PREVIEW: No Man’s Sky

No Man's Sky

Of the many bright shiny offerings that were made to us at E3 2015 a few weeks back, one of those that stood out for me was the showcasing of Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky on the Sony stage.

No Man’s Sky is the brain child of Hello Games, a studio coming out of Guildford who have already brought us Joe Danger: an entertaining and addictive mobile gaming app for Android and IOS.

What makes No Man’s Sky so special for me is the way it is set out; whichever you want to play the game is up to you. You want to take on the galaxy one ship at a time? Go for it! You want to sit on one planet and mine it until all its natural resources are sitting pretty in your cargo bay? Knock yourself out!

The game is set in a procedurally generated universe where there are hundreds, literally thousands of planets that are out there waiting to be explored. Your ‘mission’, if you could call it that, is to get to the centre of the Universe. However, how could you do that without getting distracted by the millions of things to do on the way?

As shown at E3 by head honcho Sean Murray on the Sony stage, we were granted a glimpse and a teasing look into the gargantuan world.

What I like about this demonstration is the fact that Sean gets straight into it: there’s no smoke and mirrors, nothing like Watch Dogs where what was sold to us and what we bought differed greatly. Sean shows us a world in which everything is possible where, if we fancy it, we can land on the planet, call it our own and discover every living thing in sight and then kill it. The whole point is that the choice is yours.

Much like Freelancer back in the day,  it seems as if you are the maker of your own destiny and that is why this game is going places.

The game and the way it was played in front of those baying crowds in Los Angeles made it the standout game of that convention. Yes, we have Fallout 4, Shenmue III, The Last Guardian and the rest, but those studios have already churned out multi-award winning titles. Hello Games is doing what we British love to do most: be the underdog. I’m not saying that Hello Games is disadvantaged or should be looked at with sympathy due to its size or budget, these guys can compete in the big leagues because they are not limited by their own imagination and by the fact that they wanted to make a science-fiction game their way.

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