The debut of No Man’s Sky Origins sandworms is one of the many new features coming in the next update, but this isn’t just a cool new monster. Hello Games is finally delivering on one of the features it showed off in early launch trailers that never actually materialized in the game — until now.
Anyone who has followed No Man’s Sky since the beginning is well aware that it didn’t have the most fantastic launch. The pre-launch trailers promised a fantastic world for players to enjoy, but it didn’t exactly deliver what many people expected. It got so bad, in fact, that the game lost 85% of its player base in its first few weeks.
The sheer amount of criticism directed at the developer would cause anyone to give up, but Hello Games buckled down and kept on working. As time went on, it released more and more of the features that many people assumed would be coming at launch. Multiplayer debuted in a post-launch patch and was then expanded. Oodles of new content was released with each subsequent patch. And now, one more launch promise is finally being fulfilled with the latest update: sandworms.
No Man’s Sky Origins sandworms look a fair bit different from what we saw in the earliest trailers. These “[devastatingly] huge worm creatures” now populate certain planets and can explode out from the ground, blotting out the sun and posing a serious danger to players.
The earliest trailers showed a giant snakelike creature slithering around on the surface of a planet, but those were never actually put into the game. They did exist at one point during development according to Sean Murray. Unfortunately, the sandworms didn’t work out too well in actual gameplay.
“[In] one of the early videos, we show this giant kind of sandworm, and it turned out, as we went through development, that wasn’t very fun,” Hello Games’ Sean Murray told Vice in 2018.
“But people would hate them within the game,” he continued. “They would be totally overpowered to the player. It would just come from nowhere, and it just wasn’t very fun. And it didn’t make sense within the scale of the game. We had a whole bunch of models for these snake-like creatures, and they ended up as a thing that we moved into the sky, and they fly around. There’s enormous worms, so you’ve still got the spectacle and stuff like that.”
Since then, the giant sandworms have finally made their debut, exactly as they were described in Murray’s 2018 interview. The game has had its fair share of problems over the years, but Hello Games has managed to fix many of the issues and finally deliver on the promises it made all those years ago.
