‘No Man’s Sky’ is finally here, but PC and PS4 players won’t cross paths

After three years of hype, No Man’s Sky was finally released Tuesday, and players are beginning to explore the 18 quintillion planets that make up its universe. The release also brings new details about the game’s multiuser component.

No Man’s Sky is built around a shared universe, where players can feasibly end up bumping into their friends — even though it’s unlikely to happen, given the enormous number of planets to explore.

Unfortunately, PlayStation 4 and PC players won’t be able to cross paths in-game, according to a report from Videogamer. It’s been confirmed that the two versions of the game are using different servers, and as a result, they aren’t linked together.

To be clear, cooperative play was never intended to be a huge part of the No Man’s Sky experience. Rather than teaming up to take on a challenge in the vein of something like Destiny, interactions with other users are far more sedate — choosing a name for a planet that you discovered and seeing that moniker pop up in other player’s games is the most prevalent way of affecting someone else’s experience.

In fact, the mechanic of naming places and species is apparently feeding into a lighthearted experiment run by the game’s developer, Hello Games. Studio co-founder Sean Murray detailed this investigation in a Reddit Ask Me Anything discussing the game on the eve of its release.

“We are running a control experiment to see who names things the most juvenile things,” Murray wrote. “Let the games begin!”

It remains to be seen who will come out on top in the race to impress Murray and the Hello Games team with childish names for creatures and planets. Based on some of what we’ve seen of the game’s weird alien races, players have their work cut out for them.