After watching the trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 earlier this week, I was relatively confident that nothing at The Game Awards on Thursday would be able to top it. Little did I know Hello Games would steal the show with the trailer for Light No Fire — a game that looks somehow even more ambitious than its open-universe survival epic No Man’s Sky.
Like No Man’s Sky, Light No Fire is a sandbox adventure game filled with role-playing, survival, crafting, and exploration. Unlike No Man’s Sky, the entire game takes place “on a fantasy planet the size of Earth.” Where No Man’s Sky contained billions and trillions of procedurally generated planets, Light No Fire focuses on a single, far more detailed planet.
We can glean quite a few details about the game from the trailer, which Hello Games says was recorded during an actual multiplayer session. In Light No Fire, you can gather resources, build structures, mount various terrestrial and aerial creatures, equip weapons, sail the oceans, battle monsters, swim underwater, and meet other real players.
“Carve a life together,” reads the description of the game’s multiplayer on Steam. “Meet players from across the globe, build a life, explore and survive together. Construct persistent buildings and communities, or strike out alone to discover the world for others.”
As a fan of survival games like Minecraft, Valheim, Rust, and even the new Lego Fortnite, I will admit that I am having trouble containing my excitement. Conceptually, I love No Man’s Sky, but the gargantuan scale of its universe makes my brain short-circuit. Every time I play, I experience the same decision paralysis as I do on Netflix, but if Netflix had 18 quintillion shows and movies to choose from. A single planet, even one as big as Earth, is more manageable.
Open-world RPGs have always been my favorite games, from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Xenoblade Chronicles to The Witcher 3 and Elden Ring. If Hello Games is able to alchemize some of the standout elements of those games while integrating the best bits of No Man’s Sky, it could be one of the crowning achievements of this console generation.
At this point, I need to make two important notes:
- I’m still incredibly excited about GTA 6, and I can’t wait to see what a new Grand Theft Auto looks like after 12 years of technological advancements.
- No Man’s Sky completely failed to live up to the hype at launch, and only after years of hard work by the development team does it look like the game we were promised.
To the second point, I’m giving Hello Games the benefit of the doubt. After being raked over the coals in 2016 following the launch of No Man’s Sky, there’s no way anyone on that team wants to go through that again. Gamers should probably temper their expectations, but Hello Games should also do a better job of setting realistic expectations this time around.
With that said, Light No Fire is now at the top of my list of most anticipated games. We don’t know when it’s coming out, what platforms it will be available for, or even how far along it is in development. We don’t know if it will be out before Grand Theft Auto 6, either, but I can’t wait to see what the finished product looks like whenever it’s ready.
