'No Man's Sky' Release Date, Trailer, News, Updates, And Gameplay: Sean Murray Of Hello Games Talks To MIT About Using Bots To Do Beta Test [VIDEO]

No Man's Sky release date, gameplay, trailers, news and rumours

"No Man's Sky" is an upcoming game by Hello Games, where the player is dropped into an actual sized algorithm generated galaxy, with no rules, no objectives, and no missions, just unlimed exploration.

Originally announced at VGX 2013 with a trailer, the game was expanded upon at E3 2014 during the Sony presentation. Currently the game is set to land on the PS4 only, with a PC version potentially in the works too.

 It's expected that the game will arrive for PS4 in 2015, but that hasn't been confirmed by developer Hello Games.

"Basically we're doing a console debut on PS4. That's all we're saying right now. But that leaves open a PC version, which we really want to do", said Hello Games founder Sean Murray.

Sean Murray has also revealed the developer is using automated programing bots to explore the "No Man's Sky" universe, because it is so large no human beta testers could not possibly do it.

"We are attempting to do things that haven't been done before," said Murray to MIT Technology Review. "No game has made it possible to fly down to a planet, and for it to be planet-sized, and feature life, ecology, lakes, caves, waterfalls and canyons, then seamlessly fly up through the stratosphere and take to space again. It's a tremendous challenge."

Murray said, "if you were to visit one virtual planet every second then our own sun will have died before you'd have seen them all."

"We talked about the feeling of landing on a planet and effectively being the first person to discover it, not knowing what was out there," said game creator Sean Murray. "In this era in which footage of every game is recorded and uploaded to YouTube, we wanted a game where, even if you watched every video, it still wouldn't be spoiled for you."

Every planet in No Man's Sky is created by an algorithm that randomly generates the contents of that planet. This idea was origonally in Minecraft, where the land is randomly generated. Each planet one is subject to the laws of its solar system and can be vulnerable to erosion and other naturally occurring phenomenon. The quality of the light on each planet will also be affected on what is contained within its universe, such as a yellow sun, red dwarf or red giant for example. That's what is so interesting about this game, that they are taking real natural laws, and translating them into a game, letting them play out with interesting results.

"[The algorithm has] simple rules, but combined they produce something that seems natural, recognisable to our eyes. We have come from a place where everything was random and messy to something which is procedural and emergent, but still pleasingly chaotic in the mathematical sense. Things happen with cause and effect, but they are still unpredictable to us."