No Man’s Sky has, for lack of a better term, divided the gaming community. It was propelled to many a gamer’s wishlist after a marketing campaign that some argue was deceptive.
Interestingly, while the game’s player base has dropped off significantly since launch, people are still finding interesting ways to play it. While the core game seems quite far removed from the visions that both Sony and developer Hello Games amplified, it appears to still offer something in the way of adventure and discovery.
To say it didn’t live up to expectations would be an understatement, and Hello Games has, disappointingly, felt the brunt of much of the criticism. The studio was thrusted back under the limelight last week when someone gained access to its Twitter account and posted that “No Man’s Sky was a mistake”. Some outlets reported that it was Sean Murray, the game’s lead designer and director, but he venomously denied that and claimed the account was hacked.
Regardless of what actually happened there, it’s clear that the response to the game has had a lot of influence over how Hello Games response to and acts towards fans. Before the game’s release, the studio and Murray were active on social media, but they’ve essentially gone MIA since.
SIE Worldwide Studios president, Shawn Layden, has come out in defense of Murray and the studio, speaking on the Live With YouTube Gaming vidcast that the team behind the game “had an incredible vision of what they were going to create”.
It was a “very huge ambition”, he continued, something that such a small team was probably overwhelmed by. He said that they’re still working on bringing the game “close to what their vision was”.
“What we learned from [No Man’s Sky] is that we don’t want to stifle ambition, we don’t want to stifle creativity,” Layden said. “We don’t want to put people into slots where they must execute against an action-adventure path or a fighting path or a shooting path.
“And perhaps over time, it’ll reveal itself to be all that it can be.”
