I Saw a Brachiosaur!

I SAW A BRACHIOSAUR!

After publishing ‘Joe Danger’, the games company ‘Hello Games’ revealed their plans for an altogether more ambitious title, ‘No Man’s Sky’. This game, they promised, would be the ultimate sandbox. Forget GTA with its recreation of a US State; NMS promised an entire universe, with 1:1 scale planets to explore, each with its own unique flora and fauna.

In order to give a taste of what was to come, Hello Games released a short trailer. The footage showed the first-person perspective of an adventurer emerging from a cave and stepping out into a jungle. Various insects and small animals scurry among the alien trees. And then, these giant creatures, looking a lot like long-necked sauropods, are seen wallowing in a lake.

The trailer showed other stuff, such as space-based combat and the ability to fly to other planets, but who cared about all that? Just look at those dinosaurs!

A couple of years later, the game was released. It was not long before ‘No Man’s Sky’ became a topic of discussion, although the theme of these discussions was not often positive. Basically, people felt that there was too large a gap between what had been promised and what was in the actual game.

Search ‘No Man’s Lie’ and you will find plenty of videos that list all the promises that were made which were not in the game itself. Some of these are pretty funny. One of my favourites shows the original trailer with its majestic sauropods, accompanied by the stirring ‘Jurassic Park’ theme, before cutting to footage from the finished game with a ludicrous looking T-Rex and the ‘Jurassic Park’ theme being badly played on a harmonium. You should check it out, it’s really funny.

But it did have a serious point to make. Where were those sauropods? It’s worth noting that, not only did they feature in the trailer, they are also shown in screenshots on the DVD case itself.

When people played NMS, though, no such dinosaurs were found. Was this another lie from Hello Games?

Some investigative types dived into the game’s code and discovered that those types of animal did exist, it was just that they rarely appear when you play ‘No Man’s Sky’. I can attest to that. I have clocked up well over 150 hours and I never saw a brachiosaur.

Until, that is, a few days ago. There I was, exploring this desert planet, when I noticed the long neck of a sauropod-like alien creature rising up over the edge of a canyon. It actually felt pretty exciting to see it, almost like getting a glimpse of a snow leopard or some such rare animal. Here’s my screenshot to prove my discovery

So, there we are. I saw a brachiosaur, which proves they do indeed exist in ‘No Man’s Sky’. Oh, and after the initial disappointment, Hello Games busied themselves and released several free updates for the game, which have gone some way to making it the game we were promised. The next update is due in a couple of weeks and, among other things, it will make NMS the biggest Virtual-Reality-compatible game on the market. I believe VR will be the perfect match for NMS, which to me has always been predominantly about exploring and discovering. Imagine how cool it would be to physically gaze up so as to see a brachiosaur towering over you!

Thanks to Hello Games for the images.