When No Man’s Sky launched six years ago, the last thing on Hello Games founder Sean Murray’s mind was if he could release it to the Nintendo Switch. For one, it preceded the official announcement of the Switch by two months. More importantly, the game released to a loud thud, thanks to many technical issues upon launch, but there was more to it than that. Partnering with Sony on marketing, Sean himself talked up his ambitions for the game too much, so much so that fans’ expectations were raised too high. When the disappointment set in, the backlash and game reviews were severe.
What followed for the next six years were a slow, but more meaningful crawl back to redemption. A steady series of patches, that did everything from fix major issues and vulnerabilities, to QOL improvements and changes that dramatically affected the game design, did their job of mending the game’s reputation.. This would eventually amount to 32 patches, across those six years, with a seeming highlight coming in a few days with the release on Nintendo Switch.
Today makes all the difference in the world as Hello Games brings their flagship game to the last undiscovered frontier. When bringing the game to Nintendo Switch, Sean had two main things in mind. One, was the technical challenge of making the port. This would not be the first current gen game to make the half step back to what is roughly a last gen console. As recently as last week, Nier Automata was receiving praise for its surprisingly faithful, stunning recreation to Nintendo’s console.
In particular, the idea of a randomly generating space exploration game running on that chip seemed impossible. What won Sean over was the fact that they already made this supposedly impossible jump to VR. On top of that, the many changes to technology, including the refinement of making Switch ports, made it seem more and more feasible.
The other thing, perhaps the reason so many modern games brave the jump to the Switch in the first place, is the interesting way people play games today. Many people who played No Man’s Sky on the Steam Deck already played it on Steam on PC, and this pointed to a common trend today. Gamers like playing the same game on multiple platforms, double dipping and even triple dipping sometimes. While Steam Deck is arguably portable, the notion of playing No Man’s Sky on a platform like the Nintendo Switch, where you could play it for hours instead of one or two, was interesting to Sean.
On top of that, of course, there would also still be that segment of Nintendo Switch owners who don’t play anything else. Would the people who played Animal Crossing over the pandemic be interested in No Man’s Sky?
As for the game itself, Sean explained they had been planning and working on the Switch port for over two years, and they had discreetly ascertained that the port was even possible. The truth is, they hit every roadblock that could have ended the port, and come up with a solution over and over. Hello Games is just as astounded as everyone else that they pulled it off, and this release is coming with no fundamental compromises.
“I’ll explain two things about No Man’s Sky. The first thing, which I’m sure you’ll be aware [of], is what’s on screen is [procedurally] generated by the computer that it’s running on, which is different to other games. Other games you build a level and it is pre-built and what you see on screen is then — just to be really reductive about it — is a rendering of something static that somebody has already made. No Man’s Sky, when you walk around a planet or look at a tree or a leaf, the computer is having some element of generation there to create that thing that’s in front of you, which means that a tree for us is more expensive to create and to render than it is for another game. It gives some great benefits and it means that we have this infinite universe, but it does mean that it is just flat-out more difficult and more expensive. That’s one of the big challenges compared to other games that I have worked on.
Running on Switch, it means that everything that you’re seeing has to be generated by that little device — docked or undocked — which just has an overall impact. For that reason, I had always assumed that No Man’s Sky on Switch would have a different universe to the other platforms. Which may mean nothing to you, but is really important to us. We have generated this universe and we have generated it in loads of different ways and we can simplify that generation. I think it would have been ok for the Switch No Man’s Sky universe to be different to the other platforms. I thought that would be ok and I thought that would be a necessary compromise.
It’s been a real surprise to me that we’ve managed to get the same universe to run. You can fly to the same planet on an Xbox or a PS5 or a PC as on the Switch and see the same terrain shapes and the same tree in the same place and all of those kind of things. That has been, probably, one of the biggest challenges, and where I thought we were going to have to compromise.”
Sean says there are many small differences that players may not notice, but there have only been two major concessions that Hello Games did not put into the Switch port at launch, but in fact they may be adding later. That would be the online multiplayer, and settlements, a feature that also wasn’t available when the game originally launched, and in fact only came out last year.
On a side note, Sean was asked what Nintendo IP he would like to work on, and fittingly enough, he cited Star Fox. In the same way that Star Fox was a technical marvel when it was released on the SNES/Super Famicom in 1993, this coming release of No Man’s Sky is one that just didn’t seem possible years ago, and it’s now one of the platform’s most anticipated releases.
No Man’s Sky will be launching on the Nintendo Switch this October 7. 2022. It is playable now on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, including the Steam Deck.
Source: NintendoLife
