When No Man’s Sky launched in 2016, it was met with near-universal disappointment. After months and years of excitement, players seemed underwhelmed at the product that launched. Now, five years to the day of the game’s initial release, Hello Games’ founder Sean Murray has looked back on what has been one of the most surprising and best turnarounds in gaming history.
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In a recent post on the PlayStation Blog, Murray took a look back at the journey and noted that while it hasn’t “always been easy” for the team at Hello Games, the thing that has always been their “guiding star” throughout the course of updating the game has been the community behind No Man’s Sky. “Behind every update, every video, every feature and line in a patch note is a team that cares so deeply for this game,” said Murray.
Since launching in 2016, No Man’s Sky has released a whopping 16 updates to the game, all of which have been done in an effort to get No Man’s Sky closer to the product that many players hoped for when the game was initially announced. Of course, the sheer amount of updates released took a lot of work, work that Murray sometimes marvels at having gotten done.
“It’s hard to imagine how we launched so many major updates so close to launch,” Murray said. “Foundations launched around 10 weeks after the main game, introducing Base Building for the first time. Base building is now such an integral part of No Man’s Sky, but it felt unexpected at the time. Foundations really became the foundation for how the next few years would take shape.”
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Murray closed his post by looking ahead to the next update set to hit No Man’s Sky, called Frontiers, which Murray says in ways will add a “missing piece of the sci-fi fantasy” that the team has always wanted to include. In the meantime, players can launch into No Man’s Sky now and experience some of the many changes made to the game.
