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Eurogamer - "A future that has a history": Introducing No Man's Sky

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And so the idea starts to come together. It's not a particularly small idea. In fact, you could probably call it the Last Great Science Fiction Video Game Pitch: a procedural universe for you to bomb around inside, making discoveries and getting into scrapes. Downed ships, space battles in asteroid fields, giant worms cruising through the sands of some backwater hellhole - these are cliches for sure, but that's the whole point. They're the best cliches the genre can offer, and for once they're all connected, linked together, obeying the same handful of rules and first principles, and all the more alive because of it. Imagine an Elite with the power to take you down onto the surface of planets so you could explore the terrain. Imagine an Elite where you can use your blasters to drill a hole through an asteroid and see what's inside.

Speaking of cliches, have a go at this one. "So if you were stood on a mountain and you can see a tree three miles away you can go and you can walk and you can see that tree and what's under it," Murray tells me. "But also if you look into the sky and you see that classic science fiction crescent planet on the horizon, you can go there as well. And if you see a star that's in the sky, given enough time you can go and look at that as well. You can look at the night sky and all of those stars are actually real things, they are real places, and you can have visited some of them but not visited others. Grant [Duncan, the art director] said it the other day. 'Is this the first game that doesn't have a skybox?' It's such a weird thing, it's such a techie thing, but that should be our opener: the first game with no skybox."

So how will you orientate yourself in such a massive, bewildering place? In truth, it might come fairly naturally - for starters, you won't be alone. Everyone who plays No Man's Sky will begin the adventure on their own planet at the edge of a shared galaxy. For most people, the obvious hook will be to carve a path to the centre of the galaxy where there will be something waiting for them. Along the way, you'll discover that this universe has rules, and you'll have to work together with other players - other frontiersmen - to find out how the place fits together and how it all works. You'll be building from scratch, too. When you initially load up the galaxy map, all the systems and planets are there, but nothing's labeled. Filling in the blanks is up to you - up to everyone.

RPS - First Look: No Man’s Sky

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Exploration and resource gathering are the ways, really the only ways, in which the game is similar to Minecraft. The planets you land on aren’t cube-shaped and it’s unlikely you’ll build a house on them. They are the equivalent of Minecraft’s network of underground caves: exciting to find, unique to you, and full of materials which give them significance and value despite not being handcrafted.

Any planet you discover on your journey is marked on your galactic map, along with its name, its atmosphere and what resources you found there. If you choose to, you can then share that information with every other player, uploading it so that it’s shared across everyone’s galactic map.

You’ll get credit for discovering it. You’ll also, if the materials there are valuable, attract players to come visit. No Man’s Sky isn’t a multiplayer game, in as much as you’ll never see another player. But the galaxy is the same between everyone and actions of “significance” will be shared. If you kill a single bird, that won’t be shared. If you make an entire species of bird extinct, then those creatures will blink out of existence for everyone.

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“We are designing a set of rules, not designing a game, and I think when I talk about DayZ that’s how those feel to me. Your experience in DayZ is your experience, and there’s a set of rules in that 200km square that you then go out and experience and make stories in. And that is what we want.”
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It’s about moving the design away from strictly authored experiences, in which your actions are tightly scripted and controlled, in favour of something more expressive.

“You will at all times feel very vulnerable in this universe and not necessarily empowered,” explains Murray. “You have an enormous amount of freedom, but maybe not masses of power at your disposal.”

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“How it is at the moment, is that you can’t die, but you can lose everything,” explains Murray. “There is no saved game. Your game will be saved, your progress is saved all the time as you go along, but if your ship is destroyed then you go back to a lifepod and you’ve lost that ship, and that is your everything.”

If you decide to fill your ship with fuel and go on a risky trip to a distant, dangerous solar system, you could find yourself in trouble. “If you warp in and it is to a solar system that is full of pirates and you get shot down, then you have lost all of that. You can then rebuild from there, and you will be where you are in that universe.”

It’s your ship which defines how quickly you can progress between solar systems, so losing it would be a big blow. But if you’re lucky, you might crash land on a planet full of useful resources. “You perhaps find things that you can’t even make use of at the time and earmark that for yourself or your friends to cooperate with you to build yourself back up.”