No Man's Sky

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[PS4] [PC] No Man's Sky

Unread postby movie » 08 Dec 2013 08:09

http://www.allgamesbeta.com/2013/12/no- ... games.html

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http://www.polygon.com/2013/12/7/518677 ... ello-games

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Joe Danger developer Hello Games announced its next game at the Spike VGX awards, a massive, procedurally generated, sci-fi exploration sim called No Man's Sky.

In the game's debut trailer, No Man's Sky was pitched as an exploration game where "every atom" is procedurally generated, from flora and fauna to the stars in the sky. Every planet and every galaxy is procedural, and filled with unexplored territories. The trailer shows that players will be able to explore underwater environments, the surfaces of planets, the skies and outer space in spaceships.

"It's a huge game," said Hello Games' Sean Murray. "We wanted to make a game about exploration. And we wanted to make something that was real."

Murray said that, on planets, if you can see it — whether it be a mountain miles away in the distance — you can walk there. The game's persistent world is being created by the small team at Hello Games, and puts players into an ecosystem where they're not at the top of the food chain, Murray said. Space-based combat against other players and capital ships appears to be a major component of No Man's Sky.


http://gematsu.com/2013/12/joe-danger-d ... o-mans-sky

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Debut trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU
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Unread postby dinopoke » 09 Dec 2013 01:27

Official website: http://www.no-mans-sky.com/
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Unread postby jeffrobot494 » 10 Dec 2013 00:26

Interview with No Man's Sky programmer Sean Murray about the game's design.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/12 ... ore-179362

Graham Smith wrote:Every player in No Man’s Sky will begin their life somewhere along the edge of a galaxy. Everything in the trailer takes place in a single solar system near the galaxy’s edge and, red grass aside, on Earth-like planets. “It helps to ground people and I think if we hadn’t shown that, people would go, ‘what the fuck?’” Sean Murray, lead developer on No Man’s Sky, is choosing his words carefully. “It’s quite weird to see a thing that isn’t a fish, in the water. And so we have grounded the trailer in a particular solar system that kind of makes sense for people.”

Which suggests it’s not going to make sense later. The loose objective for players of No Man’s Sky is to head away from the edge and towards the galaxy’s centre. As you do, the planets you visit along the way become more mutated, more dangerous.

“I hate doing this, but it is the simplest way to give people hooks for the game. Games that we will get compared to, rather than I would compare us to, would be Minecraft, DayZ, but also Dark Souls to an extent and probably Journey.” Murray is torn by these descriptions. “I hate the idea that people will go around and say, ‘It’s like Minecraft but in space.’ Fuck off!”

Let’s just get it out of the way. No Man’s Sky is Minecraft in space. Also I would compare it to DayZ and Dark Souls. I haven’t played much of Journey, so – twist – I’d throw in Spore instead.

I’m being an ass, but these are useful points of comparison for the ways in which No Man’s Sky differs as much as for the ways in which it is similar.

NoMansSky_NewEridu_120913.jpg

As you make your way towards the centre of the galaxy, the planets you pass are stepping stones along the way. You’ll land your ship on them and go hunting for resources. Those resources then, in some unexplained way, aid you in upgrading your ship and yourself. These upgrades allow you to travel larger distances, or maybe make you faster, or probably improve your guns. It’s still ambiguous.

The other reason we’re not seeing beyond these worlds is that Hello Games want No Man’s Sky to be about discovery. “What we wanted to get across was a sort of frontiersmanship, a sense of mystery and wonder. For me exploration is seeing something no one has seen before, and for your experience to be unique.”

This is also why the game is procedurally generated. At one point during the conversation, an odd, exciting question is raised: is No Man’s Sky the first game without a skybox? If you’re standing on a planet’s surface and look up, every single dot in the sky is an actual star you can go visit. If you see a tree three miles away, you can walk to it and find out what’s underneath it.

Exploration and resource gathering are the ways, really the only ways, in which the game is similar to Minecraft. The planets you land on aren’t cube-shaped and it’s unlikely you’ll build a house on them. They are the equivalent of Minecraft’s network of underground caves: exciting to find, unique to you, and full of materials which give them significance and value despite not being handcrafted.

Any planet you discover on your journey is marked on your galactic map, along with its name, its atmosphere and what resources you found there. If you choose to, you can then share that information with every other player, uploading it so that it’s shared across everyone’s galactic map.

You’ll get credit for discovering it. You’ll also, if the materials there are valuable, attract players to come visit. No Man’s Sky isn’t a multiplayer game, in as much as you’ll never see another player. But the galaxy is the same between everyone and actions of “significance” will be shared. If you kill a single bird, that won’t be shared. If you make an entire species of bird extinct, then those creatures will blink out of existence for everyone.

That means you might want to keep quiet about a planet of valuable resources, so others don’t come and deplete it. I also instantly start thinking of ways to be devious. Can I upload false information to the galactic map? Can I lure people to a system full of pirates and then, when their ships crash and burn, steal materials from their ghostly hulls?

When I ask these questions, Murray is light on specifics, but hopes players will work cooperatively. “There are some things that you could do for the wrong reasons. You could broadcast certain information for the wrong reasons. But generally people are playing together cooperatively to the benefit of everyone. You can be a dick in the game if you want, but it has less point and less value.”

These are the ways in which the game is like Spore, or to a lesser extent Dark Souls. It’s a singleplayer experience, but one enriched by a community playing with shared purpose.

NoMansSky_GlatRecSystem_120913.jpg

This maybe makes the final point of reference a little strange. DayZ is dependent on other players to fuel its survivalist anecdotes. Yet it’s the game Murray mentions most.

“We are designing a set of rules, not designing a game, and I think when I talk about DayZ that’s how those feel to me. Your experience in DayZ is your experience, and there’s a set of rules in that 200km square that you then go out and experience and make stories in. And that is what we want.”

Those systems-driven experiences begin with the way the galaxy is constructed – “Every Atom Procedural” – but extend to every part of the game design. “If there’s a crashed ship, it’s there because a ship has crashed. If there is a trading outpost, those things are there for real reasons, and the way the creatures behave around those, and the type of creatures you see are there for real reasons.”

It’s about moving the design away from strictly authored experiences, in which your actions are tightly scripted and controlled, in favour of something more expressive.

“You will at all times feel very vulnerable in this universe and not necessarily empowered,” explains Murray. “You have an enormous amount of freedom, but maybe not masses of power at your disposal.”

The emphasis on exploration and discovery, and that reference to Journey, doesn’t mean the experience of playing as passive. More than any of the claims about the size of the universe, this is the stuff that I find exciting.

“It has a set of core mechanics that you can choose how to deal with situations, and how to interact with people, and how to upgrade yourself and how to upgrade your ship,” says Sean. “We want you to make choices at all times as you go through. Like in your ship, how much cargo, how much fuel to take, and we want you to live with those choices.”

“You can be that guy who just wants to walk around, find one planet and just explore that,” says Murray “But you can also play this game and not care about exploration at all and be all about building yourself up. You can also work to help other people, you can be that person. There are like a lot of different roles you can fill.”

They don’t want to closely define the experience. That’s the opposite of my goals in describing the game, but I appreciate the overall philosophy. “You are not going to boot up the game and find a 15 minute tutorial. You are not going to find a classic RPG structure.

“We want things that happen to you to have real meaning because of those choices, in a similar way to I feel like DayZ does, and for you to want to survive in that game.”

Note the word “survive”. Failure is a big part of No Man’s Sky, although it sounds as if the exact mechanics aren’t set in stone.

“How it is at the moment, is that you can’t die, but you can lose everything,” explains Murray. “There is no saved game. Your game will be saved, your progress is saved all the time as you go along, but if your ship is destroyed then you go back to a lifepod and you’ve lost that ship, and that is your everything.”

If you decide to fill your ship with fuel and go on a risky trip to a distant, dangerous solar system, you could find yourself in trouble. “If you warp in and it is to a solar system that is full of pirates and you get shot down, then you have lost all of that. You can then rebuild from there, and you will be where you are in that universe.”

It’s your ship which defines how quickly you can progress between solar systems, so losing it would be a big blow. But if you’re lucky, you might crash land on a planet full of useful resources. “You perhaps find things that you can’t even make use of at the time and earmark that for yourself or your friends to cooperate with you to build yourself back up.”

NoMansSky_Becron5_120913.jpg

This ship is here because it crashed, not because a designer placed it.

“I think probably if you were going to think of anything, you would think of games like roguelikes. If you want to put it in a box, which I would rather you didn’t, then that for me is the most similar experience.”

I love my roguelike box and I am happy to put No Man’s Sky inside.

I’m being an ass again. I understand Murray’s reticence in drawing comparisons. They don’t want to be hammered for not including features from games they never had any intention of mimicking in the first place.

Even other space games don’t necessarily sit well with Murray as direct comparisons. EVE Online is the only one mentioned during the interview, although he’s still as keen to stress the differences as much as the similarities.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but our background is as console developers, and I think everything about the game bears hallmarks of that,” says Murray. “In terms of your controls, in terms of the fluidity of the game, this is not a quirky, hard-to-decipher experience.”

Roguelikes, upgradeable ships, and Dark Souls, yes. But not necessarily tech trees and context-sensitive right-click menus. Hello Games are still the company that made the peppy, stunt racing Joe Danger.

Their commitment to capturing that same good “feel” is reflected in No Man’s Sky’s four-person development team. Of the three programmers, Murray does the “really big” procedural systems, and Hazel McKendrick is mainly focused on creatures and the look of planets. That leaves Dave Ream to focus solely on “gameplay”.

As if to underline its importance to the team, it’s Grant Duncan, the game’s sole artist, that first brings up the subject. “Going from Joe Danger to this is obviously a bit of a leap, but we’ve always been really obsessed with that feel of games. When you start playing a game, the way you’re interacting with it, the way the jump feels, the movement, feeling smooth. In Joe Danger we were completely obsessed with that, and we still are obsessed with that.”

“It’s weird because my work isn’t in the trailer,” says Ream. “You can’t feel the game by looking at it.” The little bit of camera shake as you blast into space, though? That was him.

This sounds like minor detail, but these details matter. You’re mad if you think they don’t. More than that, they ground No Man’s Sky’s ambitious claims more so than the Earth-like fish in the water. “It’s not some tech demo that we’re putting together,” says Murray.
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Unread postby dinopoke » 12 Jun 2014 14:27

http://no-mans-sky.com/press/sheet.php?p=no_man%27s_sky

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http://www.no-mans-sky.com/about/

About

No Man’s Sky is a game about exploration and survival in an infinite procedurally generated universe.

A truly open universe

Whether a distant mountain or a planet hanging low on the horizon, you can go there. You can fly seamlessly from the surface of a planet to another, and every star in the sky is a sun that you can visit.

Where you’ll go and how fast you’ll make your way through this universe is up to you. It’s yours for the taking.

Exploration is seeing things no one has ever seen before

Explore uncharted solar systems and catalogue unique new forms of life. Every planet’s landscape is different from the next, and populated by species never before encountered.

Find ancient artefacts that could reveal the secrets behind the universe.

Choose whether to share your discoveries with other players. They’re exploring the same vast universe in parallel; perhaps you’ll make your mark on their worlds as well as your own.

Survive on a dangerous frontier

Every solar system, planet, ocean and cave is filled with danger, and you are vulnerable.

Your ship and suit are fragile, and every encounter can test your skills to the limit. From dogfighting in space to firstperson combat on a planet’s surface, you will face foes ready to overwhelm you.

And one mistake could see you lose everything. In No Man’s Sky, every victory and every defeat is permanent.

Build for an epic journey

The voyage that stands before you cannot be taken lightly. You’ll need to prepare.

Collect precious resources on the surfaces of planets and trade them for the ships, suits and equipment that will take you to your destiny in the stars.


E3 2014 Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZO40WBNA60

Infinite Worlds Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0APP5WcX8v8
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Unread postby icycalm » 12 Jun 2014 19:25

The ideal design given the mechanics and the aesthetics that they've got is Sid Meier's Pirates meets Myst. Unfortunately, from the videos they've so far released it doesn't look like they're doing anything like that. It looks like they've got some kind of sly collectathon thing going on, mixed in with a "Wing Commander for casuals" combat model. And since this "cataloguing of unique lifeforms" mechanic is the only mechanic they've shown so far apart from the simplistic (and apparently meaningless) attempt at combat, it is a real letdown that all the lifeforms shown so far are tiny variations of real lifeforms. You really need an artist who can conceptualize completely different types of lifeforms, but without ending up with the typical Star Trek- and Star Wars-type ugliness that Western sci-fi is beset by, and their artist obviously can't do that. It's almost as big a disappointment to travel to a far away planet and discover minor variations of fish and dinosaurs that already exist on Earth, as it is to discover disgusting alien species that seem to have been drawn by 9-year-olds. Oh well...

The engine is surreal though. I don't mean the colors (though those are cool too), I mean the way you can seamlessly travel from space down to a planet and back out again. It totally blows away anything else of the kind I've seen. Especially the atmospheric entry sequences.

And this game screams out for VR, which may or may not be coming, according to this article:

http://vrfocus.com/archives/4012/mans-s ... periments/

Jamie Feltham wrote:NO MAN'S SKY DEV REVEALS OCULUS RIFT EXPERIMENTS

Back in April 2014 No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games revealed that it was experimenting with the Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) headset. It did so by posting images and videos on the likes of Twitter and Vine, showing members of the development team walking around its office with the headset on and connected to a laptop worn on the user’s back. At the time it was thought that this could be a possible tease for VR support for the team’s anticipated first-person project. It certainly seemed like a good fit, but it turns out that that wasn’t the case.

Studio founder Sean Murray revealed as much during an E3 2014 panel in which he sat alongside Oculus Rift designer Palmer Luckey. Speaking to GiantBomb about possible VR support for No Man’s Sky, Murray jokingly revealed that the developer kits sent by Oculus VR had been used to recreate the team’s office space, but humorously raised alarm bells when they posted media of them using the headset walking around.

“You guys sent us some kit and we got it,” Murray said, addressing Luckey. “We only had it a day but we mocked up this little demo and we built like our office basically. And I hadn’t seen anyone do this before but it was his [David Ream, creative director] stupid idea. I have like a gaming laptop basically so I was able to plug it into that and put it in my backpack so I was like wireless basically with an Xbox pad plugged in. And I would just stand in the same position in the office.”

At this point Luckey revealed that he had created a similar project, to which Murray joked that he was disappointed it wasn’t original anymore.

“And then we kind of just started going around the office and actually getting up a little speed and being able to like go up and down the stairs quite quickly and things like that. And we posted some Vines and things like that and we got like a mail from one of the guys at Oculus saying like, y’know “please stop doing this” and it was like “you may not have read the terms but please don’t post anything where you might, like, die.”"

Luckey then revealed that one of the reasons that Oculus VR asks players to use the Oculus Rift sitting down is for safety, as the headset essentially ‘blindfolds’ users in its current form.

Murray concluded with one more story: “It was just as well we got that mail because me and Dave, the tweets we did had been popular so we had like two dev kits and we’d taken a photo of two of us in our cars and we were like driving at each other with the headsets on and I was about to tweet “if you die in Oculus you die in real life” and I got the mail and I was like “let’s not.”"

It wasn’t mentioned if No Man’s Sky would actually support the Oculus Rift or the Project Morpheus on PlayStation 4, which Murray announced on Monday would host the exclusive console launch of the title. Is support still possible, given that they have the headset in its office? VRFocus will continue to follow the developer closely and report as soon as we can get confirmation on No Man’s Sky in VR.

-END-
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Unread postby infernovia » 28 Jun 2014 03:46

http://gematsu.com/2014/06/mans-sky-dev ... igin-story

Sony Computer Entertainment has posted a new developer video of No Man’s Sky, bringing viewers behind the scenes at Hello Games with Sean Murray, who discusses the game’s origin.

“We always knew the type of game that we wanted to make, and we’d known it before we even started Hello Games,” Murray said. “And we knew that Joe Danger was going to be a stepping stone towards that.”

No Man’s Sky‘s development began a year and a half ago. It was code-named “Project Skyscraper” at the time, and was a dream of Murray’s since childhood.

“I think I heard somebody saying it’s like a pitch from a child, basically,” Murray said. “There will be a universe and you can go anywhere and there’s a ship and you can shoot lasers and all that kind of things. It’s like the most childish idea for a game in the world.

“And it was really fueled by sci-fi as I’d always experienced it, which was books, books that I’d grown up with, like actual science fiction.”

Murray went on to talk about the game’s contents and objectives.

“Give everyone a spaceship, start them all on a different planet, give them a working, living, breathing universe that has planets with ecology, that has space stations and fleets, and military police, and different races, and all of them interacting.”

“That said, it isn’t just like some sort of empty blank canvas. There is a lore to the universe and there are decisions that we make based on that, and it has a personality. And it is generally a pretty dangerous place to be as it should be for sci-fi. It isn’t just some ambient utopia.”

Everyone will begin on a different planet on the edge of the galaxy. And most people, according to Murray, will want to make it their objective to reach the center of the galaxy.

“There’s a reason you would want to do that,” Murray said.

And to do that, you’ll need to upgrade your ship, upgrade your weapons, upgrade your suit, and plan and cooperate with other players.

“And there is a game beyond that [reaching the center], and you will continue to play. But for a lot of people, that’s the core journey that they will be on. They will think, ‘I started out with the smallest, crappiest ship you can imagine, and I got to a point where I can get to the center of the galaxy and can see what was there.’”


Story of Hello Games video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTczqx-PWJU
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Unread postby Gaius » 22 Aug 2014 02:49

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Unread postby alastair » 06 Dec 2014 10:56

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Unread postby dinopoke » 08 Dec 2014 00:41

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Unread postby SriK » 28 Jun 2015 08:16

http://www.allgamesbeta.com/2015/06/fiv ... eplay.html

New 5-minute video of a bunch of different clips of the game stitched together: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM4Zor7rBg4

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Unread postby icycalm » 22 Nov 2017 05:42

Is it worth giving No Man's Sky a shot 1 year later with all the updates?
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1458307

Rick1o1 wrote:I played for about 5 hours at launch on ps4. Wasn't impressed at all. It was mostly boring, but I hoped it would be better wich it didn't.

I tried it again about 2 months or so ago after hearing a lot of buzz about the new updates. There is more variety now but the core gameplay loop is still the same, so it's still boring. Not worth it imo.
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