No moment at The Game Awards this year got me more amped up than finding out No Man’s Sky developerHello Gameswas working on a new immersive game. The moment studio founder Sean Murray called the new project “something maybe more ambitious” than No Man’s Sky, my jaw hit the floor. You’re telling me you made a game with 18.4 quintillion explorable planets, shrugged, and said “Meh, we can do better”? Now that’s the kind of innovative spirit I admire.
I have dumped more time into No Man’s Sky in the last decade than any other game, and it was time well spent. Sure, the game was a little bare-bones at launch, with planets filled with wide open spaces, plenty of resources to gather, and not much else. But over the years, it’s seen so many content updates that they’re too numerous to fit succinctly into one measly article, and they’ve given us a ton of new ships, enemies, ways to play, and (most importantly for immersive players like me) base-building options to really make the No Man’s Sky feel like a living, breathing universe of planets ripe for colonization. That’s probably why, even 10 years after it’s initial announcement (which also happened at The Game Awards), it was worthy of anomination for Best Community Support, and there’s no shame in losing a category toBaldur’s Gate 3this year.
“The first real open world, right? Something without boundaries.” - Sean Murray, The Game Awards 2023
So how do you improve on a universe like that? According to Murray, you condense it into one world.
A World Of Pure Imagination
“For our new game, we wanted to create an Earth,” he said in his presentation. “You know, something as varied — a planet that is as varied — as a universe. Something bigger than Earth. Something with mountains, real mountains, not just video game mountains, but mountains that are miles high, taller than Everest, that when you climb to the top of them and look out, you can rivers and canyons and continents, you know? You can see oceans … The first real open world, right? Something without boundaries.”
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Oooooh. I just got tingles. I haven’t heard that kind of grandiose brainstorming since Peter Molyneux started talking about all the things inFablethat we would never get. As the saying goes “Fool me once, shame on you,” but with Murray, I’m willing to believe him, because his team has already lived up to its promises, even if it took a while to get there.
Come to think of it, there’s another recent game that I had high hopes for that didn’t really meet the lofty expectations I’d built after all the hype. Yep, strap in, because we’re talking aboutStarfieldagain.
Why This New Kind Of Open World Excites Me
It’s a weird comparison to make, with Light No Fire being set in the realm of high fantasy instead of sci-fi, but Hello Games has given me good reason to put itself on par withBethesda. I know I rag on Starfield a lot, but that’s just because I had extremely high expectations for it. I really love the game, but I had expected it to be the next… well, the next No Man’s Sky, and I was met with a mix of wonderment and disappointment. Combining the classic Bethesda RPG formula present in Fallout and The Elder Scrolls with a massive number of open worlds sounded like a monumental feat that did some things really well and left some things lacking, and I just can’t help but connect the two from all their similarities
Both games are absolutely packed with explorable worlds that you can mine for resources, and then you can use those resources to build bases, and those bases to build even more things to help you on your journey across the cosmos. Sure, 1,000 planets isn’t the same as 18.4 quintillion, but Starfield’s worlds were more varied from the get-go, with most supporting multiple biomes, more points of interest, andactual (AI-powered) humans to interact withinstead of aliens that you need to spend hours upon hours searching out knowledge stones just to be able to translate their three different languages and figure out what the heck they’re talking about.
No Man’s Sky is Still a Shockingly Shallow Co-op Experience
Alone, together
But where Starfield did manage to disappoint was in the variety of its points of interest. Sure, they’ve got that classic Bethesda feel to them, but if you’ve raided one secret underground malfunctioning cryogenics lab, you’ve raided them all. There will still be the same enemy types and a fresh batch of loot waiting for you, sure, but have fun reading through the exact same scientific logs from the exact same scientists who died the exact same deaths on multiple planets and moons throughout the galaxy. (There’s alsothe way you need to fast travelto get between different planets and solar systems, something No Man’s Sky was able to avoid from day one, but that hardly seems relevant to Light No Fire.)
Come On Baby, Light No Fire
If the claims about Hello’s new game hold true, it seems like that’s not something I’m going to have to worry about. Murray didn’t really go into how points of interest will work, but just like No Man’s Sky, it sounds like everyone will be playing together in the same universe — or in this case, universe-size world — so there should always be plenty of fresh interactions to be had as long as it can hold a player base. And the trailer was just the icing on the cake, featuring scenes of soaring through the skies on the backs of dragons, swimming among coral reefs, and galavanting across lush fields and forests, dusty savannahs, and a lavishly decorated throne room.
Details are still really sparse about Light No Fire — it just got announced, after all — but suffice to say, my expectations are pretty darn high. Hello Games has 10 years of experience with No Man’s Sky. The team is aware of its mistakes, and its members have clearly learned from those mistakes, building a beloved legacy out of something that was once a laughingstock of the gaming community. To me, that’s way more respectable than getting it right the first time and saying “Good enough.“Just ask CD Project Red.
Plus, according to Murray, Hello Games has been working on Light No Fire for five years already, with a dedicated team of just a dozen people, which gives me hope that we’ll be seeing it sooner rather than later. Plus, just like No Man’s Sky, it’s a game he still wants to be updating 10 years after its announcement, and I love that enthusiasm. I’m willing to wait for a quality product, but with this one, I really, really don’t want to wait.
