This is No Man’s Sky by Hello Games, which brought us Joe Danger. This is something completely different, a sprawling space adventure, as its insane premiere trailer shows.
The game is entirely procedural in all of the environments it creates, promising unique planetary environments, all of them unexplored. Sean Murray of Hello Games said he wanted to build a game that honoured the kind of science fiction he enjoyed in his youth, which weren’t just action tableaus but worlds with extremely rich back-stories and characters.
You can see just how full service No Man’s Sky will be in pursuit of this, taking you from beneath the water of another planet’s ocean into the atmosphere and to space, dog-fighting through an asteroid field. Only four people are building this game and it just handed the rest of the VGX its collective lunch.
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19 responses to “Wow. No Man’s Sky Just Stole The Show At The VGX”
The hell this game “stole the show”. It literally looks like a hollow Destiny. The only reason that this article exists is because of how lacklustre and straight-up bad VGX was. People are actually asking for VGA to come back.
From what I’ve read about Destiny you can’t control the ship and no mini space fighting game. Just have to wait for Star Citizen to get my fix. I think your personalised ship is just going to be like the Normandy from Mass Effect. You pick your destination on a map.
+1, not long now I hope with all that funding :>
VGX was pretty bad, but this game was the most exciting thing I’ve seen for a while. A completely procedurally generated galaxy, with simulated wildlife ecosystems and the ability to fly in and out of a planets atmosphere with no level transitions – exploring that is enough for me even if there is nothing else to the game, which I’m sure there will be.
Destiny looks great, beautiful art style, and I’m sure it will be a fun shooter. But it’s a bit unfair to compare a game from Bungie, with 350+ employees, backed by Activision, with a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars including marketing, with HelloGames, an indie team of 4 people.
This is a completely different type of game from the looks of it, and I’m excited for both.
That’s everything I was thinking puck, massive props to them for such a small team, will definitely be keeping an eye on it!
Meh. I smell another Spore. So much promise. So much endless mediocrity and repetition in reality.
I hope not. Be positive, they’ve only just announced it!
The tragedy with Spore is that it could have been brilliant. About half way through production they had a big internal debate about what sort of game it should be, with one side favouring hard-core simulation, and the other side favouring simplification and broad appeal. Many of the coolest simulations were stripped from the game – creature morphology actually mattered (limb length, balance etc) – they took that out completely so that every design would work. There was a real fight between the ‘science’ team and the ‘cute’ team, and the cute team won.
RIP Spore.
Yeah, completely agree – I remember reading a lot about that at the time.
Destiny?
DESTINY?
DESTINY?!
I’m sorry, but this is no FPS.
If anything, it look’s like a space sim.
AND THE STYLE.
Just because a game has a different, more vibrant colour palette doesn’t mean it LOOKS THE SAME.
And destiny is just a co-op game, it isn’t actually massive, or massively multiplayer. You will be in small zones, like halo or borderlands with like 4 people most of the time and 16 tops in boss fights, maybe 24 if your lucky in pvp. I dont know where you’re getting this impression it would be anything like this game.
Not even. This game looks great- completely different to Destiny in both style and substance. For my own, I’m sick of shooters. I yearn to play some of this more interesting titles that aren’t afraid to be new.
Hmmm, nice idea but I fear as all these worlds are newly generated and hence not playtested, they will be full of bugs and glitches, even fixed open world games like Red Dead Redemption and Skyrim have them.
Minecraft is procedurally generated, and it manages okay. I don’t see why this would be any more susceptible to bugs and glitches. Skyrim and Red Dead have a lot of other systems in place that open up the possibility for bugs, so far this looks like it’s not going to be nearly as involved in some of those areas (like character AI, quest chains etc).
There would definitely be playtesting issues, it would be very hard to make sure all that variation is fun, but that could be part of the charm.
you don’t see how this is more complex than minecraft? Well, for one, the geometry of a single ridge in that game might be 20-100k points – in minecraft – maybe 1000…. Among the trillions of other pitfalls.
It could definitely be more complex than Minecraft, in many ways, but not necessarily in ways that would introduce bugs. Skyrim and Red Dead are buggy because of their dynamic worlds (quest logic and AI interactions especially), that stuff gets very complicated very quickly – if you took out the AI from those games and made them purely exploration games then they’d be a lot more stable. I don’t know how much AI No Man’s Sky will have, but so far it looks like it’s focusing more on planetary exploration combined with space combat.
The geometry has very little to do with how susceptible to bugs it is. If the terrain is generated with voxels, it would have a similar underlying grid structure as Minecraft, which is just smoothed out when it’s converted to a mesh. If the terrain is tessellated geometry, it would just use a grey-scale height map. Or it’s a combination (underlying height map combined with rocky voxel outcroppings). Then it’s just a matter of scattering objects around (trees and other interesting things). Either way, that’s probably the part of the game that will be the least likely to be susceptible to bugs – those problems, while complicated, are well understood.
+1
lol I take it you disagree strongly, Mr 3 comments @instacado
I don’t think the bugs would be terrible, I bet they will be worth the game and easily fixed. (or you could just avoid that particular planet, there are plenty.
Good luck to them, that’s a hell of an undertaking
The game’s title is clearly misogyny.
This looks pretty cool.
Wow, this thing looks pretty darn amazing, will be interesting to see how they populate it and how much character they can put into the NPCs in the worlds.
Character? In procedural generated NPC’s? At best, you won’t notice the fragments of canned interactions are everywhere because there might be so many that it becomes statistically unlikely.. Of course.. That in itself is very unlikely.
Good luck.
downvoted as though it makes it untrue. qq.
Song is Debutant by 65daysofstatic, for anyone interested.