After a decade of solid updates and player numbers that would make most games blush, No Man’s Sky lead Sean Murray says the best part of the journey has actually been watching the team work together.
We caught up with Hello Games’ Sean Murray to talk about 10 years of No Man’s Sky, a journey that’s included some low lows and spacey highs. Asked about the best moments of that decade, Murray says the easy answer would be “when we hit the highest plater numbers since launch with [the Voyagers update]” or when the team won awards at BAFTA and The Game Awards.
But, really, player numbers and gold trophies pale next to the “more boring, slightly difficult answer.” Murray recalls moments where the team would play the Voyagers update together for the first time before its release, or the pretty transformative third-person camera option, or the player hub of The Space Anomaly, or… you get the gist. Coming together as a team to play something really exciting that “no one’s seen” before is “the real sort of development high.” (Just don’t ruin it by telling him how much No Man’s Sky DLC would’ve made.)
“Those have been a buzz,” Murray explains. “That’s when I’m going home and I’m just buzzing about it. And you’re like, ‘People are gonna love this.'”
Another example came when Hello Games put put the Beyond update, which was plagued with all sorts of bugs and problems. “We just worked really, really hard and I think we put out something ridiculous like 27 hot fixes in a week or something crazy.” Being able to work together so quickly was only possible thanks to “systems that we’d been building for years”, but the highlight was simply “the team just meshing together” and “solving problems just really quickly.”
“You know, so those moments are a real buzz,” he adds.