Six years after the release of No Man's Sky, the beloved sandbox-survival game is set to come to Nintendo Switch. The much-anticipated 4.0 update comes only a few months after the No Man's Sky Endurance update, which brought with it a slew of new content as well as the overhaul of several existing features. Now, a whole new community of players will be able to experience everything No Man's Sky has to offer when the update releases later this month.

Although No Man's Sky was initially not met with a very warm reception, over the years a series of massive updates have added almost everything players could have hoped for. The core concept of the game revolves open-world space exploration, putting players in the role of the Traveller, and much of the game's popularity comes from the freedom it offers players to focus more on the survival or sandbox elements of the title. In the past, updates have brought everything from new missions and environments to support for new consoles and VR.

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Sean Murray, a co-founder of No Man's Sky developer Hello Games, sat down with Screen Rant to discuss the 4.0 update, the highs and lows of game development, and bringing No Man's Sky to the Nintendo Switch.

It's been six years since the game released, and it's really come so far. I know it started as a fun, late-night coding session while you were waiting for a phone call with Microsoft, and it's really ballooned into something unimaginable and unique.

Sean Murray: Yeah, I'm very aware of that. It's been a real journey, for me. It's been now, and I say this with excitement, it's been 11 years for me that I've been working on it. You know, that's just crazy. But it is like, over a quarter of my life, it's a big part of my life, you know? So yeah, it's been a hell of a journey.

I know it had its anniversary in August, and now with the 4.0 update coming up, has that conjured up any especially retrospective, reflective feelings for you?

Sean Murray: Yeah, you know, I feel quite lucky. You know, if I'm honest, the team that work on the game and the team that work at Hello [Games], I feel really lucky to work with them. And they're excited about the game, which is lovely. And we have a player base. Which is a lovely phase, right? Like, I think there can be an assumption, I think, if I'm a gamer, right, there's an assumption that, like, I'm working on a live service game, and it must be a chore, or it must be so difficult or whatever. But actually, when you're working on a bigger project, you know, you might work on something for five years, and then it comes out. And during that time, it can be hard to keep motivation, right?

Actually, we have this lovely experience where we can work on something and then release it, and we know that there's like, on any given day, hundreds of thousands of people playing No Man's Sky, there are millions of active players, and we get to see their reaction, you know, good and bad, right? But it's instant, and it's always just on the horizon. And you're working on stuff for an update, and maybe some of it makes it some of it doesn't, but your instant reaction is like, "Okay, the next one." Like, you're always sort of like, "Ugh," you know, "I'm unhappy in some way about something with this particular update." And so you sort of can feel a bit down sometimes about that, and then you're like, "No, wait a minute. The next one, the next one's gonna be great. Don't get into that mindset again." So yeah, you said was I reflective at all, not in some massive way, but I do think I did feel quite lucky to be working with the team that we have and to have this community, it's a really lovely community.

Talking a little bit more just about happiness and working on this, I don't know if this is a thing that you still do, but I know that you used to graph your happiness during the development process, and that while it did have a somewhat general curve downwards, you also found there was this trend of really high peaks and low valleys. I'm curious, after all this time, what would you consider some of your highest peak moments?

Sean Murray: You know, honestly, emotion wise, I think when you're releasing a game, your emotions are all over the place, up and down. Releasing updates has a lot of that, right? Where it can be, I mean, obviously, it can be stressful, right? We're coming up to an update, we're releasing on Switch, and we're releasing an update as well across all the platforms. And like, obviously, there's stress involved in that, and worries that we've done the right things, and do they work as well as we hoped, and that kind of thing. And, you know, you never release something going, "It's perfect." And if you do, I don't know who you are.

Something's wrong.

Sean Murray: Yeah. But also, then there's the real buzz, right? And you see, my personality is such that every trailer we put out, you know, I will always look at it and think, "This one isn't a good trailer, no one's gonna like this," every single time, I really feel that. And you can tell me, "But Shawn, you felt that about all the ones before, it will be fine." and I'll be like, "No, no, you don't understand. We haven't done it right. I just don't think it works.” And then you put it out, and people are excited, and they're sharing it., and you're like, "Hey, it's all fine." You know? "Oh, I was such a fool."

It's lovely getting that reaction, and it's sort of a big motivator. You're asking me about happiness and things like that, one of the big things for me is seeing people playing the game, like, we get to see loads of data that no one else sees, and see how long people play for. For me, that's one of the best metrics of if people are enjoying the game, how are they getting on, right? And people play No Man's Sky for a long time. They always have, but it's like doubled and then tripled in terms of how long people play for, and that's a huge thing for us in terms of, I don't know, maybe not happiness. But in terms of motivation, that's one of those things, you get out of bed in the morning for it.

No Man's Sky base and ship.

It's also become a really communal game, which I think is really cool. And now coming to Switch, it's going to open it up to so many new players. Do you see that having a big effect on the game's community?

Sean Murray: Yeah, every time, so we do these sort of larger - they're not necessarily large in size, but in updates - they're sort of milestones for us. So version 2.0, version three, version four. For us, each one of those has brought a new platform. So 2.0 was Xbox, 3.0 was VR, and 4.0 Switch. We've also at that moment sort of taken the time, like you're saying, these communal moments, bringing in new players and stuff, we think about that a lot. And we step back from the game and we kind of go, "Uh, what is this game?" You know, you have that moment, and you sort of say, "Fundamentally, what is it? What is it about? What is the experience for a new player? Imagine you've never heard of it - what is it?" And you play through and you think, "God, we've added all of these things, how is it now? How is it as a whole?"

So those .0 updates, we normally take that moment to think about it from that point of view, from the new players point of view, from the returning players point of view, from the player who's played for 1000 hours. Those fundamentals, I suppose. So this update isn't a huge update in terms of content, we've done tons of content updates, but this is about design and stuff. So a big motivator, I suppose, what we think about a lot at the moment is that communal aspect, right? All these new players coming in, and you want that to be the nicest experience possible.

Crap analogy, but it's like you're thinking about your house and visitors are coming. You're already living there, and there's other people living there, but you see it through their eyes. And you're like, "Right, we need to tidy things. They're all coming." You know, that's how we feel about those sorts of Switch players and returning players. So it's a good moment for us where, like I was saying at the start, we're lucky I think in that, amongst game communities - I am biased, obviously - but I think we've got a really nice one, and they kind of get excited about new people joining, which is nice.

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With this update, like you said, it's all about adding it to the Switch, but is there anything small besides that Switch compatibility that players will find in the new update?

Sean Murray: Oh yeah, it's quite a large update for all platforms. So it's about design, and it's about the fundamentals of the game. But actually, this update is more focused on the other platforms than Switch in some ways, really. I'm going to say some negative things, but I'm very positive about No Man's Sky, I'm very proud of No Man's Sky. But if you were a player who had played No Man's Sky in the past, maybe, and you'd sort of bounced off of it, then that's the sort of thing we really want to focus on. Maybe you'd bounced off because it was a little bit grindy for you, or it was a little bit of too much of a focus on the survival elements rather than the sandbox elements, so we want to sort of address some of those things for people now. That'll be for new players, but also returning players, right?

For returning players, we want to do a lot to make it streamlined for you to come back, because it can be overwhelming, you've got like 21 updates, and they're all fighting for your attention in some ways. We want to streamline that a bit more and make it easier to return to, because we're thinking in that mindset of, "Visitors are coming in, we need to tidy the house," and so we're doing some of those fundamental things that we might not have done otherwise, you know. It's not the shiny thing that you can take screenshot of, but it is still really important. And we also, as you know, kind of want to focus on people who've played for a long time and add a lot to the sort of upper end of the game. Adding more challenge and adding a sort of greater level cap, to sort of be reductive about it in terms of how far into the game people can play and unlock.

But you were asking, for the other platforms, are there small things for them - when people see the patch notes, they'll see this huge list. We've really gone to town on a lot of small things, we often do for updates, but this has been the focus for this one. To sort of dig into just a ton of quality of life stuff that will probably mean nothing to most people, but for some of our players who've been with us for the longest time. And I love this - every time after every update, we're like, "We've added this!" and we're all excited about it, "We've added, a space whale!" And then Reddit will be like, "This!" and it's like some menu item.

It's like a UI change or something.

Sean Murray: [Laughs] It's always some UI change! And it's so gratifying, because as a player myself - and we played it a lot - you're like, "I know, right? It was so nice for us when that went in." And so yeah, I love that, and there's a lot of that this update.

Is there anything specific you can share that you're especially excited about?

Sean Murray: Yeah, and this is something that maybe won't seem that exciting again, but it's exciting to me and I think it will be impactful in terms of how long people play for and how much they enjoy the game. When we launched the game, I was very proud of that game, but it doesn't have the broad feature set that we have now. So in terms of like, if you have dials for sandbox and survival - which, our game is a survival sandbox - the feature set is the sort of sandbox element, and that was not turned that high. There was a big world to explore, but in terms of the features of a sandbox, you couldn't build a base or have a pet or a mech or whatever, right? But to balance that, you're actually cranking the survival element quite high, you know, to create the challenge and sort of create a lot of the entertainment. And actually, we know that people like that balance, and they've played that way for a long time. But for us, we know that if we had that feature set today, and we were launching for the first time, we might have balanced that a bit differently.

So we've introduced this new game mode, Relaxed, which gives you all of the content, and there is a massive sandbox there for you of all of these updates, but there is much less focused on survival, and much more focused on just enjoying that sandbox, and I'm playing with all those elements. I'm really excited about that. I think that's really cool for new players, and I think they're really gonna enjoy it. We've also made it that existing players can just switch over to that, and they can try it. And they can decide if it's for them or not, you know, and go back. But I think that it's a really lovely thing. It's going to be a big addition, and we haven't revisited game modes like that as a real fundamental since our very first update, which introduced them, and they are a big, big part of the game. Like I said, they're not kind of fun to look at like a space whale is, but they're really important.

No Man's Sky worm-like monster chasing Traveller.

I think that really meshes well with the entering Switch players too, because a lot of Switch players do tend to gravitate towards more casual, sandbox-type games.

Sean Murray: Yeah, it's been really lovely for us to see. We released No Man's Sky on Steam Deck, and I didn't actually think it would be particularly successful. Which shows what I know, I know nothing, right? Actually, it's been a big hit with players and you'll see on Steam, they put out their stats and we've been one of the top games basically on Steam deck since released. And we index higher on that, say, than on the rest of PC. And we obviously get to then see how people play, and we have thought about that a lot in terms of when we're adapting the game for Switch, you know, and how we want to adjust for that to make it more pick up and play.These are things like controls, and how the game saves. And in terms of that relaxed mode and stuff like that, those are awesome for Switch. I think from day one, it's great, but also, you know, those changes will also affect Steam Deck and the other platforms. We're often about kind of giving people a lot of freedom, that sort of sandbox sense, painting these broad brushstrokes with updates, and then seeing what people react to and what they dig into.

Is there anything you want players to know about No Man's Sky 4.0, or just the game in general?

Sean Murray: Yeah, I think for us, Switch is obviously something we're really excited about, and it's been a big technical challenge for us, something I didn't think was possible. I certainly didn't think we would be launching with the same universe. I know, that might sound weird - in my head, I thought we would have a Switch universe, and I didn't think we would be launching with so much content from the last six years. That's insane to me, I figured we would launch with, I don't know, one of the older updates, and then slowly update the game on Switch. But the team's been really into it, and have just pushed on it. I've always been the voice of like, "No, no, let's just do a cut-down version." I have to admit they have proved me wrong. I think it's a really good fit, I'm really happy with how it's playing. I'm really excited to see it come out, to see people play and then, like we do with all our platforms, take it from there. It takes steps beyond that, to sort of watch, listen, and adapt to them, I think. Yeah, really excited for that.

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The No Man's Sky 4.0 update will release October 7th for all platforms.