Light No Fire was first revealed over two years ago at The Game Awards 2023. It was the next open-world survival game from Hello Games, the studio behind No Man’s Sky. It would trade the galaxy-spanning sci-fi adventure of the former for a new fantasy RPG experience that spanned a massive simulation of a planet. Fans are hyped, but we’ve seen nothing since the initial trailer. Director Sean Murray says that wasn’t the original plan.
“I thought we would have chatted about it more by now,” Murray told me in an interview last week, part of a victory lap to mark the 10th anniversary of No Man’s Sky for a studio that rarely does press. “We dropped a trailer like two years ago, two and a half years ago, and I had a plan of like, ‘OK, we’ll do this. We’ll tease it. Right?’ It’s how I saw that 90-second trailer. And then I was like, ‘OK, and now I know what we’ll show next. We’ll really explain the game.'”
He had planned to provide a deeper dive into what players will actually spend their time doing in Light No Fire roughly six months later at Summer Game Fest 2024. Instead, the game has been a no-show at every Geoff Keighley showcase since 2023.
“I had actually intended that we were going to show it six months later, but, you know, we’ve like shot up the Steam wishlist charts; we‘re like number two on there. And I was just like, ‘OK, that’s enough. You know, we don’t need to say any more. Why? Why do any marketing?”
Back when he was launching No Man’s Sky, a PlayStation 4 exclusive at the time, Murray was everywhere, including late night talk shows. The whirlwind ended up getting the game into trouble, with launch version failing to live up to the hype as fans debated missing features and empty planets.
“I look back and it’s madness, Murray said. “I sort of cringe at it.”
In the decade since, No Man’s Sky has become the quintessential post-launch redemption story in gaming. Murray doesn’t need to go on Stephen Colbert to get people excited any more. A simple emoji on Twitter is enough to send entire subreddits spiraling with speculation.
Murray says he sits and plays Light No Fire “most days,” and the game’s tech is frequently mentioned in updates about new features for No Man’s Sky. He wouldn’t tease a release window, or even confirm if he has an idea in his own head of when the game will be ready, but he did say that the team at Hello Games, which is only around 50 employees, has been “ready” to show more of it for a while.
“I don’t think people realize just how ambitious it is and how crazy it is,” he told Kotaku. “And I look forward to people finding that out and to showing them. But I’m very happy right now just working on it in my own little cave and not having to worry about anything, trying to pretend the outside world doesn’t exist right now.”
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