Hello Games Talks the Stories and Lore of No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky doesn’t have a traditional story like most gamers might expect. “We always kind of say, we shouldn’t have a story,” Sean Murray of Hello Games explains, “but we should have a lore.”

In this way, No Man’s Sky hopes to do something only games can ever truly accomplish: build a world that allows stories to happen on their own. With an incomprehensible number of planets in the game, that means there are an incomprehensible number of stories waiting to be acted out by each player.

But the universe isn’t simply an empty sandbox. Explaining on the PlayStation Blog, Murray says there is “a real lore in the game. Hopefully everything you find has a reason for existing. When you see a building, we’ve tried to think of who might have built it, and why. It’s something we’re excited to see fans uncover as they play, and put their own interpretations on.”

With a universe so ripe for storytelling, Hello Games has enlisted two experts at just that, Dave Gibbons (Watchmen, Kingsmen) and James Swallow (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Star Trek). Both will be working on standalone stories offered as pack-in extras for the limited edition of the game. Touching on Hello Games’ approach to lore in No Man Sky, the feature above also gives a behind the scenes look at the work Gibbons and Swallow are doing.

What do you think of the direction No Man’s Sky is going? Let us know in the comments.

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