No Man’s Sky promises to be an amazing game when it finally comes out. The game will let you explore, in great detail, multiple planets throughout the universe, finally giving us the kind of open world space exploration game that I have always wanted (really, think of it as an even more open ended Elder Scrolls game in space. That’s amazing!)
Anyway, the size of this game is absolutely staggering, as it has now been revealed that this game will have 18 quintillion planets that can be fully explored. How many is that? Well…
That exact number is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616.
It’s a bit dizzying, I lost track.
And if you are worried that the planets will be nothing more than the ‘glorified’ entry level areas that they were in, say, the original Mass Effect, well, I have some good news for you.
“Even if a planet is discovered every second, it’ll take 585 billion years to find them all,” Hello Games’ Sean Murray said on the PlayStation Blog.
“The cool thing is that every planet has a single number, a random seed, that defines everything about that planet. A single random seed generates every blade of grass, tree, flower, creature. So as the developer I can note down the planet seed, and then just go back there any time I want. We demoed this at Gamescom, just jumping round the universe to different planets. There are no load times, because nothing needs to load, as the planets are entirely computer-generated.
“I neared the surface of a planet and suddenly it started to rain. As I was touching down I scared some deer who broke through the woods, dodging in and out of trees. Now this was jaw-dropping to me, because I’ve never seen any of these systems before, but also it felt like this was a real place I’d discovered. No one had been there before, and I didn’t know whether to shout excitedly, or just keep it to myself.”
So this will be absolutely amazing.
The game launches on the PS4 first, some time next year, followed by a PC release shortly later.
