Hello Games' grand follow-up to No Man's Sky, Light No Fire, is an open world the size of the actual Earth

08.12.2023 - 04:45 / pcgamer.com / Geoff Keighley / Sean Murray / No Man

How do you follow-up a game with an entire galaxy of procedurally-generated planets? With one procedurally-generated planet, it turns out—but it's a really big one.

Ten years on from the original announcement of No Man's Sky at the VGX awards, Hello Games has announced its new project, Light No Fire, at the TGA. It's clearly carrying on many of the concepts of post-updates NMS—procedural generation, exploration, base-building, and multiplayer—but switching genres from sci-fi to fantasy.

With that comes a shift in tone. Where No Man's Sky leaned into making you feel small and often alone in a vast galaxy, Light No Fire aims to be all about forming an adventuring party with your friends and setting out to explore a fantasy world dense with encounters.

At first glance, it seems less ambitious in scope than No Man's Sky—but Hello Games has emphasised to us that Light No Fire's single world is comparable in size to the real Earth. That's an easy fact to gloss over, so just take a minute to sit with it. It'll be an open world the size of the entire actual world. In videogame terms that is preposterously enormous, like if you could land anywhere in Microsoft Flight Simulator and discover an entire Assassin's Creed map at your location. Weirdly they're not the only ones attempting this right now, but that doesn't make it any less wild of a mission statement. 

«For our new game, we wanted to create an earth,» Sean Murray told Geoff Keighley on stage at The Game Awards. «A planet that is as varied as a universe. Something bigger than earth. Something with mountains, real mountains, not videogame mountains, but mountains that are miles high, taller than Everest, that when you climb to the top of them and look out, you can see rivers and canyons and continents. You can see oceans.»

«So is this like an open world planet kind of thing?» Keighley asked.

«The first real open world,» Murray said. «Something without boundaries. And we're going to let everyone play in it together. It's a place where people can live out their adventures together.»

Where No Man's Sky's relatively small planets were often desolate and mostly empty, the goal here is for this one world to feel far more detailed, alive, and realistic. Verticality is particularly a focus, with accurately tall (i.e. gigantic) mountains from which you can look down across the rivers and valleys below and plan your next adventure. 

And it's the same world for all of us—though the game will be instanced, only allowing you to see a certain number of other players at a time, it will also be persistent for everyone, and reflect everyone's actions within it. As in No Man's Sky, that means you'll be able to find bases other people have built and landmarks they've