No Man’s Sky Developer – PS4 Neo Would ‘Fundamentally Change’ the Game
No Man’s Sky is finally here and thousands upon thousands of PlayStation fans are neck deep in the ‘universe-sized sandbox full of choices’. With more than 18 quintillion planets to be discovered it should keep most fans busy for a long time to come. Launching on PC in just a few more days (Aug 12), the master race is impatiently waiting their turn to join in on the fun.
Announced back in 2013, No Man’s Sky has been a long time coming and from all early accounts the game is certainly impressive but just how impressive could it be on a more powerful machine. Sean Murray explains that while many games to get a ‘remaster’ treatment would certainly see improvements, a game like No Man’s Sky would see universe changing events.
If you play another game and if they do a remaster of that game, what they will do is up-res the textures and things like that. That’s because the base geometry, the base shape of the world, the way of playing is totally like lost, basically. 100’s of people have worked on it thousands of hours to create what you see. For our game (No Man’s Sky) it’s procedurally generated. So more powerful hardware doesn’t just mean upgraded textures or a higher framerate. It means we can fundamentally change the experience. You can have – and you’ll see this from our patch notes – we’re able to change huge things in the universe, because we have complete control. With more powerful hardware, we can have more trees, more leafs on those trees. The density or immersion of worlds, or new types of worlds could exist.
Of course, with an apparent reveal of the PS4 Neo coming on September 7th, the wait to see just what might happen to NMS on that upgraded piece of machinery isn’t really too far away. In reality, we’re probably a very long way away from seeing any drastic changes made to the just released game but it seems like Sean Murray and Hello Games are full of surprises so you just never know.