'No Man's Sky' Has Always Lived Up To Its Title

​You wake up utterly alone on a planet in the galaxy's outer rim. There's a small, disabled starship a stone's throw away from you. Something mysterious compels you to collect vital materials, repair the ship and take to the stars. That's how every player's story in "No Man's Sky" started at the time of the game's release, and it's how the story still starts nearly two years later after the game's latest, ambitious update, "No Man's Sky Next." 

First announced in 2013, "No Man's Sky" teased a sprawling, randomly generated universe filled with colorful planets torn from the covers of classic sci-fi lit; an endless world players could live out their space-faring fantasies in. In some respects, the initial 2016 version of the game delivered on its tonal promises, but many were left disappointed by the repetitive moment-to-moment flow of the game. In some parts of the internet, that disappointment turned into outrage, and the developers behind "No Man's Sky" — the small team at Hello Games in Guilford, England — went silent as scores of angry players did everything from the understandable (say, demanding refunds) to the unthinkable (death threats, bomb threats, you-name-it).

How did the situation surrounding the game turn so toxic? Has the game actually been improved over the last two years, and does it matter if it can sway its most ardent critics? Why did anyone ever get it in their head that Hello Games' universe had to be tailored specifically to them?

Turn the clock back to December 8th, 2013. "No Man's Sky" was revealed to the world at "VGX," the last annual incarnation of Spike TV's video games award show. These shows and their successors, host/producer Geoff Keighley's The Game Awards, exist in a weird space split between artistic celebration and industry boosterism. Exclusive trailers, often for unannounced games from studios owned by Microsoft or Sony, are shown in-between the awards and get about as much screen time as the awards part of the show — if you haven't seen it, imagine if the Oscars stopped every 10 minutes to premiere a teaser for a new superhero movie and you'll kind of get it. The "No Man's Sky" announcement stood out not just because of its gorgeous, ambitious trailer: five seconds of Googling would tell you that Hello Games was staffed by only a handful people, known then for their "Joe Danger" series of cartoon-y motorcycle stunt games.

At E3 2014, the industry's biggest annual trade show, "No Man's Sky" was featured at Sony's press conference. Hello Games partnered with Sony for publishing assistance on the game, with Sony later pledging that they'd support it as though it was a game from a studio they own. Over the next few years, the anticipation for "No Man's Sky" snowballed. Hello Games founder Sean Murray became nearly synonymous with the title, appearing as the little-studio-that-could's primary representative at every event and in every profile.

Many outlets tried to tease out what the actual experience of the game would be like, and, apart from talking up multiplayer features that didn't make it in the game's initial release, Murray was consistently truthful-if-meandering in his answers. Here's what he said to Eurogamer in 2015:

And as [players] go, they're upgrading their ship, they're upgrading their weapons, they're upgrading their suit. And they need to do that because they're very vulnerable, they will be attacked by AI, potentially — very rarely — other players, things like that, if they cross paths with them. There's space combat, there's combat on the ground, there's trading if you want to do that, mining resources and stuff, there's exploring if you want to do that.

That, short of the multiplayer comment, was all true of the game at launch in 2016. Given that Murray was vague about multiplayer features right up to and including the game's release day, it'd be too generous to say he was being 100% clear about the game's feel in every statement. Still, he also compared the "No Man's Sky" experience to games like "Rust" and "Minecraft" — survival games where typical video game power fantasies are eschewed for long, self-directed climbs up a progression ladder, each rung necessitating both a willingness to explore and the player's dedication to repetitive tasks. That's the kind of game "No Man's Sky" is.

"No Man's Sky" was never going to match the space dramas of "Halo" or "Mass Effect," and it was never pitched as a kindred spirit to the epic space-battle showdowns of "EVE: Online" or "Elite: Dangerous." Instead, it was always going to be the kind of game that showed through in the trailers and gameplay demos if your imagination stuck to what was being shown: one where you just sort of hang out. Surely, a lot of disappointment was teed up by evocative trailer imagery and hazy descriptions from Murray.

A 2015 trailer narrated by Rutger Hauer, keying off the actor's famous "Blade Runner" monologue, serves as a great illustration of the expectations versus reality problem at play. There are people out there who want to know exactly what "c-beams" and the "Tannhauser Gate" are, and there are people who care less about the specific terminology of Hauer's improvised words and more about their poetic grandeur. PR missteps aside, in retrospect it's hard to see how anyone could have missed that "No Man's Sky" was being designed as the poetic grandeur space game: lonely, gorgeous and introspective.

In the middle of development on "No Man's Sky," the gaming culture around it changed in drastic ways. Twitch streaming became more and more popular, YouTubers producing "trailer analysis" videos found that vilifying developers over "downgrades" was good for clicks, and Gamergate established a harassment playbook that has since escaped the bounds of gaming. Even if Hello Games had been totally upfront about the game's features and tone from the start, it's likely that with Sony's weight thrown behind the game's promotion, "No Man's Sky" still would have run headlong into brick wall of misplaced expectations and gamer entitlement.

Many, including Geoff Keighley, opined that it should have been released as an unfinished "early access" title. Sony's Shuhei Yoshida openly criticized Hello Games' handling of the launch. Meanwhile, Hello Games continued to work and work. In an interview with Waypoint leading up to the release of the "Next" update, Murray reemerged from his two years of near-silence and dismissed the idea that the game was unfinished when it came out. "We shared it too early," he said. "We didn't need to do that. But do I look at 'No Man's Sky' and think 'Oh, it was early access or something like that?' I don't actually think so." When you consider that its people like Keighley and Yoshida who played a big role in putting the game on a pedestal, it's clear that there's some sympathy owed to Hello Games.

In the interview Murray admits the game wasn't the studio's ideal vision (they're still improving it) and that he wasn't a great PR person (Sony certainly could have helped), but why would he apologize for the way the game was released when Sony didn't allow "early access" games on PlayStation at the time and only sort-of looks the other way now in the case of games like "Fortnite"? After release, Hello Games went right back to work, resurfacing every few months during the first year of the game's life to drop large updates while opting to tease them with tie-in alternate reality games instead of through press interviews. Players who enjoyed the game at launch welcomed new features including base-building, ground vehicles and expanded story paths, and many who fell off at first came back to find a game more in-line with what they had hoped "No Man's Sky" would be at launch.

Hello Games could have pocketed the money that "No Man's Sky" made at launch, then vanished, but they didn't. Every update has been free, and each one has brought new players into the game's thriving community. At Kotaku, Gita Jackson documented the fascinating player-driven developments in the game's second year, spotlighting nascent governments, galactic war, freaky beetles, and the biggest asshole in space. Now that the game has multiplayer capabilities and more side-features than ever, more stories are sure to come as support continues.

Those updates haven't changed the core ethos of "No Man's Sky" — the latest has even added more steps to many of the regular gameplay loops, making some basic actions like fueling your spaceship take longer. At the same time, the early stages of the game have been completely rethought as an engaging, helpful crash-course in all that "No Man's Sky" has to offer. A few hours in, fewer newcomers will be left wondering if there's more to the experience that they don't understand or haven't seen. "Next" hasn't made "No Man's Sky" a completely different experience, just one that's far more upfront about its philosophy.

Just, for a moment, compare its development path to that of "Fortnite," Epic Games' Battle Royale juggernaut. That's a game from a gigantic studio that was first announced in 2011 — so much more time was poured into its development than "No Man's Sky's." Shortly after "Fornite's" long-delayed "early access" debut in 2017, the focus of the game's development shifted almost completely to Battle Royale, lifting the game mode from the then-ascendant (and also "early access") "Player Unknown's Battlegrounds." Some games succeed in-part by chasing trends — "No Man's Sky" is chugging along by deepening its original vision.

I bought a copy of "No Man's Sky" last weekend before the "Next" update launched, giving me time to see a little bit of the difference between the pre- and post-update versions of its introductory hours. Both of the starter planets the game randomly dropped me on in the different versions were cold and inhospitable, but it took me much longer to get off-world in the "Next" version. Yes, it took more effort to collect the resources I needed, but I also had more obstacles thrown my way. A well-timed storm, dropping the planet's temperature below -150 degrees Fahrenheit, swept over the plains just as I found a safe structure to hide in. This is just one of the many predetermined tricks that "No Man's Sky" now uses at the start to let the player know that, yes, things can go from "relaxed" to "perilous" at the drop of a hat.

That's Hello Games gently reminding you that the game's title is apt: you can explore the universe and even leave your mark on it, but it's just too vast and aloof to be yours. Some folks who raged over "No Man's Sky" at launch two years ago may never come around to being ok with that — if only leaving their toxicity behind was as easy as hopping in a ship and flying away.