No Man’s Sky has been marketed as an exploration-first game from the beginning, with its 18 quintillion planets hosting a wide variety of trees, lakes, and animals. But with so many lifeforms, there are bound to be a few that want you off their planet — or dead.
In the new “FIGHT” trailer, an AI voice on board the player’s ship warns of incoming hostile ships as they draw near to a planet covered in rocks and teal bodies of water. Elsewhere, a pilot fires his blasters with machine gun-like intensity as his ship approaches an array of much larger vehicles. Each hit clearly causes damage, with explosions visible on the hull from several hundred yards away.
On the ground, things are just as dangerous. We see floating robotic creatures, similar in design to the sentinels in the Halo series, which pepper the player with their small blasters. A much larger robot, with two giant legs and a much more powerful blaster on its “forehead,” also attacks. The trailer also gives us a very brief glimpse of combat with an organic life form; in this case, it looks like a cross between a spider and a crustacean, and it seems unfazed by small arms fire.
The difficult part of about judging this trailer, or any number of videos that developer Hello Games has released up to this point, is that you can’t be guaranteed to see anything like it when you finally play No Man’s Sky for yourself. In fact, you’re much more likely to discover your own deadly life forms, and the chance of actually running into another player — who may just want blood — is exceptionally low. Perhaps that’s for the best.
No Man’s Sky finally releases on August 9 for PlayStation 4 and PC.
