Reach for the Sky!

While I'm far from the most ardent gamer, I still get excited from time-to-time about an upcoming release. Over the past few years though, I've been playing and anticipating less and less. Maybe it's the symptom of getting older or there haven't been many jaw-dropping innovations in gaming lately. I lean towards the latter. (Or maybe it's Netflix.)

I think video games are, or at least have the potential to be, the most amazing art form man has ever known. (People who look down on video games and gamers are increasingly looking antiquated and outdated. Neckbeards are still fair game though.) They've already produced incredible works and forged indelible memories for billions of people. The best part of the art form is, in my mind, very much still in its infancy. It took thousands of years to go from hand prints on cave walls to linear 3D perspective on a flat surface. Now consider the leap from Pong to Call of Duty in just a few decades time.

Past five years though? ... Meh. Things have gotten prettier and more powerful. Always a plus. I'd argue the story telling aspect of video games has noticeably improved. No small feat. Outside of that though, meh.

There's one titles on the horizon that I think will be a game changer in every sense of the term: No Man's Sky.

If you're not abreast to the massive hype already surrounding this title, here's the skinny: The scale of the game is h-u-g-e. Colossal. If the developer, Hello Games, is to be believed, they've essentially created a digital universe.  It's hard to comprehend our universe's millions of discovered galaxies, each containing their own billions of stars. Try wrapping you're head around that. Now, if you're not like me and you can actually pull that off, put that same scale into a digital medium. No Man's Sky has 18-quintillion planets (yes, 18,000,000,000,000,000), most allegedly being about around the size of our earth. It would take one person approximately 500-billion years of continuous play to discover every planet.

That is simply mind boggling.

Clearly they don't have the amount of artists nor the time necessary to hand craft each planet. So how do they do it? Well, this is probably going to be a gross oversimplification, but as I understand it they use a programming method called procedural generation. With it, they essentially input coding, mathematics, that govern the laws of nature within the game. Then, anything that can be done within the parameters of these laws will be randomly generated. While there will be plenty of planets with similarities, it's virtually impossible to have an exact replica of another. All of this without any (that we know of) being crafted from the ground up by hand. In a way, the planets weren't created; they just "naturally" occurred.

Much of the same is applied the species of animals and the fauna that will reside on many of the planets. There are broad parameters set in place for what species of animals and plants can and can't be, trying to keep a balance between plausibility and intriguing possibilities. Then randomness within the confines of the coding's laws does its things and large amount of species are born across the digital universe. To what exact number? I've seen nothing in regards to that. From what has been reported though, it looks pretty impressive.

But the numbers and scale wouldn't mean all that much if it doesn't have quality content and gameplay. While some planets will inevitably be more barren and bland than others (looking at you, Mars), plenty are filled with said fauna and animals. It appears some have structures built by an advance race. Maybe some will even have intelligent life. Still a lot of unknowns, but from the few screen grabs we've seen, there appears to be plenty to explore and experiences and discover.

There are some combat elements as well. It appears you can go all Star Wars on people, engaging in spaceship-on-spaceship laser battles. There are also guns of the hand-and-shoulder fired variety. Apparently you can make it your life's goal to annihilate an entire species or all sentient life in general on a planet.  Not my cup of tea, but this is an open ended game. Whatever floats your boat.

If nothing else, it's awfully difficult to not get excited about a game when the creator -- who has been working on this nearly every day for years -- rips the controller out a journalist's hands while he's demoing the game and declares, "Wow, I've never seen that before." No wonder people are clamoring to see what No Man's Sky announcements will be dropped at E3 Exposition, June 16-18, the premiere video games convention.

While not a sci-fi enthusiast, I have a layman's love for cosmology. The scale of our universe wows and inspires me. A picture of it captured on the grandest scale to date was my desktop background for over a year. The possibilities of what's out there are seemingly infinite. It's a bummer that, in all likelihood, I'll never slip the surly bonds of earth. I've barely skimmed the surface of this planet, and loved much of what I've explored thus far. Every trip and adventure has been an absolute privilege. Doesn't mean I wouldn't jump at the chance to explore on a galactic level if I could.

This game could well be the closest I ever get to fulfilling that. I bet the same is true for many of us. Fulfilling that in a digital format, that's a true game changer.