Two No Man’s Sky players manage to meet, but apparently can't see each other

Despite developer Hello Games founder Sean Murray saying just yesterday that “The chances of two players ever crossing paths in a universe this large is pretty much zero,” two players managed to cross paths in the studio's procedurally-generated sandbox game No Man’s Sky today. Almost.

One of the players, TheGalacticCactus, wrote on Reddit that they couldn’t see their new interstellar friend at all, even after they managed to stand seemingly on the exact same spot as each other on a planet’s surface. 

It's unclear whether this issue is a launch-day aberration, or whether encountering other players in real-time is not possible in No Man's Sky. Spectators of the two players, who were livestreaming their attempt, noticed that one of the players was not connected to the PlayStation Network. However eventually the two players were seemingly both online, speaking over VoIP, and simultaneously streaming the game to Twitch. Neither one could see the other player’s character or the changes either made to the landscape around them. 

If real-time contact with other players isn't possible in No Man's Sky, it would fly in the face of an interview Murray did with Game Informer in December of 2014, where he stated that “you can see other characters, and they can see you.” More recently, Murray has been abrupt in clarifying that No Man’s Sky "is not a multiplayer game," and that people should not go into it expecting that experience. 

The UK-based Hello Games hasn’t made a statement about this apparent contradiction yet, but I imagine the studio has a lot going on right now. Murray has also been tweeting today with implications that the amount of people currently playing No Man’s Sky might be taxing their servers. The game doesn’t need to be online to run, so it wouldn’t affect regular gameplay, but could potentially affect networking features without players noticing. It’s just speculation, but there is a chance that those implied server issues are the reason these two players couldn’t see each other. 

We’ll update the story when we know more about the possibility of encountering other players in No Man's Sky, and keep an eye out for our review based on the PC version after it launches this Friday.