No Man's Sky is an action-adventure survival video game developed and published by the indie studio Hello Games forPlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows. The game was released worldwide in August 2016. The gameplay of No Man's Sky is built on four pillars — exploration, survival, combat, and trading. Players are free to perform within the entirety of a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion (1.8×1019) planets, many with their own sets of floraand fauna.
Players participate in a shared universe, with the ability to exchange planet information with friends, though the game is also fully playable offline; this is enabled by the procedural generation system that assures players find the same planet with the same features, lifeforms, and other aspects once given the planet coordinates, requiring no further data to be stored or retrieved from game servers. Nearly all elements of the game are procedurally generated, including star systems, planets and their ecosystems, flora, fauna and their behavioural patterns, artificial structures, and alien factions and their spacecraft. The founder of Hello Games, Sean Murray, had wanted to create a game that captured the sense of exploration and optimism of science fiction writings and art of the 1970s and 1980s with No Man's Sky. The title was developed over three years by a small team at Hello Games with promotional and publishing help from Sony Interactive Entertainment. The British band 65daysofstatic assisted in developing the game's music, with sound designer Paul Weir developing systems to procedurally generate the soundtrack.
Significant attention and expectations were given to the title in the months leading to its release, which Murray and others journalists cautioned about the indie nature and niche appeal of the title, seeking to avoid the pitfalls that had previously occurred at the launch of Spore in 2008. At release, the game received a wide range of mixed reviews, praising the technical achievements of the procedurally-generated universe, while considering the gameplay lackluster and repetitive. No Man's Sky also suffered several technical problems at launch, while also lacking several marketed features, including a multiplayer element, that further marred the players' experience with the game. Hello Games has committed to fixing technical issues with the release, while planning to expand features of the game in time
No Man's Sky Gameplay Trailer | E3 2014 | PS4
You Don’t Play No Man's Sky, You Live With It
A good game is often said to be more than the sum of its parts – a special, unquantifiable feeling that comes from seeing every mechanic working seamlessly together to create variety and surprises. No Man’s Sky, by contrast, is a huge collection of parts that can’t find that harmony. To its credit a few work brilliantly - specifically the unheard of scale and scope of its procedurally generated sci-fi universe and often striking interplanetary exploration that allows you to hop in a spaceship and fly seamlessly to the surface of another planet. But too many other systems are badly designed and repetitive, from its basic and dull combat to its toothless survival systems, and from its unwieldy interface to its lifeless alien races.
The vague, barely-there story starts each of us on a random planet (one of a claimed 18 quintillion) with a broken spaceship and the sci-fi equivalent of Minecraft’s pickaxe: a laser beam that slowly vacuums up a planet’s resources for you to feed into typical, simplistic crafting recipes. At first I was struck by the impressive world around me, which in this particular case was lush with colorful plant and animal life straight out of a Dr. Seuss book and rolling purple hills dotted with pillars of minerals. I named it Stapleton’s Landing and uploaded it to the server – though I’ll probably never see it again, another player might one day stumble across it and wonder who I was. (As far as we’ve seen so far this is the extent of No Man’s Sky’s multiplayer interaction in every reported test to date – even people who have gone to the same place at the same time haven’t been able to see each other.)