'No Man's Sky' players can't meet up with each other just yet
The universe of "No Man's Sky" is astronomically huge. Algorithms generated somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 quintillion planets for players to explore, meaning it's impossible for one person to see everything in their lifetime.
However, players have been wondering if the game will have any kind of multiplayer features. The company line has been that the size of the universe is so staggeringly huge that the odds of two players finding each other are almost nil.
In an act of poetic perfection, that actually happened on the day it came out. The results were, well, disappointing.
One player happened to notice the planet he was on had already been discovered by someone else, so they messaged the other person and organized a meetup. The "encounter" was streamed, but nothing happened. They were in the same location, but couldn't see or interact with each other in any way.
The corner of the internet that had built up "No Man's Sky" as a sort of all-game with limitless possibilities is disappointed by the results, but the story doesn't end there. The game's creator, Sean Murray, posted a series of tweets about the encounter, starting in chronological order at the bottom:
So, according to Murray, there actually are some kind of multiplayer features in "No Man's Sky," but they weren't working because of the game's enormous server load on day one. Awkward!
Hopefully two players can arrange a meetup again at some point in the near future when the servers are more stable, but the mathematical odds of that are fairly low, so we might not know about these features for a while. "No Man's Sky" was made by a small team and it already has several lifetimes worth of planets to explore, so the lack of direct multiplayer right now isn't a big deal.