No Man’s Sky developer Howdy Video games is celebrating its 10-year anniversary with a couple of eye-catching stats and a tease for the upcoming replace.
The hotly anticipated No Man’s Sky launched on August 9, 2016 on PS4 and PC to tens of 1000’s of unfavourable evaluations on Steam, with gamers complaining about damaged guarantees and an absence of significant content material, significantly on the multiplayer facet. The sport shortly settled on the dreaded ‘overwhelmingly unfavourable’ Steam consumer overview score, a transparent signal to anybody who visited its Steam web page that one thing was very incorrect.
However Guildford, England-based developer Howdy Video games continued to replace No Man’s Sky over time, enhancing participant sentiment to the purpose the place it’s now thought of excellent. It took two years to hit ‘combined,’ then one other three to hit ‘principally constructive.’ On the time, 5 years after launch, Tim Woodley, Head of Publishing at Howdy Video games, defined how exhausting it was to claw again Steam consumer evaluations from such a low base. No Man’s Sky now sits on ‘very constructive’ on Steam consumer evaluations.
(*10*)
As we speak, Howdy Video games growth chief Sean Murray penned a notice to followers expressing his delight that No Man’s Sky has stood the take a look at of time, confirming that this yr has seen the sport’s highest participant numbers since launch. Murray even revealed an attention-grabbing stat: even now, a decade after launch, gamers have explored lower than 1% of the planets in No Man’s Sky.
No Man’s Sky contains a procedurally generated deterministic open world universe, which incorporates over 18 quintillion planets (18,446,744,073,709,551,616 to be actual). Forward of No Man’s Sky’s launch, Howdy Video games advised IGN it might take 585 billion years to see all of them. So sure, lower than 1% sounds about proper. That is lots of online game planets which can be up and operating however won’t ever be seen!
Murray additionally used the anniversary to tease No Man’s Sky’s subsequent replace, Cosmos, proving that help for the sport will proceed past the 10-year mark. Howdy Video games can also be busy engaged on its subsequent recreation, Gentle No Hearth, which is about journey, constructing, survival and exploration collectively, set on a fantasy planet the dimensions of Earth. We have not heard something about it because it was revealed at The Recreation Awards 2023.
Sean Murray’s open letter to No Man’s Sky followers in full:
Wesley is Director, Information at IGN. Discover him on Twitter at @wyp100. You may attain Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.