No Man's Sky [PS4, PS5, XO, XBSX|S, PC, NX, XGP]

New interview with Hello Game's Sean Murray by Eurogamer. Interesting interview that I think really highlights the "set your own objective" nature of the game. Also, terrain destruction (deformation?).

So when, the following day, I'm granted a private audience with both the game and its creator in his endearingly cluttered suite at the Venetian Hotel, I can't resist starting by asking him: what do you actually do in No Man's Sky?

"There's the answer I want to give, and then there's the one I can't really say,"

"So, the one I want to give is to say it's open ended, and players should be able to play a game lots of different ways.

"And that isn't a new thing. If you look at PC and a lot of the games that are on Early Access right now, they are more and more that type of open ended thing. And it's not niche; it's like Minecraft and DayZ and Rust. And none of them really work - or sound like they work - on paper. They don't have a classic motivation, or whatever. And I like that. I want to avoid having the game say, 'One of three space stations destroyed!', or having a trophy pop up [when you destroy all three]."

"That's the answer that I want to give... But then there's the answer I have to give, just because you have to talk about the game and write about it and convey it. So there is a core game mode there. There's the player's journey which, if they play it linearly and go from the outer edge of the galaxy to the centre of the galaxy, that's their start and end of the game kind of thing.

"And as they go, they're upgrading their ship, they're upgrading their weapons, they're upgrading their suit. And they need to do that because they're very vulnerable, they will be attacked by AI, potentially - very rarely - other players, things like that, if they cross paths with them. There's space combat, there's combat on the ground, there's trading if you want to do that, mining resources and stuff, there's exploring if you want to do that.

"There's all those things in a core loop. Most of them give you money - which we call Units - and you can use that money to upgrade your ship. And you need to do that to be able to travel further. As you get closer to the centre of the galaxy you will find it is more dangerous - just like in any game - and you will find that the best ships are only available towards the centre of the galaxy. Or are much more common at least. And the best weapons, best suit upgrades, and resources that are worth far more. And freighters that you can attack are worth far more closer to the centre because they're trading those resources.

"That's the answer that you need to put [No Man's Sky] in a box. And the next thing will be, 'and it's a first person survival action game' or something like that. And then we can all go home. That's the thing that I know you need to be able to convey to somebody, that there are classic game loop elements. And genuinely we're trying to convey that with everything we've released so far.
Click to expand...

As Sean scans the environment, cubes of collectible materials are outlined against the terrain. He then fires projectiles towards them, destroying great chunks of the scenery with a shimmery sci-fi sound effect.

"You can see the terrain is destructible, which is something we haven't shown people before..."

So you can terraform?

"We're not sure how much we want to say because I don't want it to become the thing. Even showing this I'm nervous, because people will think, 'Oh, right - it's like Minecraft', and then it becomes that. 'It's the Minecraft in space game!'
Click to expand...
 
That must/could be extremely data intensive! You'd need to record all the modifications being applied to every point in space that you've changed, and factor that into the terrain generation when recreating that spot.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
This game will be much better on PC with a honking great CPU driving the procedural creation!
Click to expand...

They could use compute to do that kind of stuff.

Maybe they already do use a lot of GPU time with compute for procedural creation, it could explain the simple and cartoony look of the game.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
That must/could be extremely data intensive! You'd need to record all the modifications being applied to every point in space that you've changed, and factor that into the terrain generation when recreating that spot.
Click to expand...
I think he said in the last interview that all changes in environment by players are not saved, only significant ones are carried over to everyone's game. I don't know the extent or the scope of that.
 
yeah, they also said that you can break up the environment. i wonder, can i dig all the way to planet core and blow a planet? sure it is a "significant" thing to be recorded and should be low amount of data... (planet X founded by player Y is blown up at DD/MM/YY HH:SS)
 
Karamazov said:
I loved to blow up planets in captain blood
Click to expand...
You evil bastard.

It'd be good if No Man's Sky gave you a genocide score when you destroy a planet.

"9,546,453,258 intelligent lives destroyed."

I'd hope people doing that would also get a scannable reputation.
 
Ok I'm now officially excited about this game. Took a long time to get it.

But of course boys hear about environment destruction/modification and OMG DESTROY THE WHOLE PLANET!!!!1!1!!

Really. So one by one we will have fewer and fewer planets to visit? Then again there's quite a lot of them so maybe not that important.
 
I want to be able to do it the frieza way.

Frieza's_Evil_Laugh_2.jpg
 
I liked what they showed of this, including the glimpse of space combat and reshaping a world with the mega laser (and the resulting defence force who didn't want their mountain obliterated) but disappointed there was no release date although Sean did say "we'll announce a release date soon. I promise." :yes:

Trading. Fight. Exploring. Survival. In space! :runaway:
 
Man the demo was bad. Hey look at the procedural worlds you can fly around and shoot and the aim is to get to the centre, Hmmmmmm.
 
ThePissartist said:
It'd be good if No Man's Sky gave you a genocide score when you destroy a planet.

"9,546,453,258 intelligent lives destroyed."
Click to expand...
Similar to one of my games, a 2d shmup. You fly around the galaxy in your space ship the dick cheney trying to destroy all the lifeforms on a planet, the red glowing planets are the ones you've pissed off, blue glowing = ones you havent yet attacked

A35.jpg

killemall1.jpg
 
wait.. so those aliens we pictured in movies or animes that love to destroy planets... turns out they were just playing video games?
 
London-boy said:
Ok I'm now officially excited about this game. Took a long time to get it.

But of course boys hear about environment destruction/modification and OMG DESTROY THE WHOLE PLANET!!!!1!1!!

Really. So one by one we will have fewer and fewer planets to visit? Then again there's quite a lot of them so maybe not that important.
Click to expand...

The game gives the impression that it will be hard to have a statistically significant impact. But perhaps it will be possible to create a 'quiet spot' somewhere in the universe ...
 
btw in NMS,

- we cant do something persistent except naming planets
- those planet we discover already have intelligent live (drone police)
 
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