'No Man's Sky' Multiplayer Controversy Explained: Server Issues Crushing Online Features, 'Easter Eggs'

There’s been a great deal of confusion over the potential multiplayer aspects of No Man’s Sky. This is due in part to the unorthodox, shared nature of the universe: players collaborate in filling out the vast database of planets, alien species and systems with their own names. Plus, No Man’s Sky is a hard game to understand without sitting down and playing. Its procedurally generated universe, with its 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets, is unlike any other game ever created, leading to months of hype and misunderstanding about the game’s essential nature.

But the confusion surrounding multiplayer can also partially be blamed on Hello Games’ Sean Murray, who has communicated different multiplayer features throughout the development cycle.

“It has some MMO-esque mechanics, I guess,” Murray told Gamespot in 2014. “There is this thing, which I'm not going to talk about now, that is a plan for multiplayer and for people to have a more traditional multiplayer experience within the game.” Appearances on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert further inculcated the idea that No Man’s Sky was very nearly an MMORPG, where players could run into each other and hop about the galaxy together.

This has turned out not to be the case. The lack of multiplayer in No Man’s Sky was demonstrated fairly conclusively shortly after release, when two players managed to appear at the same time on the same planet, yet remain invisible to each other.

It’s natural for a game of this scale, developed by a remarkably small team, to have some features early in development that never made it into the final product. But that doesn’t change the unfortunate confusion that’s developed surrounding the multiplayer aspects of the resolutely lonely, very solo experience of playing No Man’s Sky.

Now Murray has cleared up some of the confusion on Twitter, while also suggesting that there may be more online features and multiplayer-like “Easter eggs” yet to be uncovered. Server issues seem to be partially responsible for the absence of some of these features.

While Murray’s tweets don’t confirm whether or not players sharing the same planet will eventually be able to see each other or interact, he does suggest that there’s more to the multiplayer aspect of No Man’s Sky than just the shared server of planet and species names.

What these “easter eggs” are is still unknown, but they’re unlikely to be anything resembling the multiplayer experience some people were expecting from the game. So while there are shared universe features yet to be uncovered, don’t expect No Man’s Sky to become massively multiplayer in any traditional sense.