IGN continues to dole out morsels to the starving fans of No Man's Sky as part of their July IGN First presentation. This time they sample five random planets. I think it's cool that the weather on a planet depends on whether it exists in its solar system's "Goldilocks" habitable zone--the first evidence that No Man's Sky will try for at least some measure of astrophysical scientific accuracy instead of being a huge Star Wars-style sci-fantasy romp.
That said, the narrator Ryan McCaffrey indicates that another planet they visited was "biologically barren" and thus rich in natural resources. Pardon me Mr. McCaffrey but that planet doesn't look barren to me--it's paved over with exotic red grass and mushrooms. Exobiologists would be thrilled to find some single-celled plankton on an alien world, much less a mushroom. You want barren? Try the sun-scorched surface of Mercury, or maybe Venus, where it rains sulfuric acid, the pressure at the surface is a pulverizing 90 atmospheres, and the average temperature is a breezy 864 degrees Fahrenheit. That's frikken' barren.
Only time will tell if No Man's Sky will have truly dead, desolate worlds like, well, the rest of our solar system as we know it, or if each planet will implausibly be a minutely different grassland with weird colored mountains. That said, I really like the vista of that last planet--emerging from a cave onto a balmy paradise, with the crescent limb of a moon in the distance.
