Since we don’t have Waking Titan this year, I thought it would be fun to make a reporting thread on the one “event” we do have coming up. As many of you know, Sean Murray is doing the keynote address for Develop: Brighton on July 9th. Please post any and all news that comes out of this here.
I don’t know if Develop: Brighton lets people publisize video or livestream feed of their keynotes right away or not, but if they do, that would be a great thing to post here. At the very least, someone may do a news article about it or tweet out things Sean says.
We don’t know for sure if we will get any BIG news from this, but Sean has said he will talk about No Man’s Sky in the speech and also the future of Hello Games, so here’s hoping.
It’s kind of common practice for conferences to post the keynotes on youtube for marketing. I hope they adhere to that convention, but if not, we’ll probably get a summary of any truly new knowledge by the press. In that case, a thread to pull all the articles together will indeed come in handy.
We all know that at some point, No Man’s Sky is ‘done’. The tweet that stood out to me was the one where he says, “It’s a creative, not a commercial issue.”. Hello Games has made it pretty clear that cost is not the issue, as long as they still have creative ideas for the game (NMS), they will continue to work on it. However, what more can we expect to be planned after Beyond? What else is there to work on and implement to further enhance NMS?
When that moment comes, when work is finished, ideas have run dry, it is sad news. Many of us have all been somewhat actively part of development, thinking along, coming up with new ideas and or changes. We have always been looking forward, to figure out what comes next. Sean has said this before, for a developer it is a sad moment when a game reached the finish. In this case, for a large part of the community, there will be a similar feeling. We will be left with quite a void, once NMS is truly done.
So I do agree with you on the bad news for NMS, because we all sort of know that Beyond could very well be the last content update to expect. We should indeed all look ahead, as does Hello Games, to be excited about new and upcoming plans. Good thing the developers are ahead of us for that matter, because we have yet to play all the new content. I am sure there are plenty of hours incoming with Beyond, likely months of fun before we have figured out all the new stuff and got bored with it. We do however have to find ways to deal with the sadness that is destined to arrive soon™. There will likely be a gap when it comes to a HG title, but I am looking forward … knowing something new is gleaming at the horizon.
Very discouraging is the idea that they don’t want to keep implementing new versions of things they have before (the article gives the example of new helmets), which could spell disaster for those that keep asking for “more variety”. They did variety (some would say unsatisfactorily) in the Abyss and Visions updates, and I think they may consider the isse if variety “done” now.
One ray of hope (pun intended) I have is ray-tracing. PS5 is reported to have this as a planned feature and I strongly predict Hello Games will want to do a PS5 optimization update that will enhance No Man’s Sky with ray-tracing.
If you don’t know what ray tracing is, here is a very good video by ColdFusion that shows how well it can enhance videogames, even low-graphic games like Minecraft. I think it would make NMS way more realistic.
Why the gloom? Hello Games won’t ever leave No Man’s Sky behind. It will always be their defining game.
If when they do pause development (and they will), to refresh their creative skills with a new project, we will all be better for it when they return to to it. They have every reason to.
The article comments that,
Murray is attempting to combat creative fatigue at Hello Games by ensuring that the team is only experimenting, prototyping, and building content that excites the staff creating it.
I’m pleased to agree with that. Gee, the Beyond update hasn’t been released yet and that will probably define VR gameplay for the next couple of years. I fully expect Beyond to broaden the content and so increase the appeal of the game to newcomers and their fan base. There should be plenty of ‘play time’ ahead for No Man 's Sky, for its fans to be creative with, while HG focus on other things. Then exciting developments will likely start to be discussed with new vigour.
The gaming community will by then, have established all kinds of fantastic futures for the game they’d love to see implemented and future hardware, may then make No Man’s Sky 2, 'The Dawn of Man’ update a reality.
(My own little fantasy would be to put our own galaxy stars and planets into the game one day. It would be fun to mix things up, in weird and wonderful ways and not paying too much attention to fact. After all isn’t science fiction meant to be fun too. Imagine sipping cocktails on the veranda of your home base, looking across the Horshead Nebula… Or what might be lurking beneath the storms of Jupiter… ‘Sean Murray’ laughing at Star Citizen. O:-)
“Basically, we had a little chat after No Man’s Sky, and we decided that making games is really hard, like… it just is! It doesn’t matter what type of game you make; you can speak to any developer, you’ll meet them right at the start of development, and they will say that we are making this little physics puzzle game – a Tetris clone. Then you’ll meet them three years later, and they’ll have these massive beards right down to here,” he continues, laughing as he acknowledges those photos that did the rounds ahead of No Man’s Sky shipping, “and now the game has 300-player multiplayer. Developers just find a way to… well, fuck themselves, basically.”
Read the full paragraph again, I’m not convinced he’s talking about No Man’s Sky specifically, but just on how most developers make it very hard for themselves
That’s completely out of context. He was making a hypothetical example of a 300-player tetris to illustrate how developers tend to find ways to make life difficult for themselves, even if they’re doing something that should be a simple no-brainer (a fact I can fully confirm, currently being busy trying to shoehorn cube mapping onto panorama images that are completely unsuitable for it, because no HTML5 viewers support flat views that wrap around at 360 degrees, and because doing a little wizzardry in the image-editing backend takes way less time than writing our own viewer. So the most simple thing in the world just got a lot more complicated… sorry for the rant).
And if you widen this statement and paragraph to to what he has been saying for a while now, he is telling developers to aim to be more ambitious in their projects. It is going to be hard anyway, so you might as well push past your fears and try something new. He has been saying this since before NMS shipped, both directly and indirectly. He has mentioned when talking about NMS, and when building the HG Labs, and recently lightly touched on the subject while discussing Stadia:
but I think all of us would be interested to know what experience I could have that I couldn’t have before.
Often in his communications he presents an abstract idea, follows it will a short story for illustration, then isn’t always successful in bring the audience back to the original point. In this case I believe that he is trying to assert that you should not avoid the aggressive or new ideas because they seem hard, even the calm paths become hard eventually.
300 players in NMS, if it were to happen, would be horrible. NOT, in my opinion, in how it would affect gameplay (though it would be very chaotic) but because I know for a fact it would crash a PS4 constantly, no matter how well they optimize it.
I agree with @jedidia. Imagine how horrible it would be for 300 people to play Tetris at once,
One question I have though, if their next game is several years away, will they continue to add perhaps smaller updates to NMS in the meantime? I can’t help but think of SM stating they would support NMS for the foreseeable future. Maybe more community events with Quicksilver items…just wondering.
I’m just hoping they keep doing regular bug-fixes after Beyond, because it seems no matter how many bugs they squash, there’s always more to be found in the infinite universe of No Man’s Sky.
