Home Featured Content

6 Reasons Why No Man’s Sky Might Be The Most Important Game Ever Made

Excitement for No Man’s Sky is at fever pitch as the game gears up for its worldwide launch today. The verdict from the press so far is good, and early adopters are streaming the game live, lifting the veil on a title that has been stepped in mystique. Now that we’re all getting a better look at what No Man’s Sky is about, one thing is clear to see: its formula for procedural generation truly works.

1) The Procedural Generation Works

Recommended Videos

Let’s be clear: No Man’s Sky is a feat of technical engineering the likes of which I’ve never seen. The fact that its mechanism for procedural generation works at all – and works so well – is cause for celebration. They say it takes 30 year for an industry to mature: well, games have been around 45 years and this is the evolution we need.

The way Hello Games procedurally generates planets on-the- fly (and masks loading times, too) is remarkable. None of the 18 quintillion planets are stored on the disc or in the cloud. Instead, they’re made up by the game as it goes along.

Every speck of fauna and flora has hundreds of possible variants, and within those variants, mutations naturally evolve. As Sean Murray said in a 2014 interview, “if you build a cat, you also get a lion and a tiger and a panther and things that you’ve never seen – kind of mutations beyond that.”

Want a better idea of how it works? Keep reading….