People are already discovering millions of planets, lifeforms and objects in No Man’s Sky, but what they’re not discovering is a huge amount of fine detail. And there’s good reason for that. To make the universe of No Man’s Sky as enormous as it was, compromises had to be made — and a lot of those were visual.
But changes to that could already be in the works. Sean Murray, founder of Hello Games, has revealed that they could radically change the No Man’s Sky experience if they were given more hardware to play with.
In a chat published today with the Daily Star — which has a fair few NSFW images, as an FYI — Murray explained it with a word about remasters. “If you play another game and if they do a remaster of that game, what they will do is up-res the textures and things like that,” he said.
No Man’s Sky is procedurally generated though, and the developers can amend or change parts of the base algorithms to include much, much more detail. The hardware, whether it be on PC or console, would have to be capable of powering that of course.
“For our game it’s procedurally generated. So more powerful hardware doesn’t just mean upgraded textures or a higher framerate. It means we can fundamentally change the experience,” Murray said.
“With more powerful hardware, we can have more trees, more leafs on those trees. The density or immersion of worlds, or new types of worlds could exist.”
Good thing that the PlayStation Neo is being announced next month. And there’s always the possibility of No Man’s Sky being released in a year or two for Xbox One or, more intriguingly, the 4K-capable Project Scorpio.
Murray’s remark also opens up another world of possibility too. He’s already revealed that PC and PS4 players are on separate servers. And if it’s possible to re-generate the universe for consoles that are more powerful, would it not be possible to dial everything up to 11 for PCs?
The minimum hardware requirements for No Man’s Sky on PC suggest that the visual quality won’t differ a great deal from the PS4 version. But if it’s possible for the console version of the game to be re-generated at a higher detail, just imagine what might happen on a 4K screen with a NVIDIA GTX 1080 or something equally insane.
Comments
20 responses to “There’s Already Talk About Making No Man’s Sky A Hell Of A Lot Prettier”
No Man’s Sky being talked about as a platform like this more like COD or Minecraft makes sense, I expect there’ll be a cottage industry for Youtubers next with this game.
Still staying relatively away from anything on it for now. Glad people are responding to it, but also want to know where it falls short. If it’s going to be a Destiny-type situation where No Man’s Sky v1.2 is completely different beast, I’ll be happy to wait.
And? You can talk all day and nothing will change.
So Sean is saying that the PS4 held back the PC version of No Man’s Sky?
Not much of a surprise really.
The age old story :\
Am I the only one that thinks the game is pretty already?
I’ll tell you on the 13th. It definitely has a nice artistic style to it that I like from what I can tell.
I agree, it’s simplicity is what makes its visuals appealing. I’m loving it.
And the money that assisted the developers to make this game as massive , the marketing they got, the huge install base the game is offered are all forgotten. Age old story indeed.
No, that would be woefully irresponsible
Makes you wonder why a developer with integrity would allow his vision to be “held back”? The onus is on the developer, not the platforms.
Without the PS4 version though, would this game ever have been made?
Will we get to do the whole hype train thing again? I need hype more than I need game /s
Well FFXV comes up next month, you could hype for that?
I hype walk these days, better for you
It’s pretty enough for me. I just want a map and stackable items.
Absolutely need the map!
A map of what? The planet you’re on?
And you can stack items, just depends on your inventory slots. For example my suit can only hold 250 per slot, but the ship can hold 500. Move 2 lots from your suit to the ship and they stack.
A compass and a lat/long would do. Actually, just a lat/long would do…
I cant wait to see what Sean can overpromise and underdeliver on new hardware :p