Poor Hello Games. They received plenty of flak from critics and a massive amounts of fans, and now it doesn’t seem that the state of things over at the dev studio are all that positive either. It seems during the last two weeks, long-time Hello Games and the primary designer of No Man’s Sky has discretely made his exit from the company to work on Star Citizen over at Foundry42.
This is certainly not the best news for Hello Games to take on among all other developments, but again, it doesn’t confirm Hello Games’ demise, so it remains important to not make it seem that way. Designer Gareth Bourn’s departure is worth mentioning and even worth some concern, but here’s hoping that Hello Games finds a way to rebound from all this turmoil before things get even more troublesome. Their continued lack of communication with the player-base is still awfully questionable, so we can only hope that the studio gets their team together and pushes onward to continuing progress on No Man’s Sky so that it can become the game they always intended it to be.
Now, for Bourn’s decision to move to work on Star Citizen feels almost ironic, as that is another project that may end up being too ambitious for its own good. Starting as a Kickstarter project, Star Citizen became a $100 million project soon after thanks to overwhelming amounts of fan support. Normally, the game would then be released soon afterwards and it’d be a success story. However, SC has turned into a very controversial development over the last number of years. The development has been done across multiple studios, very few instances of true gameplay accessible to players (who didn’t come away all that impressed), and some worries concerning Foundry42’s usage of the fan-funded budget. It serves as some extra irony for Bourn to choose a slowly sinking ship over a another potentially sinking ship.
Time will tell whether Bourn made the right decision, but at this moment, it seems equivalent to jumping from one controversial mess to another.
Have you heard of Star Citizen? Do you think it’ll be another No Man’s Sky: plenty of ambition, but not enough delivery? Let us know in the comments!
