An interdimensional Tardis

Another pot in the Beyond-patch kitchen—an online expansion—similarly grew in scope. The team began by thinking of ways to update Next's online mode, which allowed parties of up to four friends to warp to the same location inside of NMS' galaxy of "14 quintillion planets." While doing this, teams of four could happen upon other online strangers, but those strangers would merely appear as floating orbs, not their actual spacesuit-wearing selves.

Four people plus some floating orbs is a bit ho-hum, innit? "What about eight?" Hello Games asked itself. Then somehow that turned into, "What about 32?" The team began putting together the essential infrastructure changes needed to let up to 32 players—friends and strangers alike—find each other on a given planet.

This week's preview trailer shows off the central piece of that plan: the Nexus, a new, super-sized space station that will materialize in every local system of planets and serve as NMS' interdimensional Tardis. (Murray calls it the game's "pinch point.") Wherever you might be in NMS' massive galaxy, once you dock at a Nexus, you'll connect to up to 31 other players, all linked by a mix of Hello Games' server infrastructure and a peer-server system. To describe this, Murray makes references to Destiny and how it divides online players into connected "shards" as appropriate.

To continue the comparison, each Nexus is "a bit like Destiny's Tower," Murray said. Not only will you see strangers' ships and avatars in this zone, you'll also see "screenshots of bases they've built on planets" floating near them. These images are firm reminders that anyone in a given Nexus can warp to someone's base anywhere in the galaxy by interacting with that stranger (should their permissions allow it). They don't have to be on your friends list to shove off to another end of the galaxy and see what they've created.

The alien dung collection agency

The Nexus will eventually host other ways to connect players to each other, as well. One of those new systems, which won't be ready for Beyond's launch, is a new, regularly updated series of "Community Missions."

"We'll say, hey, everyone. This week, you need to go to this planet and take pictures of creatures there," Murray explained. "Or bring back samples of alien dung. Or collect resources from this kind of tree. Or find the deepest cave. Or build a particular structure together." Accepting these missions will warp players directly to a particular system or planet, where they'll automatically join a shard of other online players. Completing these rewards players with in-game currency, which can be spent on a new "rewards shop," but Murray wasn't ready to describe exactly how that shop would work.

"If other people are there, you'll see them!" Murray said, a bit obviously. He repeats this point a few times in our call, but after so many people loudly dreamed of this exact kind of online interaction in NMS, it's hard to blame him. "That provides a contrast that makes you enjoy the loneliness of some of the other planets more, I feel. Go to these crowded spaces, then the quieter ones. It's a nice contrast."

Another feature coming to the Nexus is "featured bases," which will see Hello Games recognizing user-made content across the game's galaxy based on factors like popularity among Nexus users. Should a user's creations become popular enough, every single online player will get a limited-time nudge to warp directly to that base and see it first-hand, if they so choose. "If your base has been featured, you'll be playing, and people will start showing up," Murray said. "It'll be a popular hangout spot for those few days, and then those crowds will go away."

These all sound like clever solutions for a world so massive that a player might never organically run into anyone else. When pressed, however, Murray insists that when two complete strangers happen to warp to the same isolated planet at the same time, NMS' online systems should connect their sessions. (Should this play out as advertised, we cannot wait for NMS' first pure meet-cute to happen.)

All of these online features are wholly free, and Murray further explained that the company will be offering these features without requiring any subscriptions, and without any microtransactions, cosmetic or otherwise.

"A very clear message I was telling everyone"

What about that "third pillar," then? Murray says that this portion of the patch is best described as "No Man's Sky 2.0." You heard the man: a full VR mode and a fulfillment of the game's original online-strangers dream does not count in Hello Games' eyes as enough to tick the game's version level one higher.

But after hearing Murray's explanation, I bought it. The man is surprisingly frank about how he feels the game's updates have worked out: a little awkwardly.

After listing the variety of features added over the past two years, Murray described the process of "stacking them on top of everything else that's already there. A lot of live games have this problem. A new feature gets added, and it's just plunked down on top of the next one on top of the ten updates that came before. They're cool features. But we never would've made [No Man's Sky] that way if we'd had all those features from day one. To me..." He paused. "This wasn't a complaint from our user base. But the game didn't feel as cohesive as it could be."

And if you think that's frank, get a load of this. Murray went on to level a criticism of the game that echoed my own complaints from the game's 2016 launch:

If you’d talked to me nine months ago, there was a very clear message I was telling everyone who’d listen. After I visited 100 planets, 50 planets, 1,000 planets, depending on personal tastes, there’s some amount of planets you visit, where you start to feel like, 'I’ve done this. It’s not having the same kick for me anymore. Whatever I see... it’s a bit different, the sky’s a different color, but it doesn’t inspire the same emotion in my heart.'







Murray didn't offer a complete "patch notes" list of changes to expect, but he did shine a spotlight on two major updates. The first is arguably the most visible in the patch's trailer: "You can ride creatures!" Murray exclaimed. Without any prompting, he added with a laugh, "You can tame them... and milk them!" (He's serious.)

If you're wondering, Hello Games has gone to the trouble of making nearly every creature size-compatible with these features, from "huge dinosaurs to tiny rodents." Murray then described testing scenarios where eight players had charged around on matching creatures: "It's really fun. I know that's where the GIFs will come from."

The second major update sounds a lot more tantalizing: a new series of building blocks for the game's base-building mode. (Murray claims that the game's player-base currently spends a whopping 50% of its time in the game's base-building interface, which he found surprising.) A new suite of building blocks and connective tissue includes stuff like logic gates, electricity grids, teleporters, and physics distortion systems.

Murray urged fans to take a deep breath before imagining too many wild possibilities with these new building blocks, then admitted that his team "rebuilt a crappy version of Rocket League in a day. We had goals that worked, score counters, working multiplayer." He then repeated his concern, that fans "shouldn't go into [NMS Beyond] expecting to make minigames," but, uh, you literally did that, Sean. He laughed at my response. "It's a thing you can do," he conceded.

Murray, off the cuff

Sadly, that's as far as Murray was willing to go to explain the game's "version 2.0" designation, though Hello Games eventually sent over a bullet list with a few other vague hints: "cooking and recipes," a new "Galactic Atlas" website resource, "walking NPCs with new language and depth," and the 3D engine's shift to Vulkan rendering for potentially increased performance.

In addition to that list, Murray was emphatic about one part of Beyond: that its "three pillars" of patch content were held back to guarantee that every new feature was fully functional for both standard players and VR users. Again and again, Murray pointed to design decisions that revolved around the philosophy of leaving the existing NMS community intact.

That's why VR headset owners haven't been asked to buy an entirely new SKU. That's why online features don't require buying season passes. That's why a new system of building blocks won't be restricted to DLC buyers. (Unfortunately, cross-platform play is not in the cards.)

Our phone conversation began with Murray describing Beyond's patch in a largely uninterrupted speech, the kind he likely perfected for a press tour. His speech ended with him saying, "So, we've gone a bit crazy!" I responded by asking how much the game's sales and success afforded his team the ability to indeed go as crazy as they saw fit. And it's here that Murray's remarks became more off the cuff.

"All of us developers will tell you the same kind of lie" about prioritizing creativity over profit, he said, before adding, "I put it at us being a really small studio when I say, yeah, we're creatively driven." He reiterated NMS' history of continuing to sell reasonably well after every update, rambled a bit about the business side of making video games, then sighed loudly.

"If I'm honest, most people would want us, in terms of the publishing side, to sell No Man's Sky VR separately. I imagine that's commercially the more sensible thing to do. But for us, when we sat down and chatted about it, the idea of splitting the community like that would kill us. Same with multiplayer and VR together: they're super cool. Splitting those didn't excite us in the same way."

After recounting Hello Games' earlier days as the struggling makers of smaller fare like Joe Danger, he admits the studio is now "lucky enough to follow our creative urge." And while I've trimmed Murray's speech for the sake of brevity, one thing is decidedly missing from his words: any reservations or doubts about the game's original mixed reception in 2016. "Community," "playing together," "bringing people together": that's the audience he has in mind—and positive reactions to the game's years of free patches haven't hurt that one bit.

Even No Man's Sky has an ending...

This led to my question about the game's road map for future content. Murray insisted he doesn't have one.

"We're going to stop when we're not creatively into it," he said flatly. "When we're not inspired. The community will probably be mad at us when we do, but I don't think I'd want us working on something we were just adding skins to, or something like that. We get excited about stuff. It's the core of our studio now. It'd make me sad for [our staff] to just put in new costumes or parts week in and week out."

That might make the company more money in a cost-to-profit way, Murray said, "but then we wouldn't be the same studio. That's when we'll stop. I thought that might happen after Next launched; I thought it was going to happen to me. People may be annoyed or not understand that you can't predict when that's going to happen. I don't think I can."

Murray took a breath—not a sigh, though. Not even close to a sigh. "When Beyond is out of the way," he finished, "will I come into work still super-excited about this game? At the moment, yes, I feel that."