British indie studio Hello Games is building something it calls "more ambitious" that no man's sky. The studio's next game is Do not light fire, and brings procedural generation to an entire planet on an incredibly detailed scale.
Do not light fire is an open-world exploration and community-building game set on an Earth-sized planet, combining RPG elements with survival in a sandbox environment. It's a multiplayer experience set in an ancient and fantastical landscape, with climbable trees, hills and mountains, and secrets to discover around every corner. Is "the first real open world," according to Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray.
Do not light fire has been in development for five years by about a dozen Hello Games developers. In the first trailer for the title, it looks like the team took over an entire planet of no man's sky and filled it completely with life, resources and mysteries.
There is no release date for Do not light fire and there are no confirmed platforms, and the game was kept completely secret until its reveal at The Game Awards on December 7. Given Hello Games' history with over-the-top marketing schemes, that's no surprise.
Hello Games is synonymous with no man's sky, a sprawling and incredibly popular space exploration simulator that landed in 2016 and has only gotten better with time. But before the independent studio landed a big marketing deal with Sony for no man's sky – before one of its founders met with Steven Spielberg and appeared in The last show with Stephen Colbert —Hello Games was known for side-scrolling cartoons. joe danger.
British developers Ryan Doyle, Grant Duncan, Sean Murray and David Ream founded Hello Games in 2009, after leaving their jobs at major studios such as EA and Criterion. This was before the modern indie boom, at a time when XBLA was just getting started and Steam had only a handful of indie games.
"Actually, splitting up and doing your own thing was stupid at the time," Murray told me this in 2016.
For nine months, the Hello Games quartet worked on joe danger, a 3D side-scroller starring a happy-go-lucky daredevil on a dirt bike, and they tried to lock up an editor. Nobody was interested.
"They all rejected us" Murray said in 2016. "We were rejected by Sony, Microsoft and many other places."
Out of money and resigned to giving up their independent dreams, Doyle, Duncan, Murray and Ream went to the pub.
"We came up with this stupid idea." Murray said. "I had a house, so I sold it to pay for the rest of the development. …The way I looked at it was like I bought that house because I had worked at EA, so it was like blood money. Like a blood diamond. You have to sell that; That's bad karma."
And he really did it. Built on loans and money from the sale of Murray's house, joe danger It came out on June 9, 2010 and was a success. Hello Games followed up with Joe Danger 2: The Movie in 2012. By then, the studio was an established independent hitmaker and had relationships with major publishers. In December 2013, the team revealed something completely unexpected: no man's skya multiplayer game the size of the universe and filled with galaxies of procedurally generated planets to explore.
The next summer, no man's sky It had a big moment at Sony's E3 press conference and the AAA marketing machine was activated. Sony leaned heavily on Hello Games to bolster its image as an independent curator, and over the next two years, rumors surrounding no man's sky reached astronomical heights. Spielberg, Colbert, Kanye West and Elon Musk got involved in his and no man's sky was a household name years before its release.
When the game came out, there was no way it could live up to expectations. no man's sky promised a universe of procedurally generated planets to explore, packed with minerals and creatures and other players to find, but at launch on August 9, 2016, it was buggy and empty. The essence of a fantastic game was there, but some players felt so misled by Sony's intense marketing campaign that they filed a lawsuit against Hello Games.
The team continued working no man's sky, releasing bug fixes, updates and expansions, including a virtual reality version. As the years passed, the vision they were initially selling to players became clearer in the game, and the online fury died down until it was completely replaced by admiration. Since launch, no man's sky has won several high-profile awards, including Best Ongoing Game at The Game Awards 2020. This year, it is nominated at The Game Awards in the Best Community Support category.
"It has become much simpler two years after launch," Murray told me this in 2019. "At launch, we were very focused on trying to please the partners we were working with, on trying to market our game, on trying to live up to the expectations that we were really struggling to meet."
no man's sky in particular is the brainchild of Murray, and he was the face of the game as it rose, fell and rose again in public perception. He and the rest of the Hello Games team, which today is larger than four developers, have been silent about their internal projects and it's easy to understand why.
"They're super talented and I didn't want to just move on and let that be their legacy." Murray said in 2019. "It's very nice for them to be able to tell people: 'I worked in no man's sky,' and that people are really happy and positive about it now. That's something they deserved."
This story makes today's revelation of Do not light fire even sweeter. Fourteen years after that fateful night in the pub, Hello Games is a testament to perseverance.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-makers-of-no-mans-sky-will-simulate-a-whole-planet-for-light-no-fire-035108958.html ?src=rss
