The release of No Man’s Sky is inching ever closer, and developer Sean Murray has been discussing the game’s story (or lack thereof).
We’ve known the basics of No Man’s Sky for a while, of course, You’re thrown into a massive procedurally generated universe, rammed with over 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets (seriously).
The core “mission” is to inch ever closer to the centre of the universe, exploring planets and collecting materials to upgrade your character and ship as you go.
You’ll encounter all manner of new aliens and plant life on every planet, and you can even name ’em if you’re the first to discover the critters. There’ll be space battles too, just in case it didn’t sound awesome enough already.
As you might imagine, for a game so obscenely huge, it’d be a bit tricky to get a conventional story in there.
Murray wrote on the PlayStation Blog:
Today, I wanted to show you something new, a little bit of how we approach lore and storytelling in our universe. It’s a bit different to what you might be used to with some other games. With a universe as open as ours–with a near-infinite number of planets out there to see–we want players to discover everything on their terms. We don’t have huge cut scenes or a traditional linear story.
Sounds perfect to me. I think in the case of an open world game especially, we buy it because we want to explore – that is literally the reason most of us pick that kind of title up.
We don’t need to be told we’re doing what we’re doing because a kingdom needs saving or whatever, and we don’t wanna be bogged down by cutscenes. We’re doing what we’re doing because we paid £50 to explore a brave new universe. Simple.
Still, similar to a lot of locations in games like Fallout or Half Life, No Man’s Sky will have a rich lore that will be open to interpretation.
Murray explained:
Hopefully everything you find has a reason for existing. When you see a building, we’ve tried to think of who might have built it, and why. It’s something we’re excited to see fans uncover as they play, and put their own interpretations on.
The video (which you can watch below) also features Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons and author James Swallow, who discuss their new comic book set in the world of the game, called Adventures in No Man’s Sky.
No Man’s Sky comes to the UK on June 24 for PlayStation 4 and PC. Europe gets it June 22, while North America will have it by June 21. Bye Summer.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.