The Daily Populous Thursday February 17th, 2022 day edition
Authored by ign.com and submitted by Aggressive_Sea_8206

No Man's Sky creator Sean Murray says his galaxy-spanning sandbox isn't close to being finished, despite receiving its 19th major update today.

Speaking to IGN, Murray said the team at Hello Games is continuously coming up with new features they'd like added to No Man's Sky, and each new update inspires more and more ideas.

He said, for "as many updates as we've done since launch and as many bucket list items we've checked off, our list of things we're excited about never seems to get any shorter. The team are always coming up with new things that they want to do with the game: new content and features and areas for improvement.

"I'm amazed that the energy levels are as high now as they've ever been. We tend not to talk about what's on that list publicly but suffice to say we're not done yet by a long shot."

Murray explained its roadmap and development schedule as similar to a painting that never quite seems complete:

"I like to think that No Man's Sky is such a large game that we have to paint in broad brush strokes," he said, "and then each update comes along and fills in some finer detail but also paints more new broad strokes.

"That's certainly the case here. If you look at our patch notes [for the Sentinel Update], you'll see an absolute ton of refinements, but also huge new features too."

That list of updates that Hello Games has planned for No Man's Sky is being worked on alongside a new game from the studio that, in September 2021, Murray said was "very early" in development. The only morsel of information revealed is that it's a "huge, ambitious, game like No Man's Sky", though not a sequel.

This will likely be the case for a while, as Murray also said "we've learned our lesson" on talking about their games too early after No Man's Sky open (and controversial) pre-release.

The new Sentinel Update completely overhauled the game's combat by adding new weapons, updating old ones, and bringing a hoard of new enemies to use them on.

While the update is available on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC today, Nintendo players can enjoy the update alongside the rest of No Man's Sky when it comes to Switch this summer.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale.

Geta-Ve on February 17th, 2022 at 05:56 UTC »

Maybe they can redo the onboarding section at the beginning of the game. It’s so fucking boring, tedious and frustrating to play through. All of the interesting shit is late game.

Maybe they can also work on making planets look more diverse. I’ve been to hundreds of planets that all seem to share the same hundred or objects that are then put together procedurally to create something ”unique”. It all looks like hot garbage and there’s so little point in going to different planets. On top of that how about actual continental land masses with varying biomes to distinguish them apart.

How about revamping the god awful alien designs. They all look like the stupid shit my 10 year old nephew creates by randomly smashing various coloured bits of play-do together and trying to convince me it’s at all interesting to look at.

They need to hire 5 people to do nothing but add more variety to the procedural generation system. I’ve been picking this game up every couple of updates since it launched and I could not tell you with any certainty what has changed — most especially regarding the initial phase.

I’m glad they are still giving free updates and have lots of plans for the future, but they’ve done nothing to build out the amazing procedural foundation they’ve set up.

Snaz5 on February 16th, 2022 at 22:15 UTC »

Great to hear! Tho i wonder where they are getting income from. Id hate to see their creativeness and generosity be their undoing

doug on February 16th, 2022 at 17:44 UTC »

I'd love an update where like, a crew of friends can pilot a ship like FTL and just wander throughout the ship while the captain takes us wherever.

My wife sucks at piloting ships (I'm barely any better) and it'd be nice to just leave that to the player who's best at it while the rest of us do lowly maintenance tasks.