It’s a big universe out there in No Man’s Sky, but players are already stumbling across each other’s exotic discoveries, and even attempting to meet up.
Unfortunately it looks like even if two people can get to the same one planet out of 18 quintillion different planets, there’s still no guarantee you’ll see each other.
Kotaku reports that two players, who go by TheSadCactus and Psytokat, coordinated to meet on the same planet in the same spot, but couldn’t see each other.
It all started when TheSadCactus touched down on a planet already discovered by Psytokat. Seizing what we’re led to believe is a rare opportunity, TheSadCactus got in touch with his fellow explorer to see if they could meet up and test No Man’s Sky’s mysterious multiplayer.
Despite both being on the same world outside the same spot, they never once managed to get any indication that the other player was just there.
No Man’s Sky creator Sean Murray has hinted that there’s more to players meeting in-game, but that the servers are under an unexpected amount of strain.
Clearly, Hello Games did not expect two players to meet so suddenly, as Murray Tweeted that he was genuinely surprised by it.
Two players finding each other on a stream in the first day – that has blown my mind
— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 10, 2016
Murray continued, explaining that there will be much more to player interaction in the future, but the game is simply struggling to cope with the sheer number of players.
Murray wrote in a series of Tweets:
We want people to be aware they are in a shared universe. We added online features, and some Easter Eggs to create cool moments. We hope to see those happening… but too many of you are playing right now. More than we could have predicted. It is a testament to how amazing our network coders are that Discoveries are still working at all. 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!!!
So it seems that something should happen when two people get together out there in the universe – but it’s such a big universe that the next time something like this happens could be a way off.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.