New No Man's Sky Trailer Explores Trading

No Man’s Sky [official site] is a big game set in a massive universe. As release approaches, we’re learning about all of the things we can do in that universe, and they’re all of the things we’ve been doing in big space games since Elite arrived in 1984. Exploring, fighting and trading. The latter is covered in the video below, which shows the actual swapsies interface. That’s new to me, as is the actual footage of hunting and gathering.

This is both reassuring, because I want to find cool stuff and swap it for even cooler stuff, and slightly alarming. The alarm is triggered by the thought of shooting rocks for hours on end, or picking every plant on a planet just to get enough resources to swap for a neato gun or engine.

But that image at the top of the screen is something entirely new to me, in the context of No Man’s Sky. It isn’t a variation on the same old flora and fauna, and it’s not the only thing that’s new. There’s a case with a gun in it in what might be a shop, a boulder being blasted to pieces one shot at a time, and actual inventory systems. I want to explore all of that, the actual doing of things, just as much as I want to take a million screenshots of a pink dinosaur.