No Man's Sky, an action-adventure, open-universe survival game from Hello Games is bigger than it expected. Players discovered how huge the game is after it was released on Playstation 4. One day after its release, players have already learned that more species exist in the game than are known to exist on Earth.
According to Digital Trends, the 'No Man's Sky' game enables players to explore a galaxy that is created procedurally. It is generated with algorithms creating everything starting from solar systems down to individual species of animals and plants on their respective planets. Whenever a player has discovered something for the first time, they will record it into a shared catalogue and name it if they want. The discovery will be then credited permanently.
Hello Games, the games' developer, is mesmerized by the quantity of biodiversity that players already inputted on the catalogue. Sean Murray, the company's co-founder, excitingly tweeted the game's achievement of discovering 10 million species in the last 24 hours. According to Forbes, Murray's tweet generated numerous of breathless headlines across the internet. But comparing the game's number of species to the actual number of species on Earth is barely out of context.
There are various methods to classify species. Paleontologists express specimens based on fossilized bones; naturalists and geneticists has also they own ways of classifying specie. In contrary, the aliens in 'No Man's Sky's game is centered on features and behavior. Therefore, the way the game is defining the species is with the likes of a naturalist. According to some reports, Sean Murray's tweet does not really highlight the absolute number of species but just the discovery's relative rate. Otherwise, No Man's Sky is now available on PS4 and soon to be on PC.
