16 July 2015
Wow. After seeing IGN First's 18 minute gameplay demo with Hello Games founder Sean Murray, No Man's Sky is back to being this incredible, pushing boundaries further than ever game, that I cannot wait to play. This adequately comes after my first slight disappointment with the game at E3, where we saw little new gameplay and no release date.
First of all, Sean showed an 'average' planet which still looks gorgeous and abundant with life. He was attacked by a goat-looking-thing and explained you can shoot the ground to scare it off, or kill it and be a villain of the world. This quickly attracts the patrolling sentinels and killing these ramps up your wanted level. Even Sean said he was happy that Grand Theft Auto hadn't patented this game mechanic. I can see this leading to wave after wave of combat - effectively a hoard mode if this is the path you wish to take.
Another new major role within the game shown off for the first time was resource gathering. This doesn't require crafting a pickaxe and repeatedly clicking the floor, à la Minecraft. Instead it involves whipping out your gun and shooting block structures and rock formations dotted around to obtain elements. These elements form a fictional periodic table and can be combined to produce molecules and possibly genuine things. Given the scale of this game, I imagine there are hundreds of elements able to produce 10 times as many molecules. New discoveries you find (elements, plants, animals) can be uploaded to the game's server via reaching a beacon, which acts as your save point. This showed the penalty for death as you can lose your discoveries, which adds a good level of risk to the game, especially for more hostile planets.
While showing the elements gathered during the demo, we got to see the inventory UI for the first time, and I was shocked to see an almost exact replica of Destiny. There are effectively tabbed screens for your discoveries, ship, gun etc. each showing tiles of items you have collected for each category. The selector is a white circular cursor, that you surely move with the left thumbstick, and hovering over items shows a small pop-up box with a description and/or your progress to the next level. I was really impressed with Destiny's inventory UI and am quite amazed that Hello Games have managed to copy the entire feature for No Man's Sky. It's another fantastic example of (legally I assume) using an existing, solid idea for your own game.
Then onto the most impressive part of the demo, the leap into space. We'd never properly seen the player walk around a planet, jump in their ship, fly out of the atmosphere into space, then turn to see the planet from a close distance. This was such an impressive sequence purely because it was all seamless without any pause in gameplay. Seeing an entire planet's circumference fill your screen 20 seconds after walking on it was simply awesome.
Of course this led to the same beautiful flowing sequence when visiting a new planet. From space, through the atmosphere, to an aeroplane view of the planet, to landing and walking. All seamlessly. This provoked IGN's Ryan McCaffrey to say "this is literally the most open world game of all time", to which Sean replied "open universe I guess". Both so true.
Overall this was a fantastic demo. It showed new gameplay, new interfaces, and combined the space and planet navigation we'd seen plenty of times before in separate trailers. I wish it could have been shown at Sony's conference for E3 to show a mass audience, but it must have been too long for its time slot. Regardless I'm back to being super excited for this game whenever it comes out. Hello Games can take as long as they like to perfect No Man's Sky because this is a record breaking game in terms of the underlying programming and the sheer scale of the game produced, not to mention their ridiculously small development team too.
Watch the gameplay demo for yourself here.