This is E3 2015 in motion
A picture paints a thousand words. A video does even more again. A gif… well, somewhere in the middle. So let’s join the cosplayers, tour some of the elaborate booths and dodge around the people-in-suits-that-didn’t-want-to-be there. E3 2015 is all about The Business, but it also has to be fun.
NVIDIA Shield TV review: the best Android set-top box you can buy
Never let it be said that Google gives up on ideas that don’t pan out the first time. Remember when it tried invading our living rooms with clunky, disappointing set-top boxes? And then when that very same software went on to find a life right on smart TVs? Think of all that as a prelude to where we are today — Google TV has given way to Android TV, and now NVIDIA’s cooked up an interesting spin on a formula that’s nearly a year old. The Shield TV’s gaming cred and sleek design make it far and away the most interesting Android TV setup we’ve seen to date, but does that mean it’s worth your hard-earned cash? The short answer is “yes,” but the Shield only shines brightest if you’ve got the right sort of hardware already in place.
Hardware
I dug into the Shield’s design in my preview, and the broad strokes haven’t changed. It’s a handsome, paperback-sized piece of plastic with some angular edges etched into the side and an ever-present green status light that quietly peers at you while you play. Around the back, you’ll find a full suite of ports — aside from the power jack, there’s a Gigabit Ethernet port, an HDMI 2.0 that supports HDCP 2.2 for 4K video at up to 60 fps, a pair of full-sized USB 3.0 ports and micro-USB and microSD slots. NVIDIA’s $300 Pro-level Shield comes with 500GB of internal storage. It also includes a copy of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, but I’ve been testing the $200 base box, which only comes with 16GB of free space. If you’re the type who likes to hoard media instead of just streaming it, that memory expansion slot will be a lifesaver.
The Shield is a surprisingly pretty little thing, but its real beauty lies in how easily it squeezes into even the tightest home theater setups. You can even prop it up vertically if real estate is at a serious premium, although the stand that helps stabilize it will cost you extra. (This is something of a recurring theme for the Shield, as you’ll see.) Inside the Shield thrums NVIDIA’s Tegra X1 chipset, which pairs an octet of 64-bit processor cores propped up by a 256-core Maxwell GPU architecture. I half-expected this thing to wind up in a car before I saw it in a dedicated TV add-on, but its media chops are undeniable; it’s about twice as fast as the company’s last-gen K1 chipset, and that was already plenty powerful for gaming when we took it for a spin in the Shield tablet.
Speaking of, I’d bet most people who’d even consider taking the plunge on this thing would do it because of NVIDIA’s gaming cred, so the pack-in controller is one thing NVIDIA absolutely had to nail. Its answer: to toss one of those Shield Tablet controllers into a box and call it a day. That’d be a much bigger deal if the thing sucked, but that’s thankfully not the case here. Like most other Bluetooth gaming controllers, NVIDIA’s takes plenty of cues from the Xbox 360/One design, save for a few twists. A quartet of touch-sensitive buttons lives front and center and they serve as your typical Android navigation keys. There’s a handy volume rocker down along the bottom edge of the controller, too, although it’s a bit gummy and sometimes needs cajoling before your sound levels get to be just right.
All the attention NVIDIA didn’t lavish on the controller was instead focused on the remote, a dark slab of brushed metal that feels really sturdy despite how light it is. It too has a microphone and all the buttons are clicky and responsive — full marks. And, as if to drive a stake into the hearts of the Apple TV and Nexus Player remotes, a touch-sensitive strip runs right down the center of NVIDIA’s remote so you can adjust system volume on the fly. The whole thing feels much more intuitive than the controller, too, which is probably why it’ll cost you an additional $50.
Software
The silicon inside the Shield is pretty impressive, but any set-top box will only be as good as the software it’s working with. Alas, Android TV hasn’t grown much since it launched last year, which is to say it’s still far from perfect. Your media recommendations, apps, settings and games all live in their own horizontally scrolling rows, and my beef really lives in that top row where Google tries to figure out what I want to see or hear right now.
While I was writing this review, Google offered me access to Pretty Little Liars on the Play Store and Hulu Plus (never watched it, despite my sister’s best efforts); two separate YouTube videos about pets; a Travis McCoy music video (I only know him from this ages ago); an episode of The Bachelorette (unggghhhh); and a link to download Telltale Games’ six-part Game of Thrones series. Only that last one is in any way relevant to my interests, and I’ve never searched for GoT videos on the Shield itself. Android TV’s predictive abilities are sadly underwhelming, especially considering Google is already sitting on data about what I like so it can serve me highly targeted ads on every website I visit.
It’s great, then, that searching for things with your voice works so damned well. Ask for Matt Smith and you’ll get a neat info card and links to videos he’s been in, be they on YouTube, Hulu or the Play Store (sorry, Netflix). Google does pretty well with meatier requests, too — asking for Oscar winners from a given year works like a charm, though it didn’t handle queries like “critically acclaimed sci-fi movies” with quite as much grace. The only two proper film results were 9 and 12 Monkeys, and not many people were kind about the former.
Still, I spent one particularly boring evening saying random names and titles into the remote’s mic and just… sifting through all the YouTube and Hulu results that came back. In fact, the only times voice search didn’t understand exactly what I was saying was when the Shield — for some obnoxious reason — kept insisting it didn’t have a network connection. Never mind the fact that everything connected to the same router was just peachy: The Shield occasionally did the networking equivalent of sticking its fingers in its ears and going, “Lalalalala, I can’t hear you!” Thankfully, the Shield has gotten a handful of updates since I first set it up and that’s not an issue anymore. If you’re specific with your requests, though — and I think most of us are — voice search is mostly a treat.
That just leaves us with all the stuff NVIDIA layered on top of Android TV, not that there’s a whole lot of it. The biggest features live in a Shield Hub row of their very own, and from there you can dig into yet another app store dedicated solely to games. Convoluted? A bit. Holding down the home button brings up a quick settings panel that’ll look familiar to Shield Tablet users — from there you can start or stop your Twitch broadcast, or grab a screenshot for posterity. If you’ve got one of NVIDIA’s GTX-series graphics cards, your Steam game collection doesn’t just have to live on your PC. GameStream lets you funnel the horde of digital titles you picked up on sale straight to the Shield and your TV and — surprise, surprise — it works very nicely. There’s also GRID, a subscription service that’s simultaneously free and a great addition to the traditional Android TV formulas. We’ll dig into those more a little later.
Performance
No one’s going to consider buying the Shield solely for its chops as a media streamer, but it does an awfully fine job on that front. Now, I haven’t bought myself a 4K television since the last time I wrote about the Shield, but I have spent some extended playtime with a friend who did and the results are mostly great. Between the strength of Google’s voice search and the picture quality the Tegra X1 is capable of pushing out, the Shield’s lean-back experience is easily one of the most fulfilling I’ve seen to date. The issue is, there’s only so much 4K content out there right now, and Android TV as we know it plays nice with just some of it. Netflix is its most obvious partner — you’ll get a nifty Ultra HD badge on super hi-res content in the app, and the Shield box has been certified by the media company. YouTube has its share of 4K video, too, but other major players like Amazon are noticeably absent from the mix.
Of course, you don’t just have to stream all your videos. If you really wanted to, you could hook up a TV tuner like those made by SiliconDust… but there’s a pretty good chance that route is just redundant thanks to the TV service you’re already paying for. Still, the live TV interface is clean, functional and offers all the information you’d expect from the usual grid of show listings. The addition of full-on USB ports around the back make it pretty trivial to hook up an external hard drive or two if you horde old anime episodes like I do, and getting them up and running on the big screen thanks to apps like VLC and Kodi is easy. Fun fact: Android TV boxes also more or less double as Chromecasts, so if you go for a Shield, you can ditch the dongle. At times, this little addition becomes a straight-up lifesaver. The number of companies and content providers making apps for Android TV is on the upswing, but for players that haven’t gotten around to it — I’m looking specifically at you, Crunchyroll — casting videos from their mobile apps to the big screen is a no-brainer.
Now, let’s move on to the meaty stuff; I suspect you’re all a little more interested in how the Shield holds up as an honest-to-goodness gaming machine. Well, between Google’s ecosystem of apps and NVIDIA’s connected gaming services, the answer is “pretty damned well, as long as your expectations aren’t too high.” Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: The Shield Android TV box won’t replace your Xbox One or your PlayStation 4, at least not completely. But it’s got moxie enough to try. It helps that the native stuff — apps coded strictly for Android — has gotten really damned good over the past few years. To wit: I spent my days with the Shield plowing through converted versions of Doom III and Croteam’s The Talos Principle, both of which ran admirably on the Shield and my 47-inch TV. Yes, they’re technically older games that were released elsewhere first, but they still provide a level of immersive, visually impressive fun that can be hard to come by on Android; I felt like I was playing Xbox 360 games most of the time. What’s more, we’re going to see a spate of biggish recycled titles (Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and Crysis 3, to name a few) hit the Play Store within months, so be on the lookout.
There are, of course, other ways to get your game on (assuming you’ve got a solid internet connection and a beefy router). First up is GameStream, which lets you stream games straight from the Steam collection on your PC to that big screen in your living room… as long as you’ve got the right hardware. If you want to GameStream at all, you’d better hope you built your last PC around one of NVIDIA’s GTX-series graphics cards — you’re SOL otherwise. Naturally, my two-year-old gaming rig (cobbled together with an AMD graphics card at its core) didn’t come close to meeting the requirements needed to get this going. The thing is, I’d bet that’s the case for most of the folks in the market for a streaming box for their living rooms. Anyway, I got my hands on an obscenely powerful gaming rig to put GameStream through the wringer, and after some software-fueled drama — it took a beta update to the GeForce Experience Windows app to finally make GameStream work — everything was peachy. (NVIDIA says mine was an edge case and that the fix will go live for everyone shortly.)
I put several hours into GTA V and Batman: Arkham Origins, both of which ran rocksteady without any additional setup or settings tweaks. Considering all the buzz though, I spent most of my time with the Shield poking around the world of Witcher 3, and that’s where some issues started to pop up. Just like watching streaming videos, though, quality can vary pretty dramatically depending on how much oomph your network has. Steering Geralt around Witcher’s insanely vast world usually looked pretty great (I’d still peg it at Xbox 360-quality), but those occasional flare-ups of network congestion meant picture quality could get smeared and blocky. Thankfully, none of the games I tested ever, ever ground to a halt because of network issues, so there’s at least that.
If that’s the case, your only chance to stream games you don’t own will come in the form of GRID, that streaming subscription service that won’t cost you anything just yet. In exchange for buying into the Shield vision, you get access to a slate of big-name titles that run on remote cloud servers so your teensy monolith doesn’t have to. My existing Apple AirPort only just met the requirements (sometimes the Shield would nag me about diminished quality as a result), but you know what? I’m still mostly floored by how well it works. Considering how strongly they hinge on timing and precise movements, I spent my time testing GRID by playing Street Fighter X Tekken and DIRT 3.
Despite the occasional network slowdown — a problem that more or less disappeared when I swapped in a high-end ASUS router — both games were fluid and perfectly playable. Things could get smeared and blocky once in a while, but that never got in the way of laying the smackdown with my man Ken and his furious Hurricane Kicks. And honestly, I found it pretty hard to argue with the $0 price tag attached to the service right now, though that’ll change soon too — GRID will switch to paid service come July 2015. The thing you’ve got to remember with either of these remote gaming options is that they’re just not as good as having the game running on a dedicated box in front of you. They’re close — startling close sometimes — but not quite the same.
The competition
The Shield stands alone in its melding of Android TV’s media catalog and NVIDIA’s gaming credentials, but that only means it’s got two broad categories of devices to compete against. When it comes to streaming boxes, there is of course the Android TV forerunner. The vanguard. The Nexus Player. We weren’t too thrilled with the thing when we first reviewed it, but that’s sort of the issue with reference devices: They’re meant to act as equal parts landmark and jumping-off point for companies to keep in mind while they make their own stuff. Putting that aside, though, it’s dirt-cheap at $79 and you could probably nab a bundle with it and an official ASUS gamepad for a little more than half of the base Shield’s $200 asking price.
If streaming is all you’re after, you could feasibly go with the even cheaper Apple TV ($69), which already has access to key media services like HBO Now. Still, you’d be giving up the ability to play games of any kind, and the hunt-and-peck mechanism for punching out movie names is just miserable compared to Google’s voice search. Oh, and Razer’s Forge TV — the only other game-centric Android TV box — just hit Google’s online store a few days ago. You’ll be able to stream PC games to it eventually and it’s a touch cheaper than the Shield at $150, but you can kiss all that 4K content goodbye.
Interestingly, if you’re tempted by the top-end $300 Shield with the 500GB of storage, you’ve got another decision to make: Do you get this, or an Xbox One (only $50 more)? Or a PS4 ($100 more)? The Shield will never beat them at sheer horsepower and graphical intensity, plus they can stream video all the live-long day too. Still, the Shield’s PC game-streaming chops and Android’s inherent openness just might help swing the battle in its favor for some really persnickety geeks.
Wrap-up
Let’s be clear here. If you’re going to buy an Android TV device right now — and that’s still a pretty big “if” — make it this one. The Tegra X1’s horsepower and fondness for 4K video make it the most future-proof of the Android TVs you’ll find right now, and the extra layers of gamer friendliness NVIDIA added mean it’s the most well-rounded of the bunch too.
And the caveats? Well, as I write this, E3 is winding down and Microsoft and Sony just gave their fanbases a few more reasons to get hyped. The price difference between the Shield and actual, dedicated gaming consoles is virtually nil, and if you’re a die-hard gamer with teams and reputations, you’re not going to give up your Xbox or PS4. More disappointing than that is how much extra you’ll have to pay to squeeze the most functionality out of the Shield. I don’t have a 4K TV, but I’d really like one now. I won’t have a fancy NVIDIA graphics card once I send this loaner laptop back, so there goes my days of streaming my Steam collection. I could always use GRID, but that’ll cost extra in just weeks now, too. Oh, and I like how the Shield looks standing up — guess I’ll have to buy a stand, as well. The core of the Shield experience is powerful, valuable and worth your attention; whether you re-engineer your tech to take advantage of it is up to you.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Google, NVIDIA
I wish I was a ‘Street Fighter V’ master
If there was one game I wish I could be good at, I wish it was Street Fighter V. Maybe it’s because I’ve played the series, in some form or another, for around two decades, maybe it’s because most of the other games I play aren’t really multiplayer. Sure, I love playing games, but I wouldn’t say I was good at them. I get bested in FIFA, destroyed in Halo, but with Street Fighter, I’m not that bad. However, I’m not a high-level player good either — something that was clearly demonstrated than when I played the latest iteration, the PS4- and PC-only Street Fighter V, here in LA, where I was beaten, occasionally thrashed. But I kept lining up for another go — or pushing the limits of my briefing time with Capcom. The latest iteration carries over the literal jaw-smashing, eye-popping visuals of the 3D reimagining of the series, but adds some next-gen graphical glamour. The game adds a new layer of strategy and difficulty with the V-System. The characters announced so far have been changed in a lot of important ways.
At the start of E3 , Capcom announced two new characters to SFV: Cammy and Birdie. That adds to the four players already announced: staples Ryu and Chun-Li, as well as M. Bison and Nash. If you’ve played a Street Fighter or two in your time, you might recall the character Charlie, a Guile-ish character from Street Fighter Alpha. This time, the same guy’s now called Nash — and his move set has switched from charging in directions (like Guile’s Sonic Boom), to a more hadouken-style quarter-circle rotation. Be prepared to discover all kinds of subversions, tweaks and additions to the game you once knew. Sure, that’s nothing new for Street Fighter, but this is the first sequel since Capcom cleaned house on it’s (officially) fourth iteration, which simplified game mechanics as it dragged the series (canonically) into 3D.
The major changes this time around are centered around the V-system: V-Skill, V-Trigger and V-Reversal. V-Skills you’ll be able to use at anytime and will vary across characters. With Ryu, it launches a parry pose that will (if you have razor-sharp timing) evade an attack without damage. You’re then free to attack your opponent without concern. With Chun-Li, it launches her upwards and forwards — like a jump, but with damage and a different arc of travel, making attacks harder to predict.
Once you’ve built up the V-gauge (separate to the super gauge, which is still there), you’ll then be able to launch the V-trigger. Again this varies between characters but it’s a far more potent way to turn the tables on your enemy. Taking Ryu again as an example, it charges his fists with electric current that increase damage of attacks while also adding stun properties. Sounds pretty damn useful.
V-reversals is the final component, and acts as a way of countering your attacker while you block. However, each character will counter in a different way. Some will knock your rival to the ground, while others will push them backwards. Depending on the character, your mileage may well vary.
After a short briefing from Capcom staff (that I admittedly ignored), I was fighting other attendees. (In the game, I mean). I lost. And at some point, as I tried to Lightning kick as Chun-Li, my opponent, playing as Nash, was teleporting around me. He shouldn’t be able to do that. (Worse still, no matter how fast I hammered the kick button, Chun-Li still wasn’t doing the lightning kick. I learned later that this was because the move had been remapped to a different input.)
I managed to claw back a round, and as I finished my opponent with a kick, he slams into a bus, which opens its doors, and carries him away. There was a chuckle… and then I got beat-down again in the finale. The gameplay itself feels a little bit slower than its predecessor: high-level players might take issue, but for more typical fans this means it’s easy to use the system of parries and counters that now exist. That’s not to say battles still aren’t fast and occasionally manic — they still are. The new changes here suggest that selecting your character will mean selecting your play style, even more so than previous titles. Capcom will be launching an “ambitious” beta for the game later this year on PS4 and PC. It will tie into preorders in the US, while a lottery in Asia and Europe will decide who gets to play a little early — and who may get a chance to master the characters early. And when you get good enough, you’ll hardly have to look.
Filed under: Gaming
Morpheus mech game ‘Rigs’ uses color to make VR less overwhelming
My most vivid takeaway from PlayStation 4’s new Project Morpheus game Rigs wasn’t what I expected. Sure, the first-person mech shooter handled like a dream at 60 frames per-second, and targeting my enemies simply by gazing at them was impressive. But how fluid the locomotion was and how aiming system performed were nothing compared to the game’s use of fun, vibrant blocks of color to keep the mood light and subtly nudge me in the right direction. I spent a ton of time in virtual (and augmented) reality at E3 this year and it was Rigs that was perhaps the easiest game for me to pick up, play and not feel like I was floundering about. Sorry, EVE: Valkyrie. With smart color palette choices developer Guerrilla Cambridge, responsible for PS Vita’s Killzone: Mercenary, was able to tell me exactly what to do and where to go without saying a word.
For example: When your mech is destroyed, you go through an automatic eject sequence where you’re propelled high above the arena. From this vantage point you’re given a handful of different respawn zones to choose from, each denoted with a green symbol. Once I chose where I wanted to return to the action from, the same green was onscreen again, this time in a sort of bubble that blocked out the outside world and then melted away once the action began again. It was a way to give a brief break from the game’s super-quick action. Every time I saw that green on the map, i immediately knew that it was associated with getting a new mech.
In Rigs the fastest way to earn points is by jumping through a gigantic yellow ring that sits horizontally, high above the center of the map. This has a color associated with it too: yellow. The ramps leading up to it and even the ring itself are yellow. Again, it’s an immediate association between a color and an objective or direction that immediately conveys what you need to do without the need for an onscreen prompt or other explanation. As developer Tom Jones (no, not that Tom Jones) tells it, those associations are key for more than one reason.
I really appreciate how the team uses color in the game because I’m a huge nerd for color. I spend way too much thinking about palette and color psychology. I mean, it took me three weeks to figure out the colors I was going to use in my apartment.
Tom Jones: To get it right, yeah.
Exactly. Rigs uses color in a really smart way to direct players where to go. Green means i’m respawning right now, and to get to that respawn point in the ari, I look for that green spot. Yellow is going toward the goal. How much thought and consideration went into getting that right?
TJ: From the outset we wanted to make a colorful game. We wanted to make a world that people would enjoy. It’s a sport so we needed it to be vibrant and colorful, it shouldn’t be a dystopian future or anything; it’s a sporting arena. That was really important. The harder challenge was finding not doing something that’s overwhelming.You can do too much [with color] and it’s like a visual overload.
Yeah, you have to be careful about using too much color because it can confuse the player.TJ: It’s kind of being selective in areas and landmarking areas, as well. It’s a multiplayer game so you need to call out areas on the map. I think one of the things we’ve done in VR is to push more of the colors to the background so the areas are more defined by bigger colors which are more easy to find in VR as well.
Does VR present different challenges for using color and your color palette?
TJ: The challenge is not doing anything that’s too overwhelming to people. Bigger blocks of color tend to work better than smaller pockets. It’s very hard with color obviously, because warm and cold tones can change your perception of depth within a scene and that can play with you a little bit when you’re in VR. We’ve struck a really good balance now and it really works for what we’ve got.
Check here for everything happening at E3 2015!
This interview has been edited and condensed
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Sony
ICYMI: Ramen by drone, creepy robot gloves and the week in sum
Today on In Case You Missed It: A Caltech research team is studying a species of jellyfish to see if its ability to rearrange limbs when injured could be used by the robots of the future; a Harvard glove prototype could restore gripping abilities in people with disabilities, but man is it the creepiest, alien-looking glove we’ve ever seen. We’re also including a great video of a ramen-making machine that has optional drone delivery; at which point we call bulls**t.
And because it’s finally the weekend and you just can’t read everything, we’re rounding up of some of the biggest headlines from the week that was.
From the cutting room floor: Boeing’s 787-9 Dreamliner has maybe the coolest near-vertical takeoff ever, made even better by a new YouTube video that shows the flight from several angles.
Let the team at Engadget know about any interesting stories or videos that you stumble across by using the #ICYMI hashtag @engadget or @mskerryd.
Filed under: Misc, Gaming, Robots, Transportation, Wearables, Science, Internet
Jameis Winston will use VR to prepare for his first season in the NFL
Jameis Winston, the NFL’s top draft pick, will have a number of tools at his disposal as he prepares for his first professional season. According to a report from Fox Sports, virtual reality is on that list. His team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, plans to purchase a VR system to use for quarterback development. Among other things, the tech allows simulations to be rewound and watched as many times as needed to understand how to perfect each play. This isn’t the first time an NFL team dipped its toe in the VR waters. The Dallas Cowboys already implemented a system for QBs that gives them a 360-degree view of the line of scrimmage. Players can get extra practice reading defenses and making pre-snap calls to teammates. Virtual reality also offers backups who generally get less time at practice another opportunity to prep in case they’re needed, and a number of college teams are using it, too. As for Winston and Tampa Bay, the team is meeting with vendors to find the right fit, and more importantly, tech that’s ready to be put through its paces.
[Image credit: Don Juan Moore/Getty Images]
Via: Bleacher Report
Source: Fox Sports
All the news you need to know from the final day of E3 2015
From Day Minus-1 to now, it’s been one of the most exciting E3s in recent memory. No new consoles, but lots of actually exciting sequels, ideas, games and cos-players. As we rub lotion into our lanyard rashes, we present our picks from the last day of madness. We’ll be delivering our final doses of gaming news today from LA, but we’ll all be talking about what was announced this week for at least the next year. Check out everything that game from our LA stint right here. Thanks for following along — now hit it!
Filed under: Gaming
‘Minecraft’ meets ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ in space
Imagine: Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, reclines behind a desk built out of spare rocket ship parts. A gleaming saber rests to his right. Sean Murray, founder of the independent game development studio Hello Games, sits across from him, chatting about Hello’s new title, No Man’s Sky. There’s a break in the conversation and an awkward silence threatens to stretch between the two, but then: “What do you think is the percentage chance that we’re living in a simulation?” Musk asks. Murray hardly has time to answer — he’s running late for an appointment with Steven Spielberg and his communications director is getting antsy. At this rate, they won’t have time to meet up with Kanye.
This is the true story of E3 2015 for Murray and Hello Games. No Man’s Sky claimed stratospheric fame with its announcement video during the 2013 VGX awards and again with a formal reveal during Sony’s E3 2014 press conference. It’s a neon-tinged, 3D, first-person exploration game on a massive, interstellar scale. No Man’s Sky is “infinite,” by all reasonable measures: There are 264 planets to explore, each of which features unique resources, animals, colors and landscapes. The game mimics a real-life clear night sky — each point of light that appears on the screen is a planet or a star, most likely undiscovered by any other player, prime for exploration and mining.
No Man’s Sky is as mind-bogglingly big as the conceivable universe. It seems like an impossible game, one that would take billions of years for a single player to complete. Yet, so far, it fits just fine on a PlayStation 4 and it’s also coming to PC. No Man’s Sky is made possible through the magic of generated content: Everywhere a player goes, the game crafts the universe directly around that character. The second a player leaves an area, it disappears on a processing-power level, though you can of course return to it at any time by walking or flying back that way. It’s a tricky, dense and time-consuming game to develop. “There’s a reason no one is making a game like this,” Murray says.
I got my hands on No Man’s Sky for PS4 yesterday, as part of a private guided tour provided by Murray. For a game so large, innovative and, frankly, unbelievable, it feels oddly familiar. It mimics Minecraft in terms of starting from scratch and mining a planet for resources, building on each new element to craft bigger and better weapons and gadgets. It also includes a “wanted” meter that calls in deadly robotic security forces if you murder any of the native wildlife on any planet – similar to Grand Theft Auto. And, there’s something that Murray equates to a complicated Pokedex, though I like to think of it as a new kind of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Every creature, element, planet or cool thing that you find gets placed in a grid in your own digital encyclopedia. When you discover new items, you’ll have to upload them to a Beacon to ensure they’re stored for the life of your game, even if you get pummeled to death by an irate, zebra-striped slug creature with four legs and horns.
There’s an excess of things to discover in No Man’s Sky, especially considering it’s not just the game itself that’s gigantic: Each planet is also huge. The worlds are legitimately planet-sized, meaning players can walk for days, weeks, months or years across their surfaces, discovering (and maybe blowing up) new animals, elements and technologies.
For example, I directed my ship toward a swirling red solar system and ended up on a neon green world largely populated by tiny goat-like animals that bayed like whiny, electronic toddlers if I got too close. (The sound effects are procedurally generated too, it’s worth noting.) When I landed, I immediately started walking, vaguely exploring the flora and fauna without paying much attention to landmarks or navigational tools. After roughly two minutes, I had completely, absolutely, without a doubt, lost my ship. I asked Murray how to find it: Press square on the DualShock 4 to send out a golden arc that sweeps over the planet and provides markers on your top-side compass, including the location of your ship. The golden ray also is your exploration tool, picking up and cataloging the animals and elements directly around you.
I hardly scratched the surface of No Man’s Sky during my 10-minute hands-on demo — but even if I play it every day for 80 years, I’ll be able to say the same thing.
E3’s ‘Into the Pixel’ celebrates video games as art
I’ve been checking out Into the Pixel since my first E3. Seeing video game concept art in a gallery setting is a beautiful way to unwind and get a minute or two of respite from the madness of the show floor. It’s also a chance to appreciate the downright beautiful art in a format that isn’t just a rote, diminutive art book that comes with the “special edition” of a video game. In the video below, Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences president Martin Rae explains what Into the Pixel is and we take a bit of a tour through the space. The standout piece this year? It’s from Far Cry 4 and right above this text.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
JXE Streams: Talking ‘No Man’s Sky’ with Hello Games
Another E3 has come and gone. This one was particularly spectacular. We got to play Volume with Mike Bithell. We got to talk about Yooka-Laylee with legendary Rare composer Grant Kirkhope. We even got to bask in the announcements of seriously unlikely sequels like Shenmue 3 while simultaneously reveling in brand new games like ReCore. E3 2015 was amazing, but we’re not done! We have one more developer stream in store for you. Join us on Twitch.tv/Joystiq at 12PM ET/9AM PT while we discuss No Man’s Sky with Hello Games.
Tune in right here to this post or to Engadget.com/gaming starting at 12PM ET/9AM PT. Want a chance to talk with the team at Hello Games about their new sci-fi epic? Then watch at Twitch.tv/Joystiq! How do you build a game with a procedurally generated universe full of thousands upon thousands of unique worlds? Let’s find out together.
JXE Streams will also be on the air starting at 3:30PM ET/12:30PM PT to wrap up E3 2015 and usher in the weekend!
[All games are streamed at 720p via OBS.]
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