No Man’s Sky Wiki – Everything You Need To Know About The Game

No Man’s Sky is an upcoming and hugely anticipated science fiction themed video game set in an imposingly large open world, sprawling space setting with explorable words. See the Gameplay portion of this Wiki for more information on that.

Set in a truly massive procedural generated universe, No Man’s Sky is currently in development by British Developers, Hello Games who previously found fame with their Joe Danger series of games.

The game, which is also set to be published by Hello Games, is being developed with a timed exclusivity contract in mind. This means that the game will be coming to Sony’s PlayStation 4 first.

Currently slated to release in 2015 without a specific launch window, the game will eventually be ported to Microsoft Windows PC’s with no officially announced plans to bring the game to the Xbox One, despite the developers interest in doing so.

• 1. Development
• 2. Gameplay
• 3. Story
• 4. World

Development

No Man’s Sky was first revealed to the public when, according to BBC Newsman Dave Lee, it completely “stole the show” at E3 with a humble but hugely impressive brief demonstration of the game that received a huge applause from the show attendees.

Hello Games developer Sean Murray took to the stage during Sony’s PlayStation conference at E3 and after a short explanation of what the studio and the game were all about, launched into a gameplay trailer.

During the reveal event, Murray made no mention of Microsoft’s Xbox One, leading some to believe that the game was a Sony exclusive, this was however not the case, the game is in fact a time exclusive and will be transitioning to the PC at some point in time, but this far the Xbox One still hasn’t received confirmation of the game coming to it.

During the 2013 VGX Video Game Awards Show Hello Games took to the stage to announce that they were indeed working on a new sci-fi adventure game named No Man’s Sky, but tragically on Christmas Eve of 2013 a river nearby the studio broke its bank during a bad winter of heavy rains that resulted in massive damage to the studio and the contents therein. After the initial flooding and damage assessment, Hello Games sent the following tweet, “Everything in the office has pretty much been lost.”

Since then however, the little studio that could has done an admirable job of getting things back on track and have shown No Man’s Sky to be an epic sprawling Sci-fi adventure set in a massive procedurally generated universe that will take a long time to explore, Hello Games called it “infinite”.

In a rather well handled piece of developer-to-critic feedback, Sean Murray responded to a commenter who argued the validity of the “infinite” universe claim.
Mr Murray responded to this with both tact and accuracy by saying that nothing in a computer could be truly infinite based on a 32 bit number , but that “repetition may occur after playing the game for 4000 to 5000 years. That is, if you explore a planet every second of the day.”

He went on to say that if they were to use a 64bit number it would take nearly five billion years before the play would see any form of repetition, his closing statement was simply “We will all be dead; our sun would not work.”

No Man’s Sky took home the award for Best Original Game and Best Independent Game awarded to them by a panel of video game crtics. It was also awarded the Special Commendation for Innovation award.

Gameplay

As mentioned above, No Man’s Sky is set in a massive procedurally generated open universe that is by gaming standards, considered infinite. Just to reiterate, “repetition may occur after playing the game for 4000 to 5000 years” were you to play the game every second of every day for that amount of time. And frankly, I don’t think even you’re that dedicated to gaming.

Since then, Hello Games have announced that the final build of the game will be running with a 64bit seeding key which, if you’re into big numbers, means that the game can generate a whopping estimated 18 quintillion possible separate planets.

Upon launching the game, players are randomly inserted into universe and are given control of a planetary explore and a spacecraft. From there, it’s pretty much down to the player what happens next.

You can transition seamlessly from the planets to surface, to low orbit and deep space all without ever encountering a loading screen. This means that one moment you’ll be walking amongst the trees and wildlife of a world and the next you’ll be tearing into space and engaging a hostile force in a vicious interplanetary dogfight that will bring you between massive capital ships and space bound debris fields.
The game will have online features that enable players to share information that they’ve gathered from the planets that they’ve visited, they can also receive information from other players that are exploring their own universe.
But in a stroke of genius that pleases gamers like myself that prefer to go it alone and eschew online multiplayer more often than not, Hello Games announced that the game would indeed be playable offline.

Story

There just straight up is no story. Players are free to do as they please and interact with the various factions in however they see fit.

World

Given that No Man’s Sky will potentially incorporate 18 quintillion possible separate planets, it goes without saying that the game world is truly epic in its scale. The inclusion of reactionary factions, living creatures and seamless interplanetary travel means it all looks and feels just that little bit more alive.

For more information on this, refer to the gameplay and development portions of this wiki for more information regarding the nature of No Man’s Sky’s game world.

Note: This wiki will be updated once we have more information about the game.