<I Time Off Reviews
I'M CRUISING T HROUGH AN
amaranth-tinged vac uum in a
dangerously vulnerable starship.
Asteroids phase in and out of
view, each a mineral mass my
photon cannons can mine for fuel.
In the distance, a distress signal
beckons from one of the nearly
unlimited number of planets I
can visit if I choose to. I'm lost in
space, and I feel fine.
This is No Man's Sky, an absurdly
ambitious sci-fi experiment out
now for PlayStation 4 and PC.
One of the year's most eagerly
awaited games is, unlike most
megabits nowadays, the product
of a handful of programmers
led by creator Sean Murray at a
tiny Guildford, England, studio
named Hello Games. Since it was
first announced three years ago,
No Man's Sky has earned legions
of fans as well as doubters who
wondered if the game could
possibly deliver on its promise
to let players loose in a digital
universe bigger than the Milky Way
and populated by alien life-forms
to study, exploit or destroy.
Murray is a lanky
30-something who favo rs
PLANETS IN THE MILKY WAY:
100,000,000,000
PLANETS IN NO MAN'S SKY:
18,446, 7 44,073, 709,551,616
rumpled button-ups and sports
a thick beard. His laid-back
demeanor b elies an intellectual
intensity that has earned him a
cult following online. "I'm really
enamored with the idea of players'
being able to express themselves
in games," he says. Murray
argues that most contemporary
blockbusters eschew this in
favor of too-linear game play and
theatrical action.
That's why No Man's Sky is
built upon real-world equations
for describing natural objects.
Instead ofhandcrafting every
<I Time Off Reviews
planet, moon and star, Hello
Games inserts formulas that tell
an algorithm what planets, moons
and stars should look like and
how they ought to behave. Same
goes for the alien flora and fauna
you'll find there. In mathematics,
the process is called "procedural
generation." It's essentially a way
to get massive
You can output(a
become a universe) from
space pirate. relatively minor
Or fashion
yourself as input(some
an inter- numbers). As a
galactic result, No Man's
Claude Levi- Sky is populated
Strauss. It's by over
a cosmic
carte 18 quintillion-
blanche that's 18 followed
by as many
zeros-unique planets. Even if
a player could visit one every
second (and travel between them
instantly), seeing the entire game
would take nearly 585 billion real-
life years.
Players start on a random
planet beside a crashed spaceship
and must first learn to survive.
To get the ship working, you have
to probe for resources using a jet
pack and a "multi-tool"-a sort of
space-age Swiss Army knife that
doubles as a weapon. Repair your
ship by alchemizing the right
materials and you can lift off into
space, all of which is seamless,
since there are no loading screens
of any kind in No Man's Sky.
From orbit, you can leap to other
planets or dock at space stations
to trade with other species. Or
become a space pirate. Or fashion
yourself as an intergalactic
Claude Levi-Strauss. It's a cosmic
carte blanche.
Ultimately, playing the game
engenders old-school optimism.
Where contemporary science
fiction seems mired in dystopian
visions of the future, No Man's
Sky produces something akin
to the giddy awe of 1960s pulp
magazines. This is by design:
No Man's Sky is a challenge from
Murray to a games industry that
has grown rich and complacent
by aping Hollywood's preferred
themes and penchant for franchise
sequels. While its scope is the
headline attraction, No Man's Sky's
real triumph is the way it manages
to gin up limitless wonder. D