Don’t expect so much hype this time
Hello Games has seen the good and the bad with No Man’s Sky. It has seen the dangers of unchecked expectations and the blowback of unrealized promises. It has made right on an underwhelming game, eventually redeeming No Man’s Sky by turning it into something vast and detailed and excellent. It has been quite the ride, and it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that a title with the potential to deliver so many in-game stories ended up as a rollercoaster of real-world stories.
But Hello Games and its founder, Sean Murray, are about ready to create new stories. Hopefully, this ride won’t be quite so bumpy.
In an interview with Polygon, Murray reveals that the studio is in the very early phases of planning its next major project. Murray says it’s “a huge, ambitious game like No Man’s Sky,” but emphasizes that it’s not a sequel. Making sequels is antithetical to the reason Murray and Hello Games’ other employees went indie in the first place.
That’s all the information we have for now. Murray seems gunshy about divulging too much too fast. He has a history with that sort of thing. Ultimately, he’s happy with where No Man’s Sky ended up, but regrets the emotional wringer that the initial launch put his employees through. He’ll probably look to avoid that with this next game, and that might mean publicizing it less.
“A lot of [press] opportunities were put in front of us, and we were told that they were the right things to do and I look back and I’m not sure that they were super, super important to the overall outcome kind of thing,” Murray says. Whatever No Man’s Sky successor ends up being, Hello Games likely won’t promise the world this time.
Hello Games’ Sean Murray on the studio’s next No Man’s Sky-sized game [Polygon]
