Hello Games are showing off No Man’s Sky with IGN, and the first episode of their showcase has been revealed.
Featured above – you can view roughly 18 minutes of the game – unfortunately, most of it is stuff we’ve seen before, like the transitioning from planet surface to outer space, to hyperspace, and finally to other galaxies, planets, and so on.
However, we got tiny glimpses into some real mechanics in game – the first being the wanted system, which is clearly taking a page out of Grand Theft Auto’s book. The more crime you commit, the more of a wanted level you’ll get. Naturally, this means the local authorities (the sentinels) will come after you, to which you have to evade to lower your wanted level. It’s not clear if this is only relevant to that planet, or if your wanted level carries with you across solar systems.
It’s worth pointing out that not only are the planets procedurally generated, the ships and weapons are as well. There are reportedly “hundreds of thousands” of variants between ships and weapons that you can obtain.
Resource gathering was shown – the developers at Hello Games have created their own periodic table that all of the resources are based off of. Environment destruction was briefly shown off, with a piece of ground hilariously breaking the laws of physics, and the ability to even “dig” holes via shooting through terrain (in this case it was a resource you can mine). Your rank will improve depending on your ship and the type of hyperdrive that you currently use in your ship.
Your ship, your weapon, and your suit all have inventory, all of which can be customized via installing technologies (which are also upgradeable and craftable). We’ve also learned that you can traverse on planets with hostile environments, which require upgrading your suit (they might be toxic, radioactive, or lack oxygen, etc).
No Man’s Sky is currently in development for Playstation 4 and PC.