Light No Fire, the next massive survival game from Hello Games, makes a rare appearance in the update overview for No Man’s Sky’s Cosmos update, which is out today, September 9.
Cosmos introduces sweeping changes and additions to space itself, from custom space stations to resource-rich “space hulks.” It also adds player alliances that can fit thousands of allied players and stations across the stars. The bones of some of these features will carry over to Light No Fire, it seems.
Toward the end of the trailer, studio boss Sean Murray says “all of this is tech we get to test now, refine, and hopefully players will also experience on our other game, Light No Fire.”
Some old Light No Fire footage played in the background shows a gathering of humanoid rabbit warriors, a brief shot of a dragon mount, and a very bemused ogre.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about Light No Fire, and that now includes just how much of this Cosmos update, along with the rest of No Man’s Sky’s systems, will carry over. Will player alliances work in the same way, and on the same scale? With just one Earth-sized planet to explore instead of a functionally infinite universe, how do points of interest have to evolve?
I get the impression that Murray wants to leverage what the team’s created here. “So many things that we never thought we’d do,” he says of Cosmos. “Having alliances of tens of thousands of players, real communities working together, claiming space stations. It’s pretty cool, but it’s been a lot of work.”
Elsewhere in the Cosmos update video, Murray mentions “our new volumetric lighting tech,” which does feel like a safe bet for Light No Fire. For years, Hello Games has described No Man’s Sky as a handy test bed for its next game, which, Murray recently told us, has “between 12 and 20” people working on it at any given moment.