Hello Games' Sean Murray impressed the audience and "Late Show" host Stephen Colbert with his "No Man's Sky" demo but no release date was announced. Murray did explain the inner workings of procedural generation in his appearance at the New Yorker Festival.
"I thought Morgan Freeman was God," Colbert told Murray, as quoted by PC Gamer, "You're actually my second God."
As noted by the website, the "No Man's Sky" demo showcased at "The Late Show" yielded new information for the game. For instance, the developer created its own periodic table and players won't know what their avatar looks like until someone else sees them.
Check out the Murray's demo and interview in the video below:
The following day, the dev appeared on the New Yorker Festival for a 90-minute talk hosted by Raffi Khatchadourian. Again, fans were disappointed with the lack of release date announcement but the panel did shed light on the "No Man's Sky's" much touted feature - procedural generation.
As GameZone explained, the feature allows the game to create massive worlds using "carefully-crafted algorithms." But what most people ask is what happens when changes are made to the world.
"Changes the player makes are saved locally," Murray clarified.
The dev distinguished between "insignificant" changes, saved in the player's machine and "significant" ones, stored in their servers.
"If you kill a creature, we scratch that, we save that that's happened, but we don't feel the need to like, kill that creature for everybody," the dev added.
Asked what would be a "significant" change in "No Man's Sky," Murray responded.
"There are things like attacking space stations and things like that that we want to be shared because they are significant for the gameplay, but actually, your tiny little hole that you burrow, it might seem huge to you, but it's not in the grand scheme of things."
But as GZ noted, procedural generation's concept of in-game changes could create "potentially odd scenerios."
"No Man's Sky" will be available for the PC and PS4 but no release date has been confirmed just yet.
