Columnist Sophie Kruse writes about No Man's Sky, a space exploration video game set to be released in June.
If you’ve been online lately, you might have heard the buzz about No Man’s Sky. Set to be released in June, this game is taking what we know of sci-fi games and completely changing the mold.
According to the game’s website, “No Man’s Sky is a game about exploration and survival in an infinite procedurally generated galaxy.”
This game is a bit more unique than we’re used to. You don’t have typical quests or pre-written storylines to follow. Instead, you start the game out with just a few necessities to survive. To continue through the game, you have to find items to upgrade your materials. You’re then able to do whatever you want in the game. According to The Verge, many players will begin by mining their resources or by starting to become a bounty hunter or security guard. To find out what else is in the game relies on exploration.
Every single piece of universe in the game is playable — you can visit every star, planet and mountain. Developers didn’t have an artist draw every in-game object, and instead, the game “uses a library of base prototypes, randomizes their parameters along a set of rules for internal coherence, and produces a form of organized, infinitely diverse chaos."
All real-life players will be playing within the same universe, but the creators doubt that you would unintentionally see anyone else in the game.
“People underestimate how vast our (in-game) universe is. If we were lucky enough to have a million players and started them all on one planet, they would still be very far apart,” Hello Games founder Sean Murray said.
You don’t “level up” like in a normal game, but instead have to keep exploring to find new objects or grow the ones you have.
This game completely changes the model that seems to have been set for games. Picking up a new title, we’re usually looking for the most intense quests, the deepest story lines or the hardest character progressions. No Man’s Sky is trying to change this. Instead, the game is asking us to slow down and take a look around. The game is pushing us to explore and adventure.
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It might not be a game that will get your heart racing or have you itching to pull a trigger. The storyline is what you create for yourself and there are infinite places you can visit and explore. In some ways, it sees to be the game that relates to our real lives most.
All video games don’t need to have the excitement that we typically find. Instead, maybe taking a step back to truly explore is what the industry needs.
Sophie Kruse is a senior studying journalism. Are you going to play No Man’s Sky? Email her at sk139011@ohio.edu.
