Latest No Man’s Sky demo answers one question, creates ten more

Following an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Sean Murray of Hello Games co-hosted a panel with New Yorker staff writer Raffi Khatchadourian. The 90-minute panel explored the history of Hello Games, their background, design ethos, and of course, No Man’s Sky. Those hoping for some megaton announcements regarding this mysterious game (like a release date) likely left disappointed, but Murray did manage to clarify one key aspect of the game — while creating about a million more questions in the process.

Procedural generation is one of No Man’s Sky’s tauted features, allowing massive worlds to be constructed in seconds. Hello Games uses carefully crafted algorithms to generate millions of interesting locations for the player, and then that reliable math can be used to take down and rebuild those locations again and again. What this allows for is “planet-sized planets” to be discovered, landed on, messed-with, abandoned, and returned to with very little loading. When you leave a planet, that planet is tossed out of memory to make room for the next. Think of every planet as a recipe that’s cooked every time you show up and you have an idea of how it works.

The problem, and the question on many people's’ minds, is what happens when you make a change to the world. No Man’s Sky allows you to kill creatures and blast holes in the terrain, potentially digging down into the planet to make discoveries within. When you leave, all of those changes — many assumed — were erased, making No Man’s Sky sound a bit gimmicky and potentially meaningless. Thankfully, Murray clarified that your changes are a little more complicated than that.

“Changes the player makes are saved locally,” Murray explained. “So if you start destructing the terrain, that’s saved on your own machine. And if you try and make — what we would consider — really significant [changes], some of those [changes] are stored on the server, along with the discoveries that you make. But in general, a lot of what you’re doing is considered insignificant. If you kill a creature, we scratch that, we save that that’s happened, but we don’t feel the need to like, kill that creature for everybody.”

Co-host Raffi Khatchadourian dug into the concept a little deeper before moving on, asking whether the destruction of a planet would constitute a significant change. Murray’s response suggests that you’ll have to search elsewhere for your planet-annihilating Death Star gun:

“The reality is that you can burrow holes and things like that, but what you’re doing in terms of the scope of a planet-sized planet is tiny. There are things like attacking space stations and things like that that we want to be shared because they are significant for the gameplay, but actually, your tiny little hole that you burrow, it might seem huge to you, but it’s not in the grand scheme of things.”

While it’s good to hear that you can make an impact on your own version of No Man’s Sky, Murray’s answer only presents new questions for me. Say I burrow into a cool cave and I want to take another player there — if I take them to that cave will they see it as a plain-old wall? Hello Games has insisted that seeing other players will be a rarity, but this concept of local changes vs. server changes seems to create some potentially odd scenarios either way. And if it’s all fine because your tiny hole doesn’t matter, and you’ll probably never see another player anyway, then I start to wonder what will matter in No Man’s Sky when it finally comes out.