There are rough launches, and then there’s whatever No Man’s Sky experienced on their launch date. In recent history, it’s arguably the worst launch that any game has experienced.
The bulk of this was because of the constant lies of the managing director of the game, Sean Murray. Through the marketing of the game, a massive hype train was behind it, based on promises of the exploration of galaxies and distant planets in a neverending procedurally generated universe. Once release day came, it was swiftly made incredibly obvious that the features of the game as Murray sold them were. . . exaggerated, we’ll say.
No Man’s Sky had such a bad launch that it caused Steam to literally restructure their refund policy to allow the hordes of dissatisfied consumers to return the game beyond when it was normally allowed. A lack of features, constant crashing, and even situations where online players weren’t seeing each other in the exact same place.
But credit needs to be given where credit is due. It would’ve been easy for Hello Games to have dropped the title and kept what money they’d made, rebrand their name, and start working on something else while the game burned down to ashes behind them.
Rather than do that, Hello Games stuck by their flaming trash heap and slowly put out the games. Over the years since the game’s release, they’ve put out countless bug fixes, patches, content additions, and general improvements to the game.
This new update is the latest in that long, long line of improvements, and comes with quite a bit of new things to marvel at. Like, a lot of new things. It’s a massive update that plugs quite a few holes. Here’s a handful of the major changes that are being implemented:
- Explorers can now visit the Starship Outfitting Terminal at a Space Station to add inventory slots to their starship
- You can now salvage unwanted ships for scrap, products, and technologies
- The Terrain Manipulator has been improved, adding the new Restore and Flatten Modes to help terraform. Terrain edits now will also be protected from regeneration
- You can now save custom outfits!
- An overhaul and improvement to the starship’s Space Map
- Improved UI management
These are the major things that every player is likely to notice, but there are countless more bug fixes and implemented improvements. Again, credit where credit is due, Hello Games has done an absolutely fantastic job on improving their once-horrid game on a regular basis.