The Press Box - Ep. 166: 'No Man's Sky' With Ben Lindbergh, Jason Concepcion, and Creator Sean Murray

Episode Date: August 13, 2016

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion give their thoughts on one of the year's most highly anticipated video games, 'No Man's Sky.' Then, game creator Sean Murray joins (26:55) to discuss the release process and dealing with lofty expectations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hello and welcome to a special Channel 33 podcast. My name is Ben Lindberg, and I'm a writer for the ringer.com. And on the other line, putting some plutonium in his mental multi-tool. Because he's about to start mining for insights is my fellow ringer writer, Jason Concepcion. Hey, Jason. Thank you for having me here. I've just been naming various animals and plants throughout the galaxy.

So what we are talking about is this is the first, but hopefully, not the last ringer episode about a video game. We thought the occasion called for it, so we've convened today to discuss No Man Sky, the most anticipated game of this year, or really any recent year, which came out for PS4 and PC this week. Earlier this week, I spoke to Sean Murray, the creator of No Man Sky, so later in this episode, you'll hear a condensed version of my conversation with him. But before we get to that, we want to discuss our own week one impressions of this game. And I wrote something about it for our website,

so I sunk some significant time into this thing. And you had to do some real-life non-isotope-powered traveling this week. So you're not quite as far in, but I'm not sure that my extra playtime has actually allowed me to see anything you haven't seen, which is possibly part of a problem that we might be about to talk about. But I thought we could frame the discussion this way, because I think the most important predictor of how you feel about No Man Sky today, is probably how you felt about No Man Sky a week ago before it came out

because this is one of those games that gets judged based on sky high, probably unrealistic expectations for what it would be. So what was your level of hype for this game on a scale of bitter Xbox fanboy to sending death threats to the developer when the game got delayed? My level of hype for this game was, this is the only reason that I own a PS4 essentially? Wow, okay. This and Last of Us.

That's just below death threat. I know, without those two games, I would not have, I would not own the console. As soon as I saw the 2014 trailer, I was like, yeah, I have to get a PS4 and be ready for this game. At the same time, you know, it's like you look at what was promised and you watch the trailer several hundred times. And it's, I came into it knowing that there's no way that it could possibly deliver on everything that you expect. Infinity is kind of a hard thing to live up to. Right. Yeah, I never really, my anticipation level never really rose above intrigued, I think.

I'm a sci-fi fan, so this game is very much up my alley, and the premise was impressive, but I just never really had a solid pre-release sense of what playing the game would actually involve. So I just reserve judgment. A novel concept on the internet, I know, reserving judgment, but that was the question everyone had, going back to the first teaser, was just what would No Man's Guy be, and what would it be like to play it. And I never really had a handle on that until I actually played it. So I hoped for the best, but had no really high expectations. And by the way, not that the death threat is ever really the right move, but the game delay death threat is probably the most puzzling kind. Like, aside from the

fact that it's a video game, so relax, it's just logically inconsistent. Like, I'm so mad that you didn't deliver the game on time that I'm going to prevent you from ever finishing the game. And I'll never get to play it because you'll be dead. Question. Has you were playing the game at all answered any of your questions about what the game is about that you had previous to playing the game? I have a better idea that I did before I had my hands on it. I still have questions about whether there is enough game in the game to keep me playing

it for as long as it's designed to be played. And I will say that I don't consider this like a Peter Malinu situation. I think Hello Games gave us the product they promised, basically. I don't feel misled. I don't feel hoodwinked by the trailers and the teasers and the presentations. Like, this is the game that we saw and that we got excited about and the things that we got excited about you can actually do in this game. It's just all the other stuff surrounding those really eye-catching mechanics doesn't quite hold up.

So what are the things that you enjoy about this before we, Before we really go in on it on its endless infinite mining possibilities and complete lack of pocket space, what do you enjoy about this game? Well, just going back to the very first time we all saw No Man Sky at VGX in 2013, it was like a minute-long video, and it was just walking underwater and then walking on land and then getting in your spaceship and then taking off and flying into space. and no loading times, no barriers, no invisible walls, no skybox, nothing. And that was all it took to get us super hyped about this game. And I think it's as cool in practice as it was three years ago watching it on the screen. It's just a unique experience, I think, to be able to traverse all of these different landscapes and to go from one to the other seamlessly.

And really, there's just no loading time ever except some. kind of cleverly camouflaged ones, I guess, when you go from one solar system to the next, or maybe when you enter a space station, there's kind of a set animation you see, which, you know, makes sense kind of as an in-universe thing and also allows them to load that environment. But that's it. Like, there's almost never a time when I feel like I should stop playing because it's just this seamless experience and the scale of it is something I've never really encountered in a video game before.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, just traveling between solar systems, between planets, kind of plying the meteorite fields on the outskirts of an atmosphere and then diving into the atmosphere and flying around, looking for different markers on the landscape. It's incredible. I mean, it's a mind-boggling vastness of this game is an achievement into itself. I think it's an engineering marvel. it feels to me a little like, and I said this to you an email, like it feels a little to me like if you owned an iPad in 1960, you can tell that this is amazing, but you really can't do anything. There's not much you can do with it. It's essentially the gameplay is, I would describe it as Minecraft without the crafting.

It's just a lot of harvesting of materials and trying to figure out if you can carry stuff and then kind of a very simplistic crafting system to make different shields and different kind of fabrics and different things, different fuels, and that's kind of the break

on the progression system that they use to kind of keep you from realizing that it's really not much to do except explore. But the exploring part is so intriguing that I think, I mean, I would suggest that people buy this game if they were intrigued at all by it,

but they should be aware that I'm not sure that there's anything to do beyond mining stuff. Right, which is a significant drawback. But yeah, I agree. I mean, there is a lot of, you know, rote tasks. There's a lot of just sort of grinding and farming that goes into this game, and it's not all that interesting. You are, I mean, it's very quickly the game's goals just shrink

and even though the horizons of the game are just limitless, your own horizons as a player just kind of come inward very quickly because there is a goal getting to the center of the universe. I've been playing for dozens of hours, and I honestly don't know if I'm any closer to that goal than I was when I started because there are these multiple options. You can do this Atlas path where you're just trying to follow the instructions of this mysterious floating omniscient orb,

and you kind of follow it from one installation to the next. And I've been doing that for a while, and I don't know where that's getting me, and it seems to be taking me farther away from the center of the galaxy. So you can try to jump toward the center of the galaxy. If you do that, if you focus on nothing else, it will still take you a long time to achieve that goal. And I don't know what the end game is because I haven't seen it.

So you end up focusing on these very short-term small-scale goals, like upgrading your shield or, you know, being able to stay outside in the elements for longer without having to die or replenish your supplies or upgrading your ship. And that stuff can be kind of satisfying for a while, but there does come a point at which you wonder what it's all for. And because there's so much to explore, because you can never hope to see even a tiny fraction of all the worlds that are out there, all the creatures, all the florists, all the florals,

and fauna that you can discover. I reached a point pretty quickly where if something was way out of my way, I just wasn't going to go there because why go there? I can't cross everything off my list. I can't get to 100% complete.

So I might as well just skip the stuff that's not within reach and that sort of a shame. Yeah, I think the core dissonance that keeps this game really from being a transcendent experience is the infinite possibilities of, and the large scale, you know, really true vastness of the game world versus the fact that, I mean, I think you start with six slots in your suit for carrying

stuff and you, you know, upgrade that relatively quickly to, you know, 10 or 12. But it's the way they designed the slots so that you can't, you know, your various perks and upgrades for your existing equipment, they take up slots. If you're completely full up, there's a lot of things you can't interact with aliens. You can't, you know, moving stuff around and stacking similar materials is not, it's not a seamless, it's not a seamless activity. There's a lot of, I think, getting hung up on the menu screens, really, for me, is the kind of like poorly designed menu screens is really, it's a big problem for me.

And like just today, for the first time I went on Reddit, I've been trying to kind of not take in any information about the game, but just for the first time I went to read it and just to see what people are saying. And I found this thread that was like helpful mechanics about No Man Sky that are not explained at all. I think that's actually the title. And it's just all these, like things that I had no, like you can pin recipes for, you know, different crafting recipes to the bottom of your screen. So you could actually see what you need to look for instead of like toggling your menu all the time.

There is, uh, you know that. Yep. there's like ways to there's different ways to create waypoints there's different ways to stack and transfer items which I'm still not quite sure how to do there's a cockpit view there's just all there's all manner of mechanics in this game

that are not explained to you whatsoever when you start and I think that's part of the difficulty in me trying to figure out what this game really is Like, I feel like, you know, like the first patch in the, in the verb is for the first patch, there's like stuff about, you know, trade ships and you're going to be else build bases. So I'm not sure like how much more there really is. And it feels like there should be more, but I just don't know if I can't find it. Yeah.

I mean, it's a hard problem to solve because the universe is so enormous. It's like, you know, they sort of zoomed out to encompass this entire vast universe. And so in zooming out and in being able to contain all of that space, you kind of lose some detail. It's like you're, you know, taking a picture of something from very far away and you can't see the fine print anymore. And so all of these little details just feel not fully fleshed out. Like combat is pretty rudimentary, you know, whether you're in your ship or you're on the ground, it's point and shoot. There's no real subtlety to it. not much strategy to it. It's just kind of have you upgraded your gun and your shield enough

to survive whatever's attacking you. And it's just kind of, you know, like the interactions with NPCs are occasionally interesting, but, you know, I've noticed some repetition already, and it's just purely text-based. No one ever moves or changes. So the universe just feels static in some ways. I mean, it feels alive in other ways. Like, you know, if you land on a planet and it's one of the planets that's just teeming with life and there's changing weather and there's a day-night cycle, I mean, it feels like a living world. But there's just, you know, like even if there are animals roping around, they're just wandering around aimlessly. There isn't really anything you can do with or to them except feed them and kill them. And so, you know, it's just like, I think, and I don't

know that, again, it's not that they messed up even, I don't think, or that, like, it's just that they didn't have the resources because it's a small indie developer. I mean, if Sean Murray were still at EA where he started out and he had some massive team of hundreds of people working on this game, I don't know that that would make an appreciable difference. If you had everyone in the world designing content for this game, it would be hard to fill the sheer amount of space that is out there. So I don't know, I think you're right. It feels ahead of its time.

It feels like their ability to create space, kind of outstripped, their ability to fill that space with interesting activities and attractions. And that holds it back a bit. I've been thinking about destiny and the kind of, you're one release of destiny. And that's, Bungi is a company with probably like 4,000 percent. more workers than than Hello Games. I think there's 14 people

that work at Hello Games. And the title before No Man Sky was, you know, like a side-scrolling motorbike game. Right. So this is,

you know, like the jump in ambition is really as infinite as the game itself. But it's the same kind of, these are the same kind of issues that Destiny had, but Destiny has like this

core feedback loop of gameplay that's, you know, shooter gameplay, move, aim, shoot, repeat. Whereas no man sky's feedback loop, like if you had to kind of distill it down to the core gameplay, it's find materials, craft some kind of fuel

that lets you travel outside of the solar system, travel to that solar system, replenish those materials so you can do that again and then repeat. And then that is a very large feedback loop. So it's kind of, it just can feel aimless. And much like Destiny, the game uses the same kind of breaks on progression to keep you from real,

you know, it feels like almost like a cheap way to keep you from realizing that it's a very empty, it's a very empty world. Destiny used a lot of grinding and a lot of currencies, currencies stacked upon currencies, having to transfer them to each other. No Man Sky doesn't do that. It just kind of like slows you down with vastness. That said, I like this game. Like when I'm not playing it, I want to play it.

Yep, I feel the same way. I have settled into this routine. I thought the game was great for the first few hours when you really have these concrete goals. You're repairing your ship. You're trying to get a hyperdrive. You're trying to get fuel for it. You're trying to escape the solar system. And that was great.

If they could somehow have just kept scaling those goals the whole way, I would have loved this game. And as it is, I settled into this routine pretty quickly where, you know, I jump to a new system and I visit this space station and I buy and sell some stuff. And then I check out one or two landmarks. And I just kind of move on very quickly. You just sort of skim the interesting stuff off the top of that solar system. And then you move on to the next and then you start repeating it. And it is very repetitive.

And yet while I'm playing, like I'm not bored. I kind of question why I'm continuing to play, but I still want to play. and when I'm not playing, I wish I were playing, as you said. So just on the core, that's not a super intellectual argument for why this game is worth your time. But it's fun. I want to play the game. So you might want to play the game too. So I would recommend that people check this out.

If only just for those initial mind-bending moments when you point your cursor at something you can see, and then it tells you that at the default walking or... or flying speed, it will take you hours or literally days to get there. That in itself, I think, was worth the price of admission for me. And some of the mechanics that we talked about were worth it too. And it is fun. And, you know, I think that destiny, the initial lack of content in destiny was probably less forgivable just because the scope of destiny was not nearly as grand as no man sky.

It just seemed like there should have been a lot more content on day one in that game. But I wouldn't be shocked, I guess, if this game followed a similar progression. And I talked to Sean later in this episode about how long he can envision himself working on this game. But I kind of had two questions for you. And the first is whether this is fixable. And by fixable, I mean, is it possible to get it to a point where it is actually fulfilling the expectations that the most enthusiastic people had for it? And we've seen games go from unplayable to playable. We've seen games go from good to great.

Like every game at this point is the life of Pablo, basically, and every developer can just be like, I'm a fix wolves. And then the patch or the expansion comes out. And sometimes it makes a real improvement. So is there anything that this game could do, do you think, building on the really impressive technical core it has to flesh that out with something that would really keep you hooked in the long run? Yeah, I think if they can get the trading system and the base building system up and running

and then also kind of graft some sort of rudimentary multiplayer on top of it, not a kind of combat thing, but something where you could at least see players that are, you know, some reasonable amount of light years from where you are. There's just so many people playing. I find it hard to believe that you couldn't at least, you couldn't implement that in some way. workable where you could say, oh, look, there's someone, you know, 15 parsecs from you, do you want to trade with them, do you want to meet on a world, or having kind of like base worlds where a marketplace, you know, a vast marketplace where players can go and trade stuff with

each other. I think that would go a long way towards making, you know, improving the game's replayability beyond just having an infinite sandbox where you can just go look at rats and alien squirrels. Right. And there's a certain percentage of people, I think, who would probably be perfectly happy playing this game forever as it is. Like the people who were perfectly happy playing Destiny for hundreds of hours when I just tired of it initially until some of the expansions came out.

If I were a kid with a summer vacation and I was looking for something to fill that time, I would be really happy to have No Man Sky. Oh, absolutely. So it depends, you know, what other... entertainment options it's competing with. And I guess my other question for you is whether you can think of any other applications for this technology that would produce a game that you'd be excited to play. Sean says later in this episode that, you know, when he lands on a planet and he sees it sort of generate itself, he has all these ideas about ways that he could make new games with this

technology as a base and you know i don't know maybe maybe there is a way in which the creating an entire universe is one way to use procedural generation but not the only way maybe there's some other kind of game that could function really well with this technology as it's based yeah i think that like when i think about the possibilities i get i get really excited i don't know how yeah i don't know how how attainable this stuff is in the short term but you know if you think about something like Warcraft, but in a universe, where, you know, what if I could claim an entire planet,

set the rules on the planet, you know, create missions for other players on the planet, scale economies up to that kind of universe size. I think that's the future of this technology at some point. Is it just a kind of massive, one of those MMOP RPGs, but on a universe scale, that would be really cool.

I don't know how close we are to that, but I think that would be just incredible. Yeah, I'd kind of like to see it just, it's just kind of, you know, every type of game we have, but bigger. Yeah. Like, just, you know, I'm thinking of, like, I've always been interested in games where you can just have a battle with an enormous number of either people or NPCs or a mix of the two,

like, you know, maybe some of the Dynasty Warriors games where there's just a very crowded battlefield or something like Planet Side 2 where there were over a thousand people playing in a single battle at one point, or that game Mag for PS3, where I think they set a console record with like 256 player or something like that. Like with this technology, I assume you could just create a battle that really feels like a battle. Like you are just a very small part of, you know, maybe you are taking control. maybe you are just a random grunt in this giant battle that you can't really control the tide of except for your small contribution to it. I'd like to play something like that.

So that's what came to mind for me. But, you know, I assume that this game will make its mark. And, you know, it might not out of the gate be everything that people wanted to be. I still hold out some hope that a year, two years down the road it will have gotten to a point. where it really does fulfill all of its promise. But even if it never gets there, I would think that just the experience of playing it and some of those memorable moments that, you know,

at least on an individual minute-by-minute basis are probably more exciting than anything else you'll play this year, will, you know, inspire people to create something else that does something similar, but maybe fixes the flaws. This is kind of a first-generation product. those always have problems that get corrected down the road. More Star Wars caninas. That's what this game's like.

If you could just do that, find me like a dangerous bar on every single planet, dangerous alien bar where bad things happen and I can, you know, it's not just this kind of like placid, you know, 19th century Darwinism going and looking at plants and naming them thing. Give me a sense of danger, Sean Murray. Yeah,

there's not a, there's not much of a sense of danger in this game. I've died a few times that's usually. when I just did something dumb. Yeah. There's occasional glitching. I don't know how much you've encountered. My game has crashed a few times.

There was one time when I, like, my ship got stuck to a big pillar of some element. And when I tried to boost away from it, it just killed me. And so weird things like that have happened from time to time. But in the course of normal events, you don't really feel threatened. You know, your life support meters are going down very, very slowly. and maybe there's a random encounter with a starship every now and then or there's some animal that attacks you, but you can usually escape those things or fight back pretty easily.

So that is another thing that just kind of lowers the stakes and just makes it all about crafting and upgrading with no real concrete goal in mind. And yet it's enjoyable. Yes. I feel like we have to keep restating that. I think play it for sure. If you have any interest in space, space exploration, if you like sci-fi, if you like video games in general and want to play something that's really, I feel like is going to be a landmark title, certainly in console gaming. I think you should play it.

Agreed. Okay. So we have procedurally generated a podcast. It was nice to talk to you. And we will continue to share our exploits in the vast reaches of the No Man Sky Universe. and now you can stay tuned to listen to me talking to Sean Murray on PS4 launch day earlier this week. Yeah, it's a bit of a crazy day. But yeah, good to chat to you.

Yeah, have you shaved or are you still letting the development beard grow? No, I'm letting it grow. We're not done yet. We've still got PC to come out on Friday, and then I reckon I'm done. I can... So that'll be it. You'll have a ritual shaving after the final release. Yeah, exactly. There's an element of it that's just like, you know, crunch beard kind of thing.

Yeah. Like development beard, but there's an element where it's also like it's a bit of a disguise, you know. I can, I don't like doing, you know, all the kind of public things. Right. So I could just like shave my beard and, you know, return to some sort of anonymity. Yeah. Or I'd feel a lot more comfortable. You should auction it off, the normal sky beard.

Nobody would want that. Someone would. I bet someone would. So what are you sort of watching as this first day on spools? I saw your tweets about the number of discoveries. So what are you kind of tracking in real time now that people actually have their hands on this thing? Oh, it's insane. Just the things that people name stuff. I mean, that at first, you know, the first hour or so, that was fun.

You could just see, you know, names. names pop up or whatever, but that is now like it is just scrolling past such a ridiculous rate. Yeah. And like we thought it was kind of, we've had an odd day where we thought, okay, the servers are just about taking care of everything. And then we realized that, of course, it's only out in the States right now. And so all of you guys just started waking up in the morning and just the numbers have just clive declined. So like I was tweeting that like in the last. hour we had gone up to like a million discoveries in an hour and that's growing I guess as the

US waking up so like we're just about to pass nine million and I was looking up like nine million creatures discovered it's like that is more I think it's 8.7 million is the number of creatures discovered on earth so it took you half a day of one region and one platform to surpass all of actual history. Well, it's like, you know, if all of, this is the thing I was joking about, which is like if gamers, you know, would just get rewards presumably for finding new types of insect in the real world, you know, and trophies and things of that, that we'd probably have found far more.

Yeah. Well, Pokemon Go is the closest we've come, I guess. Yeah, exactly. So the one thing that I've kind of experienced through my first day or so of immersing myself in the game is that, you know, there's obviously this urge to, explore and there's this sense of wonder at how huge everything is. And at the same time, I almost find myself looking at an undiscovered planet and saying, well, I could go discover that planet, but I'm never going to get to all of them. So I'm going to have to skip some. So there's this

kind of constant tension between I could explore everything. And yet, however much I explore, it will only make a tiny dent in all of the stuff I could possibly explore. So it's a little bit different from a game where you can kind of, you know, open the menu and see your progress complete and you know that you can see 100% of everything if you want to and you can check off every box and this is different. So how have you managed that? How have you tried to build in systems that will keep people coming even though they know that there's no way that they're going to get to everything? I have two answers for you, right? And one of those answers is like, okay, so there's a whole bunch of systems of play for that. So there is a like a kind of

a standard goal, which is, you know, get to the center of the universe, you know, and try and make that journey as quickly as possible. And on your way, you upgrade your ship and your suit and your weapons, you know, kind of standard RPG stuff to allow you to make that journey like faster and allow you to go further, right? And as you make that journey, you'll find that more and more cool tech is available, you know, closer to the center, but also resources. become much more plentiful. And so there's kind of these standard like rules. And I can kind of reassure you. There's like this more linear path. And we have those journey milestones, which you carry with you. We have your ship and your suit, which we see people kind of forming like an ownership of.

And they kind of tailor them to the character that they want to be, you know. And like I can break it down in a way that makes people feel a bit more reassured. And they're like, yeah, I can. can understand those things. I'm used to those things in other games. But there's part to me, probably a bigger part to me, that's like, actually you look at what people are playing a lot of today. You look at the Steam charts. And in the top 10 of the Steam charts, there will always be three or four games that are like completely open, survival sandboxes, you know, things like Subnotica, things like Grav, things like Stranda Deep or, you know, Don't Starve or Minecraft or whatever, right? And they're games where you set your own objectives. And when I talk to people who

have grown up with a lot of those games, kids or whatever, have grown up with Minecraft instead of Mario, you know, they often won't have those questions. They won't say, where's my trophies or my leaderboard or my, you know, more linear progression or where's the story mode or whatever it is, you know, will there be missions or quests there instead just like, and we can see it and twitch all to they. People enjoying the game in that way, making their own objectives, you know, deciding to be a trader or a fighter or an explorer, you know, and deciding like, like you were saying, you'll never be able to complete the game, but they are used to playing games that you will never be able to complete. You know, they are used to being in Minecraft and knowing that they can never just visit every

single thing in Minecraft or mine every single thing or whatever, and they're okay with that because they're going to play in that space and enjoy it. And some people do just go and make their own objective and kind of play in that way and define themselves and decide to actually not travel that far, but just play for 10 hours just trying to buy a new ship or something like that. And there are other people who are just obsessed with like getting to the next waypoint and doing the next thing.

It's something we've, I'm talking about a lot, but it's something we've thought about so much during this game. I'm sure. And it's kind of one of the like themes of the game. You know, like I'm actually really happy when people say to me like, oh, I was playing a game and I just felt really overwhelmed by it, you know, into the galactic map and kind of thought, if I can only explore one planet, then there are all of these planets, like, you know, I'm daunted by that, you know.

And I like that because that's cool. You've never had that in a video game before. Yeah. That's really interesting of nothing else, right? Yeah, it's almost a tangible sense as I'm playing it. There's this sort of sense of exhilaration. I could go anywhere. I can do anything and then there's almost this

oppressiveness of it's so huge and you know it's the same sort of feeling you might get kind of you know looking through a telescope at something and realizing how tiny you are compared to everything that's actually out there so it's both at the same time it's so cool that you just said that

we didn't sit down to when we made this game to try and make like the perfect game you know or to make the game that you can play forever right actually we talked about like emotions that we wanted you to have. And one of those emotions was feeling just for a minute of being somewhere and knowing that no one else had been there before. Right? Because that's like video games can give that to you,

like a book or a film never could because obviously it's like everyone consumes the exact same thing, but like video games are interactive. So theoretically, right, you could go somewhere and no one could have been there before. You know, exploration is a thing you could do in a video game. You never do because like everything you see has been built by somebody and everyone else is playing the same thing. So that was a big thing. And then the other thing that we talked about was just feeling of the overwhelming huge space. Like, wow, how small am I? Right.

Those kind of things are way more important to me. You know, if we do that for people for like, you know, one minute. And I've had so many messages about that today from people who often don't normally play games or for, people who were playing No Man's Guy, never expected to feel that. And it's really nice to see that resonating, you know. But I've had weird emails today where people are like, you know, practically just mailing me, asking me what the meaning of life is, you know. And from a technical perspective, you mentioned the servers and, you know, we've seen so

many games, player versus player games and MMOs and everything that have had issues early on just because of how many people are playing them. And, you know, this is different in that, I mean, the scale of it is even more massive. And yet maybe there are fewer complications in that sense. And in that, you know, it's very unlikely for players to run into each other in this universe. It's not really a traditional multiplayer game. So is there more of a strain than there normally would be with an online game or less of one? Yeah, I mean, we're definitely, we always try and be clear to not go into this looking for a traditional multiplayer experience.

Or in fact, to just go in. into it expecting a solo like lone astronaut at the edge of space experience. And, you know, we have some Easter eggs and some cool online functionality that we hope gives people and will give people some really nice moments, you know, as they play the game. We're guessing because we don't know how much people are going to play and how far they're going to explore in what way they're going to explore. They're going to, you know, be attracted to where other people have been or are they going to going to like just set out into their own space kind of thing but today's been crazy we estimated for

a reasonable amount of people playing like what we felt was a large amount of people playing and we estimated for a level of you know posting discoveries and things where we thought well not everyone will do it you know we'll do it a little bit and then they might not after that um probably quite naive because it's been pretty crazy. Like we had a database set aside that should have lasted us for like a lifetime. We burnt through that today. We had to migrate to new servers and stuff. So it's been pretty insane.

But I'm super proud of the team. Like you said, most games, anything like this would have server problems day one. And you would expect that with a bunch of like idiots like us running it. this really small team that we would have had the place on fire or something today. So when normally you would have maybe 20 network engineers working out a game, we've got one guy. Right. This was all on him today.

So the sense of scale is really incredible when you start playing and you, you know, you point your ship towards something and you see that it's going to take you two hours to get there. And then, you know, there are all these different modes of transportation. So you start off walking and then you sprint and then you take your ship and then you can boost in the ship and then you can go to hyperspeed. And, you know, it's kind of this nice progression. And I'm wondering if there are any sort of existing properties you tried to draw on or channel, you know, in conveying that sense of scale. Yeah, it's a really strange one. Like, I actually think those various types of speed that you can go on are sort of misleading, you know, because, um,

And we were torn on this for a while. Like, we want it to be an entertaining experience and a really nice, like, gameplay experience. But the reality is, like, when you move that fast, it betrays how enormous the kind of universe that we've built is, like, how far apart planets can be, you know, and things like that. And we actually had much more realistic distances between planets. Actually, from a gameplay point of view, it's almost untenable, you know. and we had more realistic speeds and again from a gameplay point of view it's kind of, it could be quite a slow process

to fly between two planets at realistic speed of light speeds, you know. And so we've actually kind of taken our own little science fiction route and a kind of a Star Trek route, you know, where generally everything's, you know, it's quite easy to kind of go from one planet, you know, to be stood on a planet, to flying to another planet that you can see on the horizon,

or another moon takes moments, right? And it's nice, but I think for us making the game, we're fully aware of the actual distances involved, that actually, you know, you as a little player, you were walking around in a few hundred meters squared, and you fly out into space. And when you look back down, that whole play area that you were on is like,

is less than a pixel. And you could have been playing down there for like an hour or two, you know. And like that is, you know, you were saying you get this real feeling of scale, but I don't think we ever let the player fully appreciate it the way we do when we're making it, you know. And then when you come, like, out into space, you're dealing with, you know, hundreds of thousands of kilometers squared, you know, and then coming out to the fact of the map, you're dealing with light years. And it's really like, we obviously have, I guess our ability as developers to kind of go. in and debug problems and things like that.

And so we get a much greater sense of the actual scale of things, which I think we sort of try and hide from you as a player, like to give you lots of those different modes of transport. So it's actually quite easy to get around, you know. But like, I think my favorite moments are when it comes home to people, like you were saying, when you are stood on a planet and you perhaps activate a beacon and it tells you that there is a waypoint, perhaps like an alien has been discovered, an alien life form or something at that.

I love that moment when you look at that waypoint and it happens every now and then and it's, you know, like six days away or something like that, you know, and people's faces when I do that, like when they see that, as I've watched playtesters and they will turn around to you and they'll say, like, I think I've, you know, I think I found a bug, you know. I think there's a bug with your game is saying it's six days away, you know, I think that's, you know, there's just something really awesome about that. Yeah. And so, you know, you mentioned just now having to balance the realism and the gameplay.

And I'm sure you guys didn't start out as experts in physics and astrophysics and how a universe works. So what kind of sort of scientific resources did you draw on? Did you have consultants who would tell you how these things would actually look or would actually work, you know, so that you could avoid being the subject? of a Neil deGrasse Tyson tweet about how such and such a thing is not actually how it would be? Like, we didn't set out to make like a universe simulator, you know what I mean? Like in terms of we didn't try and simulate our universe, the one that I'm currently living in, right? Yeah. You know, that was never the aim.

It was to create something that could get you, like, excited about our universe, I suppose, and is kind of exciting from a, like a science fiction point of view. Like, I went and the kind of pleasure of meeting the mission controller from the ESA, the European Space Agency. I was talking to him and I felt so embarrassed, you know, because I was like, I don't know. He's going to, like, he's going to pick apart how our ships look or the speed they go at or how quickly, you know, you enter the atmosphere or how you don't burn up at certain angles and things like that. you know, things we definitely know. And instead, he was just, like, so happy, you know, playing the game and looking at it and saying, you know, that he had grown up with Star Wars.

And, like, that's what got him into, like, it just got him so excited about space. And he was like, oh, you know, like, everyone who works here, they're big science fiction nerds, you know. And it was actually really lovely to hear. And he was saying, you know, it's games like this that get people interested in. science or in space or whatever, you know. And so we didn't, no, we didn't like consult with, you know, astrophysicists or whatever. We did read up quite a lot and that's quite a fun part of the process, right? And like I really enjoyed kind of reading up about things like erosion and geology and things like that.

Yeah. And just like getting engrossed in the game. You know, that's all part of the fun of it, the process of it. But we picked things that were things that we could imbue the world with, you know, that would make sense to people. We didn't, we're creating our own fictional universe, I guess. And, you know, thus far it feels you can walk around and fly around. And most of the time you're not in any imminent danger of dying. Occasionally you are.

But for the most part, you are in it. So, you know, it almost feels as if my inventory is the enemy most of the time. that I'm constantly battling to save the things that I want to save and collect all the things I want to collect and, you know, having to make difficult decisions about what I can and can't keep with me. So how much time and effort did you go into trying to get the right balance there between just, you know, letting people keep everything they come across and not wanting them to feel frustrated and, you know, feel as if they're spending more time in the menu than they are in the game? Yeah, it's an interesting one, actually.

I mean, the reality is that for a lot of people or for gamers, they might picture a game like ours and they might think, well, I just want to, I just want to explore, right? I don't want any constraints on me. I don't want anything to get in my way or whatever. And I want to explore, like, beautiful worlds, right? But actually, we love, like, survival games. And a lot of games, if you play, like, The Long Dark or something like that,

you are constantly thinking about what am I carrying with me? me, where did I leave my stuff? You know, and it kind of grounds you in the world. And that was the reason that we've done that. And that's what you carry around with you. You carry around that inventory. And it becomes meaningful to you. It becomes like you know exactly what's in your ship.

And getting a bigger ship means like a lot to you kind of thing. Yeah. So it's important that you have to, I guess, like if you think of it in terms of being stranded on a desert island and suddenly everything, you know, you have to be very conscious of what are the things are going to gather, what are the things are going to save, stuff like that. But it is something that we see like hoarders and things that will really struggle with. They will want to mine and mine and mine, you know.

And the reality is that that limited inventory or limiting the inventory gives them a sense of meaning to the things that they collect, you know, and makes them make choices and stuff. And it also kind of, if you, I don't know if you play many survival games, but normally at the start you're really fighting up, but you're just fighting to survive, you know? But as you get further into the game, your circle expands in what you're able to do.

And it seems almost ludicrous to you that you used to have these problems, right? Yeah. And that's the way that No Man Sky is. It's a game that, you know, when you're whatever, 50 hours into it, your problem set is really different, you know, to those first few hours or whatever.

So you need to feel some of those bites of like challenge, you know, so that you appreciate it later on as some of those challenges are removed kind of thing. It gives you aims and things. But without those things and with complete freedom, actually things like your discoveries and where you go and, you know, what you buy and things of that, they have no, they have no meaning. So it was important for us to provide that challenge for people. And, you know, obviously the marketing effort was extremely successful. People were extremely excited about the game, and that is the goal of a marketing effort is to get people excited and sell some copies, and so by any standard, it worked out very well. But I wonder whether if you could go back to the very beginning of all the publicity

when you were first introducing the game to the world, is there anything different you would do? Is there any way in which you would sort of tailor the message differently? Because obviously, no one is ever going to be pleased with every aspect of every aspect of every game someone's always going to think, oh, this is different from what I expected that it would be. But I wonder whether, if you could go back to the beginning, is there any different aspect of it you would stress or any different way you would sort of present it than you actually did? Well, I think it's interesting, isn't it? It would be lovely to, like, have never told anyone anything about the game, but release it today.

Uh-huh. Right. Like, potentially, that would be a super cool thing to do, right? We could, like, believe in, like, just the word of mouth would get out. People would play it, and it does sometimes happen, right? But I would have been feeling, you know, I was feeling pretty nervous yesterday, but I was feeling very nervous if I had worked for five years and never showed anyone the game kind of thing, you know?

Right. Like, I think that would be a pretty insane thing to do, right? So the reality is, like, after two years of working on the game, which is a long time, more than most people, you know, manage, we worked on the game for two years and we showed like 60 seconds of me playing the game as a BGXs. And at the time, we thought of it as a pretty niche game, but it was, you know, it was like 60 seconds of me walking along a beach, right? and then flying into space, how, like, we could never have predicted that that would be so popular, you know. And so that was the VGXs, and then we got to do E3. And that was a cool moment. It was an amazing moment.

And I'd never been to E3, the show, like, I've never visited E3 before. It's super cool to be invited to go on stage there, right, and show a game. And again, it was just me walking, you know, through one of our worlds. flying out into space and flying over another planet. And it was just like five minutes of straight gameplay. But that was, again, incredibly popular, you know. But the reality is, like, it was interesting. You said marketing because, like, Sony is definitely behind the game now,

especially coming up to launch. But for two years after we announced, there was no marketing. Right. I mean... It sold itself, essentially. Well, no, like, I just... I stood on stage and I showed it, you know? And they'd...

like Stephen Cabrera saw it and asked us to go on his show. And again, that was huge for us. And you could never turn that down, right? It would be a crazy thing to do. Like, no. No, Stephen, people are too excited about the game. We could possibly set the more of it. But each time, it was just us, like, just playing the game, just straight, playing

the game. So in some ways, it would seem like this, like people always say this to me. Like, it was, you know, such a masterful, like, marketing campaign. but it wasn't. All we did was like, you know, just walk through some of our worlds. We really, we put way more thought into how we presented our previous games.

It's just that they didn't have the same impact. They didn't resonate. You know, we spent way more time making trailers on previous games than we did on this one. It's been very simple game to present, actually, in loads of ways. It always blows me away. or if you look back through our trailers,

it's always just, you know, 10 minutes of me playing or 5 minutes of me playing and, you know, walking around one of our worlds or doing something very, you know, to be straightforward in one of our worlds. But people really liked the concept, I guess, and it resonated. So I can't look back and think anything other than,

you know, maybe we could have just not showed it. Like certain things we could have just not showed it up, but I can't think, you know, in future, if I was, like if I was to give advice to somebody and somebody was to say, oh, I'm going to show my game at E3, do you think I should? I'd never say, you know, no, don't do that. People might like it too much. I get too excited about it.

And I know it was frustrating for you that some people did get their hands on the game before intended and posted those impressions. And, you know, no one wants to see something that they've invested all this time effort in come out before it's fully ready. But I wonder how that affected the release. How did that affect the day one patch? Were there any ways in which it actually helped the product that was available on day one to the public?

No. No, it's heartbreaking to see that, you know. And people will say like, oh, there was some, you know, this person played and they had a complaint and you know that was good for other games because they fixed it and it's like no like by the time the game leaked we were already you know we were four weeks into really arduous task of having worked flat out for like five years and then turning around once the game had gone gold and just doing some more on it you know it's almost like this massive marathon and then you finish it and then you start sprinting you know so we were already like really really

deep in like crazy difficult hard work. And for us in that final phases of that, it was horrible to see people just spoiling things that we had kind of kept hidden or hadn't talked about or, you know, even small things that we just didn't feel like it was going to do anyone any good to see, you know, because you want that moment, you want that moment where people like they're having today where they get to experience everything fresh. And if you put something, it's really easy to say, oh, don't watch the spoilers. But actually, if you post something that is going to happen in Game of Thrones, you know, I will click on that link.

I will instantly regret it. Yeah. I will click on it, you know. And we just didn't want that happening for people. It felt I was most annoyed for people who had waited three years for the game. And just before it came out, they were having so much of their experience, you know, those first impressions, those first impressions, those first moments just a little bit, like a little bit spoiled. But it's not, it's, you know, it's painful and stuff, but actually the reality is it's because people were excited about the game, you know. It's not

that bad a complaint. It's a pretty, you know, first world problem kind of thing. So my last question was, you know, with a game that theoretically players could never finish. Is there ever a time when the creator is going to be finished? Are, can you even imagine there, you know, coming a day when you say, I'm done, I'm not working on this anymore, or is this going to be your life's work and, you know, you'll be working on it in a decade still? I'm really torn, so I'm still in that phase where I can think about nothing but no man's guy, but like I feel like we have so many ideas that would expand upon the game, you know, that would take it in different directions that I'd love to see explored, you know, and I think

that would be really meaningful, it would be really fun to do that. but obviously it would only make sense if people were enjoying the game and playing it. They wanted, you know, they wanted those updates and stuff. You know, maybe one thing is annoying them or something, right? Maybe, you know, maybe you're like, you come and complain to me that the, you're frustrated by the inventory or whatever, right? And then we do it update and, you know, it resolves that, that it's like the, you know, things like that are how something like Minecraft,

or Don't Starve has gone to where they are through that process, right, where people say, we love doing this, we don't like doing that, you know, and it improves not for the people who play for five hours, but improves for the people who want to play for like 500 hours or whatever. And so I'm excited about that, you know, and actually it's weird because people will review the game now, but actually this, yes, we finish the game and we put it on a disc and then we did an update. and that was finished. And like next month we'll probably do another major update. And then that will be finished.

You know, and in a weird way, the game is always finished, but it's always like, you know, never finished, you know? Right. And so it's like, it's interesting from that point of view. And it looks like people are going to enjoy the game. You know, certainly that's been our impression so far that people are enjoying it. And so for the first time, I can kind of go, right, wow, this might be something. thing that we're doing now, you know, like I've always wanted to do it, but I've never been

sure. Kind of like for the reasons you said, I've spent three years thinking like, the hype is so much that like, you know, the game's going to come out and then everyone will want to kill me or whatever, you know. So that excites me. That's like, I want to get and add more things and fix this bug that this person's seeing, whatever. But also, like, just to give you a really long, rambly answer, there have been so many moments where I've been playing No Man's Skies, we've been developing it, and I've flown down to a planet, and that planet's just like generated right in front of me, you know, there's a whole entire planet, right? And I've just thought, we could have this other game idea, you know, using this kind of tech, or we could do,

there's just so many things I can think that we could do when some of those constraints of making all the content are taken away from you, you know. Right. So that doesn't really answer your question. It's basically I can really see myself doing No Man's Guy for a while, but I also feel this real draw of like, there are other game ideas, right? And there's like cool things we could do now, you know. Yeah, well, thanks.

So congrats again on finishing the game for now and having it come out. And I appreciate the time and I will make way for the next person. Yeah, yeah. Thanks a lot. Really good to chat with you, Matt.