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Sean Murray talks about the future of No Man’s Sky
The galactic sandbox is here at last, so where are its creators setting coordinates for now?
No Man’s Sky is a playable painting in space
© Hello Games
You'll encounter situations in No Man's Sky that feel like GTA V in space. Minutes where you go all in guns blazing to take out a single freighter in a larger convoy. You target the containers on the floating giant because a lot of resources are waiting to be turned into cash. Except, even in a universe with 18 quintillion planets, escaping the long arm of the law isn't as simple as diving into a chop shop.
It's our fault, really. At a recent hands-on event with the most wanted game, we got a bit too cocky. Just an hour ago we'd started out on a lonely planet with lush pink trees and repaired our first ship, fixed the launch thruster and pulse engine. We'd made it to space, even found a trading station that looked like a baby death star, where we could buy upgrades or even a new ship. But that would take time. So, instead, we decided to fly around, look for a target and become a pirate. How tough could it be to attack a freighter?
That was our first mistake. Within two minutes of attacking, three space police ships appear out of nowhere. They looked like used X-Wings purchased by the LAPD for some astral crackdown – they didn't even try to warn us first, simply opened fire. We engaged, they called for backup, two more appeared. We went down in flames. Lessons learned in the first hours with No Man's Sky.
A little bit of punishment is fun
"So I'm a huge fan of games like DayZ and these sort of survival simulators," explains Hello Games managing director Sean Murray during a launch event at the European Space Agency in Germany, Darmstadt last week. "And No Man's Sky is quite similar: We want you to do whatever you like. But there must be some consequences. If you fail, a little bit of punishment is certainly fun."
And yes, No Man's Sky is a lot of fun, because it has a ton of ideas, feels like a playable painting, but is also challenging. There's a huge variety of danger on all of these planets; not every one has peaceable life forms. You'll see families of dinosaurs frolicking on the grass, meet with rhinos that have giant ears or soft pink elephants glow in the night. Adorable. But there is also the cold, the heat, and radiation, the relentless vacuum of a universe so big.
Sean Murray, the brain behind the game
© Hello Games
It's not like the atmosphere will always protect you either. We can't even count the situations, where we were just standing around, looking at a huge floating forest in front of us, when in all of a sudden our screen turned yellow and there were blinking alerts all over the place: 'Radiation protection at 10 percent. Security cannot be guaranteed anymore'.
It's not the suit that tells us this, but actually an artificial intelligence that we've met at the start of the game. There's a little dialogue and at the end, the AI, called Atlas, asks us whether we want some guidance or if we would rather 'spurn direction and explore freely'.
"I don't think this is a very easy game," says Murray. "It's certainly a good challenge, so we want to at least offer a helping hand. If you're a veteran of this genre, just ignore it and do your thing."
But Atlas is definitely not a tutorial, we still have to find out how all of these mechanics work. Your radiation shield goes down? Press the touchpad of the PS4 controller and Atlas tells you what kind of components you need to repair it. But the process of actually fixing components is never explained.
"Just try it out. Maybe you fail the first time, maybe you die and you have to find your corpse to get your loot back. But isn't that the reason, why we play games?" Murray posits. "Please don't just Google stuff or watch it on YouTube. I mean you can, but you will destroy a lot of the charm of this game by doing it."
Sometimes there are situations where you have to decide if you're ready to disassemble a certain suit component to fix one that you need right now. And that's the real magic of No Man's Sky.
Once you attack anyone, security drones appear
© Hello Games
Pink planets and sun god loving robots
Playing the finished product for the first time, it soon becomes plain that every planet really is different – that wasn't just marketing. Set your fears aside about anodyne procedural generation and an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters writing an infinite amount of hot gibberish. We've already been to a planet with fungi the size of houses, as well as another which looked, more or less, like Earth's own moon.
It's all algorithms and parameters, it's the magic of math that makes No Man's Sky possible. "When we talk about settings, there are certain parameters determining stuff," explains Murray. "Let's say a planet is very toxic – then you need a certain variety of animals living there that can handle that. Maybe you will encounter some mutated rat crawling around glowing trees. I don't even know, even we haven't seen all planets."
It's hard to believe that a game's creator not knowing what awaits inside could be seen as a selling point, but there you are; No Man's Sky is very much about anarchy. Stuff just happens, out of nowhere.
Take this one instance; we'd just upgraded from the classic Mining Laser to a Land Disruptor. It's a tool that essentially flattens an entire area so that we can mine a huge block of blue Palladium crystals faster. But suddenly a little giraffe-like alien falls into our trap, that wasn't even supposed to be a trap. Whoops. If this wasn't a remote, uninhabited planet, we joke to ourselves, that would have landed us in a lot of trouble.
We spoke too soon, of course. The sentinels – drone security forces that are controlled and powered by the Malevolent Force, an A.I. that maybe, we don't know that for sure, controls the entire galaxy – emerge out of nowhere to school us in the consequences of eco-crimes.
World of wonder: Flying stones and religious rocks
© Hello Games
No Man's Sky first and foremost is about learning lessons, we discover as we go crashing down in flames. You don't have the weaponry necessary to fight against the sentinels? Well, just accept the dying sequence, start at the last checkpoint and get back to your corpse to gather your loot and resources, which you can transfer to your ship at any time. We've tried to fight these drones in early stages, to no avail. We've killed maybe two or three, but they can always call for support. It's almost like Hello Games wants to say, "Hey, this is a beautiful world. Please don't kill our animals."
Murray laughs at our predicament, "It's so funny, so many of our playtesters got stuck on the first planets and became obsessed with fighting the sentinels. And I'm like, 'We've built this whole universe for you with an almost endless variety of planets. Why stay here? Why don't you go to space, meet new factions, learn their language, maybe even build trade alliances?'"
These last words are a pretty good indication of how big No Man's Sky actually is. This is not a review, we've probably spent 10 hours with the game so far. But this piece of art is not just awesome to look at and to discover, it also has a ton of depth. We have to calculate how much fuel we need to go from a space station in the orbit to a far away planet to gather resources, that the Vy'keen are ready to pay big time for. So this kind of is a bit about math, but mostly resource management. There's no way to just buy hyperdrive fuel, we have to generate it out of certain components like Tamium or anti-matter. If you are good at chemistry, you might know how tough it is to create anti-matter.
There will be no paid DLC, just patches
"It's funny, since we are here at ESA and I've just talked to professionals working here and the honest truth is: We as a society have no idea, how a real hyperdrive works," Murray confesses. "We try to stay true to science whenever possible, but with these futuristic technologies, we had to invent technologies or borrow from fantastic writers like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke or H.G. Wells."
The generated fuel also needs space in our cargo area. So far there are no freighters in the game, but Hello Games is working hard to include them as soon as possible.
One thing you won't see however, is the studio exploiting that with micro-transactions. Murray is adamant on this point. "We do want to add a ton of features, like we've just discussed: Freighters, bases, these type of things. But we want to do it for free. You've paid for the game, so you should get this stuff without paying even more money. So no, there will be no paid DLC, just patches."
The future of No Man’s Sky: Freighters, bases, space whales
Despite the hype, – No Man's Sky has already garnered about as many headlines as there are planets in the game, or so it seems some days – Hello Games are still cautious when it comes to what happens next. "I don't know if No Man's Sky is going to be a success," admits Murray. "But if there are a couple more people buying and playing the game, we would love to continue developing and supporting it for years."
That's not to say they've paused in any way now that the game is on sale. For a start, there's the demanding challenge of making sure the serves cope with launch day demand, something highlighted by another game with huge hype surrounding it recently, Pokémon GO. Is Murray confident they can avoid similar issues, if the game takes off as the team no doubt intends?
"Obviously I was insanely busy and didn't have any time to play Pokémon GO, but it was quite nice for us because it took us out of the spotlight for at least a little bit. We are a tiny studio and really not used to all the press coverage, so thank you Pokémon. As for the servers: That's why we are working with partners like Sony and Steam, who know what they are doing. Server load is something very difficult to predict and manage, so we couldn't do that on our own."
Then there's the huge launch day patch, which is why Murray asked people to not play early. Hello Games already changed a ton of things – dead moons, low atmosphere and extremely hazardous planets are new, for a start. The latter even includes blizzards and dust storms. There's more variety in terrain so that caves can be up to 128m tall. And since you can never have too much cargo space in any game, we're very happy to see that ship inventories now store five times more resources per slot, and suit inventories now store 2.5 times more per slot.
That's a great fix, because in our hands-on the inventories felt too small for the giant amount of resources necessary to craft weapon upgrades for our ship and new thruster technology plus all the stuff that's required for the constant repairing of our suit.
Freighters will come with an update in the future
© Hello Games
Hello Games has also improved the entire trading system, which now according to Murray offers much more depth, "Star systems and planets each have their own wants and needs, based off a galactic economy. Observing these is the key to successful trading."
And then there's perhaps our favourite new feature – we can now feed animals, so they either protect us, alert us to rare loot or even start mining for us, which is super cool. Oh, and they might poop valuable resources, which is weird, but we tried civet coffee once and it was okay, so we'll take whatever we can get.
As the interview wraps, we have to ask; even with this task ahead of them, this entire universe to uncover – the team aren't thinking about what comes after No Man's Sky, are they? Not likely, publicly at least.
"There are way more features that our community want, and they deserve to get it," Murray says. "We want you to own these giant freighters that you've seen in trailers. And build bases. And maybe even include space whales, because apparently space whales these days are synonymous with No Man's Sky. But yeah, we are focused on that. It wouldn't make any sense to talk sequels, before this game is out of the door." You've got to love this tiny little studio from Guildford.
No Man's Sky is on sale on PS4 now. For more gaming coverage, be sure to follow @RedBullGames on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
