All of these games, No Man’s Sky included, were not particularly well received at launch. However, each team kept the updates rolling in, and they eventually found themselves on awards lists the world over. Fortnite added battle royale and transformed into a multi-billion-dollar franchise; Rainbow Six Siege embraced esports and DLC, and garnered 40 million registered players; Warframe chased an aggressive content-release schedule and listened to its core audience, and it’s now one of Digital Extremes’ most successful games.

No Man’s Sky rolled out a steady stream of updates to deliver the features that fans really wanted (and expected from day one), and climbed its way up from “cautionary indie tale” to “Best Ongoing Game award nominee” in just two years. Today, it’s a universe-sized astronaut simulator packed with quintillions of planets, absurd creatures on land and sea, plus crafting, mining, building, flying and oodles of exploration. This summer, the gigantic No Man’s Sky Beyond update goes live, bringing three major features to the game, two of which are public knowledge: MMO-style mechanics and, announced just last week, VR support.

Hello Games is bringing No Man’s Sky to every headset on the market via Steam VR and PlayStation 4 for PSVR (with an exclusive physical edition as well as a digital offering). No Man’s Sky VR isn’t a separate mode; instead, it incorporates virtual-reality players into the existing game. VR players can join games with non-VR friends, and they’ll receive all future updates. Same game, new input method.

“It feels very comfortable to me in terms of a fit for No Man’s Sky,” Murray said. “If I’m honest, we’re supporting VR because we want to. Genuinely, I think it’s creatively led more than necessarily commercially or anything like that. It just feels like a good fit.”

After spending 15 minutes with the game in full VR glory, I can’t help agreeing with Murray. No Man’s Sky makes sense in VR, putting you directly in the space suit — jetpack, multi-tool, inventory and all. The multi-tool, which mines minerals, blows holes in the terrain and builds towering structures out of nearby organic matter, lives in your right hand, while inventory can be pulled up as a hologram on your left arm, streamlining the crafting process.

Walking involves a teleportation system that serves its purpose just fine, though there are a handful of other ways to navigate new planets and the surrounding interstellar sea. First, there’s the jetpack, which is loads of fun yet slightly disorienting in VR, with the most potential to cause headset-related nausea. However, No Man’s Sky VR also has vehicles, swimming and — this is the big one — spaceships.

It takes two hands to steer the ship, pressing and pulling the throttle with your left hand and using a joystick to direct with your right, and the entire process is visceral in a way that only VR can provide. Flying a ship in VR — racing over mysterious planets and up, out of the atmosphere in a tunnel of light and space dust — is an absolutely fantastic feeling. Then, the hyperdrive clicks off and the galaxies finally come into focus. Asteroids loom like mountainsides, and flying between them is smooth, thrilling and profoundly peaceful. Planets sit, suspended in the ink of space, impossibly large. Everything is frightening and gorgeous in equal measure, shining a light on the incomprehensible size of the universe, the planets, the space rocks, the ship, yourself.

This sense of scale and immersion simply can’t translate on a 2D screen.

If the goal of No Man’s Sky is to make players feel simultaneously miniscule yet deeply connected to a network of atoms that stretches in all directions, forever — if the goal of No Man’s Sky is to make players feel, full-stop — then VR is the best way to play. This sense of scale and immersion simply can’t translate on a 2D screen.

Murray has had a long time to think about interstellar scale. His parents traveled a lot when he was young, and at one point they ended up running a million-and-a-quarter acre ranch in the Australian outback. At night, Murray would stare at the dense blanket of stars and dream about their depths; by day, he would play Elite, devour everything sci-fi and program his own games. No Man’s Sky VR is the unique result of decades of stargazing and coding.

“If five-year-old me could see that you’re putting on a headset and being in this world, he would be very excited about that,” Murray said.

While Valve worked closely for years with HTC on Vive VR hardware, it’s about to introduce a virtual reality headset of its own. A teaser page on the Steam website shows off this image of the Index, with the tagline “Upgrade your experience” and a May 2019 date. This occurs despite layoffs of some employees on its hardware team, which Valve said would not mean major changes to its plans.

The development of Steam VR gives some ideas of what Valve would like to do, but there are no details or specs on the Index itself. Hints of the device have appeared with trademark filings and even a logo, but we don’t even know if it will use the “Knuckles” finger tracking controllers we’ve seen from Valve a few times over the years. Whatever it is, we’ll know more about it soon.