The journey of No Man’s Sky has been fascinating to witness. Starting life as a game that was widely criticized at launch for failing to live up to its lofty promises, slowly but surely, over the following years, it has grown into a massive, ambitious game that has not only made good on those initial promises, but even exceeded them, and has, as such, drawn in increasing numbers of players.
Frequent and significant updates have been hugely responsible for that. Just over the last year, the game has received significant expansions in Prisms, Frontiers, and most recently, Sentinel, while smaller content additions like Expeditions and crowd-pleasing crossovers have kept up the game’s momentum as well. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down anytime soon.
Speaking recently to IGN, No Man’s Sky creator and Hello Games boss Sean Murray said the development team still has a number of ideas for major additions and improvements they want to implement in the game, with more new ideas coming up at a constant basis on top of that. According to Murray, Hello Games isn’t done with its continued support for No Man’s Sky “by a long shot.”
“As many updates as we’ve done since launch and as many bucket list items we’ve checked off, our list of things we’re excited about never seems to get any shorter,” he said. “The team are always coming up with new things that they want to do with the game: new content and features and areas for improvement.
“I’m amazed that the energy levels are as high now as they’ve ever been. We tend not to talk about what’s on that list publicly but suffice to say we’re not done yet by a long shot.”
Murray added: “I like to think that No Man’s Sky is such a large game that we have to paint in broad brush strokes, and then each update comes along and fills in some finer detail but also paints more new broad strokes.
“That’s certainly the case here. If you look at our patch notes [for the Sentinel Update], you’ll see an absolute ton of refinements, but also huge new features too.”
There isn’t much information out there yet on what Hello Games is working on for No Man’s Sky beyond the newly-released Sentinel update, but we do know that the game will finally launch for the Nintendo Switch this summer, and will include all of its post-launch content up to and including the Frontiers update.
Meanwhile, Hello Games has other irons in the fire as well. In September of 2020, Murray revealed that the studio was working on new, unannounced game that he described as “huge” and “ambitious”. He also confirmed that it won’t be a No Man’s Sky sequel.