In a recent interview, Sean Murray has discussed once again the complicated launch of No Man’s Sky, the space exploration game that was released in 2016 on PC and PlayStation 4, and dropped on Xbox One down the road.
The game, you might recall, was very much controversial back in the days because it lacked features that had been promised throughout the promotional campaign, and also because it was sold at full price while it was being dealt with as an early access product.
Talking about all that, Murray told PCGamesN that he felt that the game was already “complete” to a certain degree when it released because he wanted it to achieve two fundamental emotions and he noticed that the original version (later expanded with a lot of free updates) managed to do so.
“No Man’s Sky, when it released, for what we wanted it to do, we kind of felt like it was largely complete. I would have killed for a little bit more time to work on the game,” he said. “But I would sit and play it and think, ‘Yeah, it evokes the kind of emotions that I wanted it to evoke.’”
“Things that I sat down and years before talked about with other people on the team – there’s very few games and make you feel lonely, right? It sounds weird to want to make you feel lonely [laughs], but that kind of thing,” Murray added.
“But very few games and make you feel a sense of awe or wonder, or whatever. I felt at times, like not all the time, but occasionally we were hitting those things. So, I was really happy, I knew to an extent that the game would be a bit polarising, but that was really unique. I hadn’t really seen that that much before.”
No Man’s Sky is releasing a brand new expansion this summer, called Beyond, that will further extend the multiplayer and social experience, on top of adding a virtual reality mode for PS4 and PC. Lots of things have happened since the original launch, and luckily enough we can all agree that it is a complete game now.
