Watch: building sky-ships in Worlds Adrift to fly into the unknown together
No Man's Sky meets Minecraft meets Sea of Thieves.
What a week for flying towards an uncharted horizon. No Man's Sky is here, finally, but how multiplayer is it? How much can you do with friends - or can you only talk to them about the places you've been, see their proverbial flags on the planets they've discovered? What if you could go there together?
That's where Worlds Adrift comes in. It's not a space game but it is a ship-flying game, and the whole idea is endless exploration in multiplayer. Massively multiplayer. Not so much so that you'll trip over people, but you will encounter them and you will fly ships with them - and you will fight them.
But Worlds Adrift goes one deeper than that. It wants those flying machines to be yours from the framework up. Will you create a galleon of the sky to be crewed by your friends, or will you zip around in a nimble one-person fighter? Where will you place the helm, the engines, the canons, the sheet metal armour? Perhaps you'll make your ship a doughnut in order to confuse attackers about where your vital components are.
Maybe you'll be destroyed anyway, and your craft will fall from the sky to rest on a floating island, one of a countless many, a mechanical carcass for someone else to discover - some intrepid explorer who, weeks or months or years later, will piece together the wreckage's story themselves. In Worlds Adrift, nothing disappears, and so player stories pile upon player stories, and a history is made.
Worlds Adrift is creation, it's exploration, it's cooperation. It's No Man's Sky but it's Sea of Thieves and Minecraft also, and its possibilities are fascinating.
I went to London recently to meet the people at Bossa Studios making the game (you may remember the name from Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread) and to record me playing it.
Game designer Luke Williams coaches me through and shows me ship building for the very first time. I'm talking about ship building from scratch - from imagining a framework you fix materials and components to. That part is towards the end of the video if you want to jump straight to it.
Worlds Adrift was unveiled at the end of 2014, and Christian Donlan wrote a Worlds Adrift preview at the end of 2015. Bossa raised an extra $1.35m to invest into Worlds Adrift recently, and the plan is to release the game in 2017.
Exactly when Worlds Adrift comes out depends on how various testing phases go. There are sporadic alpha tests at the moment and the plan is for closed beta tests before the end of the year.
Worlds Adrift is a PC game for the time being.