For people who want a better idea of what this game MIGHT be like, we're thinking it's going to be a more console-friendly version of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II
That game also procedurally generated planets and a whole galaxy and such, it just did it with graphics that look like Star Fox 1 (in the same year Star Fox 1 came out actually). The game before it did this but without the ability to actually land on planets. Someone recently brought to my attention
an iOS game heavily inspired by it where you just fly around freely, orbit planets, and deal with people. Elite Dangerous at launch (this month I believe) is going to be like that but with modern high-end PC graphics, adding full planet exploration later on (probably after NMS comes out). There hasn't been a game like this on a console since the NES version of the first Elite.
In these games there isn't really a progression but there is a world built of factions and lore. So I guess it's kind of like a space Skyrim with no main quest? You just do jobs for people and that might piss off one faction or befriend you to another, and it just keeps going.
I know I'm probably wrong, but there's multiple ships on that cover...and they don't seem to be enemies. Group exploration with friends maybe??
Probably non-hostile ships. If NWS is anything like the aforementioned games, it'll probably have factions you can befriend or antagonize.
Honest question: what is the appeal of No Man's Sky?
Are they aren't challenges to overcome or skills to learn? Every demo I've seen just shows you going from a randomly generated planet where there are blue trees and orange lakes, and then you fly out with no big transitions like Star Wars Battlefront and go to another planet and there are yellow trees with orange lakes this time, ooooh.
Like...is that it? Exploring random generated content in the absence of any real developer-crafted level design because the team is so small? A cadre of random sidequests that probably won't be more complex than the boring tedium that populates Destiny's explore mode? This is what everyone is excited about?
It's been confirmed there will be upgrades you get for your ship, and even whole new ships you can buy. There will be people who give you jobs (quests basically). It's heavily implied like 1% of planets will have intelligent people on them whom you can interact with, probably in the same way. Even the 90% of planets that are dead rocks in space will probably have resources to gather.
All these reactions make me really interested in what the reaction will be to the PS4 version of DayZ, because that game is sort of the same thing, just in a world based on real satellite data. Games like this and Minecraft are kid of just a bunch of factors and systems thrown together, and people perpetually survive within those factors. Games like this are rare on consoles which I guess is why we're getting these reactions.