With the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo moon landing this year, many stories from that era found fresh audiences - and one of the most inspiring ideas comes from the astronauts themselves, who famously spoke of how seeing Earth from space gave them a powerful sense of love for the planet. Space travel has a long history of beautiful sights. Who wouldn’t want to immerse themselves in these galaxies and their amazing sights? Still, even without VR, players will often find their jaws dropping at what they see onscreen.
No Man’s Sky won’t bring about that sea change overnight, but it’s difficult to imagine a game better suited to popularizing VR for casual gamers. The work has paid off.įor years, tech experts and gamers alike have been predicting VR will bring the next revolution in home gaming. Making a game as visually stunning as No Man’s Sky, with its huge map, compatible with VR gave its developers a staggering challenge. Plus, No Man’s Sky is constantly updating, building on its original framework, so there’s always more to do.īeyond, the latest update, brings expanded multiplayer gaming and VR compatibility into the mix, along with much more. There’s so much to see, and the game underscores the value of simply pausing and looking - one of the main tasks in gameplay is to use your “visor scanner” to identify and catalogue undiscovered species, just like you discover new planets (yes you can name them yourself). Not to mention the pleasure of simply zooming through the stars, dodging asteroids, discovering Saturn-esque ringed planets and red moons and more. Alien animals somehow familiar and psychedelic at once, prehistoric dinosaur-looking things and sleek, futuristic creatures alike. Desert planets like Georgia O’Keeffe landscapes on steroids. Wooded, green planets teaming with trees that would make Dr. Desolate, rocky planets beautiful in their Spartan landscape. Pure beauty ahead: slow down to appreciate itĪnd what scenery it is. In that way, No Man’s Sky does something revolutionary in today’s culture: it asks you to stop thinking of life as a competition, to break away from the mindset ingrained in all of us from year one, and retrain yourself to find pleasure in slowness. You could finish the primary storyline, sure, but with an open world so enormous, is that really the true purpose of the game? There really isn’t any beating this game. Mindboggling in size and scale, No Man’s Sky flips the typical video game experience on its head. It would take you nearly 585 billion years to see them all. Your character wakes up on one planet, but No Man’s Sky has 255 entire galaxies’ worth of planets to explore, totaling up to more than 18 quintillion worlds. The bigger the map, the more potential for exploring it for your own purposes and at your own pace - and where those other open world games offer a continent or a planet to map out, No Man’s Sky offers something much, much more expansive. That’s the whole point of the open world. These games have primary missions, or “stories,” that players spend vast amounts of time finishing, along with plenty of side adventures along the way.īut the greatest thing about open world games, especially for a casual gamer? You don’t need to follow the storyline to have a great time. Maybe you’re a knight crossing the hills of a medieval fantasy world to find magical artifacts, or a bad-seed gunslinger, ruthlessly galloping through the West in search of infamy and fortune.
#ENDLESS SKY MAP FREE#
“Open world” games invite players to wander their environments, free from the rigid, linear maps of old-school video games. This is the largest, most complex open world game of all time. The more accurate, less simple answer? The plot is whatever you want it to be. Along the way, you’ll discover endless new species of flora and fauna, fight enemies on land and in space, make connections with likeminded explorers, and more, as you search for the answers to the universe’s mysteries and your own. You’ve got to repair your ship, take off into space, and explore the galaxy for answers. What’s the plot of No Man’s Sky? The simple answer: you’re a space explorer who wakes up on an alien planet, without any memory of how you got there.
An open galaxy to explore at your own speed