No Man’s Sky dev is working on a ‘huge, ambitious’ new game

Hello Games is working on a new project described as “a huge, ambitious game like No Man’s Sky.”

Speaking in a new interview with Polygon, studio founder Shaun Murray confirmed the unannounced game wasn’t a sequel to No Man’s Sky, neither a small title like the just-released adventure game The Last Campfire.

“I had worked at EA before I started Hello Games, and we’d just done lots of sequels,” Murray said. “Everything that I worked on was the sequel to something. I found that a bit of a depressing thing in some ways. It was part of the reason for moving.”

Hello Games is now made up of 26 people, Murray said. Just three of them worked on The Last Campfire, while the remaining 23 are split between supporting No Man’s Sky and working on the next “big” project.

While Murray would not reveal details on the new game, he said he had learned plenty of lessons from No Man’s Sky, which received a mixed reception at release following years of marketing hype, but eventually grew a large fanbase following continued improvements via updates.

“There is this poison chalice or deal with the devil that I think any indie game developer would find actually a very difficult choice, right? The choice that we had with No Man’s Sky where if I was to go back again, I would find it very difficult to know what the right path was.

“Where you will have incredible interest in your game, you will have a huge amount of excitement for it. But you will be in a rocket ship, launching towards the sun, and you will be building that rocket on the way up.”

He added: “And there is an excitement and a craziness to that. Where we’ve ended up with the game, where we have hundreds of millions of hours played and a really happy community and all of that kind of thing, you know, I’m OK with that deal that we did, right?”