Briefly: No Man’s Sky is finally, finally here.
The years in the making, incredibly ambitious, and unbelievably anticipated space exploration sandbox releases tonight, and today, following a massive patch that all but targets early player’s gripes with the hot new title, Hello Games’ Sean Murray took to the game’s official blog to ‘splain a few things.
I’ve really enjoyed the transparency that Murray and company have kept with fans over the course of the game’s development, and today’s blog post is no different. Murray touchingly notes that five years ago, when the first lines of code for this ambitions project were written, he had “such a clear picture in my mind of an emotion I wanted you to feel. To wander around an alien planet, and to feel you had discovered it.”
Now, the game is here, and “the game looks and plays just as we aimed to.”
A burning question that many gamers (who apparently aren’t too keen on watching the hours of gameplay videos that have been posted throughout the game’s development) is, well, what exactly do you do in the game? Here’s what Murray notes that No Man’s Sky definitely is:
-Exploring a universe of pretty procedurally generated worlds, with beautiful creatures
-Trading with NPCs
-Combat against robots/mechs and cool space battles
-Survival/crafting in a universe sized sandbox
-An awesome procedural soundtrack from my genuine favourite band (check the NMS album out here)
-For one small moment, you might feel like you’ve stepped into a sci-fi book cover
There’s plenty of additional interesting, fascinating notes on the game and its development in the official blog post, but one of the the most stand-out comments (and another transparent thought from Murray) is that the team knows that this won’t be a game for everyone, stating that “This game might not be for everyone, I expect it to be super divisive, but I’m sat here watching playtesters right now who weren’t supposed to be in, but just wanted to play and chill out. I can’t wait for you to experience that for yourselves.”
That said, as reviews start to hit, and scores start to vary, it’s all going to be dependent on the personal experiences and tastes of the player. A game like this has never existed before; No Man’s Sky is literally its own universe, for you to explore and do whatever you want in, and I can’t imagine how tough it will be to form an opinion on that.
For me? When the game was first announced, I saw a title that looked cool, but I had no idea why I would play it. As more and more videos debuted, my excitement for No Man’s Sky grew and grew, and on the eve of release I realize that this game looks like everything a young me wanted to do in some facet: explore, wonder what lay beyond what the eye can see, and have curiosity guide me to my next destination.
Will you be playing? Sound out in the comments below!