After months of silence from the team behind No Man’s Sky, PlayStation executive Shawn Layden has appeared on a YouTube ‘live’ stream, in which he responded to the controversy surrounding the game and its unfulfilled promises.

During his talk, Layden praised No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games for their “incredible vision”, citing how procedurally generated worlds have never been done before (not at such scale at least), and how the six-people team did everything in their hands to deliver to the fans… haven’t stopped working on the game.

“They’re still updating it. They’re trying to get it closer enough or closer to what their vision was,” he said, implying that all the features promised during the kickstarting campaign will indeed become part of the game, if only eventually.

No Man’s Sky and its creators, were heavily criticized by the media and fans alike when the game launched, after everybody noticed that a lot of the features discussed by director Sean Murray himself, were mysteriously missing – most prominently the multiplayer aspect (after all, sharing a whole universe with other people was a big part of the marketing campaign).

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Hayden mentioned that we still haven’t seen everything No Man’s Sky is up to, “We don’t want to put people into slots where they must execute against an action adventure path or a fighting path or a shooting path. Perhaps over time, No Man’s Sky will reveal itself to be all it can be.”

If anything, he adjudicated the game’s shortcomings to the fact that the vision was so great that the team might have went overboard with the challenge.

“I think looking at the different industries I’ve had the privilege of working, the gaming industry is where everybody has the courage to say ‘yes.’ And they want to try to realise their ambitions. They want to try to make that vision. No one slinks away from a huge challenge. And sometimes you just don’t get all the way there at the first go,” he added.

It’s hard to sympathize with Hello Games after their disappearance from social media (the last relevant thing we heard from them was a hacked tweet), the unanswered refund requests (Steam had to step in for this one), and the fact those new features were already promised by Sean Murray to be included in “future DLCs”, yet the latest update, which took place in September, only brought some bug fixes.

There’s also the whole UK advertising authorities investigating the game for fraudulent advertising, which is it’s own story.

Even then, it’s not necessarily too late for No Man’s Sky to redeem itself, and while gamers all over the world have shown their spite to Hello Games’ movements, those are the same gamers who still crave for an infinite, unique universe in their consoles.

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