No Man's Sky

OK, I'm back home from the event now and will try to convey some of my thoughts in a not-as-rushed manner as when I was giving updates live from the event via mobile.

Overall, it felt awesome to see the game live, in person on a nice big TV right in front of me. It's really beautiful -- the colors, the shapes, everything. It looks amazing and I kind of wanted to run up there and take the controller from Sean so I could play.

Yeah, I'm disappointed -- but not at all surprised -- that we didn't get a release date, and that Hazel and the guys wouldn't entertain my query about the release date of the release date.

It was weird when Sean corrected himself from talking about the center of the galaxy to the center of the universe. I'd thought you start in one galaxy and try to get to the center of that and then maybe get access to other galaxies that are part of the larger universe. But maybe that's changed, or maybe Sean just misspoke tonight.

One bit of news: Sean says the "reality is" that you can't destroy a planet to the point where the destruction becomes important enough to save on the server for other players to see. That will only be stored locally for you. He did reiterate that attacking fleets and the like would be saved universally, though.

For folks like me who have watched every existing NMS video and read every article, there just wasn't that much new. Much time was spent going over Sean's history in the games industry and the founding of HG. The stories about Project Skyscraper and a small team and all that stuff we in the sub already know.

Some tidbits from those stories:

Heavy gaming influences for NMS are Peggle and Journey, which Sean called two of the greatest games ever. The former because it has what Sean calls "juiciness" -- a system that constantly rewards the player. Sean compared it to Doritos -- not good for you but carefully constructed to make you want more. Journey, he said, is like a nice restaurant -- high quality.

Pixar is a heavy style influence for HG -- particularly on Joe Danger.

Metaphor comparing skyscapers to modest, Swedish homes: AAA games are the skyscraper -- so big and so carefully designed. Small architecture you can moreso put your stamp on it. A HG co-founder (Dave?) asked Sean, to urge him to leave big gaming companies and found a smaller studio: Do we want to build our own unique house or haul bricks for someone else to build a skyscraper with?

Sean hated working on AAA shooter-style games, coming into work and just "shooting thousands of people" every day. Sean called the money he earned at EA "blood diamonds."

Joe Danger was influenced by Grant moving out of his parents' house in northern England to be closer to the team. He found an old box of toys there and brought it into the office. The guys spent lots of time playing with the toys -- including an Evel Knievel figurine -- using them as inspiration to figure out what type of game to make. They ended up sending the action figure off of some big ramps and into another business's neighboring area of the office space, perhaps annoying its employees.

One funny moment was when they showed a bunch of old scifi book covers on the screen that the team drew inspiration from. One was a book called "God Whale." Everyone laughed. Made me think about Space Whales a bit. But what about Space God Whales? Oh shit.

Sean says procedural generation is the way to go because computers "unlike Grant" aren't lazy and never tell you 'no.'

The aesthetic of some planets gives Sean a Zelda vibe. He said the E3 planet reminded him of The Witness.

Anyway, I felt like it was worth going. I do wish I got a chance to ask my a question during the Q & A, or that we got a bit more gameplay info. But it really was awesome to see the game played live right in front of me on a nice big TV. It made me better realize how fun it's going to be to do that myself someday (hopefully) soon.

Good questions. The first thing we saw, game-wise, was a (I think) new trailer. Music and quick cuts of various aspects of the game. I think I've watched every bit of publicly available footage so far and I saw some scenes I hadn't seen so far, like a planet moving in front of its star in an eclipse-like scenario.

Later, we saw a demo of how the planets are generated. The barren flatworld, the sine world, then a couple worlds with more nuance and detail.

Then, we saw an actual gameplay demo. He was using the same system as that demoed on Colbert last night. He used the warp function to go from world to world and sometimes went into a debug camera to move around in the sky. We saw lots of different creatures. Big ones, small ones, flying little butterfly ones. Ones that looked like they had platypus tails. Saw lots of different weather. It was cool to see him sit on a planet and stop and talk about it and to see the sky get a little darker as time went on due to the planet's rotation.

In general, it was nice to see this in person and not as rushed as at E3 or on Colbert or with dumb IGN guys getting in the way :-)