No Man's Sky breaks all the rules of play

It's no exaggeration to say that No Man's Sky has been one of the most-hyped video games of the past few years. The title, developed by Hello Games, has broken one of the cardinal rules of video game marketing in promising the player something close to true freedom. Of course, gamers worldwide immediately took notice. The thought of a nearly infinite game world -- not just in scope but in possibilities -- intoxicated us with dreams of a game unlike anything we had seen before.

On the surface, this seems silly. No Man's Sky, at first blush, looks like any other space-faring game. You have a ship. You have blasters. There are planets you can land on. No, what sets this game apart is something much more important, a philosophy that informs the entire game and therefore the way that players interact with it.

In most video games, even open-world affairs like Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto V, developers create fairly linear games to allow for scripted storylines and emotional beats. The player is given a list of missions to complete across the map so that they can follow along a story that the developers have crafted just for them.

No Man's Sky doesn't do that. Here, the developers have simply created a huge, living universe that is procedurally generated as the player, well, plays. They then focused their efforts on giving the player abilities and tuning the rules of the world. This means that the 'game', as it appears on screen, is mostly determined by the player's actions. The developers have said multiple times that the game's guiding philosophy is one of freedom. The way the missions are set up, the way the game is written, it all allows the player to create their own story, to write the game as it is being played.

This is completely new for a game of this scale, one that focuses on the single-player experience. Other games, like EVE Online and Second Life come close, in that they let multiple players come together to create the story of the game together, but No Man's Sky is attempting to let players do this on their own and allowing them to, in essence, create the game they want to play as they play it.

Hello Games is intentionally messing with the rules of play here, the way that players interact with the game, and it's not without risk. Many are comparing this game to Spore, a similarly ambitious game that ended up falling short because it did not end up offering the sort of freedom it initially promised, instead breaking the gameplay up into chunks that all seemed somehow familiar. Spore did not fully commit to its innovations (or the developers simply did not know how to create a game that would), but it appears as if Hello Games has figured it out.

Time will tell what the game actually turns out to be upon its release on August 9, but Hello Games has, if nothing else, committed to an idea of player freedom that fundamentally changes the basic way a player will interact with the game. The question will be whether or not that is enough to create a compelling gameplay experience, or if players will be content to leave the game's story unwritten.