4. No Man's Sky (PC, PS4)
How can you not get excited by the prospect of No Man's Sky? It's promising literally a galaxy's worth of planets to visit in its vast sandbox, which would purportedly take the player a few billion years to explore in their entirety. The sweet magic of procedural generation, eh? What also impresses about No Man's Sky is how seamless the game world looks, as for the first time in the history of gaming we've seen players descending from outer space onto the surface of planets, tearing through the stratosphere, heliosphere, and all the other layers of a planet's atmosphere on the way down. It looks truly mesmerising, and whatever the final outcome, Hello Games have one hell of a hook by offering us a whole cosmos to play around in. Gameplay-wise, No Man's Sky goes down the trending
permadeath/survival route, as you gather resources from uncharted planets, upgrade your spacecraft to better handle yourself in dogfights, or just bumble around a great big galaxy. The hype is huge, the stakes are high, so here's hoping it delivers. Oh, and the
possibility of it getting a VR launch is particularly mouth-watering.