For months, fans everywhere couldn’t help but ask, ‘what do you DO in No Man’s Sky?’ Recently, the developers seem keen on answering that very question.
While we gave you some impressions on an E3 demo recently, this deep video dive by IGN is still worth checking out. You’ll see some familiar things we’ve mentioned before — the wanted system, harvesting resources, and so on — in action, which is always nice.
Plus, there are a few new tidbits of information in this footage too, including:
- -The five levels that make up the wanted system, and how to get rid of your wanted levels.
- -How the game tracks your discoveries, as well as rewards you for discoveries.
- -Planets have moons.
- -Ships and weapons are also procedurally generated.
- -You have a jetpack.
- -What the consequences of dying are.
- -Crystals, and why they’re a good resource early on.
- -What it looks like to kill enemies/creatures.
- -How you customise your weapons.
- -What happens when your ship is destroyed.
Plus other stuff! If you’re at all interested in the game, give it a watch.
Comments
28 responses to “18 Minutes Of No Man’s Sky In Action”
*high pitched squealing*
(Some of the animals sounded an awful lot like ones from Spore)
I agree, I don’t care if it looks empty, this is the scale Bungie alluded to for Destiny, instead we got a corridor shooter…
I don’t know. Still can’t see the gameplay hook that’s going to keep me interested. What about things like rare creatures that are like bounties to hunt down and kill? That would be a cool feature.
What about bounties on other players who have pissed off the galaxy by killing too many animals / freighters? Like, imagine hunting one guy across the galaxy, the most wanted player in the game. How cool would it be to hunt them down, how cool would it be to BE that player!
What about rare weapons hidden in the world that change the way you play significantly. Like a mini nuke that can blow up half a planet?
Basically, there needs to be something that is going to keep me playing past the week the idea of this game might excite me for.
Meet with your friends and race to either discover as many new creatures as you can or find/reach a specific planet first. This could be even like, a weekly leaderboard, and if you’re at the top of the leaderboard at the end of the week between your friends or something you would get rare loot or cash or something. Just finding ways to incentivise these basic gameplay systems to make something like breaking rocks or hitting a button to scan animals stay fresh or at least important to people, these are the sorts of things that I feel would get boring quickly.
Another thought on the other player bounty hunting: When you have a bounty on you, the game reveals your location every 30 minutes so players know where you are roughly. As the bounty increases (in time since it was placed on you), the duration between each reveal is shortened. So like, every 30 mins, to every 25 mins, 20, 15. and so on. probably 10 minutes would be the lowest, but it would raise the stakes as your bounty goes on and ensure that someone can’t evade their bounty for too long and give players more chances to succeed as time goes on. Bounties would also expire if you don’t log in regularly enough, but I don’t think you should be able to pay them off.
Imagine the stories kotaku would post like “This player evaded their bounty for 300 days in No Man’s Sky!” That’s like that EVE online shit you always hear that makes you desperate to play the game until you realise that the game is boring as hell 90% of the time.
I don’t know, i just don’t want to be one of those people who say “still skeptical” without providing any meaningful feedback.
To be honest this isn’t that type of game. This seems like the type of game that you play just for looks…You fly down, think “wow, this place looks awesome” Most of the gameplay suggests that a large aspect of the game is just exploring, discovering weird animals etc. Sean Murray has talked about other ways of playing the game, but on the whole this isn’t going to be like most AAA game releases. Everything is procedural – hence no scripted events and stuff, so anything that happens is gonna be up to chance.
There are rare creatures to discover, I think he said. I think the appeal there is to discover things before other players. Ditto with getting new weapons and ships. It’s a lot like a Roguelike combined with a space game like Freelancer or EV (which, if you’re the type of person to get into those games, makes this sound PERFECT)
Well I think they sorta covered the first aspect. He mentioned the fish he scanned wasn’t particularly rare which might mean there are elusive species hidden on planets amongst all the common fauna.
Not sure about hunting them though, the choice is there obviously, but it seems the “police” place value on animals and rare ones might stick you with a higher bounty.
I’ve got a feeling you’re going to be disappointed @geometrics
I can see this game just being some core functions and you have to go make your own fun.
Yeah, same. But, and I don’t know anything really about programming here, these suggestions don’t seem like they’d be impossible to implement or bolt onto what’s there, would it really be a case of reprogramming everything to get them in there?
I imagine building the game engine and the world is the longest part, so maybe they’ll add some extra’s in as DLC done the line? I can’t really see them going back to Joe Danger after this! (although the first JD game was amazing!)
Still so skeptical. Getting harder not to hop on that hype train though……
The one thing that always impressed me whenever there’s a new trailer or gameplay video is when the player leaves the planet naturally with no loading screen or anything. Just fly up into space. That’s something I’ve always wanted to see in space exploration games and they never done it until now.(Actually Kerbal Space Program did it but that’s the point of the game :P)
The Elite series did it 20 years ago.
His ship looks exactly like a colonial viper from Battlestar Galactica..
Thankyou. That was bugging me the whole time I was watching but I couldnt put my finger on what it reminded me of
Absolutely loving the look of this game. I’m getting more and more excited every time I see new footage. I love the idea of playing how I want and being able to explore such a stupidly enormous universe. Give us a release date already!
beelines for center of galaxy, finds largest creature on planet and names it Peter Moleneux
Given the size of the galaxy a person could spend more time upgrading their hyper drive and overtake you on their way there.
Oh man!! This is so exciting!
I may be too hopeful, but these IGN Firsts are always about games a few months from release, right? Surely this means a release date is around the corner. Right? Right?!
Whenever I see a No Man’s Sky clip, I just want it to go on forever, exploring random worlds over and over and over. Even if this game turns into a sandbox with no purpose, I will still love it.
So you can name animals you find….aaaaand I’m guessing after a while, every previously discovered planet wil have animals running around named slight variations of “p3n1s-a-saurus”
They only touched on it but I’d love to see more of the crafting.
I’m really hoping for morpheus support though. I also want morpheus to keep it’s name
Please tell me the final game frame rate does not jump between 30fps and 60fps like in the video. It would be extremely horrible to play. Either lock 30 or lock 60
Looks amazing, but isn’t it just Elite on steroids?
Isn’t Elite just Star Raiders on steroids?
The video game industry has a real drug problem.
Menu screens look similar to that of Destiny. Just an observation…..