Sean Murray on the Present, Past and Future of No Man's Sky

By Joe Skrebels

Sean Murray is excited again. When I meet him, he resembles the developer the Internet got to know, love and, eventually, turn on – fidgety, unintentionally charming, interrupting his own sentences to make new points as they occur to him. But as the conversation goes on, I realise what he’s saying is far from what I remember of the man.

From 2014 to 2016, the Hello Games founder and mouthpiece appeared to be a sort of restless ideas machine, appearing in interviews with the express purpose of pouring out whatever was in his mind, rather than what was safely calcified in code on his computer. It was, by his own admission, a mistake:

“We messed up some of the easy things, in that we talked about the game too early. We were really excited when we talked about the game. We talked about features as they were in development. Press would say to us, ‘It’s so nice to get to sit down with a developer and just talk, you know? You guys don’t seem scripted.’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t. Why does everyone else do that?’.

“I now understand why everyone does that.”

It’s a lesson he’s taken to heart. Hello Games, as a matter of policy, no longer talks about unfinished ideas. Hell, it barely talks at all – Murray hasn’t spoken to the press directly for two years before this round of interviews, and the studio’s preferred means of communication with its audience is through ARGs and one-shot, exhaustive blog posts about its updates.

Murray doesn’t talk about what he’s making anymore. He talks about what he’s already made. But, unlike most games, the public relishes talking about how No Man’s Sky was created and released as much as the playing of it and so, for half an hour, I sit back as its creator works through the evolving dream of No Man’s Sky, the nightmare of its release, and the reality of where it stands, two years down the line.

Sean Murray is not a liar. In YouTube’s inimitable way, watching almost any No Man’s Sky video now seems to lead the autoplayer directly to a video throwing that little slur his way (there’s a whole other piece to be written about what that algorithmic quirk has had on public perception), but in retrospect it feels a short-sighted accusation.

Murray shoulders the twin Atlas stones of wide-eyed hope and boundless self-belief – he wants to make whatever’s in his head a reality. There’s entirely reasonable debate over whether it should have taken as long as it did, but there’s also the fact that many of the features promised in those early, effusive interviews have by now made it to No Man’s Sky.

In fact, it’s actually fairly astonishing how closely patch notes for the latest update, NEXT resemble two-year-old lists of Murray’s ‘lies’. Full multiplayer, player-owned freighter fleets, special ship classes, and ringed planets – they’re all in there, just surrounded by slightly less… flowery adjectives these days. It’s tempting to say that NEXT is an attempt by Hello to finally release what No Man’s Sky promised to be in 2016 – so tempting, in fact, that I do say it.

Murray disagrees: “I think now it’s a really grand vision. Like way bigger than we could’ve delivered at launch.” In fact, he seems to put that grander vision down to, at least in some cases, abandoning what he wanted No Man’s Sky to be in the first place, and trying to accommodate what various different types of players wanted out of it.

“When we launched [the Foundation update] and had a Creative mode, there were some people who were suddenly really happy with the game. And it’s hard for you to take as a developer, because they liked Creative mode because it got rid of loads of things that we had added and just allowed them to do their own crazy thing. [But] you’re like, ‘Okay, I can live with that. You’re having fun and you’re creating something very different within the game.’”

There’s a new development theory in action at Hello, then: “It’s really just a case of focusing a little bit on where we wanna go as developers and a little bit on where the community wants us to go.

“We’ve done these major updates and each one will have a headline. And I think often that headline isn’t necessarily things that the community is really, really asking for, because it’s something brand new. Like base building, when we announced base building people were like, ‘I’m off exploring. Why do I want to have a base?’ They love it now, but at the time they were like, ‘No, I want everything.’ But actually, normally that’s the headline and then you just scroll down through this massive page of lots of the stuff that we’ve added. And everything else normally just comes straight from the community.”

NEXT represents the culmination of that “some for us, some for them” development idea. Murray doesn’t think that multiplayer – by far the most-requested feature for No Man’s Sky – could have comfortably existed without the Hello team’s own additions:

“Multiplayer as we have it now, this kind of full experience, I don’t think it makes nearly as much sense if you don’t have that base building. Or those freighters that you can go and buy. Or missions that you can go on. It would’ve just been a really hollow experience without all of the other game systems to back it up.”

This seems to be Murray’s key discovery as a developer over the last two years – that those flights of fancy back in the day weren’t the be-all and end-all of what No Man’s Sky could be. His vision of a single-player galactic-survival game may have come to pass, but it was just one view of what Hello could make, and letting go enough to allow others to realise their own fantasies within the game’s galaxies has been as much a boon as just making the game he set out to:

“It’s actually been really fun to get some perspective. It’s made us quite happy just working on something, seeing it improve, and seeing people who wanted to like the game – who saw potential, maybe even different potential to what we saw – come back to it.”

But perhaps what Sean Murray likes most about the current state of No Man’s Sky is that it’s become the game, not him, doing all the talking. He wishes he’d realised that a little earlier: “Oh, are we allowed to just do let the game speak for itself? Oh fantastic, well why didn’t someone tell me that?”

“I was somebody who never really wanted to talk to the press. I didn’t particularly enjoy it when I was doing it. And I don’t think I was very good at it.”

There’s something strange about revisiting Murray’s earlier public appearances with this in mind. Suddenly, that sheepish smile looks a little more rictus, the constant movements more like cascading nervousness than bobbing anticipation. Perhaps, in some worried way, Murray knew what might be coming.

From its earliest announcement, No Man’s Sky was always a strange engine of potential, a set of overlapping ideas that seemed to combine, react and metabolise entirely different game ideas in different people’s heads. Obviously, a major element of that comes down to how Murray talked about it. The literally unimaginable scope of the idea, coupled with its headline billing from Sony (practically unprecedented for a game by a developer of this size), led to a lot of people forming ideas about a game that simply didn’t exist yet, seemingly even Murray himself.

Stretch that misplaced anticipation over the course of years, and the seismic reaction to the launch version begins to make sense. Like trying to explain a dream, No Man’s Sky could never be quite what it promised to be in your head.

Murray sums up quite how polarizing that mass realisation was neatly, saying it’s the first game he’s ever made that had some players immediately proclaim it their favourite game of all time (“Nobody said that about Joe Danger”). The same bundle of code in another player’s console would garner him death threats.

Murray is surprisingly willing to admit his part in that: “I’ve obviously thought about it a lot and have way more perspective. Now, two years later, I look back and I can really clearly see things that we should’ve done differently. Like, lots of things. You could imagine with any development that’s lasted five years, you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I wish I could’ve done this differently’. Or I feel I messed this up. Or whatever it is. The internet isn’t always like the fairest at kind of determining appropriate response or whatever, but I think they pointed out things we did badly that they were right about. ”

There’s a conflicted pride in how Murray talks about the launch version of the game – he made what he set out to, but he clearly understands that it wasn’t what many were hoping for:

“When we launched, Hello Games was 15 people. The average team size was six people. It was this huge, broad game. And it delivered on a thing that I always wanted, which was this feeling of loneliness, which sounds strange I know, but a kind of a science fiction loneliness. You, out in the world, amongst the vastness of the universe.

“And along the development, lots of things changed about the game, but that was one thing that stayed the same – when I first sat down to write the first lines of code, that was the emotion that I was going for. I’m super proud of that, but because it was such a small team, and because it was so weirdly innovative and ambitious, you know, it wasn’t as deep in a whole bunch of areas.”

Beyond the storm of reaction, Murray’s remarkably sanguine about the experience. At a distance of years, it reveals one of the quirks that sets No Man’s Sky apart from other games, that makes it quite so interesting to talk about, even years down the line – people’s fury at the launch version wasn’t as much about hating what the game was but hating what it wasn’t:

“The people who were often the most disappointed with the game were angry or frustrated because, for them, it could’ve been their perfect game. And it was driving them crazy. There was crazy noise around release, and drama, and intensity. But taking a step back, you’re suddenly reading comments and you’re like, ‘This guy here really wants to love the game, but the inventory is driving him crazy.’ And you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I can fix that.’”

And so the updates began. Four free additions have been a conscious attempt to hone the game into something like those dreamed–up pre–release versions, to add depth to that breadth. Hello knows that it has a dormant install base beyond that of most games by a developer its size – it’s just a case of getting them to come back:

“That’s really what the updates have been about”, Murray explains. “I think without them people would’ve played for 20, 30 hours and, but then they probably wouldn’t have picked it up again. Like, that’s how lots of single player games play out. The games that came out alongside us, like Far Cry Primal or whatever? People have moved on to the sequel and the sequel after that. Whereas for us, we were like, ‘Hey, we’ve got this massive universe–sized sandbox. What else can we add to it?’”

That philosophy’s been the driving force for development since launch – and it doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.

“What we want to get across, and this sounds weird, is, like, ‘This isn’t it’.”

Sean Murray is very keen for you to know that NEXT isn’t a finale, or a sequel, but a step. “We worried that people would think that we’re releasing this update on the second anniversary of the launch, we’re coming out on Xbox, and then we weren’t going to do anymore to it. And actually that’s not how we work.”

Hello Games might not want to talk about what it’s making (and yes, I asked, there’s no word on a Switch version), but it’s very keen to let you know it absolutely is making new things. So is there any word on an overall vision, if not specific features? Going by Murray’s comments, you can sum it up in a word: ‘bigger’.

“There was a thing we were trying to do at launch,” Murray explains of his original lonely vision for the game, “and it was a very polarizing thing. But it was also a super difficult thing and something that we were really proud of. But over time we’ve just grown and grown what that thing is, and what it can be. Our long term vision is to add to that until it becomes bigger and bigger.

“And that’s kind of the way we foresee it for the foreseeable future. We always said before the game came out that we were going to update the game continuously post launch. I would’ve liked to update it even more regularly, and we’re going to start doing that now. And I know it can be difficult for people – some people think it’s a negative that you’re continuously updating the game. Hopefully most people think it’s a positive, it’s a cool thing. What we see a lot of is people playing No Man’s Sky for X number of hours, then going away, then coming back to that experience.”

From the little I can glean, multiplayer seems to be where Murray is focused for now. It feels appropriate – the early game was designed to be lonely, and I imagine Murray was lonely himself, weathering the brunt of the Twitter storm in those first months. Multiplayer finally adds light and laughter to his quiet galaxy – it’s probably no surprise that he wants to stay in that headspace for a time.

But for all this artistic vision, there’s always the looming question of money. No Man’s Sky has been a one-time purchase for two years – a true rarity in the current industry – and, while each update presumably brings with it a fresh wave of buyers, there must surely be diminishing returns. How sustainable is this model? The answer, at least for now, seems to be something along the lines of ‘who cares?’

“Maybe we’re just terrible business people or whatever,” laughs Murray, “but for us, we enjoy making something, and we enjoy the simplicity of making it. Making it as good as we can, continuously expanding it and people just paying once to play the game, not separating our audience, allowing them to all play in this sandbox and play together. That seems really appropriate. Other developers can do what they want and whatever works for them, but that works for us. And we’re really happy with that. It’s a lot simpler and a lot less complex.”

Honestly, it feels a little like that simplicity is what Sean Murray needs. NEXT represents No Man’s Sky at its highest ebb since just before release. The community’s thriving, the reaction has been positive, the future is bright. After the unimaginable gamut of development, top–tier promotion, and fire and brimstone reaction, the relative quiet of intermittent updates – whether or not they make cold business sense – feels like a perfectly reasonable choice.

Murray is the same man he always was, but he has a new outlook, and it’s working for him, and for Hello as a whole:

“People are into the game. The fantasy of the game and the theory of it was so huge, right, they’re like, ‘Just do that, deliver on that’. People don’t do need all of these interviews and things that we were doing.” He looks at me, hoisting my phone towards his face for the recording, and smiles. “In the nicest possible way.”

No Man’s Sky isn’t an engine of potential anymore, not subject to the dreams of its creator nor its fans. It’s just a game – you like it or you don’t. That seems preferable to Murray: “Like right now, it’s nice to sit with you and talk about a game and an update that’s done. That you can just play, and you ask me questions, and I tell you exactly what it is. Because I know. Because it’s done. You know what I mean? And that’s just … That’s lovely.”

I don’t expect to talk to Sean Murray again for some time. That’s OK.

Joe Skrebels is IGN’s UK News Editor, and yesterday he found an alien horse with a crescent moon for a head. Follow him on Twitter.