'No Man's Sky' Xeno Arena is 'Pokémon' meets 'Spore'

'Spore' was a kind of monster builder and battler with space themes

I remember the hype around No Man's Sky and the unrealistic expectations placed on the small team. They did promise a lot and delivered a programmatically generated universe, but it felt empty.

The launch caused a lot of people to bounce off, and coverage at the time was rather unforgiving. Over the past decade, that team has pumped out multiple free updates that have transformed it into some combination of space life sim, Minecraft, and Star Wars.

It really is a living, breathing, near-infinite universe limited only by the math.

Like Minecraft, I enjoy jumping into No Man's Sky for a couple dozen hours once a year. Except, with this game, it's almost always busting with new content and gameplay mechanics.

The latest is Xeno Arena, which everyone is calling Pokémon, but it's not quite that. The world's reference point to collecting and battling monsters is certainly Pokémon, but that isn't the only example.

A screenshot of No Man's Sky showing two monsters fighting on a virtual arena surrounded by space aliens in spacesuits — That arena is a little too on the nose for Pokémon

Since the creatures are algorithmically generated and the player names the species, it feels more like Spore. You played as a kind of god that could guide the evolution of a creature by upgrading and designing it with various parts.

Ultimately, your creature could form a civilization and go to space. The other creatures were made up of the available parts combined in certain ways to give them different attributes.

No Man's Sky works by having a giant library of creature parts and attributes and an algorithm that combines them based on coordinates as the input. Obviously, there's more to it, but that's the idea.

I haven't had a chance to play the update as I write this, but it looks like you'll be able to travel the galaxy and find the best creatures for fighting, racing, and other activities. Breeding and customization are obvious features.

The trailer most definitely tried to evoke Pokémon with its music and style. The announcer and cuts between scenes even gave 2000s-era ad vibes.

I love that it took them 10 years to do it, but they looked at their growing encyclopedia of space life and said, "What can we do with this?" And the answer was "Let them fight."

I have no doubt that I'll be checking out this new update for No Man's Sky while I wait for Light No Fire, the studio's Earth-sized fantasy realm.

A fantasy world with a large mountain, monsters, and a stone town shown in a screenshot for 'Light No Fire' — 'Light No Fire' looks like it could be a rather interesting take on the generated world concept