No Man's Sky

A first-person adventure simulator set in a futuristic world. You’ll explore outer space and planets, some of which let you interact with various forms of extraterrestrial life. You can gather resources, fight in space across a variety of randomly generated regions of the galaxy, develop and upgrade your own ship, and complete missions for “bounty hunters.”

No Man's Sky is an open-world sandbox with elements of an action-adventure game. The player must explore a vast game world at the helm of a spaceship, but there are a few other gameplay options. That’s about it.

No Man's Sky takes place in an alternate universe made up of 256 galaxies nested inside one another like Russian dolls. To reach the next galaxy, you have to travel to the center of the current one.

Each galaxy contains 20 billion star systems and more than 80 billion planets, and it takes hours of real time to travel from the edge (where the player appears) to the center. You can travel within a system using a hyperdrive, and between systems with a warp jump.

This makes No Man's Sky the largest game ever created at the time of its release. Thanks to procedural generation, even the combined efforts of all players would not be enough to explore the entire game world. The developers drew inspiration from the latest astronomical discoveries when creating the stars and planets.

The story of No Man's Sky is completely independent of the world. The player finds themselves on an unexplored planet, where they begin learning the basics: using technology to craft items, searching for resources, interacting with the world, trading, and piloting a spaceship.

Some players begin their journey on toxic planets and must spend their first hours clinging to life and painstakingly gathering resources, while others find themselves in a paradise, surrounded by peaceful animals and rich deposits of resources.

The story of No Man's Sky was refined with each new update, so if you played after launch, it's worth giving the game another try — a lot has changed. For example, the character learned to think (in the 2018 Next update), take part in conversations and share their own thoughts, as well as try to figure out what an alien is saying if their language hasn't been learned yet.

The character has no backstory or major plot-altering choices à la Mass Effect. Instead, the story of No Man's Sky is about feelings and meaning, rather than choices and epic drama.

Over the course of roughly 30 hours, the writers lead the player to consider that our Universe is just a computer simulation. In the game, the hero encounters characters who make them question whether the No Man's Sky universe is real, or whether it was created by some kind of superintelligence (which the developers mean to represent themselves).

There are also side quests that can turn out to be harder than the main quest and require an upgraded ship and character. The developers constantly add new quests and activities, and in 2018 it took more than 50 hours to complete them all.

When No Man's Sky launched, its gameplay was simple and focused on flying through space and exploring planets, discovering and cataloguing new species of plants and animals (as in Spore), completing simple quests, hunting, gathering resources, crafting items, and trading with NPCs.

Updates added other points of interest to star systems — black holes, space anomalies, trading stations, and bases built by other players. Some activities became tied to mini-games and puzzles, which could reward you with a valuable item or technology for solving them correctly.

You could encounter both friendly natives, who might give you a missing technology or resource, and hostile ones who would rather eat the hero for breakfast. You can fight them with four types of weapon. You can also explore the ruins of fallen civilizations, build up habitable worlds, or expand your fleet of ships.

The economy in No Man's Sky is simple: discovering new lifeforms, for example, brings in a small amount of money, while fully exploring a planet earns you a substantial bonus. You can also sell surplus resources, organize expeditions, grow rare plants on a space farm, and more.

All the credits you earn from quests can be spent on new technologies, rare resources, items, or ships. Each trader has their own selection, so think carefully about whether to buy something now or travel across the galaxy if you need it later.

At launch, No Man's Sky offered an unusual kind of online interaction: the names players gave to discovered planets and species were shared with the community. That meant you might come across planets called “Butt” or “Frontbutt,” and some truly “original” species names.

Later updates added full four-player co-op multiplayer. When the world is synchronized, players and their starships appear in the same universe, where they can explore together, take on certain types of quests, and trade resources.

In online mode, many of the game's systems started working for real instead of just “pretending.” For example, there was now a reason to build bases and defend them, earn credits and gather resources, hunt each other (direct PvP between Travelers is allowed, but you can also just fly around and raid caravans), and visit each other through a teleporter from halfway across the galaxy.