New No Man's Sky Trailers Show Space Stations, Portals
The imminent release of other, exciting space games has done nothing to dull my interest in No Man's Sky. I can think of three good reasons for that: it's the only space game with a colour palette taken from a '70s paperback book cover; it looks an awful lot like a procedural walking simulator on a universal scale; I have little clue as to what it's really about and I am easily manipulated by the withholding of information.
Aren't we all! There's two new trailers of the game inside.
The first video was shown at The Game Awards, which is an awards show for games which is a replacement for or a competitor to another awards show for games. I don't know.
I like the planet with the swoopy land beams. Here's a second, longer video which has more that's new to show.
This one reminds me of target renders you sometimes see for the future of games. "This is what we want our space MMO to look like in 2020." That it's not a target render, but a functional, in-game recording of No Man's Sky makes me want to imagine that all my dreams are true and that this is every game I've ever wanted to play.
But there are still only two verbs on display here. There's "explore", which we've seen across multiple videos, and now there seems to be "trade" or "collect", as the player deposits resources on a planetary landing pad in exchange for, I presume, spacebux. It's still unclear what you'll spend your time doing in the rest of the game. Will I be punching those long-legged striders in their trunks in exchange for alien wood with which to build mineral factories or interplanetary portals? Is it simply Elite: Dangerous with planet landing and colours?
There's no hurry for Hello Games to give out these answers, and there was some suggestion in our early interviews with Sean Murray that they wanted to hold as much back for players to discover as possible. That might mean waiting until its release next year - when it'll arrive first on PlayStation 4, and PC sometime after.