Until just last week, Hello Games' massive left-turn from the arcade stylings of Trials-esque Joe Danger into creating an entire galaxy's worth of content with No Man's Sky looked like all it had to offer was some superbly refined space exploration. Oh, how that assumption was so wrong. Turns out the only reason creator Sean Murray was holding back on delving into the astounding amount of game design details was because he really didn't want a game with such a high magnitude of things to do, to be wrongly labelled. As he noted "If I say you can terraform the world, then all of a sudden it's 'Minecraft in space!'" which is totally a fair point, as press labels and the 'need' to summarise can do a huge disservice to a team's efforts. So, with that in mind, so far what it seems No Man's Sky will let you do is create and customise a set of armour and a ship to go alongside, which you'll then need to upgrade to travel to different stars, planets and solar systems, reaping different rewards along the way. The whole thing is procedurally generated so everyone's solar systems are completely different, and there's A.I. governing other vessels you'll engage with or trade routes you can intercept if you're fancying yourself a bit of a Firefly/Malcolm Reynolds type. The terraforming and mining comes into how you'll gather these resources for your upgrades if you don't want to engage in combat, and depending on how much you want to obsess over creating your own space station you're free to be as inventive as you like. All of that is just a fraction of how much horsepower and game-changing appeal this idea of interacting with an entire galaxy will bring - and if Sean and his team can deliver on the concepts being described, this'll easily net the best technological achievement of the year alongside a heap of others. What brand new franchises are you looking forward to? Let us know in the comments!
