Hello Games announce No Man's Sky, a stunning procedural sci-fi adventure

No Man's Sky was revealed on Saturday during the carnival of awfulness that is the Spike VGAs/VGX, and in its two minutes of real-time footage it put every other cinematic/teaser/tech showcase trailer displayed there to shame. It's Hello Games' extraordinary follow-up to their Joe Danger series: a procedurally generated sci-fi adventure featuring planet-based and underwater exploration, spaceships, sandworms, dogfighting and - making ten-year-old me ecstatically happy - the ability to fly straight through the atmosphere and into outer space. It's the most inspiring game-related video I think I've seen all year, and it's awaiting your soon-to-be-widened eyes after the break.

Wow. I'm most excited by the focus on exploration: "every planet unique, every planet unexplored" boasts the trailer. Also: every planet may contain sharks. No Man's Sky takes place in a shared, procedurally generated universe - you can hear more about that from Hello Games' Sean Murray in the following video, if you can make it past the cringeworthy opening.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.

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