No Man’s Sky is finally out, and it appears to be a massive success so far, if early indications are anything to go by. In the lead up to the game’s release, given the massive hype that there was for it, there were a lot of doubts about whether or not it would be able to deliver- but more importantly, there were also doubts about how players would respond to a game that is as fundamentally meandering (in a good way!) as No Man’s Sky is.
No Man’s Sky has generally been sold on the premise of ‘all players need to try and get to the center of the universe.’ But now that the game is out and apparently already success, Hello Games’ Sean Murray discusses in an interview with GameReactor how he never thinks of it as the point of the game at all- it was just something that the press and the audience ran with, because they found comfort in the fact that this game might have an objective after all.
“We originally had that in mind for No Man’s Sky and when press were on it we said ‘well you could try to reach the centre of the universe’, but we personally never saw that as the point of the game,” Murray said. “But a certain set of gaming and media press, and also some gamers, that made them just feel a lot better, they were like oh there is a goal, okay that’s fine then, but actually for us we didn’t set out to make the perfect game, like maybe through updates and stuff we can approach that, but we didn’t set out to do that. We didn’t set out to make the game that you could play forever, again maybe in two years’ time, after we’ve updated it loads it will feel closer to that.
“What we did set out to do, for just one moment you play the game, you land on a planet and you feel embedded there, that this is a real place. It’s something you’ve discovered for yourself and you have a moment of wonder, and for me that is unique to games that we can do that and I think totally justifies the game. The game doesn’t need to do anything else than that and I would be happy.”
Personally, I was always going to play the game just for the joy of exploration and the wonder of discovery- in my opinion, that is what this game is ultimately about. It may have taken most players actually playing the game to come around to that, but I am glad that they were able to see it regardless.
No Man’s Sky is available on PS4 now, with a launch for PC coming later this week.