No Man’s Sky is filled with weird creatures. At least, that’s what the Internet would have you believe. But the truth is, the animals in No Man’s Sky are normal as hell. It’s you, not the alien, who’s the weird one. And that means the game is working. It’s creating truly immersive environments, filled with crazy beasts that fit in perfectly with where they live. The only thing that doesn’t fit on the planets in No Man’s Sky is the player.
No Man’s Sky Creatures: You Are The Interloper
Almost everything in No Man’s Sky is totally seamless. The worlds, the transition to outer space or hyperspace, the movement between the surface and caves and the ocean—it all looks and feels totally natural. So do the creatures you run into. They’re living on those planetside environments. And for each planet you discover, the flora and the fauna seem to fit right in. Take a look at some of the galleries of “weirdest creatures” online. And yea, they’re pretty strange looking beasties. But all of them look adapted to their actual environment.
It’s genuinely shocking how well the creatures of No Man’s Sky fit into their landscape (this all applies to fauna, too). It’s easy enough to make an algorithm to generate crazy, creepy creatures. It sounds a lot harder to create animals that feel natural in the world they’re generated on. Somehow, No Man’s Sky manages to do just that.
Think about marsupials—kangaroos, koalas, bandicoots. Marsupials are weird, right? Sure, in isolation. But they aren’t weird in the context of Australia, a dry continent with few other mammals and a less competitive environment. Or think about crazy deep sea fish or giant tube worms, which are total nightmare fuel on their own… but are perfectly adapted to their unique environments.
That’s what the weird tentacle monsters or horses that look like sexual organs in No Man’s Sky are like. They’re only weird out of context. You, not they, are the outlier. In the planet you see them on, they’re as normal as can be—because they’ve evolved to fit that environment. Except in this case, evolution came via algorithm.
