No Man’s Sky has been surrounded by controversy since its launch, mostly due to the massive amount of hype and promised features the game never fully lived up to, at least not yet. Now, SIE Worldwide Studios president Shawn Layden has defended the game and spoke of its potential.

Speaking on Live with YouTube Gaming, the Sony boss said that he thinks Sean Murray and his team at Hello Games “had an incredible vision of what they were going to create.”

He also made a note in that the game was something never fully achieved before, saying the team had “very huge ambition” despite being a very small number of actual staff. Layden also noted that Hello Games is “still working at” building the game to be “closer to what their vision was.”

“What we learned from [No Man’s Sky] is that we don’t want to stifle ambition, we don’t want to stifle creativity,” Layden said. “We don’t want to put people into slots where they must execute against an action-adventure path or a fighting path or a shooting path.

“And perhaps over time, it’ll reveal itself to be all that it can be.”

Hello Games and No Man’s Sky director Sean Murray finally broke their public silence last month, albeit via a disgruntled employee.