What earns an MMO a spot in your own Top 5 Most Anticipated Games list? There’s a lot of factors to consider: personal preferences, studio cred, funding, sales pitch, market viability, and more. I don’t know about you, but I’m constantly shuffling around my Top 5 depending on the month and news cycle.

Yet since late 2023, there’s been one game that’s remained on my Top 5 hyped MMOs, even though we haven’t heard all that much about it in the past year. So today I thought we’d talk about the crazy potential of Light No Fire — and why the studio needs to rekindle excitement for it after that initial announcement.

What do we know about Light No Fire so far?

Announced during The Game Awards in December 2023, Light No Fire is the latest project from Hello Games. It’s a survival fantasy sandbox that we think is well within the boundaries of an MMO from what we’ve seen thus far.

As the studio pitched, Light No Fire is “set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth [and] brings the depth of a roleplaying game to the freedom of a survival sandbox.” Hello Games highlighted the massively multiplayer aspect, including being able to build communities together, and it also stressed a fully explorable open world “at a scale never attempted before.”

According to the studio, this game is “inspired by the adventure, charm and imagination that we love from classic fantasy […] Set sail across vast oceans and rivers, ride wild beasts through fantastical landscapes, fly dragons over undiscovered landscapes.”

Obviously, this project caught our attention in a big way for its ambitious sandbox design. Of course, we always know that studios can promise the stars — but delivering on those promises is far more difficult and not always attainable. So could this actually come to pass?

Hello, Hello Games!

It wasn’t merely the elevator pitch that caught our attention, as attractive as it was. After all, plenty of projects have emerged that made grand claims and then either fail to come to fruition or simply give us an unfinished, broken mess. Why not assume that this will be the same here?

Three words: No Man’s Sky.

Hello Games’ first title was a survivalbox legend that cratered upon release and was widely criticized for failing to live up to much of these same grand ambitious promises. It was such a disappointment that many assumed that the studio would take the money from sales and run away from both its players and their mounting legal challenges.

But that’s not what happened at all. Hello Games took its critical lumps and then stuck around for years to shape and build No Man’s Sky into the game that it initially promised. It dug in and worked, month after month, year after year, until this space sandbox turned from a public laughingstock to a highly acclaimed title that won over many of its former foes. And then Hello Games continued to improve No Man’s Sky even further, expanding the title into a true MMO of sorts, and adding tons of content without asking players for any additional purchases.

In short, we’re excited about Light No Fire because our respect for Hello Games is (no man’s) sky high. This is a studio that doesn’t quit but rather has shown that it’ll work hard to fulfill its vision. And so if it says it’s going to create this huge explorable fantasy world on a scale rarely seen, I kind of believe it. Add on to that all of the developers’ experience building an online game and all of the tech that it’s generated for its previous project… the better question is, “Why shouldn’t someone get ridiculously excited about this?”

Why so much silence, then?

Now we come to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that after that initial late 2023 announcement, Hello Games hasn’t talked much about Light No Fire at all. So far, we’ve seen only limited follow-up press, previews, dev blogs, and so forth. We’re going on a year-and-a-half of near-radio silence for this title, aside from a brief mention that “great progress” was being made last November, and to some gamers, that’s got to be worrying.

I’m not completely ruling out that something’s changed or delayed behind the scenes, but I don’t personally see as great of a cause for worry here as we might elsewhere. It’s not uncommon for a studio to use a platform like The Game Awards to generate initial hype, put out a wishlist to gather as many prospective fans as possible, and then go quiet for a good period of pre-testing development.

Let’s not forget that Hello Games learned a painful lesson about overhyping No Man’s Sky and setting expectations so high that a backlash was inevitable. We might well be seeing a more cautious approach this time around, where the studio’s going to keep quiet until it’s fully ready to show, test, launch, or any combination of the above.

But I would still be a lot more at ease if Hello Games started chatting up this project, even if just to confirm that it isn’t dead or delayed. If we get to the two-year mark and we’re still in the dark, then I’ll start to panic. Until then, it remains in my Top 5. I can’t wait to see what this plucky outfit can do with a fantasy MMO.

Do you love spectating and speculating about upcoming MMOs? We do too! Every week, Justin tackles another upcoming title on the MMO Hype Train with opinions, analysis, and blind fervent hope. Choo choo all aboard!