It’s been another busy year for No Man’s Sky. Not only has the exploratory space sim received three significant updates in 2022 – delivering some of the most meaningful revisions it’s yet seen its six years of post-launch support, developer Hello Games has been working behind-the-scenes on bringing the game to a number of new platforms in the not-too-distant future: Switch, PSVR2, iPad, and MacOS. Of those, Switch comes first, arriving on Nintendo’s console – alongside a major 4.0 update for all players – this Friday, 7th October. Ahead of release, Eurogamer sat down with Hello Games boss Sean Murray to discuss the ‘madness’ of porting to Switch, No Man’s Sky’s eagerly anticipated 4.0 update, the studio’s future, and more.
ON THE STATE OF THINGS IN 2022
Somewhat incredibly, it’s been over six years since No Man’s Sky’s infamously rocky launch, during which time the studio has released a staggering 20 free updates, massively changing the trajectory of the game, both in terms of its scope and reception. “In general,” Murray tells me when I ask about the studio’s outlook in 2022, “I think we’re a really happy team. I think we’re sort of the happiest and the most productive we’ve been in the last five or six years… The launch of No Man’s Sky, if I was to plot that on a graph, it was maximum stress, and there’s been a gradual but steady improvement year-on-year in how we do things and within the team. I think we’re enjoying it, you know.”
Murray attributes much of the studio’s revitalised outlook to No Man’s Sky’s ever-growing community. “We’re so lucky to have a player base that’s really engaged with this, and is really welcoming and happy,” he explains. “And we get to make updates that generally go down well, [and] we get a lot of buzz from that process… I feel like we’ve planted the garden and that was the hard work… and we’re tending to the garden now, so we can enjoy it. It’s there for our enjoyment as well. There’s a game there, and I can sit down and lose myself in it, talk with others on the team and get excited about features and stuff. I’m not saying it’s not hard work at times, but it’s a nice relationship.”
It helps too, says Murray, that Hello Games has settled into a development rhythm that’s able to support a closer relationship with No Man’s Sky’s community. “The first [big updates], we were spending a year working on those,” he explains,” and the community would see nothing from us, and it was a really different relationship. There was no room for experimentation, you couldn’t just try something out and see how people would react – we were grafting on it for a year, crossing our fingers. And the reason we were having to do that is because we were doing these big, fundamental changes, and we were laying a lot of groundwork for where we are now. And now, we have much more solid foundations, I think – it’s a joy, you know, any day there’s 100,000, a few hundred thousand people playing – and we’re able to put things in the game, and they can be out very quickly. And then we can… see how people react to it, and interact with it, and then build upon it.”
ON NO MAN’S SKY’S 4.0 UPDATE
As it happens, No Man’s Sky’s next major update – known as 4.0 – isn’t far away, arriving this Friday, 7th October, alongside the game’s Switch port. “Normally when we bump the version numbers,” explains Murray, “we’ve added a new platform… 2.0 was Xbox, 3.0 was VR, 4.0 is Switch… and we take the time to sort of revisit the fundamentals of the game a little bit… It’s a moment where we can do that, where we feel we should, because we’re going to have new players coming in, starting fresh”.