No Man's Sky

No Man's Sky[b] is an action-adventure survival game developed and published by Hello Games. It was released worldwide for the PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows in August 2016, for Xbox One in July 2018, and for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S consoles in November 2020. A Nintendo Switch port is scheduled for release in October 2022, while ports for macOS and iPadOS are in development.[6] The game is built around four pillars: exploration, survival, combat, and trading. Players are free to perform within the entirety of a procedurally generated deterministic open world universe, which includes over 18 quintillion planets. Through the game's procedural generation system, planets have their own ecosystems with unique forms of flora and fauna, and various alien species may engage the player in combat or trade within planetary systems. Players advance in the game by mining for resources to power and improve their equipment, buying and selling resources using credits earned by documenting flora and fauna, building planetary bases and expanding space fleets, or otherwise following the game's overarching plot by seeking out the mystery around the entity known as The Atlas.

Sean Murray, the founder of Hello Games, had wanted to create a game that captured the sense of exploration and optimism of science fiction writings and art of the 1970s and 1980s. The game was developed over three years by a small team at Hello Games with promotional and publishing help from Sony Interactive Entertainment. The game was seen as an ambitious project for a small team by the gaming media, and Murray and Hello Games drew significant attention leading to its release.

No Man's Sky received mixed reviews at its 2016 launch, with some critics praising the technical achievements of the procedurally generated universe, while others considered the gameplay lackluster and repetitive. However, the critical response was marred by the lack of several features that had been reported to be in the game, particularly multiplayer capabilities. The game was further criticised due to Hello Games' lack of communication in the months following the launch, creating a hostile backlash from some of its players. Murray stated later that Hello Games had failed to control the exaggerated expectations of the game from the media and the larger-than-expected player count at launch, and since have taken an approach of remaining quiet about updates to the game until they are nearly ready to ship. The promotion and marketing for No Man's Sky became a subject of debate and has been cited as an example of what to avoid in video game marketing.

Since the game's initial release, Hello Games has continued to improve and expand No Man's Sky to achieve the vision of the experience they wanted to build. The game has received multiple free major content updates that have introduced several previously missing features, such as multiplayer components, while adding new features like surface vehicles, base-building, space fleet management, cross-platform play, and virtual reality support, all of which have substantially improved its overall reception, and considered to have redeemed both the game and Hello Games from the troublesome launch.

Gameplay

No Man's Sky allows players to explore planets with procedurally generated flora and fauna

No Man's Sky is an action-adventure survival game played from a first or third person perspective that allows players to engage in four principal activities: exploration, survival, combat, and trading.[7] The player takes the role of a specimen of alien humanoid planetary explorer, known in-game as the Traveller, in an uncharted universe. They start on a randomized planet near a crashed spacecraft towards the edge of the galaxy, and are equipped with a survival exosuit with a jetpack, and a "multitool" that can be used to scan, mine and collect resources as well as to attack or defend oneself from creatures and hostile forces. The player can collect, repair, and refuel the craft, allowing them to travel about the planet, between other planets and space stations in the local planetary system, engage in space combat with alien factions, or make hyperspace jumps to other star systems.[8] While the game is open ended, the player may follow the guidance of the entity known as The Atlas to head towards the centre of the galaxy.[9]

The defining feature of No Man's Sky is that nearly all parts of the galaxy, including stars, planets, flora and fauna on these planets, and sentient alien encounters, are created through procedural generation using deterministic algorithms and random number generators from a single seed number. This 64-bit value leads to there being over 18 quintillion[c] (1.8×1019) planets to explore within the game.[10] Very little data is stored on the game's servers, as all elements of the game are created through deterministic calculations when the player is near them, assuring that other players will see the same elements as another player by travelling to the same location in the galaxy. The player may make temporary changes on planets, such as mining resources, but these changes are not tracked once the player leaves that vicinity.[11][12] Until July 2020, the game used different servers for each platform versions; following a July 2020 patch, cross-platform play was enabled for all supported platforms.[13]

Through exploration, the player is credited with "units", the in-game currency, by 'scanning' planets, alien bases, flora and fauna in their travels.[14][15] If the player is first to discover one of these, they can earn additional units by uploading this information to The Atlas, as well as having their name credited with the discovery to be seen by other players. Players also have the opportunity to rename these features at this point within limits set by a content filter.[16][17] No Man's Sky can be played offline, but interaction with The Atlas requires online connectivity.[9][11]

The player must assure the survival of the Traveller, as many planets have dangerous atmospheres such as extreme temperatures, toxic gases, and dangerous storms.[16] Though the player can seek shelter at alien bases or caves, these environments will wear away at the exosuit's shielding and armour and can kill the Traveller, thus the player must collect resources necessary for survival. By collecting blueprints, the player can use resources to craft upgrades to their exosuit, multitool, and spacecraft to make survival easier, with several of these upgrades working in synergistic manners to improve the survivability and capabilities of the Traveller.[8] Each of these elements have a limited number of slots for both upgrades and resource space, requiring the player to manage their inventories and feature sets, though the player can either gain new slots for the exosuit or purchase new ships and multitools with more slots.[18] Many features of the exosuit, multitool, and spacecraft need to be refuelled after prolonged use, using collected resources as a fuel source.[19][20]

While on a planet, the Traveller may be attacked by hostile creatures. They also may be attacked by Sentinels, a self-replicating robot force that patrols the planets and takes action against those that take the planet's resources. The player can fend these off using the weapons installed on the multitool. The game uses a "wanted level" similar to that of the Grand Theft Auto series. Low wanted levels may cause small drones to appear which may be easily fought off, while walking machines, such as the 'Walker' or 'Quad' can assault the player at higher wanted levels.[8][21] While in space, the Traveller may be attacked by pirates seeking their ship's cargo, or by alien factions with whom they have a poor reputation. Here, the player can use the ship's weapon systems to engage in these battles. Should the Traveller die on a planet, they will be respawned at their last save point without their exosuit's inventory; the player can recover these materials if the player can reach the last death location. If the Traveller dies in space, they will similarly respawn at the local system's space station, but having lost all the goods aboard their ship.[7][14] Again, these goods can be recovered by travelling to the point at which the player died in space, but with the added uncertainty of pirates claiming the goods first.

Some star systems have a space station where the Traveller can trade resources, multitools, and ships, and interact with one or more aliens from three different races that populate the galaxy. The player may also find active or abandoned alien bases on planets that offer similar functions. Each alien race has their own language, with word-for-word substitutions which initially will be nonsense to the player.[22] By frequent communications with that race, as well as finding monoliths scattered on planets that act as Rosetta stones of sorts, the player can better understand these languages and perform proper actions when interacting with the alien non-player characters, gaining favour from the alien and its race for future trading and combat.[22][23][24] Consequentially, improper responses to aliens may cause them to dislike the Traveller, and their space-bound fleets may attack the Traveller on sight.[25] The game includes a free market galactic store accessible at space stations or alien bases, where some resources and goods have higher values in some systems compared to others, enabling the player to profit on resource gathering and subsequent trade.[9][26]

No Man's Sky is primarily designed as a single-player game, though discoveries can be shared to all players via the Steam Workshop, and friends can track each other on the game's galactic map. Hello Games' Sean Murray stated that one might spend about forty hours of game-time to reach the centre of the galaxy if they did not perform any side activities, but he also said that he fully anticipated that players would play the game in a manner that suits them, such as having those that might try to catalogue the flora and fauna in the universe, while others may attempt to set up trade routes between planets.[27] Players can track friends on the galactic map and the system maps.[28] Due to limited multiplayer aspects at launch, Sony did not require PlayStation 4 users to have a PlayStation Plus subscription to play the game online.[29]

Initial post-release updates

A large update released in November 2016, known as the "Foundation Update", added the ability for the player to define a planet as a "home planet", and construct a base on that planet from modular components created from collected resources. Once constructed, the player can then immediately return to their base via teleportation from a space station in the rest of the galaxy. The base supports building special stations, such as research terminals, that can be operated by one of the sentient aliens, which can help to unlock additional base components and blueprints, tend to harvesting flora for resources, and other aspects. The player may opt to tear down the base and relocate to a different home planet at any time. The player can also deploy devices such as automatic mineral drills in the field. The player is able to purchase large starship freighters, which serve both as a space-bound base, with similar base-building and construction options as the planetary base, and as additional storage capacity that collected resources can be transferred.[30]

The Foundation update also adds in two new play modes, with the original gameplay considered as the third, default mode. Survival mode is similar to standard gameplay but the difficulty is much higher—atmospheric effects have larger impact on the exosuit's armour, alien creatures are more hostile, Sentinels are more alert and deadly, and resources tend to be sparse. If a player should die in Survival mode, they must restart without being able to recover their lost progress, though they still possess their credits, alien language progress, and known blueprints. Creative mode removes much of the mechanics that can kill the player's character, and gives them unlimited resources for constructing bases.[30]

A second update released in March 2017, known as the "Path Finder Update", added several new features to the game. Among these included the ability to share bases with other players, as well as new vehicles called exocraft to help in exploration. The exocraft can be built on the player's set home planet, and called upon on any other planet. The update also contained a permadeath option that wipes the player's progress completely on death; support for Steam Workshop for user modifications on the Windows version; new base building features and materials, ship and multitool classes and support for PlayStation 4 Pro enhanced graphics.[31][32][33]

A third update, titled "Atlas Rises", was released in August 2017. It included significant contributions to the game's story mode, added an estimated 30 hours of narrative, and added procedurally generated missions. The player can use portals to quickly transport across the game's galaxy. A limited online cooperative mode, called "Joint Exploration", allows for up to 16 players to explore the same planet and use voice chat and text commands to communicate to others in close proximity, seeing each other as glowing spheres, but otherwise they cannot directly interact with each other; Hello Games called it an "important first step into the world of synchronous co-op". The update was preceded by several weeks of a "Waking Titan" alternate reality game.[34][35]