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and good Thursday morning august eleventh here from the New York studios for cnet I am in the room with Ben Fox Rubin Roger Cheng and Jeff Bakalar for another episode of the 359 episode 94 and they 100 we're talking no man's sky yeah we're we're doing a little bit differently today one topic no man's sky you might have heard of it if you're if you're a gamer you've definitely heard if you have ears you've likely well look if you're a mainstream you know if you're you're my mom daddy will you haven't heard of it if you're Ben's mom right for me like I don't know a month ago i actually had really I mean I that's surprised I heard the name I had no idea what the point of the game was but you you remember when it was first announced oh oh you don't okay cuz it made a very significant splash it was that an e3 that was uh so was announced a little before in III but in 2014 they did a demo or 15 min it may have been that I saw and I forgot about it like just never registered idea it the whole high concept they never registered with me sure I never really cared I me I think the name popped up every once in a while I'd see it right that what is that whatever we're gonna get into that today know about what it is yeah we will we will talk about what the game is why are we talking about it in the first place exactly so we have to why is it we have an entire segment hell yeah mostly cuz it's Thursday and always got an expert here and we have to take advantage oh that's nice of you to live anyways we'll get started with the podcast very shortly but as always giving questions throw them out to the comments section or producer Brian will pick out the best questions and we will do our best really Jeff will do his best to answer this sure and then I have no real we have nothing to contribute here that's okay was still on a ps2 but don't admit that no you're not three secret 360 that's right with like a dozen of my games that's right ah yeah 67 I haven't even playing them you played any of those games you didn't you told me you started DMC I did I did all right let's get this thing on the road yeah right yeah let's do it all right uh yeah let's get started wanna be ready audio to speed and we are going in three two welcome to the 359 talk about all the top tech news of the day of the crap we want throwing screw it again bro yeah that's two strokes in a row it's a good you screw up he's feeling the phone yesterday yes feeling the foots that one of the 100 episode I don't everything to me yeah on episode 100 you should change the opening stick right I'll be the host yes yeah maybe like I got take it over forever oh dear God and I will leave this show alright let's let's do it again sorry Brian all right round two and three two welcome to the 359 when we talk about the top to tell what the hell is your grade is the text not big enough by tell you literally twisty right as I'm saying this so I don't know so did it this happened hey man it's not easy don't at ease ya don't it'll actually pretty darn easy edges can I do it no not you I I feel like I can do it just from memory cuz I'm such a big fan well there you see nine where we talk about the top tech news of the day and all the other crap we want to throw in there I'm Roger Cheng were you recording can we just do that and I'll just say I'm Ben Fox Rubin now all right come on sorry we already need to give you your Redemption intro alright good I'm serious yeah so are we take 532 as our numbers dwindle and in 32 welcome to the 359 we talk about the top tech news of the day and all the crap we want to throw in I'm Roger Cheng I'm Ben Fox Rubin and with us a special guest Jeff Bakalar hello I don't well me free beta yes yes so we're gonna be devoting the entire show to talking about one topic and that's no man's sky all right orna manski is nothing calling well what for one thing what is no man say we were just talking about this I wasn't really sure what that was it's a pretty high crazy concept that it's it's flown around video game is a video made by company called hello games from the UK it is uh ps4 and PC game independent if you want to label it like that uh hi concept is that it was this it was pitched as this sort of open universe sort of procedurally generated game which means the game can calculate things on the fly to give you a very complex number of possibilities while you're exploring different planets space travel game and the numbers are it's like it's the 14 Quinn I think the the numbers like eating four trillion if that is a thing there's thing i don't like about that number of planets fittingly in bed correct uh so the game until II an 18.4 quintillion which is just mind-blowing um so yeah that that's the high-concept the game came out this week and for a lot of people the game sort of wound up being a little different than what people were expecting that doesn't mean it was bad it just wasn't maybe the sort of hyped up unbelievably uh do anything explore anything and this is the last game I'll ever play sort of thing well it works what were people expecting to do people are expecting that sort of thing where it's like this game is strictly exploration and I'm never going to need to do anything else because I can lose my life inside this universe that the game people want creates they do want in one like I said they want to use HTC vive and you know oculus and leave them with a little more narrow it's a little more narrow what this game boils down to being and I'm not saying it's good a bit but what it boils down to is it is a crafting survival resource management game with space-travel sort of peppered in a lot of minecraft yeah well it's it's got slices of bags of mine shades in Minecraft I think um you know a lot of this a lot of scheme you spend in the menus a lot of it is like moving junk around in your inventory crafting stuff there's a few headaches involved in that sort of nitrous mchale asleep I know this sounds it's not boring okay so it's not boring you start this game off and there are moments of brilliance where the second you leave a planet you can't because there's very little loading involved yeah it is a remarkable thing planets are the size of planets you get to you know the atmosphere it is mind blowing every planet I've seen is different the animals on the planets are different because they're all sort of decided by math they all ran will generate oh they're not selling this gives a random it's not random because there is sort of a method to the madness meaning game does follow an algorithm a sort of set language that it picks and chooses thousands of animal elements and crafts them into a sort of presentable thing so you're not getting these like totally ridiculous looking AB tars they are resembling animals the way we understand animals to be so think about like 50,000 animal assets in the game sort of thing like re well its got rhinoceros feet a chicken head and a horse you know body my mind just blew yeah that's what's cool it is cool so the planets are varied some of them are cavernous some of them are deserts some of them constantly raining acid uh it varying temperatures it's really cool stuff some of them are water planets but it's not it's not as immersive as people expect what but it's not you know once you see 30 planets you sort of get the idea of like you know very for me you know and that's the thing everyone's gameplay experience is different right so you see a lot of different stuff to that the idea though and heard like if you name a plan you discover planets someone else can go and find the planner that is so true so it is true I actually five by the plan so apparently 1822 people did try and be on the same planet at the same time which when you really do the math how is that even possible that somebody would find a planet that someone else so sort of multiplayer source single player I wouldn't call it multiplayer all right all right well we got a lot to pack y know more about this well one room word about this game yes check us out on scene at checkout has Jeff's room his hands on I'm Roger Cheng I'm Ben Fox Rubin & I'm Jeff Bakalar thanks for listening whew man four minutes goes by quick I know ya RAB though yeah does it have to talk about yeah we didn't even get result get to the question is it fun yeah I know like us I come ask those born it sounded boring yeah yeah this game is can be fun so you go work at yeah it's like every marriage yeah the first thing two to three hours are short of spectacular inexpensive like you're leaving your you're fixing your ship you're you're adding components to it and then you finally take off by the way I was just talking to our whatever intern Jacob yeah and he said he was playing the game yesterday and he was stuck on the planet for two hours he never asked first one you never got to be an intern so he is it intern maybe he's got a like fizz around said the drones kept killing him and kept dying of comparison to death that doesn't make he might not just know how to play video games that could be it like I don't know like I and there nothing by this game it doesn't hold your hand really at all right it sort of just says like pay get off the planet you're like all right wait does it actually Sega like everybody tell you there there's sort of objectives that are in the lower right-hand corner of the screen and it'll say like fix your thruster yeah they're like all right you got a ship you use it you find out that you have to harvest elements to get enough carbon so that you can repair your thruster well then you gotta fuel the thruster and that requires plutonium so you go out in the world and you find plutonium and you mind everything with this laser gun that you have okay and you shoot these like crystallize growths out of the ground and they sort of just suck into your face and that becomes the things you can catch a series of never-ending fetch quests it's a lot of that it's a lot of harvesting um you know would you either way is super popular thanks to moody's but I also think like the delicate balance of it sounds like it could get repetitive really quickly for sure like there there's a delicate balance and I'm not sure this game has the satisfying balance that I think I that most modern games tend to sort of have um and again like this game is so much bigger than I guess it was ever maybe meant to be the game had such an unnatural response in a positive way that it just it got away from them it got away from the people making it got away from Sony I don't think anybody anticipated the audience reaction that this game did have its this and it's this coming to xbox at all no it's coming sorry you see later this what is it don't worry I'm not going well it's comin tomorrow oh yeah all right so look out for sobriety's Ryan do we have any question I see some songs we really don't rather than comment that's fine we have it haha I see a lot of laughter that's good we are funny I know BOTS you got it alright well hello bot well good night Bob John YouTube yes but um all right i mean like i guess we could wrap it up another sniffing last questions about the game yeah do you have anything else cuz i'm happy i guess just bottom line is it is it fun yes or no i'm gonna say yes for me it's open I don't think it's for everybody I think a lot of people who maybe only heard about this game casually yeah on a surface level will it be expecting one thing pop it in loaded up and be like what the f is going on right now there's no story there's no hand-holding there's no real narrative right there is a bit of a sort of story all you kind of know is that you have to get to the center of the galaxy the center or is it the universe center of the universe there's like a big glowing orb in the distance when you finally technically impossible yeah but for the purposes of this fictional video game okay okay with that um and we also don't get attacked by drones they say you're able to warp in between star systems yeah they sort of say hey the path to the center is if you hop along these star systems oh so you sort of follow that rat okay uh what school is like you know you'll be flying through space and you'll see a planet in the distance it'll be like hey at this speed it'll take you six hours to get there but then you engage your pulse beat up engine and it's like oh now it'll take four minutes and then if you go even faster you'll get there in 30 seconds so that kind of stuff is cool but that's all things that need to be fueled you're constantly keeping aware of all these things rafting is upgrading a lot of plates at the same time and this is what I want to know yes this um does this kind of provide some sort of blueprint for more games like this this is a kind of a trend that we may be going in where it's high-concept huge universe types of games I don't think you'll get that on a mainstream level this is an indie game yeah this is an in a game it's a very small team that that made this game but I think the notion of procedural generation is like mind-blowing when you really give especially with these new updated consoles coming out you're giving a lot of power to the developers and the people who are able to harness that and use it in creative ways we'll really start to blow people away but this is like a great it's not the first time anyone's done something like this but it's a great first effort in the sort of planetary you know building giving give me an if I like so if I like playing the sims and minecraft is this my alley um maybe yeah maybe you're not building things in mind in no man's sky the way you are in Minecraft reporter spores is really the only way to describe the sort of animal generation stuff that's going on there sure are about halo good topic if your get a laugh and you're probably not gonna like no man sky affair only like Halo games exclusively you're not gonna like no man ski the only the only relatable part is that you're in a spacesuit in both thumb that's it I can you know and you'll fight robots every now there you go they're drones in Halo sort of Thor yeah kind of yeah Guilty Spark that's right oh you are a halo guy yeah you know it oh yeah all right let's uh let's wrap things up okay let's wrap things up for the week alright alright been a good week down I know if you liked anything you saw or heard here check us on cnet.com our podcasts also available on itunes google play music tune in feedburner soundcloud that's it yeah we're good i'm out next week this week sad to miss me too much and then after that we're gonna be going on to episode 100 oh my oh yeah yeah big episode 100 cool so All Right see y'all next week later you