Light No Fire will 'absolutely' be like No Man's Sky, with new features coming post-release: Sean Murray says he'd like to still be working on it '10 years after launch'
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"I've worked on it for seven years now, and I'm still really enjoying it."
It's hard to believe, travelers, but No Man's Sky has turned 10 years old. As part of the sprawling space sandbox's double-digit anniversary, Sean Murray took some time to talk to PC Gamer about No Man's Sky's decade of development, as well as the future of earth-sized multiplayer fantasy game Light No Fire. It was announced in December of 2023, but we haven't heard much about it since.
Looking back over the sheer number of free features that have been added to No Man's Sky over the years since it launched, I asked Murray if he anticipates that Light No Fire will be similar to No Man's Sky—in terms of how it was released as a sandbox with a core experience but had lots of major features added post-launch, many of them based on player requests.
"I think about this a lot," Murray said. "When we had been working on No Man's Sky and it had come out, and we were talking about what we were going to do next, one thing that rang true across the team was that they were saying 'What I really enjoy about No Man's Sky is that I can think of ideas, and they generally fit.' Especially if they are sci-fi related. So many sci-fi things can fit in the No Man's Sky universe, and it's this really broad canvas, and you can bring your imagination to it."
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The team wanted the same sort of canvas, though based in fantasy instead of science-fiction, for their next game. "Something that is ambitious enough and broad enough that lots of ideas make sense there."
Murray mentioned a post-launch update, 2025's Voyagers, which added large multi-crew spaceships to No Man's Sky.
"That started as something on Light No Fire, where we were making ships that you could have as a crew and [use in] multiplayer, but they are their own physics world, and they can travel across oceans because we've got these huge oceans on Light No Fire," Murray said.
"And so we were like, 'Oh, well, that could work with No Man's Sky actually, and so we started working on the sort of spaceships that were buildable and that multiple crew could get inside of."
"So to answer your question, yeah absolutely," he said. "We feel that [Light No Fire is] a game that will fit with that way of making games, where you can think of a lot of ideas, and they would make sense, and we can feed off the community.
"Whether we'll be lucky enough to get to work on it for 10 years after launch, I don't know, but I'd like to," Murray said. "I've worked on it for seven years now, and I'm still really enjoying it."
