Sean Murray Breaks 2017 Silence on No Man’s Sky
The silence of Sean Murray has been notorious among the No Man’s Sky community, but after months of hearing absolutely nothing from the Hello Games Director, we finally have some noteworthy comments. Sean Murray made an appearance at GDC this past week to give a talk entitled “Building Worlds Using Math(s).” During the talk, Murray described the complex procedural generation methods used to create No Man’s Sky’s multitude of planets, and he discussed the early days of development, when it was just him having fun working on the engine in his spare time.
Murray said:
“I just wanted to sit down and write something completely different. Mainly, selfishly, because I just thought of the things I wanted to learn about, and then I started to write [the engine for No Man’s Sky] that had those things in, I guess. And that was fun, that was a really fun period in my life where every evening and weekend, I was coming home from coding all day and I would write my little engine, and it was really fun.”
One thing is clear, once the public hype train fired up, the fun began to disappear. With growing expectations, came growing pressures. Murray goes on to say:
“Then we showed it, we showed the first trailer, and from then on it was like, it was like we were building a rocket ship being fired into the sun with the skin burning from our faces, right? It was like, it was a bit of a rollercoaster ride from then on. But at the start it was genuinely just a hobby and something super enjoyable.”
You have to feel a little sorry for Sean Murray and company because you just know how hard they busted their ass to get that game right. No Man’s Sky is nowhere near the same game it was at launch, yet so many people have moved on. At the end of the day, No Man’s Sky appears to be a case of a developer’s ideas being bigger than their ability to execute. We’ve seen this with so many games and it won’t be the last time.