Don’t take the hype surrounding the universe in No Man’s Sky as just a bit of marketing. It’s truly a massive place. So huge in fact that a few weeks ago Sony and Hello Games announced that the game wouldn’t require players to have PS Plus membership to access the game. Apparently, 18 quintillion planets separated by light-years of empty void is comfortably large enough world to consider the game a single-player experience.
Like we said before players can find each other, but don’t jump into the game expecting an MMO-like experience. That being said, two players have already found each other, sorta.
Yesterday, according to Game Informer, two players who go by the names TheSadCactus and Psytokat discovered that they were in the same solar system. The two began to message one another over PSN, decided to set up a meeting point, and to stream their interaction. However, when they both reached the agreed upon meeting point, there was nothing. On the stream, it showed that they were both there, but their day/night cycles were different.
Of course, the chat during the stream immediately began to call Sean Murray, the game’s creator and founder of Hello Games, a liar but they may have jumped to that conclusion too quickly.
Murray took to twitter to comment on the situation, and his reason for the lack of interaction was due to the day-one traffic. Murray said that they added in a “scan for other players” players feature, but he never expected people to find each other so soon.
We added a ‘scan for other players’ in the Galactic Map to try to encourage this happening. We wanted it to happen – but the first day?
— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 10, 2016
We hope to see those happening… but too many of you are playing right now. More than we could have predicted
— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 10, 2016
For instance over night we hit 10 million species discovered in NMS… that’s more than has been discovered on earth.
WHAT IS GOING ON!!!— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 10, 2016
While that doesn’t totally explain why the two couldn’t see one another, it does give some insight on how much strain the game’s servers were under at launch.
No Man’s Sky is currently out on PS4 and, after a short delay, is set to release on PC on August 12th.