In less than two weeks, "No Man's Sky" comes out on PS4 and PC. The actual content of the game has been kept in a all-encompassing shroud of mystery. What we know about the game amounts to very little. There will be harsh conditions you must survive, animals and robots can and will attack you, and alien merchants exist. Oh, and there are over eighteen quintillion planets for you to explore.
And that is where the true beauty of "No Man's Sky" exists. For all I know, the game could come out as absolute garbage.
Combat could be out-dated, the trading and upgrade systems might feel weird, and flying your spaceship could feel less like Rogue Squadron and more like Google Earth Flight Simulator. But there are eighteen quintillion planets. If you teleported to a planet a second, it would take you five hundred and eighty-five billion years to see all the planets. The game director, Sean Murray, has said "99.9% of the planets will probably never be visited".
For years, it won't be the laser guns making people play this game, and it certainly won't be the survival system. What will keep people playing this game is the thought of "What if..." What if that planet has a really cool outpost on it? What if that planet looks like Hoth? What if underneath those waves lurks a huge leviathan no one has ever seen before?
Undoubtedly, most of the time the answer to those questions will be a quick and resounding no. No, these waters were empty, save for a few minnow sized alien fish. That forest didn't hide some Gieger-esque Tyrannosaurus Rex. And no, that outpost was pretty empty.
"No Mans's Sky" will live or die based on how long it can keep you asking "What if..." Too much "No" in a row, and the magic might start to wear off. People will stop asking "What if" when they can never expect a moment of pure, amazing discovery. Too much "Yes" and the game becomes less special. The sense of discovery is replaced with the sense of monotony. "Look, another outpost" players will sigh. "Here's another one of those huge mecha-whales" someone will say with a sense of boredom never before mentioned with the word "Mecha"
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But, with just enough "yes" mixed with a whole lot of "no", "No Man's Sky" will be the perfect exploration game. So vast and functioning, with orbits and solar positioning determining the day-night cycle , No Mans Sky will soar into the stratosphere, with millions of players searching for the center of the universe, hoping to be the first to see whatever lies in the middle of it all.
Moving beyond "No Man's Sky," the technology used could revolutionize the industry all together. If "No Man's Sky" proves successful, the technology could be applied to many other open world games. Assuming the planets aren't repetitive, and nothing is too sparsely populated, imagine effectively infinite game worlds applied to your favorite franchises. Imagine this technology in the hands of Bethesda, and instead of just generating landscapes, the code generates towns, villages, cities even.
It populates them with generated NPC's, You could be playing Fallout 6 without a central city, but the entire United States. You could be playing Elder Scrolls 7 on all of Tamriel, not simply a single country. Zelda: Breath of the Wild looks to be one of the largest games made in a long, long time, entirely hand crafted. If the technology for procedural generation surpasses Breath of the Wild, be prepared to see it everywhere.
