No Man’s Sky developer: ‘I don’t know necessarily that we’re a good role model’

‎Sean Murray shares his takeaways form the last two years of NMS

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No Man’s Sky has been through a hell of a journey: I should know, I was there day one! It was a trip seeing the game evolve over time and hit its true potential, and the same goes for Hello Games studio head Sean Murray.

Speaking to Game Informer in the latest issue, Murray gives a pretty candid post mortem on No Man’s Sky, most notably explaining that he doesn’t necessarily think that the team is a good role model of how to handle “saving” a project after a rocky launch. Murray lays it all down: “I don’t know that we necessarily have the answers or anything. I know that, for us, we could see that people were really enjoying the game. There was a lot of noise, a lot of noise about what is often industry-wide problems.”

Murray goes on to confirm that those problems include overhyped E3 appearances, early releases, and “things like that,” sins committed by No Man’s Sky. Explaining his position, Murray says that although he agrees with “a bunch of it,” the fact that Hello Games is such a small developer means that they can’t solve every problem. He says that wading through all the “noise” he eventually found solutions from players, and “once [they] locked on to that, that was a super helpful thing.” Murray learned to take all the criticism, good and bad, to help fix No Man’s Sky, musing that in some cases, someone would complain about something that also annoys him.

He seemingly isn’t done with the game yet, despite the massive launch of the recent Beyond update. Responding to whether or not Beyond was the “final” big update, he vaguely notes, “I don’t want to guarantee what we’re going to do in the future, but at the moment we’re still really excited. I’m working on something else in my spare time, but for the team No Man’s Sky is something we really enjoy.”

No Man’s Sky will be studied for years to come on what not to do and what to do when launching a game and supporting it respectively. Whether or not some disasters-at-launch projects like Fallout 76 will join it remains to be seen, but as such a small studio, Hello Games possibly pulled off a miracle.

No Man’s Sky [Game Informer Issue 318]


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Managing Editor - Chris has been enjoying Destructoid avidly since 2008. He finally decided to take the next step in January of 2009 blogging on the site. Now, he's staff!