No Man's Sky: 10 Core Gameplay Features You Need To Know About

1. You Almost Definitely Won't Meet Other Players

The whole point of No Man's Sky is a feeling of survival-infused exploration - going it alone against the final frontier, travelling to places no one has ever gone before (No Man's Sky, geddit?). It is not "Let's all meet up at 6pm and fly around together".

Instead, the team have been very hesitant to describe precisely what they're building in regards to multiplayer, aside from making a point of clarifying that there's no multiplayer focus, and for good reason. As the universe is so vast, Murray had this to say:

"People keep saying to us, ‘Yeah, but what if I knew where they were? Would I go there?’ And it’s like, yeah, but they are going to have to stay there for quite a while while you get over there. And then once you get over there you might land on the same planet and then you will say, ‘I’m on a planet the size of Earth and I am on a mountain. Where are you?"

He also stated through Game Informer that you wouldn't even know if another player flew past, as there are A.I. ships darting across the skies quite frequently. There'll be no markers over players' heads, and it seems aside from having a pop-up window state "This planet was found by X", your interactions are left entirely up to chance:

If another human player flies past you, will their username pop up or will you not even know that it was another player? At the moment it doesn't, and I would like to keep it that way. So would you think it was just an A.I. for the most part? Yeah. Because we don't want to focus people on it. It will be so surreal to see another person walking around on a planet. We keep talking about Jack's dad from Lost, basically just to see them in the distance. Like, “Did I? What?”

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Let us know in the comments how excited you are for No Man's Sky, or if you're waiting until it's in your hands, just to see how much is real!