No Man’s Sky Has Destructible Terrain, Vows To Make Resource Gathering Fun
No Man’s Sky has been in many gamers’ most anticipated lists for quite some time since its reveal, and yet its main focus as a game is still a bit hazy. Yesterday Eurogamer published a massive interview with Managing Director Sean Murray specifically trying to address this topic, and while many aspects of the game were touched, there was some new information as well, such as the fact that No Man’s Sky will feature destructible terrain.
You can see the terrain is destructible, which is something we haven’t shown people before..
We’re not sure how much we want to say because I don’t want it to become the thing. Even showing this I’m nervous, because people will think, ‘Oh, right - it’s like Minecraft’, and then it becomes that. ‘It’s the Minecraft in space game!’
This also ties into how Hello Games is trying to make resource gathering fun in No Man’s Sky.
So, a thing that we haven’t really shown off yet is resources. We’re not generally showing this - and it will look better in the finished game - but you can scan by pressing [the square button], and you can ‘see’ certain resources… You can look around..
Resource gathering in every game is normally super boring, and people purposely make it like a chore. And we want it to be fun. It’s something we’re still playing about with. It’s quite fun to be able to do it from a distance, and we also have this grenade thing. Now this isn’t how it will look - it will be like plasma ball - you’ll just have to trust me. And that blows holes in the terrain. And if you’re really good… [Sean expertly levels the surrounding scenery]
I find myself just doing this, being on a mountain and scanning and then just destroying everything around me. Doing the usual stupid things of drilling a hole and having an animal fall into it. Stuff like that keeps me amused. And when people are like, ‘What do you do [in No Man’s Sky]?’, the reality is, for some people just that, and that’s fine.
All of this sounds great, especially as I wholeheartedly agree about resource gathering being super boring in most games. That said, I still secretly hope that there will be serious opportunities to group with friends as opposed to the highly sporadic occurrences hinted by the studio so far.
No Man’s Sky should release some time in 2015 as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, although it will be later be ported to PC.