The developer behind the upcoming PlayStation 4 and PC title No Man’s Sky has revealed a few new tidbits on the ambitious adventure romp, making it clear that players are unlikely to see everything the game has to offer.
Speaking with IGN, Hello Games’ Sean Murray touched base on how players will likely go about exploring planets, noting that gamers won’t have any helping and from YouTube and the like; they’ll have to discover things for themselves as they cruise across the universe.
“That’s a big part of exploring a world is knowing where things are and we normally find that players kind of make almost like a little temporary base on their planet. They learn landmarks around them, where they can get certain things, where caves are, buildings are and where certain resources are on the planet.
“When you land on a planet, like I said, no one has been there before. There is no YouTube video that you can look up, there is no FAQ, so you have to discover it for yourself. A big part of it is you can scan creatures, and when you scan them, you can name them…It’s actually a slightly sad but amazing thing that 99.9 percent of the planets in No Man’s Sky I think will probably never be visited.”
No Man’s Sky is scheduled for release in June 2016. The game is chiefly based around four principles; exploration, survival, combat and training, and takes place in a sprawling, procedurally generated universe featuring legions of planets to discover.
Your main task is to explore and gather vital data on the planets you visit by scanning the flaura and fauna, which is then uploaded to a massive database known as the Atlas for other players to digest.
Explorers can share the coordinates of planets with others, although you’ll have to be careful of how many resources you drain and creatures you kill. Go too far, and you’ll be hunted down by malevolent and tenacious Sentinels out for your blood.
No Man’s Sky features a soundtrack combining Paul Weir’s ambient music (also procedurally generated) and original works composed by the British post-rock band, 65daysofstatic. The soundtrack will be released on June 17.