Ars was treated to a closed-room demo of upcoming galaxy exploration game No Man's Sky on Tuesday at E3. There, packed in a tiny and extremely warm conference room with a dozen other journalists, lead designer Sean Murray showed off the current state of the game—starting off on an unexplored planet and eventually taking us up into the swirling colorful depths of space.
Honestly, the most fascinating thing about No Man’s Sky is Murray himself. Tall and thin, the British developer sometimes has trouble holding eye contact with the audience when we ask questions; he’s simultaneously aloof and brimming with excitement about being able to present the game. His passion is infectious—this is clearly a person who loves what he’s created and who can’t wait to share it. He answers questions at length, but not laboriously—he talks very quickly, almost breathlessly, giving in-depth but fast answers to the room and then turning back to the game and describing its features at the same fast pace. The only time he’s clearly at a loss is when one of the reporters in the room asks how many terabytes the procedural universe of No Man’s Sky takes up on Hello Games’ servers.
Murray pauses as if he's not quite sure where to start with the answer—procedural galaxy generation is one of the most well-covered aspects of the game, so asking this question is a lot like showing up to a dinner party and asking what food is—then he launches into a fast, very abbreviated explanation of how the entire galaxy is algorithmically generated and doesn’t exist as a complete dataset on a server somewhere. The reporter doesn't quite get it and asks the question again but a different way, this time asking how much storage space is used for each planet.
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