One of the highpoints of E3 was Sony showing of Hello Games’ marvelous looking No Man’s Sky. I hadn’t seen the reveal trailer from earlier in the year, so it might have had a bigger affect on me than most others, but the brief trailer rocketed it up to the top of my must play list.
Shortly after the convention, PlayStation Blog sat down with Hello Games’ Sean Murray and discussed the ambition of his indie studio and what challenged them to take on such a massive project. How exactly does a studio go from making a cute motocross game like Joe Danger to No Man’s Sky? You can hear it from Murray’s voice in the video.
It goes without saying that No Man’s Sky is a huge undertaking. Is it just me, or does procedurally generated worlds seem like the only new “next-gen” idea that is really worth exploring? Minecraft already proved that it has legs, and hopefully No Man’s Sky is the game that proves it can be something even bigger. Publishers can keep their social gaming, I’d like them to explore actual gameplay elements like these.
For all of its grand ideas, I do have one little reservation about No Man’s Sky, and that is I find it hard to see the game in here. Will there be objectives to undertake in this world, and if there are, will they be just as random? Will there be a reason to dive into this place after the shock of its gorgeous art and random world wear off? How easy is Hello Games going to make finding a game under all of this ambition?
Minecraft had infinite possibilities with its item creation mechanic, but we’ve seen no such hook from No Man’s Sky just yet.
That aside, this is the game which pushed me to jump into the next-gen consoles. Much like Mass Effect before it, an original science fiction franchise brought the wall down. In a gaming world still leaning on safe, previous-generation conventions to appease its massive audience, No Man’s Sky‘s unprecedented ideas convinced me that maybe we won’t be stuck in the mud for the next five to six years.
Anybody else looking forward to No Man’s Sky? It will be released for PlayStation 4 and possibly other unannounced platforms.
Source: PlayStation Blog