The scarily ambitious No Man's Sky contains an entire universe of infinite possibilities in a single video game. Previous trailers for the game captivated last year's E3 audience, showing purple dinosaurs, green oceans, fleets of neon pink cruisers, and spaceships capable of blasting between habitable worlds.
This year at E3 we got to see a live demo that jumped right into the game and immediately demonstrated the insane scale of the universe. While the demo was brief, it filled in a few details about how the game will work — including the way you'll be able to explore the universe's endless star systems and warp between them.
Most impressively, this entire universe has been created by a tiny team of independent developers. Ten-person indie outfit Hello Games would need a thousand lifetimes to create by hand the millions of assets required for No Man's Sky — instead it built the game to procedurally generate stars, planets, and lifeforms, using base prototypes to create weird worlds of long-necked thunder lizards, lime-green grasslands, and continents covered in lush, orange forests.
There's still no release date for No Man's Sky, but as Hello Games completes the presumably trivial task of adding the finishing touches to an whole universe, it says to expect the game to be out "soon."
Check out our Sony E3 live blog for the latest updates and our E3 2015 event page for all the news!