No Man’s Sky began with a boy under an outback sky. Sean Murray, the founder of Hello Games, spent part of his childhood on a remote Australian farm, a few hundred miles from anyone else, under a night sky with “more stars than you’ve ever seen in your life”. He was also, he told Edge, spending a lot of time with his Amstrad CPC, starting to program, “and looking up… I always thought that’s where videogames would go, that we would create videogames that just contained the whole universe, and you’d be able to visit it all.”
That is what Hello Games set out to make: a universe of planets, each one generated by the program as the player arrives, with its own terrain, colours, weather, plants and animals. Wireframe later put the number of planets at about 18 quintillion. The game’s reveal in 2013 made the small studio famous. Its launch in 2016 brought a long, angry backlash, and the free updates that followed changed the game almost beyond recognition.
Fast facts
- Developer: Hello Games, Guildford.
- Revealed: December 2013, with a trailer at the VGX awards show.
- Released: PlayStation 4, 9 August 2016 in North America; Windows PCs, 12 August 2016. Later versions for the Xbox One (2018), PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series (2020) and Nintendo Switch (2022).
- Planets: about 18 quintillion, generated rather than stored.
- Updates: free, starting with Foundation (November 2016) and still continuing in the mid-2020s.
A universe built from rules
The technique is procedural generation, the same idea that let Elite fit eight galaxies into a BBC Micro in 1984. Murray was keen to explain that it did not mean random. “There’s a misconception in terms of what people think of as procedural,” he told Edge in 2014. “They’re used to it meaning ‘random’.” Instead the team fed numbers into what the programmer Dave Ream called “a magic black box of maths” built from simple systems. The colours of a sky came from the chemistry of its atmosphere and the light passing through it; a planet’s distance from its sun decided whether it could hold water.
There was one strict rule for the people writing it. Every new rule added to the game had to be explicable “in a single sentence of plain English”, so that each of the three programmers could keep the whole system in their heads. Murray had worked on Burnout and Black at Criterion, where 100 people worked on a game and “no one person even had one-tenth of that codebase in their heads”. Simple rules had side effects of their own: a change to how creatures behaved, he said, could alter the way fish, birds, fireflies and even spaceships moved.
The artist Grant Duncan admitted that “as an artist, I hate that word [procedural]. The majority of procedural stuff looks ugly.” He would draw a scene, and Murray would work out the rules that would produce it.
Murray also described how players would share the universe. Everyone would start at its outer edges and work inwards, and discoveries such as planets and creatures could be uploaded for others to see. But it would not be “a traditional multiplayer experience”. He hated lobbies, he said: “‘Oh, come and join me on my planet — it’s only 7,000 light years away.’ We didn’t want to have that.”
The launch
The 2013 trailer had almost not been shown: Murray said that eight of the ten people he showed it to beforehand told him not to. Expectations grew for nearly three years. The game came out on the PlayStation 4 on 9 August 2016 and on the PC three days later.
Many players felt that features they had been led to expect were missing. The most famous case came on the first day. Two players found that they were in the same star system, arranged to meet at the same spot on the same planet, and streamed the attempt. They could not see each other. “We are 100 per cent in the same station same spot and everything and we cannot see each other,” one of them reported. Complaints about the game’s advertising reached the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, which ruled in November 2016 that its Steam page was not misleading, accepting that a procedurally generated game would differ from player to player.
Hello Games said very little in public for months. Wireframe later judged the game “somewhat unfairly maligned at launch”: the studio “took a lot of flak for (apparent) promises unfulfilled but worked very hard over the years that followed”.
Free updates
The studio’s answer came as a series of free updates:
| Update | Date | What it added |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation | November 2016 | Base-building |
| Path Finder | March 2017 | Ground vehicles; a permadeath mode |
| Atlas Rises | August 2017 | A new story; portals; limited multiplayer |
| Next | July 2018 | Full multiplayer; the Xbox One version |
| Beyond | August 2019 | Virtual reality |
| Origins | September 2020 | Reworked planets |
| Frontiers | September 2021 | Settlements to run |
| Waypoint | October 2022 | The Nintendo Switch version |
Next was the turning point for many reviewers. Wireframe’s Harry Slater wrote that the original had “a sizable hole in the centre of the game that left so many people feeling a little cold”, and that Next “narrows the focus” on to small, shared adventures: “The addition of multiplayer to the game – real multiplayer where you can explore with friends – erases the loneliness.” By 2020 Wireframe was calling the result “a triumph of developer’s spirit”. The updates went on through the 2020s, and the official release log now lists dozens of them.
Sources
- Edge issue 263, February 2014, pp. 78–83: No Man’s Sky feature (the VGX trailer and the ten people who saw it first; Murray’s childhood and the Amstrad CPC; procedural, not random; “a magic black box of maths”; rules in “a single sentence of plain English”; three programmers; Criterion, Burnout and Black; Grant Duncan on procedural art; players starting at the edges; no lobbies).
- Wireframe issue 1, November 2018, p. 60: No Man’s Sky Next review (Harry Slater).
- Wireframe issue 12, April 2019, p. 25: the 18 quintillion planets.
- Wireframe issue 45, November 2020, p. 42: “somewhat unfairly maligned at launch”; “a triumph of developer’s spirit”.
- Rik Henderson, “Two players meet in No Man’s Sky, guess what happened next”, Pocket-lint, 10 August 2016, and “Two No Man’s Sky players manage to meet, but apparently can’t see each other”, PC Gamer, August 2016 (web, secondary). https://www.pocket-lint.com/games/news/138474-two-players-meet-in-no-man-s-sky-guess-what-happened-next
- “‘No Man’s Sky’ cleared in false advertising investigation”, Engadget, 30 November 2016 (web, secondary): the Advertising Standards Authority ruling. https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/30/no-mans-sky-steam-asa-investigation/
- Hello Games, No Man’s Sky release log (web): the named updates and their dates. https://www.nomanssky.com/release-log/
- Wikipedia, “No Man’s Sky” (web, secondary): release dates; the 18 quintillion planets from a 64-bit seed; Next and the Xbox One version. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky