The expansive universe of No Man’s Sky and its 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets is so charged with possibility that many of us have tumbled into a No Man’s Sky of the mind, a place of gameplay possibilities that the actual, unboxed product couldn’t possibly match in depth. The world is rife with misinformation to match, as people hang on director Sean Murray’s every word, spiraling the smallest bits of new information into entire game mechanics and qualities built only from hopes and misplaced expectations.
Also, people really love killing stuff. So is it any surprise that there’s so much misinformation out there about No Man’s Sky and the upper limit to the horrors you can inflict within?
Our amygdalas twinkle every time we press a button and produce a squirt of blood or a slumped down ragdoll. It can be more than just an impulsive twitch. It can be downright predatory, as we look for ways to torment NPCs not originally imagined by the game’s designers. Our blood lust can even take on the pale aspect of the serial killer, as we make elaborate plans — like building a mod to kill Skyrim kids — to crack our death’s head designs through the games’ bedrock.
Take the self-destructive, sadomasochistic thanatos inside us, map it to a virtual world, then watch as mild people, domesticated and socialized people, become leering cacodemons, so hungry for death that no amount of fake murder could ever satiate that snarling thing inside them.
And so we plot to wipe out entire species in No Man’s Sk . Speciocide has become a hot topic and a big open question when it comes to the expansive universe. Species extinction has popped up in nearly every Q&A with NMS developer Hello Games and speciocide has been an area of particular interest in both articles and subreddit discussions.
Everyone wants to know, is it possible to erase a species from existence? With each creature in No Man’s Sky generated by algorithm, it’s possible, even likely, that some of the critters we encounter on our individual adventures will never be seen by any other human eyes than our own. But can we know for sure that this animal will be ours alone? Can we tear each one apart by particle beam and deny its particular form to every other human playing?
Despite some mixed information and claims to the contrary, you will not be able to wipe out a species and deny it to other players.
In an interview with Game Informer, Sean Murray clarified the extent of speciocide possible in No Man’s Sky. “If you do something of significance then we’ll try and share that,” Murray said, explaining that big events like the destruction of a space station or the elimination of an entire fleet will affect everyone else’s game.
“If you kill a bird, we scratch that off locally and that bird is dead… but we don’t feel the need to broadcast that to every single player,” Murray said.
Ultimately, the decision to not have speciocide resonate through everyone’s game came down to the practical hurdles of wiping out a species. “It’s not that hard to implement. It’s just that when we looked at it, in practice, it’s pretty much impossible,” Murray told Game Informer. “They aren’t thinking about an entire planet, an Earth-sized planet, filled with deer and trying to track down every single one of them.”
Rather than sending players on quixotic quests to murder 10,000s of animals, the No Man’s Sky team decided it wouldn’t incentivize speciocide by having it reverberate back through everyone’s game. If you want to kill, it’ll have to be for your own, personal reasons. Sorry, would-be Mauritius dutchmen.
