No Mans Sky is too big to comprehend at this point

Sean Murray from Hello Games is as friendly as can be when showing off No Mans Sky, his companys insanely ambitious game. Murray and his team have a goal to create an infinite universe of planets, so he couldnt help but be amused when I asked what'll happen once players explore everything in the game. He responded with this factoid: if one million players were to explore only one planet in No Mans Skys procedurally generated galaxies, those gamers would likely never explore every part of that world. Like the universe itself, I have trouble wrapping my head around just how vast a single in-game planet is, let alone the countless ones that surround it.

No Mans Sky drops players into a dense sci-fi cosmos, then just hands them a spaceship and tells them to go exploring as they see fit. You could end up on a planet no one has ever visited before, finding rare resources that you can sell for more fuel to then head off even deeper into space to seek out bold new worlds. Or you could get stuck in an explosive battle over a trade route. Maybe you'll discover a new type of dinosaur. The planets are randomly generated, as is every piece of wildlife, every plant, and every chunk of land. The developers hope players will explore everything they see, discovering strange locales that Hello Games didnt even know the game could generate.

That sense of freedom extends to how Hello Games leaves goals open to the player. If you want to build up your ship for massive outer-space firefights, then focus on collecting all the resources you need to build a formidable cruiser. Or, you could just as easily become a botanist that flies to the least-explored planets to find unknown plant life. The possibilities for players seem as vast as anything else in No Mans Sky, though the current release date is also a bit nebulous. But really, when the game seems to be actually infinite, how will Hello Games be able to tell when No Mans Sky is finished?

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