No Man’s Sky Dev: We’re Already Working on a “Small Experiment” That’s Unannounced

Yesterday, Hello Games Founder Sean Murray held a Reddit AMA where he revealed that Sony has been a great partner to work with on No Man’s Sky – mostly because they’ve let them do their own thing:

Sony has been super cool to work with, but mainly just because they haven’t been involved in development, you know? We’re still sort of the underdog with Sony, and in the general AAA (for obvious reasons). If NMS is a success, I think that probably will have a real impact in terms of how a lot of people in larger publishers view indie games. People generally think of NMS as a Sony title, but we’re still just a self funded indie studio – it’s kind of a crazy situation 🙂

Elsewhere in the AMA, someone brought up the fact that an old trailer for No Man’s Sky featured huge snakes/wurms. This prompted Murray to confirm that “huge creatures are out there, and I haven’t seen them on streams yet. They are rare.”

The PS4 version of No Man’s Sky is out today in North America and tomorrow in Europe as planned, but the PC version was delayed by three days just a couple of weeks ago. According to Murray, there wasn’t a conspiracy involved. “The reality is that we’re still here working on it right now,” he said. “There’s no conspiracy, we’re just racing to get all the extra options and stuff we want.” As of the AMA, he expects it to be available on Friday at 6pm GMT.

Murray then talked about having to be tight-lipped on certain things due to contracts:

Whenever devs are tight-lipped, it’s normally just because they literally, legally, can’t talk about a thing. Man, you would surprised how wrapped up most devs are in contracts and nonsense. Often for instance lots of devs will have a clause that says “you literally can’t say the name of platform X”. Knowing this it’s really funny watching interviews where devs are squirming trying not to the word Wii or whatever when being asked about some industry thing 🙂 – you see us say things like “well the thing about supporting… that particular console is…”

When sharing your discoveries in No Man’s Sky, they’ll only be seen by players on the same platform, as “PS4 and PC players are using two different servers,” Murray said. “We are running a control experiment to see who names things the most juvenile things… Let the games begin!”

For the future of Hello Games, Murray says most of the team is focused on supporting No Man’s Sky right now, but they also have a small experiment in the works:

Initially I think we’ll all be supporting NMS. But there are other ideas we’ve got rattling around in our heads too. I think video games is just such a largely unexplored field. There’s very few studios that pull off the two game thing, but supporting one game and then kicking off something new – that’s doable right?

Sh*t, I just remembered, we’ve got another thing we’re already working on that’s unannounced. It’s a small experiment, but hopefully you all might like it 🙂

Maybe we can be the Johnny Depp of studios 😀 – do a mixture of big stuff and indie stuff? 😀

Murray also revealed that, if they hadn’t announced No Man’s Sky when they did and received so much fan support, it might never have been released:

REAL TALK – so obviously the hype is terrifying. I mean, I have had this hanging over me for three years since we announced. I get like 3 hours sleep a night, but like I can’t sleep even if I was home so ¯_(シ)_/¯. It’s catch 22, if we hadn’t announced when we did, we probably would have quit the project without the community supporting us… but god… should I have passed up Colbert? Or E3? I dunno. Every time we showed the game we always assumed people would suddenly not like it anymore… but instead the hype would just get crazier. In an alternate timeline, imagine if we could just be showing it for the first time tonight and launching tomorrow? Imagine how fun that would have been…

Finally, one tweet that received a lot of attention recently was this one from Nibellion showing Sean Murray over the years:

As Murray revealed in the AMA, “So basically my beard is a disguise. I’m totally going to shave it off when this game is done, and burn every check shirt I own (5?) and hopefully no one will ever shout ‘No Man’s Sky FOV Slider?’ at me in the street. ever. again. in. my. life.”

Do you think that small experiment is VR support?

[Source: Reddit]

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