With its latest update, No Man’s Sky is, again, expanding its immense scope. This new patch will focus on the cosmic side of things, introducing new derelict ships to be explored, players’ own space stations, and a feature that we’ve waited 10 years for: actual stars in systems.
With the introduction of real, 3D, interactive stars to every system in the game, No Man’s Sky edges ever closer to being the game we were promised in 2016. For those of you who don’t remember, Sean Murray of Hello Games overpromised just a little bit and told us that No Man’s Sky would have a real open space where you could travel to each part of a system manually.
That wasn’t true, though, and we could only get between planets. Trying to actually reach a star or go in a random direction outside of the system would eventually end up no-clipping you and bricking the game, since, of course, nothing existed outside of the playable area. And that had its own set of repercussions for the design, including the failure to deliver on another promise: realistic planetary climate and physics.
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Murray, back in those elder years, said that each planet will have a fully simulated climate that would be calculated by the game’s algorithm based on that planet’s proximity to the system star. The closer a planet was to the sun, the hotter it would be—and vice versa, those planets on the edge of a system would be fairly frigid and dark.
But without stars existing in systems except within the skybox for visual purposes, those two climate effects on planets were simply impossible to implement. Stellar proximity has a lot of other effects on celestial bodies, but those two were features that I, as a physics nerd, was very excited for. So you can imagine my disappointment when none of that was in the game.
And none of it ever got added, either, until now.
Since stars are real and present within No Man’s Sky‘s systems now, Hello Games has the potential to solve these two issues. All it takes is a simple algorithm to calculate distance and select from biomes or climates suited to set distances. It would add tremendous realism to each system and perhaps a lot of variance between systems depending on where each system’s planets tend to orbit.
Asteroid belts are now also in the game, so the studio definitely seems interested in deepening the simulation and realism of its cosmos, and while the title has definitely come a long way, I’m still eagerly awaiting this last addition before I can finally say that yes, No Man’s Sky is the game I imagined I would be playing an entire decade ago.
But even without these features, it’s still a pretty good game.
