When I caught wind of a new No Man’s Sky update launching on August 14, free for all owners, I went through the usual routine of emailing its makers at Hello Games to request some form of access. Anything from a beta branch to a list of patch notes might support whatever I’d end up writing, I said. In response, Hello Games offered a high-class upgrade: a phone conversation with the game’s director.

That’s Sean Murray himself, the man whose name kept getting attached to stories about disappointed fans—and who thus went into media-blackout mode for some time. Since launch, NMS has benefited from a series of patches, and I looked forward to hearing about even more new content coming to the game, like a VR update (which I’d briefly tested at a Valve Index reveal event in April) and an emphasis on online play.

Of course, hours before my phone rang, my game-news feed lit up with the No Man’s Sky community losing its danged mind.

Murray had just hopped onto Twitter and announced that NMS’ upcoming “Beyond” patch encompassed “three pillars,” and then posted the fuzzy-math equation of “30-40%” of the patch being about VR, and 30-40% being about online play. That left a few percent unexplained. At the game’s biggest Reddit community, the highest-ranked thread about these tweets was simply titled, “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!“

Once my phone rang, I asked Murray a pointed question. NMS fans are currently frothing at the mouth with speculation and hope for features. We’ve been down this road before. Does this mean you’re not done putting your foot in your mouth?

Murray laughed nervously—the fitful laugh I remembered so clearly from our last lengthy chat in February 2016—and blurted, “Oh, you know. Never say never, right? But I’d like to be.”

“We’ve had a crazy old journey”

Perhaps Murray’s return to the public eye, and newfound confidence in teasing the game’s updates, has something to do with his sense of shock—shock over the positive reception of last August’s massive No Man’s Sky update, the 1.5 “Next” patch, was successful by every measure.

“None of us had super high hopes for [Next],” Murray said from Hello Games’ headquarters in Guildford, England. He recalled the game’s age at that point—two years since launch, and a year after its last significant update—and assumed Next would largely be received by “those already playing the game.” Instead, Murray said the free patch drove “millions” in new sales across all platforms combined. (He did not clarify how many of those came from the game’s 2018 premiere on Xbox One consoles.)

“That was a surprise,” Murray said. “We were very nervous before [Next]’s release, wondering how people would react. After all, we’ve had a crazy old journey on No Man’s Sky. Then we said to ourselves, ‘We’re definitely never doing that again.’ That was a huge update, and it was stressful, so we’re done with those. Let’s do what any normal studio would do: small updates.”

Some smaller-scale quality-of-life patches followed, each propelling the game back into Steam’s top-25 “concurrent player” rankings. Then the team began toying with ideas for three separate patches to round out the next few months of development: a VR mode, an expansion of the game’s 2018 multiplayer options, and a “2.0”-worthy slate of under-the-hood fixes. Murray explains that each began modestly, only to spiral beyond their individual scopes.

For VR, the studio planned to deliver a “direct, straightforward port in VR,” which he compared to 2017’s Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR version. Upon hearing this comparison, a red flag went off for me; the amount of VR-specific optimization needed to map Skyrim‘s traversal and combat to VR controllers was not insubstantial. And in the case of No Man’s Sky, plans for a simpler scope (meaning, unchanged UI and non-VR gamepad restrictions) evaporated the first time Murray sat in its VR cockpit.

“This awesome moment, to sit in the ship, to grab the [virtual] joystick with one hand, the throttle with another, and fly the ship properly?” Murray gushed. “That was it. We were done. We had to do that for the entire rest of the game.” This meant a top-to-bottom rework of 20 control mechanics to support 3D-tracked VR controllers, including terrain deformation, submarine controls, and freighters. (VR modes will also work just fine with standard gamepads, too.)

While Murray didn’t offer specifics about VR comfort, I can at least point to my brief test of the mode in April as a good indicator of what’s to come. An in-helmet UI while walking over a planet and a stable cockpit view while blasting into space grounded my sense of presence in a way that didn’t feel dizzying. Still, we’re waiting to see how that all feels for more than a 10-minute demo.

Why, you may ask at this point, did Hello Games choose to increase the scope of this completely free, no-extra-charge VR feature update? That became a recurring theme in our conversation.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1547751