1) The Procedural Generation Works
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….