After four years of hype, development, and delays, it looks like the much anticipated No Man’s Sky is finally ready for mass production.
Founder of developer Hello Games Sean Murray took to twitter yesterday to announce the good news.
The game was originally meant to come out on June 21st but a last minute delay pushed the game’s release to August 9th, a move that prompted people to do the rational and level-headed thing, that is, send Murray death threats. An act that Murray handled with humor.
With the game having “gone gold”, the industry term meaning a game is ready for production, the odds the game will be delayed again are very low. So in one month and a day from now people will get their hands on the game and finally see the game for themselves.
If you have been living under a rock for the last four years, No Man’s Sky is an exploration game where players can explore, colonize, and catalogue planets in a procedurally-generated universe. Hello Games says that players will be able to explore over 18 quintillion planets, each with their own ecosystem.
Gamespot recently did a report where they put the in-game universe into perspective. According to their report, No Man’s Sky has the largest in-game explorable universe ever. The only game close to it is Elite: Dangerous with 400 billion star systems. By their estimate, with each system having ten planets a piece that still only adds up to about 4 trillion planets. That would mean that you would need “4.5 million copies of Elite’s galaxy to equate to No Man’s Sky’s.”
In case you think that these planets are tiny or can only be viewed from orbit; Gamespot also compared the planet’s surface area to other popular games. Open world games like Fallout 4 and Grand Theft Auto V have maps around 49 square miles, which is small compared to No Man’s Sky. Using a helpful Reddit user, Gamespot was able to determine that one planet in the game has the surface area of 78.5 square miles. The only map listed that is larger than it was Medici in Just Cause 3 with 400 square miles.
No Man’s Sky is a PS4 exclusive and will be out on August 9th.