Editorial: No Man's Sky's Wild and Wacky Road to Release

No Man’s Sky’s Wild and Wacky Road to Release

          This year’s been filled with nothing but hotly anticipated games. We finally got the long-awaited fourth Uncharted game, the revival of Doom, a Mirror’s Edge sequel, and there’s more to come in the later months, like the launch of the long delayed The Last Guardian and our first steps into the seventh generation of Pokémon.

          However, what many consider to be the biggest game of the year will be arriving at store shelves Tuesday. A game long shrouded in mystery, yet has everyone in uproar with how potentially game changing it could be.

          I am, of course, talking about No Man’s Sky.

          First seen at The Game Awards in 2013, this has been one of the most talked about and anticipated games of all time. Just the implication of a near endless universe to explore, with every inch of the over quintillion planets being procedurally and randomly generated, was tantalizing to gamers everywhere.

          However, it hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for developer Hello Games. It seemed as if No Man’s Sky was the Murphy’s Law of video games for some time, as it suffered delay after delay, as disaster struck again and again.

          Shortly after the first trailer was released, Hello Games’ office was flooded, destroying nearly everything inside. At this point, it seemed as if that this game of the future had been lost to Mother Nature, but the developers were determined. They cleaned up, and started again.

          At 2014’s E3, No Man’s Sky was finally unveiled in full, and people were blown away. See, this console generation hadn’t really seen much innovation so far. The new systems were all still trying to find their footing at this point, and while we had a lot of really cool games, there wasn’t anything that really stood out as new or original.

          But with this trailer, everything seemed to change. This game looked unbelievable. Hello Games representative Sean Murray showed off what the game could do, how the procedural generation worked, and more. As the year went on, they pulled back the curtain more and more on the game, showing us just enough to get us excited, but not too much that any of the surprises were spoiled.

          However, the game wasn’t without more issues as it slowly made it’s way closer to release. A lawsuit over the use of the word “Sky” plagued the game for ages, only being resolved a few months ago. Even more recently, another lawsuit came up claiming that Hello Games stole the “superformula” used to create all the planets in the game. This game’s been so plagued with controversy and disaster that in the last few days before release, gamers have been joking that “they only have a few more days to fit a couple more controversies in”.

          Arguably the biggest misstep came after the final delay. The game was originally set to launch in June of this year, however, it wound up being delayed because they needed just a little more time to make sure everything was working. That’s perfectly fine, in my opinion. Better have it later and good than right now and broken. However, some others didn’t feel the same way. Conspiracy theories flew with reckless abandon, with some people claiming that Sony themselves was keeping the game from them.

          Amidst all the chaos, there was still a lot of good. People wouldn’t get this upset about a game they didn’t care about, after all. A PC release was confirmed, the game had an excellent presentation at E3 2015, and a few songs from the soundtrack were revealed. To say No Man’s Sky had almost unlimited potential is putting it lightly.

          And what is the end result of all these wacky races? We’ll just have to wait for Tuesday to find out. I’m going to be picking it up on launch day, and reviewing it right here on this blog once I feel I have a good enough grasp on everything to give a proper discussion. This is a game I’ve been waiting for for a long time. I hope it doesn’t let me down.

Song of the Week

          Well, I really had no other choice this week. I’ve selected Supermoon, one of the main themes from the No Man’s Sky soundtrack. I’ve held off on listening to the rest of the songs as of right now (I like to experience soundtracks in-game first before I listen to them online), but if the rest of the music is as good as this song, we’re in for a wild ride.