Despite a rocky launch, Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky has since been updated with plenty of incredible and ambitious content. While updates are still coming to the survival game, we’re looking forward to the developer’s next game, and Light No Fire looks to be an exciting change of pace – especially when you consider the sheer size of the game’s procedurally generated world.
With Hello Games sticking with No Man’s Sky and making it one of the best survival games in the redemption of the decade, we’re excited to see whether Light No Fire can launch better than its universe-hopping brother. It’s certainly one of the most exciting new PS5 games and new Xbox games already, but at the very least, its impressive world should be a big deal on its own achievements.
Set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth, as told on the Light No Fire website, Hello Games’ upcoming release is also a procedurally generated experience, like No Man’s Sky before it. Unlike the over 18 quintillion planets in a procedural universe, however, Light No Fire’s world will be one densely packed planet. But what does that mean for traversal?
Humans walk, on average, at a speed of 3.1 miles per hour. The circumference of Earth, so the distance around the equator, is 24,901 miles long. If you were to start at one point in the equator and then continuously walk until you reach the same point again, it would take you roughly 8,032 hours, or a whopping 334 days. And we can’t stress this enough, but that is real-time. Almost a year of your life, walking a virtual planet. While we have yet to play the game, we can imagine it’ll be one of the best open world games on the scale alone.
For reference, TheyCallMeConor took 12 hours to walk halfway around a planet in No Man’s Sky, despite Hello Games’ Sean Murray stating that each of the planets would be ‘planet-sized’ in No Man’s Sky. Considering that Light No Fire’s world could take you over 334 days of constant real-life walking, that puts No Man’s Sky’s roughly 24-hour planet marathons to shame.
That being said, there are a few factors that may change our estimated times. Right now, it’s unclear how fast our characters actually walk in Light No Fire, so if they can walk 50 miles per hour, that time will actually drop all the way down to 20 days of walking. That’s still a long time, mind you, but nowhere near the almost 12-month trawl that you’d be committing to if your character walks the same measly speed as we humans do.
And it’s unlikely you’ll ever actually try a 300+ days walk on a videogame. Most of the time, you’ll likely be traversing Light No Fire’s world via fantastical beasts, such as the dragon-like creatures seen in the reveal trailer. But it’s a wild experiment to consider, and we hope that someday, someone will attempt this extraordinary challenge. For scientific reasons, of course.
Will Light No Fire be one of the best PS5 games and best Xbox games when it finally releases? Considering Hello Games’ success with No Man’s Sky, we certainly hope so. For now, though, we recommend jumping into the best multiplayer games with friends if you want something to pass the time before Light No Fire’s release.