The story of No Man's Sky is one of gaming's biggest redemption arcs, with millions now enjoying the vast contents of a near-infinite digital galaxy. While Hello Games is now talking about its next project, it will be its space exploration release from 2016 that will almost certainly go down in history as one of the industry's most hyped up games. It will be difficult to see how the studio can follow it up, but for now, the developer seems intent to continue pumping out more DLC. Recently, Sean Murray, founder of Hello Games, posted on Twitter something which has the No Man's Sky community talking. Traditionally, when a studio wants to market some potential upcoming content, it would do so in a myriad of convoluted and complex ways. Sometimes it could be an obtuse screenshot or an ambivalent video. Not Murray, however. In this case, he has simply posted an emoticon of a whale. And that's it. There's no message to go along with it, and so the fan base has been left to guess what it could be hinting at.With the recent Outlaws DLC going live for No Man's Sky, the developer is keeping to its promise of making sure that fans can enjoy the game for as long as possible and with as much content as they can handle. Given that this update was also given a minimalist bit of hype, in the form of a pirate flag, many are speculating about what the the whale emoticon could signify. Some suggest it could be an ocean update, while others think it could be in relation to living freighters, in a similar vain to the patch that implemented living ships. Some believe it could literally be whales being added to the game. In any case, it's all guesswork at this stage.
Since launching several years ago, No Man's Sky has been through many notable changes. To combat the immediate backlash the studio received upon release, Hello Games has committed itself to adding a ton of free DLC to really expand the universe and gameplay elements. This has obviously paid dividends, as No Man's Sky won a BAFTA recently in the "Evolving Game" category.
As one of the biggest video games in terms of map size, the studio had huge ambition when it first conceived of a sci-fi title that would feature 18 quintillion planets. Hopefully, more will come to the surface soon to reveal what Murray's tweet is about. For now, all fans can really do is offer up their own interpretation of this simple whale tweet.
No Man's Sky is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, with a Switch version also in development.