No Man’s Sky Has Come a Long Way
Hello Games director Sean Murray recently spoke on the past, present, and future of No Man’s Sky, beginning with this mistake of playing the mouthpiece for the game prior to its release.
“We messed up some of the easy things, in that we talked about the game too early,” he said. “We were really excited when we talked about the game. We talked about features as they were in development. Press would say to us, ‘It’s so nice to get to sit down with a developer and just talk, you know? You guys don’t seem scripted.’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t. Why does everyone else do that?’”
“I now understand why everyone does that,” he added.
After initially launching without many of the features Murray spoke about, No Man’s Sky has made lots of progress as the team focuses on pushing the game into the direction Hello Games wants, as well as where the community wants it to go.
“We’ve done these major updates and each one will have a headline,” he said. “And I think often that headline isn’t necessarily things that the community is really, really asking for, because it’s something brand new. Like base building, when we announced base building people were like, ‘I’m off exploring. Why do I want to have a base?’ They love it now, but at the time they were like, ‘No, I want everything.’ But actually, normally that’s the headline and then you just scroll down through this massive page of lots of the stuff that we’ve added. And everything else normally just comes straight from the community.”
All in all, Murray claims that he’s the same person that he always was, but the creation of No Man’s Sky has changed his outlook as a person and for Hello Games as a whole.
“People are into the game,” he said. “The fantasy of the game and the theory of it was so huge, right? They’re like: ‘Just do that, deliver on that’. People don’t need all of these interviews and things that we were doing. In the nicest possible way.”