"No Man's Sky" PC and PS4 will reportedly have a traversable cosmos of 18 quintillion life-size planets.
According to The Guardian, video game programmer Sean Murray claimed that if players were to visit the game's virtual planets at a rate of one per second, the sun would have died before players could completely see all the planets. The worlds were created by algorithms. Everything is generated rather than drawn or shaped by hand.
In "No Man's Sky" PC and PS4, players take on the role of an astronaut. Each player will start the journey on an undiscovered planet where they are the only person in it. Afterwards, players can board their ship, take off, and begin to tour the galaxy.
"We are attempting to do things that have never been done before," Murray said when the project was announced publicly. "No game has made it possible to fly down to a planet, and for it to be planet-sized, and feature life, ecology, lakes, caves, waterfalls, and canyons, then seamlessly fly up through the stratosphere and take to space again."
Unlike other video games, "No Man's Sky" PC and PS4 will continue to function regardless of human interaction. Animals will follow a set of daily routines. Heavy freighters will follow trade routes. Similar to the game's worlds, all this is based on mathematics.
The ultimate goal for players is to go to the center of the universe. While playing the game, players may not be able to meet each other easily. But, this common destination increases the likelihood that people will encounter one another on their journey.
"We don't know whether people will congregate or disperse," Murray told The Guardian. "I know that people don't like to be told that we don't know what will happen in our game, but that's what is exciting to us."
"No Man's Sky" will be published for PC and PS4. No official release date has been announced yet.
