Exploring A Little Of No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky is a marvel, a true work of genius, but Sean Murray makes the construction of the billions of worlds in the game seem simple as he begins his demonstration of the game. He shows a planet devoid of any terrain, to which he then adds a simple sine wave, creating thousands of sets of identical hills and valleys. Adding a second sine wave to the pattern intersects and creates larger peaks and troughs, in a procedure known as a Fourier transform. Keep going, adding more and more waves, all of which are mathematical formulas, and bingo, you have a totally unique planet from a string of numbers.

“If you imagine, with a simple sine wave, for any given input you know the output, and that’s how No Man’s Sky works,” explains Sean. “The input is where you are standing, the formula is all our maths, and the output is what you see on screen.”

More variables, such as the sea level and atmosphere are now added, along with plant life and animals (all of which are generated using mathematical formula) and within seconds there is a living, breathing world to explore, complete with a day and night cycle as it orbits a sun and spins on it’s axis. “It’s an approximation of a sci-fi book cover,” notes Sean, “That’s what we were really aiming for.”

“If I had to boil it down, then the kind of things you do in the game are exploring, trading, fighting and surviving,” he adds. “The reality is you do a mixture of all of those, and exploring feeds them all. It helps you find new resources to trade, trading gets you more money to buy better ships so you can explore more.”

If you have the right attachments to your weapon, you can even modify the terrain, tunnelling down in to the planet to escape the deadly temperatures as night falls. “Pretty much everything is destructable,” Sean said.

Pressing down on the D-pad scans the local area and highlights resources, whilst using the binoculars allows you to tag points of interest in the distance and use them as way points. As well as harvesting resources from the planet, which are are a mixture of elements from our own periodic table and fictional elements created for the game, you can also discover discarded pods or crash ships, and these are used to upgrade your suit, ship and weapons.

“A big part of the game is the RPG element,” Sean explained. “As you explore you will find tech blueprints, maybe from a crashed ship, and when you do you can install them in your gun, suit or ship. This allows you to completely customize your weapon. If you were playing more as a trader you could customise your gun towards mining, if you were a Survivor you would use a different set of upgrades.”

Alien structures including factories and trading posts are dotted round the landscape, as are monoliths that help you learn the languages of the alien races. “There are a bunch of different races in the game and they speak to you in their own dialect and you can learn words from those dialects,” explains Sean. “This helps you understand what the aliens are saying and how to interact with them. The more you interact with them, the more happy they will be, you have a ‘standing’ with each of the races. The races represent factions and each faction has interactions with the others; some might like each other so might not, and in some cases some are very focussed to certain areas of the game.”

As you have entire planets to explore – and they are truly huge – you can wander a very long way from your ship, so Hello Games have thoughtfully added buildings where, for a small deposit of tech, you can call you ship in to land rather than spend an hour hiking back to where you left it. I’m happy to report that that take off and landing sequences are not automated, you won’t get blasted off in to space unless you point the ship in that direction, and you can just fly around the planet taking in the vistas if you so wish.

“I might land on this planet and be the first person who has been here, and probably no one else will ever be here. So I can’t look up a YouTube video, I can’t look up online to ask where things are or where a good place is to find shelter from cold. That’s a cool thing; you are really, genuinely exploring,” enthuses Sean.

Much like Grand Theft Auto V, each player has a ‘wanted’ level, “There are little drones flying around which are keeping track of you, making sure you don’t mine too heavily or do things to upset the balance,” says Sean. Attacking a building will increase your level, and “The more I fight, the more of a response you will get” he adds.

Sean continues the presentation by zooming off into space, “Those are trade routes between planets,” he notes as we fly up to some freighters and begin to attack them. When the pods on the freighters are destroyed, they release resources which are automatically scooped, but the freighters respond with deadly forces, and Sean respawns inside a space station. “Something we haven’t shown before,” he notes.

Inside the space stations, which can be quite complex, you can trade, save your game and more. Grinning as he shows it off, Sean opens up a portal and looks out at the planet below. “My favourite part of the game,” he says. “That whole area we were exploring, the buildings, the animals, the terrain, is now represented by just a couple of pixels on screen.”

Unfortunately, it’s a game of such a scope that, even though I did have thirty minutes hands on time with the game, I simply can’t give an honest opinion of the game. I know that many of you will be eager to know what the game is like to play, but thirty minutes is barely enough time to get across London, let alone explore the complexities of a title in which you can venture forth and explore 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets.

I can tell you that I went and mined a little bit and I scanned some of the creatures on the planet in order to name them. So there is now a six-legged Aptosaurus/Tiger/Bat thing of the genus “Gerald”, and a rather ferocious raccoon like creature that kept on attacking me, now of the species “Tuffcubicus”.

I explored a little more, spoke to an alien and blew the doors off a factory, before heading into the heavens to find a new planet. This second planet had a thick atmosphere and large archipelagos to explore. Heading down I found a network of caves the head into, but all too soon my time was up.

Technically the game is impressive, but as for how it plays, I am still as much in the dark as you are. Despite that, I am still optimistic that behind the complex maths there is a decent game.

“Cool, life-like environments, crazy dinosaurs, this isn’t necessarily what the game is,” says Sean, and I hope he is right.