'No Man's Sky' launch day update totally reshapes the game
A lot of people are playing No Man's Sky after multiple stores sold it early, but the game that launches on Aug. 9 will be a lot different than the one being played now.
That's thanks to the upcoming "1.03 update," which is set to go live on Monday as media outlets receive their review copies of the game. Project lead and Hello Games founder Sean Murray lays out the extensive changes in a new post on the No Man's Sky website.
For anyone who's unfamiliar: No Man's Sky is a first-person survival game in which players are handed a ship and a vague mission to journey from the fringes of a galaxy to its center.
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The massive galaxy -- we're talking multiple quintillions of planets -- is randomly generated as players explore it. The plant and animal life, the ships and their alien pilots, global weather systems, pirate attacks ... it's all created on the fly, with the help of complicated algorithms.
The day one patch is significant because of the foundational changes it appears to make. We've been playing a store-bought copy of No Man's Sky obsessively -- I managed to reach the center of the galaxy during a Friday/Saturday 30-hour sprint -- and these alterations promise to shake up everything.
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There's too much to even summarize. Virtually every facet of the game has been re-tooled in some way, from the way planetary ecosystems are generated to the introductory moments that set you along one of three now-clearly-defined paths.
Read the whole rundown right here.
While Sony had initially suggested after early copies started to surface that the day one patch would break saved games, Murray offers a different explanation. Older save files will still work, but continuing your pre-1.03 game means you miss out on the changes to the early game.
Murray's post also lays out some of Hello's road ahead for No Man's Sky. It sounds like they're treating it a little bit like Minecraft, with plans to release more updates that add new features.
"This universe we’ve built is a pretty large canvas, we’ve got a lot of ideas," Murray wrote. "This is the type of game we want to be."
No Man's Sky comes to PlayStation 4 on Aug. 9, with a Steam release (for Windows) to follow on Aug. 12.
Topics Gaming
Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
