What’s that? It’s been 10 years since No Man’s Sky launched? Oh! That’s gone by a bit too quick! In that time the planet hopping survival game has changed drastically, starting life frequently derided for missing promised features, slowly morphing into what it is now. The game now has a massive mish mash of features that have kept people coming back year after year, and according to Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray, he could keep going as long as they do.
“If people keep playing it, I could work on this forever. I love it,” Murray shared with GamesRadar in a recent interview. “You’ve got to understand, this was a game that when I was a kid, you could have asked me, and I would have been like, ‘Yeah, that’s a dream game. I would love that to exist’. So I feel very lucky from that point of view, and I would be happy working on this.”
Murray continues to explain he finds a lot of motivation to work on the game thanks to having such an engaged community ready to pick up whatever Hello Games put down, but ultimately what the studio works on is down to the staff themselves. “We don’t really have much of a management structure at Hello Games,” he explains. “So we don’t really have the ability, even if we wanted to, to make people work on things they don’t want to work on… as long as they’re motivated, we’re happy to keep making cool things, but it has to come from the team having ideas that they’re excited about and things that they’re excited about putting out there in the world. As long as that happens, we’ll keep updating it.”
The developer does acknowledge that there “probably is some end date” for No Man’s Sky, but notes that if he was asked when work on the game would end five years ago, he’d have thought they would have finished it by now. “It is a surprise to me. I remember finishing Voyagers last year, which did incredibly well for us in terms of highest player number since launch, and then turning around to the team, and I sort of expected them to say, ‘Yeah, we’re kind of done,’ but instead they were just buzzing, because they’ve just shipped this thing.”
It’s strange to reflect on how long this game has stuck around for, and how much it’s changed over the years. Despite my excitement for it, I wasn’t one of those people that thought the game not quite being what was promised was tantamount to treason, but it didn’t fully grip me either. I’ve dipped my toes back in here and there and still haven’t quite latched on, surprised at the radical differences between those visits, and wondering if it will ever grip me again. I’m not entirely convinced, for my tastes there honestly seems like there’s too much going on, but ultimately it is a perplexing and interesting tale of redemption.
