UK developers Hello Games has taken a massive leap from developing the Joe Danger series, and currently they're hard at work on No Man's Sky. This new, ambitious project will let people explore an entire universe filled with procedurally generated planets. Thanks to beautiful aesthetics and a (mostly) calm atmosphere, the game has already been described as Journey meets Elite: Dangerous.
That is definitely a compliment, and Hello Games themselves would much rather be labeled this way than to be mistaken for a mainstream AAA blockbuster. In fact, Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray believes the gamers growing up these days, a group he refers to as the Minecraft generation, won't be interested in games like Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed:
"Games are obsessed with having no breathing space - they never let the player walk around and enjoy something. With Call of Duty, it feels like they sit there with a stopwatch and if an explosion hasn't gone off every 30 seconds, someone is fired. I'm numb to it," he told The Guardian.
"The kids who grew up with Minecraft will really struggle to relate to something like Assassin's Creed. They won't want to be that guy. The Minecraft generation has a totally different expectation. I've found myself intersecting with them - I've found myself playing those games, playing Day Z for hours and being reinvigorated. This is the kind of game we want to make."
There might very well be some truth to these statements, but it's also hard to view them as any less than major generalisations. Isn't there room for calm, creative games as well hectic shooters? Are really none of the Minecraft players also enjoying titles like The Last of Us and Battlefield 4?