No Man’s Sky VR is fast approaching this summer on PSVR and PC VR headsets. In anticipation of the big Beyond update, Sean Murray, co-founder of Hello Games, spoke to the Develop: Brighton team about the release.
We still don’t have an exact release date yet for the Beyond update, which revamps the game’s online functionality and adds full VR support, but it has been rated in Australia which hints that a date announcement could be imminent.
“The thing we’re working on at the moment is bringing the game to virtual reality, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” says Murray. “It’s very uniquely sci-fi, I think — the idea of you’ve already got this game that’s procedurally generated with a whole universe you can explore and then the idea that you’re going to put on a headset and walk around in virtual reality…if eight year old me could see that I was working on that I think that he’d just have a heart attack. It’s nuts. It’s the perfect kind of sci-fi dream.”
I got a chance to try out the upcoming VR support for No Man’s Sky on both an HTC Vive Pro and PSVR headset and am impatiently waiting for it to release. The sheer magnitude of the game world, multitude of possibilities, and scale of it all is breathtaking. Describing it as a “perfect kind of sci-fi dream” doesn’t feel very hyperbolic if you’re familiar with the game’s design. Playing it in VR is pretty special.
Earlier this week we asked what you plan on doing first in No Man’s Sky VR once it comes to VR and there have been a wide range of enticing responses.
“It’s also been hugely challenging for us to take this big, broad game and make it so that people can explore it with a headset and virtual controllers and things like that,” says Murray. “But I’m excited for it to come out and it’s been very creatively driven. It’s something that we have wanted to work on for a long time and it’s almost been like our dessert. Like our pudding. We’ve worked on a lot of other features and it’s been like, ‘When we’re done with all of that, then we can have time to have our nice little treat at the end.'”
Last week Murray was quoted as saying that over one million people that currently own No Man’s Sky also own a VR headset, echoing a previous comment from GDC earlier this year. I can imagine that once the VR support goes live that number will only increase even further.
