It’s been a long road for No Man’s Sky. The game quickly went from heavily hyped to heavily criticized, after launching without many promised features. After several years of updates, however, the sci-fi game is in a good place, and it’s set to change once again with today’s huge Origins expansion, which doubles the amount of variety in the game and adds new features like volcanoes and a greater breadth of plant and animal life.
Hello says No Man’s Sky is more popular than ever, but its slow-burn success does raise an interesting question: what’s next for the studio? The team has previously released smaller-scale titles like the arcade game Joe Danger and, more recently, the beautiful adventure The Last Campfire. However, according to Hello’s Sean Murray, the studio’s next project could well be something much bigger.
“We’re a small team, and [releasing small games like The Last Campfire] would be fine,” Murray says. “I wouldn’t have a problem with that. But that’s not representative of where we’re at. Actually, I think our ambitions have grown, if anything, doing No Man’s Sky. And I feel like it’s left a little bit of hunger, there’s a lot that we feel is unproven. Just from the point of view of what No Man’s Sky was and seeing opportunities — with how cool the tech is, and how cool procedural generation stuff is — but also just for the future in general. No Man’s Sky left a bit of a hole for the team of things that they wanted to prove going forward.”
But don’t expect to hear much about this mystery project any time soon. One of the biggest issues around No Man’s Sky was outsized expectations; the game that launched in 2016 was missing things that many players expected. That was fixed over time, thanks to a large number of updates over the last few years. But it’s a mistake the team doesn’t want to repeat.
“It’s not something that we’re in a place where we want to talk about it a lot,” Murray says of the new project. “We talked about No Man’s Sky too early, I feel, and we hopefully won’t do that again in the future.”
