A lot of gamers may have been disappointed by No Man’s Sky’s repetitive gameplay, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the game’s sheer scale. Not only is its galaxy home to more planets than we could ever hope to explore (especially as players give up on it), but each one is so massive in size itself that the game truly feels like it lacks the artificial geographic boundaries that usually keep players within a game’s usable play area.
Still, the planets aren’t exactly the size of, say, our own, as demonstrated in this time-lapse video by Conor Kearney, a YouTuber who traverses game terrain to estimate its real-world size. It took Kearney about 12 hours to walk halfway around the planet he used for this demonstration, meaning the whole planet would take about a day to traverse—significantly smaller than a planet or even our own Moon, but still an incredible distance in a video game.
Kearny explained the details of his walk (and the bugs and design choices that made it difficult) in another video, where he was left feeling unimpressed with the planet’s scale compared to promises made during the game’s marketing. I can’t blame him, after how poorly the final game has been received, but as far as convincingly creating the feeling that in-game planets are as large as real ones, I’d say that making them so large that no one would want to walk fully around one probably gets the job done.
(via Polygon)
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