No Man’s Sky still looks, sounds and is seemingly impossible. From its tiny team, ridiculous ability to generate hype and massive scale, I won’t believe it’s real until I’m sat playing it. Even then, regular pinches to the arm will be required. As part of a continued effort to delude not only myself but all of you, here’s an interview from E3 with Hello Games’ founder Sean Murray and the new footage that served as a backdrop. Spoilers: it’s lovely.
First, here’s all the flying around, space shooty, land explorery stuff:
All very exciting, still lacking in details. There’s a lot of cynicism out there for No Man’s Sky, with everyone admitting that it’s unlikely the game they’ve built in their heads is the one they’re going to receive – but for some reason blaming the game for that. We don’t have a good grasp on what we’ll actually be doing moment to moment and every new trailer provides little extra knowledge in that area but for some the immediate followup to that seems to be “therefore it will be bad.” That seems pretty unfair, even if the scepticism comes from a healthy place.
Helping to shed a little light is this interview, where the footage was first shown:
Now this was conducted by Sony, who are hardly going to be the most critical of the game they’re helping to publish, but it does ask some questions we’ve all been wondering. Sean remains cagey on specifics, but lays out the freeform nature of the universe. What remains to wonder is what will be pushing us in these different directions beyond a sense of adventure or a want to make space-dollars and how the information we can gather from planets will be used. There will be a significant element for whom the exploration side of things is enough, but personally I do need some sort of quest to accomplish, even if it doesn’t involve collecting x of y space-items.
Also missing from both trailer and interview is a release date. It’s getting into that “they’ll say this year, end up in March” phase of announcement now, but there’s still hope for Christmas wanderings of the cosmos. Hopefully this newly uploaded part of the OST is enough to tide you over: