The latest update from Sean Murray and Hello Games for No Man’s Sky includes living ships that players can grow from eggs. It’s later game stuff, so don’t expect to fly off your starter planet in a Vong cruiser, but slimy xenomorph vehicles fit the procedurally generated aesthetic of No Man’s Sky so much better than hard right-angles of steel and glass. The update also adds more alien NPC encounters, weird objects to investigate in space, multiplayer grouping enhancements, and some general quality of life improvements.
In related news, the developers are pivoting to more frequent, but smaller, updates. The need for gigantic releases like Next and Beyond have passed, and the team can work on incremental additions.
The latest update for space survival crafting game, No Man’s Sky, features community challenges. Starting today, explorers can fulfill special fetch quests that reward players with quicksilver. Instead of giving you mercury poisoning, you can trade quicksilver in for stuff like a “mind blown” gesture for the rare times you’ll use an emote in multiplayer, cosmetic decals, and exclusive base components. The initial wave will have a small selection of community challenge items, but Hello Games will add more as the season progresses.
Over the coming weeks this will expand to 50+ items, including further base parts, emotes, customisations, exocraft, and more.
That’s me on my third No Man’s Sky starting planet in a row that tried to kill me. Those are the breaks in the infamous survival crafting game from Sean Murray and Hello Games. I was trying to check out all the changes in the much-anticipated NEXT update that was just released. True multiplayer, a third-person view, more junk to craft, a better guided beginning, and loads of other stuff came in the free update. Some of it works better than others. For example, the guided beginning works a lot better if the random number gods put you on an hospitable starting planet. The ones that burn you with constant acid rain or the fiery heat of a too-close sun make for a less great first impression. Overall, NEXT is a lot of greatness. It doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of the game, but it does fulfill a lot of the promise people thought the game was supposed to have originally.
Atlas Rises, the coming update for Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky, finally adds a step towards real-time elbow-rubbing multiplayer. The joint exploration feature lets up to 16 players see and communicate with one another – as glowing orbs. Think of them as the ghostly shadows of players in parallel dimensions for now.
“While interaction with others is currently very limited, this is an important first step into the world of synchronous co-op in No Man’s Sky.”
The Atlas Rising update adds a bunch of improvements that may satisfy the many detractors of the game. There’s thirty more hours of story to uncover, portals that can beam you around the galaxy, a new mission system, terrain editing tools, improved space combat, low altitude planetary flight, and new ships and items to purchase and trade. Will the game finally rise above Spore? Spore didn’t have the glowing player orbs from Fable 2, so score one for space orbs!
That’s video for the Foundation Update which was just released for No Man’s Sky. It’s a substantial addition to the space wanderer experience from Hello Games that mainly adds a customizable home base for players to return to after traveling. Along with base-building, the update features a new, harsher survival mode to test players’ scavenging and hoarding skills, farming, automated mining, buildable waypoints to help map systems, the ability to hire mercenary space freighters, and a revamped user interface. Will it be enough to overcome the post-launch backlash against No Man’s Sky? According to Hello Games, the Foundation Update is the “first of many” free updates to the game.
No Man’s Sky had one of the best launches on the PlayStation 4 since the console was released. It sold almost a million copies on PC in preorders and the first week of sales. It’s an unqualified sales success. Less than a month later, refund requests are in such volume that Valve has posted a special notice on the Steam store page. What happened? How did the indie darling go from being one of the most anticipated games of this year, to a swirl of controversy? Between accusations that Hello Games and Sean Murray lied about the game’s content, and a public debate about the merits of marketing, there is No Man’s Sky – a title that’s become the new poster child for an industry of hype.
After the jump, it’s the second star to the right and straight on ’til morning!Continue reading →
No Man’s Sky, the highly anticipated space exploration game, launches in a few days and despite dozens of leaks from streamers buying the game early, people are still confused about the game’s activities. Part of the mystery can be blamed on No Man’s Sky itself, which as it turns out, is incomplete on the retail disc. People that snapped up the game being sold at outlets before it was officially supposed to be on shelves have been playing without the benefit of an extensive day one patch. Beyond that, the lingering question of “What is it all about?” has plagued the game since its initial reveal. Is it an aimless pastel-colored space vacation? An interstellar combat survival-thon? According to Hello Games’ studio head, Sean Murray, it’s probably not what most people think it’s going to be.
It’s a weird game, it’s a niche game and it’s a very very chill game.
Sony will not require players to have PlayStation Plus to play No Man’s Sky online. Game Informer reached out to Sony and the console-maker confirmed that despite requiring an active PlayStation Plus subscription to play most games online, they will not require it for No Man’s Sky. That’s a good thing because while the game has some shared universe gameplay like logging discoveries and tagging them with your name, the studio is treating the game as a single player experience. Thanks to the procedurally generated nature of the galaxy, there are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets in the No Man’s Sky universe. Running into another player on accident should be a rare occurrence, but congratulations if you do! You just got free multiplayer!
No Man’s Sky will release on August 9th for the PlayStation 4 and August 12th for Windows PC.
