UK studio Hello Games realises that attempting to break into the increasingly crowded ‘Is This The Next Elite?’ genre is a risk.
It’s freshly revealed game No Man’s Sky (the trailer for which can be seen below) was the surprise hit of last weekend’s VGX Awards.
And the Joe Danger developer says it wanted to offer something different from the endless grey cities and space marines found in so many space games.
"A lot of indie game developers make something good and then they plateau," Sean Murray told Polygon. "We saw Joe Danger as a stepping stone to get us here, so we can risk everything all over again.
"As a child I would look at the sky at night and all the stars and I would want to visit them. That’s the feeling I got later, when I would read books from the golden age of sci-fi, from the ’60s and the ’70s, and that’s what we want to do with No Man’s Sky."
Gamers who have spent the last two decades awaiting a worthy successor to Elite certainly have lots to keep their eyes on – upcoming titles Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous are both potentially special, although let’s hope they both work out better than X Rebirth.
Here’s the video: