When an Indie Developer Shoots for the (Procedurally Generated) Stars

For me, No Man’s Sky is a bit like a brussels sprout. I haven’t tried it, but I’ve seen pictures online and heard from enough people that I can tell it’s just not for me.

But there are plenty of games that fall into that category. I just don’t have the money- and certainly not the time- to play every game that gets released, and even among the more well-received titles I often have to pick and choose. No Man’s Sky is different, though, in that I’m sure I’ve never read so many opinions or developed such a strong opinion about a game that I haven’t played.

In all honesty I’m beginning to feel sorry for Sean Murray and his development team. It’s pretty damn obvious that he’s far from innocent in all this, but how many other indie developers get this amount of hate thrown their way?

No Man’s Sky stepped onto the world stage in 2014, if I’m remembering correctly, with a debut trailer at E3 of that year. From the get go it caught everyone’s eye with a gorgeous trailer and a lofty premise, coupled with the ambitious claims of Hello Games. We were told that the game would offer a procedurally generated universe of nearly infinite number of planets for players to explore. Even now, the thought of planet hopping between worlds full of infinite types of flora and fauna, meeting aliens and uncovering secrets is easy to get excited about. Hello Games set out to make us excited for their game and that’s just what they did, surely more than they could’ve imagined.

The hype train gathered steam as time went on and in the two years between the game’s announcement and its release, that hype reached levels that Hello Games and Sean Murray never would have anticipated, which is precisely where they slipped up. They let their own vision surpass what was realistically plausible.

It’s pretty damn clear that NMS was a passion project for Murray and his team. You can see it in Murray’s face in his countless interviews- including one on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert himself!- all of which gathered thousands of Youtube hits and led to countless wide-eyed preview articles across the internet. Everyone expected No Man’s Sky to be a game-changer within the industry.

Almost everyone. Some of us had our doubts but our voices were mostly drowned out, and really, why spoil everyone’s fun? So when the game finally launched and turned out to be nothing at all like what we were promised, people flipped the hell out. Usually I find this sort of angry backlash overblown and churlish, but this time it’s not without justification.

Sean Murray definitely told some fibs. He wasn’t truthful. Yes, the planets are infinite but they aren’t nearly as interesting as all the trailers made them look. Mountain ranges and giant forests teeming with dinosaurs and sentry bots emerging from the ground!? Nope, none of that. The multiplayer that Murray definitively confirmed is flat-out nonexistent, as are things like different alien factions, a variety of ship types, giant space battles, and so on and so forth. You can’t fly your ship across the planets (rather you simply hit a button and the ship automatically takes off or lands), customization is extremely limited and frankly, most of the procedurally generated animals look like drawings on the wall of a kindergarten classroom.

The worst and most perplexing lie (in my humble opinion) of all? Sean Murray consistently teased an end-game in which players would reach some sort of “center of the universe” where a secret surprise awaited the player. In one interview, Murray even laughed at a fan’s playful suggestion that the center of the universe contained nothing at all, and the screen would just go black like at the end of The Sopranos. How ridiculous that would be, he joked, after teasing us with this supposedly awesome secret.

So what is that secret? It’s nothing. There’s nothing at the center of the universe, almost like they completely forgot to put something there. You fly your ship in, and then the screen pulls out and you get to start all over. One ultra-patient Youtuber even trekked to the center ten times over just to make sure, and every time it was the same. I mean, come on now. That’s just insulting. Hello Games, you owe people an explanation for that one.

As it turns out, procedural generation still can’t create the sort of interesting levels and environments that purposeful design can, and a development studio as small as Hello Games couldn’t fulfill every promise and deliver the sort of landmark video game that everyone expected. But why the lies?

Surprisingly enough, I actually think Sean Murray deserves a tiny bit of slack here. Just a tiny bit, though. Hello Games is still an indie studio that probably bit off more than it could chew, but I commend them all for their ambition. That’s what’s so exciting about video games these days: there’s a lot of innovation taking place, from the smallest teams writing code in their mom’s basement to the giant studios with millions of dollars to spend. It’s inspiring when a game developer takes a risk, especially when that developer is so dedicated to his/her vision as Murray and Hello Games were.

Here’s what I think happened, though obviously I don’t have all the facts. Hello Games set out to create a procedurally generated game that would allow for the existence of an insane number of planets for gamers to explore… What was the number, 18 quintillion unique worlds, or something like that? They went and made an overly ambitious announcement trailer that took the world by surprise back at E3 2014, rode the wave of hype that surely included a hefty injection of funds from Sony, and let their imaginations run wild and untempered.

Simply put, they couldn’t meet their own expectations. Sean Murray became a sort of Yes Man in all of his interviews, smiling and nodding as people tried to figure out exactly what the game entailed. Will there be multiplayer? Yes. Is there an endgame? Yes, with a huge surprise that comes with it. Will we be able to join different factions and participate in giant space battles? Yes. And the crowds gasped in awe.

Push came to shove, deadline day came swiftly (and they’d already pushed it back a number of times) and they simply couldn’t fulfill all of their promises. There’s only so much you can do with a team of a dozen guys or so.

No Man’s Sky should not be priced like a triple AAA title. Sixty dollars is far too pricey and players were always going to feel ripped off. Sean Murray should have been a bit wiser in his interviews and the team should have held back a little (well, a lot) in all of those gorgeous trailers and demos they showed off. There’s no question about that.

But Sean Murray is certainly not the scheming liar that everyone is making him out to be. He got carried away with no one there to scale his claims back- certainly not Sony, who wanted to create as much excitement as humanly possible so that a game that likely should’ve sold for fifteen or twenty bucks like most indie titles could retail for the price of a big-budget game.

Truthfully, I never had high hopes for the game because I’m not a big believer in procedural generation, and even if No Man’s Sky had delivered on all promises it was never going to be my cup of tea. So I can see why people are upset even if I’m not one of those people, and the way the internet operates these days, it’s pretty inevitable that Murray and his team are going to get roasted until they can banish their demons with their next project. I’m really hoping they learn from their mistakes and go on to find success with whatever they cook up next. More than anything, I hope this hasn’t disillusioned them from taking risks.