There's been no shortage of opinion on No Man's Sky since it released last week, and now developers from around the industry are chiming in with their takes on the infamous space exploration game, and some of them are rather profound. While fan opinion ranges from "boring" to "incredible", developers seem to have a much more intuitive response to the game in terms of the translation from game systems, to immersion, to the emotional response of the player.
Here's what a few of them said:
Samantha Kalman, director of Timbre Interactive (Sentris)
"I think it's a profound achievement in scope and scale."
Alexis Kennedy, a founder of Failbetter and creative director on Sunless Sea and Dragon Age: The Last Court
"Imagine an alternate universe where Star Trek had had no plot or characters, just a different colored planet with different shaped rocks and new animatronic puppets each week; but Nicolas Roeg directed, and Jim Henson had done the puppets. I'd watch at least a few episodes of that."
"No Man’s Sky is essentially European, echoing Elite, Mercenary, and Captain Blood. If you’re expecting Wing Commander you’ll be disappointed. In the context of the prior games in the genre, it’s nice! But the style of the genre is ‘empty space,' letting your brain fill in a lot.English devs in particular have a long history of making expansive space exploration games. Not just Elite but Damocles, Starglider, etc. (It's surely no coincidence that the pre-eminent American designer of these games, Chris Roberts, grew up in England.) The design is: 'here's an infinite procedural world. I hid a game in here, see if you can find it.'"
"I felt surprisingly guilty harvesting resources from a pristine landscape, especially since it involved shooting them. When I realized the Sentinels were drawn to me based on the rate of my pillaging — I felt like the designers had done something good. I like the idea of games moving away from the idea that you can take anything you want from a place (or its people) to survive."
Source: [Gamasutra]
