind of the point. Hello Games wants you to embrace the boredom. During Murray’s presentation of the game, we were shown a behind-the-scenes look at the mathematical foundations of how the game was built. What started off as a lifeless planet with a flat surface, transitioned to a planet comprised of uniform sine waves that looked like mountains but were too uniform to be interesting.
As more sine waves were added to the next planet in a chaotic way, things started to look more random: hills begat mountains and gave
way to ravines. With all of the variables thrown into the mix, he teleported to a planet filled with life that rendered near instantaneously, despite an abundance of non-uniform terrain, flora and fauna. The idea is that by using mathematical algorithms to populate the world, the player can travel seamlessly to, from and between planets, without the need for an initially long loading or respawn time.
On top of this, it means that players that eventually visit the same rock as another will encounter the same thing. “Because it’s such a simple formula, it would generate the same for every other player who went there,” explained Murray. “So if they fly down to this planet, it generates like this, into their memory, gets rendered by the GPU, and if they fly away again, it all gets thrown away. It exists for the moment that you’re there, but it always exists in the same way.”
The fall of seasons
Despite the promise of billions of hours of potential gameplay for the dedicated cosmonaut, don’t expect to see the impact of time beyond a day/night cycle. Murray confirmed there aren’t seasons on planets, with No Man’s Sky taking more of a Star Wars approach to seasonally themed planets to account for this. “The planets are generally pretty static,” reasoned Murray. “They change in a variety of different ways, but really you’re not dealing with things like seasons, and the reason for that is we want you to explore.”
This push for players to explore the planets is also used as a measuring stick for what makes the cut in No Man’s Sky. “That’s how we decide what goes in the game and what doesn’t,” explained Murray. “We want you to explore, which means when you visit a planet, we want you to spend maybe an hour or two there and feel like you’ve seen it. You’ve
seen that planet, and you don’t need to just live there. We want you to keep going. If you want to see an autumnal planet, then you should go and find the autumnal planet, rather than just living on one planet.”
Despite the lack of seasonal elements in No Man’s Sky at launch, it’s a feature that Hello Games may include at some point. “We could have had seasons and terraforming and things like that, and maybe we will add some of those things down the line,” admitted Murray. “But I actually like the idea of this planet being a static thing and I can say to you, ‘Hey, check out this ice planet,’ and if you ever make your way there, you will see that’s a cool ice planet.” We can confirm there was no pun intended.
Circling back to the earlier point about boredom, Murray was unflinching in his description of a game universe that’s filled with planets that are 90 percent boring, with the intention that the remaining 10 percent of planets are something truly special. “[Maths] does create boring results, but that’s part of it,” said Murray. “We were showing a planet that didn’t have life, and it’s important that those exist. It’s actually important that there’s a fair number of them, because otherwise it’s not nearly as exciting as when you find a planet that’s rich in life and it’s got loads of trees, grass, plants, creatures, and stuff like that.
“That becomes less meaningful if you’re seeing that time and time again. It’s important that, like our universe, nine times out of ten everything isn’t perfect, and everything isn’t beautiful because then when it is, it’s more meaningful.” During our time with the game, we did a speed-run of sorts to encounter as many planets as possible. Of the three planets we visited, two were covered in a pea soup fog, which made atmospheric scouting for points of interest close to impossible. On the surface of these planets, visibility was worse.
The certainty of mathematics
On the third planet, things were a lot clearer when scouting beneath the clouds and on the surface, but the enormity of the planet meant we lost our spaceship within a few minutes of exploration. Thankfully, our scanning binoculars highlighted the seemingly hiding spaceship after a 360-degree view of the environment, but it proved that orienteering proficiency is a handy skill to have. We didn’t get lost because everything looked the same, either; we got lost because No Man’s Sky is constantly tugging at your curiosity to see what’s over the next hill. What’s on the next planet. What’s in the next solar system. You forget to take note of rudimentary considerations such as where you parked your ship.
Those concerned that No Man’s Sky may well be a cleverly masked walking simulator should take heart in the understanding that it’s really more of a curiosity simulator, and an incredibly accessible one, at that. Like any good open-world game, predetermining a path from, say, spaceship to distant structure is the surest way to guarantee you’ll be distracted by a newly discovered cave network, a lake brimming with life, or the tantalising prospect of never-encountered creatures along the way.
But just because such scenarios may feel random, Murray was quick to emphasise that algorithmic beats accidental. “We always say procedural rather than random, and that’s because the game doesn’t just pick randomly,” explained Murray. “It doesn’t just say, ‘This [planet] will have a blue sky, and that one will be a red sky, and that one will be a pink sky. The problem with that is you end up with red planets with red skies and red terrain and red creatures, and it’s all just a horrible mess. We try to put some rules into it.
“We try and make the skies created from genuine atmosphere. You can see that when you fly through it and fly in. Most games would just have a skybox. We make it out of atmosphere and we think about what elements would be in it, and what elements you get in atmospheres and then that naturally creates things that look more like skies. The light is diffracted as it goes through them at different wave lengths, so you
the enormity of the planet meant we lost our spaceship within a few minutes of exploration
get hardly any green skies, for instance, because that’s just a thing: gases hardly ever can create a green sky.
“You end up not getting really dark blue skies, and stuff like that. Things begin to make a bit more sense. We have things [that look] eroded, and it creates terrain shapes that look a bit more real. Our brains are very good at knowing patterns, knowing that a creature would not be able to hold its body weight with those legs, or whatever, and you need some of those rules in there, basically.” As far as our limited planetary exposure in No Man’s Sky, despite the alien nature of the planets, none of them felt off in an immersion-damaging kind of way.
Four-letter Fauna
you’ll discover creatures that look like a Frankenstein-like combination of genitals which, once noticed, cannot be unnoticed
In terms of creatures, looks can be deceiving. Just because a towering beast with Dilophosaurus-like frills for ears and pointy teeth looks like it enjoys dining on interstellar explorers, doesn’t mean it will. We shied away from this exact procedurally generated creature, fearing for our digital lives. Once curiosity trumped anxiety, we discovered that it had little interest in us as it stomped off into the distance. The creature may have looked comically villainous, but that’s also part of the design.
“The nice thing that hopefully people will see is just finding little bits of life and weird creatures,” said Murray. “That’s always the thing is that people like the crazy creatures when they find them: the things that look like they shouldn’t exist. To be honest, there’s kind of a lot of humour to the game from that point of view. You will find people pointing and laughing at some silly thing that’s grown two heads and no eyes, or whatever.”
Alternatively, you’ll discover creatures that look like a Frankensteinlike combination of genitals which, once noticed, cannot be unnoticed. “The amount of times I’ve seen people name a creature after some appendage, normally a genital or something like that, and then you see it and you can’t unsee it,” said Murray. “You’re like, ‘It DOES look like that.” For those
interested in more of a family friendly adventure in the stars, though, take heart that No Man’s Sky will include a profanity filter to keep animal naming conventions safe for work. “Human ingenuity is too good for that, I’m afraid,” laughed Murray, when we jokingly lamented the exclusion of juvenile naming conventions.
Astronauts in A Haystack
In terms of multiplayer, naming a planet’s local fauna is about as interactive as it gets. Despite the inherent realities of the unlikelihood of running into another player visiting the exact part of the specific planet you happen to be on, No Man’s Sky has been built as an isolated experience. By design, the gameplay revolves around a solitary explorer who starts at the edge of the universe, and is encouraged to travel inwards to the centre. In the same breath, arguably, the entire point of No Man’s Sky is to be distracted from the main path thousands of times along the way.
“The chances of you coming across another planet where there is a player in the same place at the same time is actually pretty rare,” admitted Murray. “Even if that does happen, you will get a sense of that happening, but you don’t go then and play a deathmatch. That’s not what the game is about.” That said, much like the possibility of planetary seasons and terraforming that Murray alluded to earlier, fans hoping for multiplayer can continue to partially hold their breath.
“Maybe, further down the line, we can introduce those elements, but they will probably be quite alternate to the game, like, in the same way that you see GTA or Metal Gear Solid had a kind of an online component,” said Murray. “They’re separate to the game, but still in the same universe. There are things like that we would love to do, but they aren’t really what the core of the game is about. The core of the game is about being the lone explorer out on the edge of the frontier, and not Quake deathmatch.”
A whistling companion
Despite the loneliness of No Man’s Sky, the most consistent player companion in No Man’s Sky will be the soundtrack. Fusing a traditional album-like track listing with 10 original tracks and six additional soundscapes, instrumental post-rock band 65daysofstatic was enlisted to create the soundtrack for No Man’s Sky.
“We jumped at the chance to be involved with No Man’s Sky,” said Joe Shrewsbury of 65daysofstatic fame. “The game had a really strong aesthetic even early on, and the scope of what Hello Games was trying to make was really exciting. Creatively, we were being given lots of freedom. Essentially, we were asked to, ‘Just make a 65daysofstatic record,’ although, as the project has grown, we’ve obviously pushed this remit further. Nevertheless, we understood that it was our music that would contribute to the games identity at a fundamental level, and that level of responsibility was really inspiring.”
Shrewsbury and his fellow musicians knew that forging the band’s first game soundtrack would be challenging in No Man’s Sky. “We knew the ingame music would be very different and would work very differently to the music we were writing,” said Shrewsbury. “We didn’t know quite how, but we knew it would have to be more mood-based, less demanding on the player’s faculties as they had this whole universe to explore.”
Creating a track listing to match the procedurally generated content of No Man’s Sky was no small feat, either. The band conceptualised it as something that could stand alone, external to the game. “It had to work in its own right for listeners who’d never heard of No Man’s Sky or played a videogame in their lives,” said Shrewsbury. “On the other hand, we knew we needed those compositions to have a range of possibilities, variations, textures, that could work outside of the context of a five- or six-minute arrangement.
On top of this, the other challenge was to ensure that the soundtrack didn’t descent into a collection of ambient tones, while simultaneously not edging too close to the foreground. “We’re feeling pretty confident that much of the audio we’ve compiled is texturally and sonically aggressive enough that it transcends being ambient simply by definition,” said Shrewsbury. “At the same time, a lot of the music is ‘background’ to the individual engaged in playing the game. We’re trying to create something more emotive within that context: instances of music which suggest uneasiness, loneliness, temporality, and so on.”
In a race against the clock to experience as much as possible in 30 short minutes, our time with No Man’s Sky felt piecemeal, but touched on gameplay elements that made us curious for more. We tried our hand at Red Faction-like excavation with a powerful weapon upgrade earned by correctly guessing an incomprehensible question from an alien trader. We blasted a spaceship that took exception to us leaving the surface of a planet, and avoided upsetting planetary sentinels by minimising our resource-collecting mining endeavours.
But most of all, we explored. No Man’s Sky may be many things, but at its heart, it’s an accessible space exploration title that pulls you in with its unique art direction and constantly distracts you with the possibilities of what you might discover. NATHAN LAWRENCE