The wait is finally over: Hello Games just officially released the Beyond Update for No Man’s Sky which includes a massively overhauled multiplayer infrastructure, tons of new features and game mechanics, a multiplayer “Nexus” hub, and, most importantly, complete VR support.
As of the time of this writing the update is live for PS4 players and is rolling out soon for other storefronts.
If you’ve got the game on PS4 or PC already then Beyond, just like all previous overhaul updates, is entirely free to download. Luckily, it’s not half-hearted VR integration either. Instead, they’ve redesigned how you interact with the world and allowed players to carry over their entire save file or even play online with other players (VR or otherwise) in the same universe.
If that’s not enough for you, engage in some of our discussion topics, such as whether or not No Man’s Sky is the most important VR game launch so far and what you plan on doing first once the VR update is on your hard drive, ready to go.
Tomorrow, No Man’s Sky Beyond launches as a free update. It adds PSVR and PC VR support among other things. For many VR fans, this is something of a dream come true. Turns out the same is true for Hello Games.
We sat down with the team’s Sean Murray to talk about the creation of the VR mode. In the interview below, we discuss its history and the team’s hopes for the VR support. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so best get reading.
Upload: The first thing I wanted to talk about really was… I know how long this has been in your guy’s minds because I’ve been following VR for a long time. I remember back when before No Man’s Sky was coming out you guys were doing experiments with the [Oculus Rift] DK2. What’s the timeline been like, here? Back in those days, how much serious consideration were you giving this?
Sean Murray: Pretty serious. We’re professional developers but we’re also hobbyists. Something like DK2 gets released, obviously, we’re going to start messing about with it and trying to get little bits of the engine running. And at various points over the last few years, it’s been an ongoing thing.
Someone will do a little bit more work and a little bit more work and a little bit more work on it. And we’ll play it and there’s always been two or three people in the team here who just really, really, really deeply care about VR. And it’s been enthusiasts but also evangelists for it, saying this is what we should be doing.
And so those guys, when we got to the point on Next, there was a really strong argument there for “Okay it feels like we’ve kind of delivered on things that we really felt we needed to for the community.” Some of the big ticket items for them. In our mind, VR was maybe more of a niche thing for people. Maybe something that felt a little bit indulgent for us; now we can do this, now we can have our dessert.
Whereas before there were certain things about the game that I felt like people would almost be annoyed with us if we did VR before that. That was our take and, actually, as I was just explaining to you, we were worried that we would announce VR and people would say: “Oh but I’m not interested, what’s in it for me?”
Weirdly, it’s not gone that way. We actually are at a point where I need to remind people that it’s not just the VR update. People are really focusing on it. And people seem really excited about it.
We’ve been really surprised by that. In our heads, it was a niche thing for us. So I think it’s really exciting. I mean the stats on it were much higher than we expected. So, over a million people who own No Man’s Sky already own a headset. Which is a really big stat, especially when you consider how many headsets there are out there. It’s a really high percentage that already own No Man’s Sky. That’s much bigger than we probably expected going into this. That’s a cool moment for all of those people to get an update and to be able to turn on their headset and even try it out. And hopefully we give them a cool experience.
So it’s been there in the background for ages, but we’ve been kind of holding ourselves off. Like, trying to be good almost. And actually we probably didn’t need to wait this long because people seem really excited about it.
Upload: I thought you were going to do it ages ago.
SM: I think within the team what you’ll see is it’s grown. It started off with two or three people. We were almost trying to convince the rest of the team because it seemed like a lot of work. And we were saying: “Oh, don’t worry, it will just be quite a direct port. We’re not going to revisit this and this and this. It’ll be fine, we’re not gonna run on PSVR and it’ll be fine.”
And then as we’ve gone through it’s gone more and more exciting. More and more people as a team wanted to work on it. And that’s one of the biggest factors for us. You were saying kind of, where does it stop? When we reached the end of Next, we weren’t sure whether there would be things we would get excited about and this is one that we really got enthused about. We could see it within the team, they are becoming more and more enthusiasts and evangelists for it.
Upload: This being a port, again going back to the early days of VR was one of those golden rules was you don’t port games to VR, you make them from the ground up. Obviously, you guys, looking at it, have gone out of your way to make it feel native. I’m interested to learn if there were things in there you struggled with. A lot of people say when you port a game to VR straight away you’ll find the scale is all off in the world, for example. Were those sorts of things you encountered?
SM: Yeah, like way more than I was expecting. It’s weird. So one of the nicest things is that I felt like, this was a game I’ve worked on a lot. So many of the team say this. When you’re working on a game for that long, the thing you would kill for is to see the game with fresh eyes, as somebody new to it.
I can’t explain how removed from it you become. Like, imagine you were making a puzzle game. You already know all the puzzles so you will never find any difficulty so you can never experience what it feels like. And that’s how it is for us. Playing it in VR, suddenly, you could see the game fresh.
I remember just feeling like small things like “Oh god, this is way too difficult.” And people had been telling me it was difficult and I hadn’t been listening to them. It’s like “Oh, I can see it now! This is really frustrating or too grindy, or whatever.”
There’s something about having a headset on and feeling immersed in the game that you feel like you want things to be a bit more immediate because it’s just a more intense experience. So there’s things like that where we actually made gameplay changes because we felt like, one, we were seeing it with fresh eyes and two, VR necessitates it almost.
But the scale, oh my god. Our character does technically fit inside the ship and fits inside the vehicles, all of that kind of thing. You just play it and you think “No, in my head the ship was really big.” And it’s really fucking small! It’s mind-blowing, going through doorways and stuff. Technically the character does fit through it, but I feel like I’m going to bump my head. I feel like “Oh my god, that crate! How low down has that crate been?”
Upload: And this is happening across a billion planets.
Murray: Yeah, I mean there’s some lovely moments where you see just a normal — and we’ve had this with almost everyone who played on the team — just seeing like a tree. A lot of the trees in the game are 50, 60 foot tall. As trees are in real life in a forest. But you never take that in. And when you’re stood beside one just towering above you, there’s suddenly a real appreciate for exploring which wasn’t there before. Not the same immersion, not the same feeling of exploring.
But, we’ve actually ended up scaling up all the vehicles, all the ships, adding in loads more detail. Putting interiors into the cockpits, adding loads and loads of detail. And it’s made us make the non-VR version a lot better. You just have more of a sense of scale. You see it in, like in the video, those ships are about twice the size they are normally. It doesn’t look weird at all to you, it looks fine.
Now I go back to the old world and I’m like “What were we thinking?” These worlds weren’t cohesive or they weren’t as impressive as they should be. It just puts things into really sharp focus that you don’t see when you’re working on something day-in, day-out.
But yeah, we have changed the scale of so many things in the game. Even rocks and trees and little shrubs that it turns out where rocks and trees and little things that were way too big.
Upload: And then, presumably the way they deform when you start mining them.
SM: And loads of those things change. They improve both versions of the game but they have a massive impact on VR. I think VR now, if you play it, feels about the same level of difficulty as the base game. I think, when people play they’re like “Yeah, this feels like No Man’s Sky in VR.” but actually, we’ve done so much refinement. And when we first ported it and first played it, it felt so arduous to play.
Like, it was unbelievable. Just the length of time that you would be mining something for, or meleeing something. When you’re doing that in VR and you have a controller in your hand, there’s a certain intensity to the experience that you want things to be immediate. You want them to be real.
Upload: It’s such a hard balance because, like you’re saying you want realism and then you want instant gratification when it comes to VR. And it’s a pick and choose thing. When you’re in the cockpit for example in the trailer you’re pulling all these levers and stuff and that feels great but at the same time doing the same to mine a rock is exhausting.
SM: Right, exactly. We’ve gone back and forth. We’ve had things in the cockpits of the ships where you’ve had lots of buttons to press to go into pulse drive, to do various things. We thought that would feel cool but actually it’s off-putting because you’re doing that constantly and it’s repetitive and you feel like “No, I’ve got a controller in my hand, I’ve got some buttons.”
But, certain other things where it’s nice to have a 3D controller, like the joystick, like the gun to place things in the world or to do terrain manipulation. that really benefits. But where you go too overboard, it can feel really repetitive. You can feel almost tired in your arms. There’s a real balance. We’ve generally been doing usability sessions and things like that with it where we’ll have 10 people playing at once that just go through and then we get another 10 people and another 10 people in. And generally we’re doing eight hour days with people.
I don’t expect people to play eight hours a day. But we want to stress test it in that way and see how people feel about it after that.
Upload: People absolutely will do that, though. They did it for Skyrim.
SM: Yeah, Skyrim has really long playtimes from what I’ve heard.
Upload: Obviously when this game started out it was about discovery, this whole universe was undiscovered basically for people to go off into. If you’re allowed to talk about it, how much of a percentage of that universe has been discovered now?
SM: It’s funny, so as of Next, I can talk about that. There have been a quarter of a billion hours played of our game. Which is a big old number. As AAA games go, that’s still a lot of hours. This was pre-Next. Of the first galaxy, and there are many galaxies but of the first galaxy, there was less than 1% of the galaxy discovered. I don’t think we’ve broken that 1% yet. I know that the number of hours has gone up a great deal.
But yeah it really is vast. I could get really boring about it. There’s a ring around the outside where everyone starts. And when you plot it on graphs that we see, there is a good amount of that around the edge, and then there’s just huge swathes where no one has been. It’s like there’s kind of a white circle around the edge and then all the rest is just like a mess of little dots.
Upload: So you’re pretty confident first-time VR players are going to come in and have a new game to play. Because I’m one of those 25 hour players that played the game at the start and want to go back and start again and have that new experience.
SM: I hope you will. Also a lot of what we’ve done. There are updates that came out after Next like Visions and Abyss which expanded underwater and Visions expanded biomes to create a lot more variety. Those things are there and most people haven’t yet seen them or played them or whatever.
Upload: This is a really long shot but, Oculus Quest?
SM: Yeah. I’ve been playing it a lot, actually, and it’s lovely.
Upload: It’s the best. But…
SM: Yeah. There is a future there, right, for that kind of device, right? People tend to think of, when you release a game, and it’s the thing I always want to hammer home to people, when you release a game that ‘that’s it’. Obviously we want to release good content that we are proud of and have a lot of people play on day one and they get a good experience.
But our community really likes that we keep updating, we keep embellishing. And this might be version 2.0 for the game, but it’s version 1.0 for VR. There’s a lot that I expect people will want, and we’re going to see a lot of new players playing a lot of different ways. And we don’t know if they’ll end up really migrating to base building in VR which is cool, or if they’ll want to socially and they’ll want to play in the social space and it will be a bit more like VRChat or whatever where you’re just kind of messing about with your friends. Or whether people are playing online.
It’s really hard to predict but we’ll follow that. Whether it’s people wanting much more controller options, much more headset options or whatever. We’ll see. Because it’s very much a hobbyist space, especially on PC. There are so many things that are potential ways for us to go.
Upload: And now that you’re integrating the two user-bases too. There’s going to be behavior patterns to follow. Are you going to have friends that are in VR and not in VR that like doing different things?
SM: Yeah. We’ve already seen in playtests. Whether this will happen in real life we don’t know but in playtests you’ve got the guy who’s in VR playing with other people who are not, and they’re saying to him “You’re the one who builds the base. We’ll go off and collect the resources.” Which feels really nice, like you’re empowered in different ways.
The developers behind space exploration and building game No Man’s Sky say that due to platform-related restrictions there is no plan to unite the communities playing multiplayer on PC, Xbox or PlayStation.
That means you can explore the universe together only with friends who bought the game for the same platform as you. That separation is far from unusual — cross-play is expensive to support and not always beneficial to players. It only works, for example, with a few games like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Rec Room — but those games do allow players on most systems to play together with players on others as part of a single shared community. The same plan is in place for this year’s new Call of Duty game. Right now, though, most gamers in most games generally can only play with friends who bought the game for the same platform.
“Due to platform restrictions, there are currently no plans to bring cross play to No Man’s Sky,” Hello Games explained in an email in response to questions.
We are very excited for the launch this week of No Man’s Sky Beyond — an enormous update to the game across all three of its supported platforms.
The update includes the addition of VR support for Sony’s PlayStation 4 PSVR headset and the PC version with support for Rift, Vive, Index, and Windows MR. You can play together in sessions with up to 32 players exploring uncharted planets and building up complex bases together across both VR and non-VR systems. Wearing a VR headset, then, and playing No Man’s Sky after the Beyond Update will likely bring some players the nearest 2019 offers to living out sci-fi fantasies of endless exploration of strange new worlds.
That promise — somewhat more open-ended and creatively-driven than the typical multiplayer game — is why I asked Hello Games about whether cross-play was on its roadmap for No Man’s Sky after the Beyond update. I also asked whether the game would come to other storefronts with VR support like the Epic Store or Facebook’s Oculus Store.
“We are keen to work with anyone who can help get No Man’s Sky into as many hands as possible, and would never rule anything out, but, as a small team, we can only support so many platforms,” the developers explained in the email.
Check out our schedule of planned VR gaming livestreams this week and don’t forget to tune in over on YouTube once we’re live. Plus, if you’re curious about how we livestream the way we do look no further than this handy guide for general tips and this guide specific to our Oculus Quest setup.
Every week we will post a new Livestream Schedule like this. You can click here to see all past livestream archives and scheduled streams. This way everyone can anticipate what’s coming for the week and know when to tune in. If you have suggestions for games you want to see us stream next, leave those ideas down in the comments below!
We’ll embed archived versions of each stream after they’re done and embed the stream directly when it’s happening.
Friday, August 16th 2019 @10:00 AM PT No Man’s Sky VR, Playing the Beyond Update on Rift S
Closing out the week with more No Man’s Sky VR. Big surprise there, right?
(Archived) Monday, August 12th, 2019 – Until You Fall, Sword-Fighting Action Game on Rift S
This sword-fighting action game from Schell Games is due out later this month in Early Access on August 27th but we’ve got a pre-release version of the game ready to go already. You can watch some gameplay here to get an idea of what it’s like and tune-in to see us slice and dice some monsters live.
(Archived) Wednesday, August 14th, 2019 –
No Man’s Sky VR, Playing the Beyond Update on Rift S
This is it. The moment we’ve all been waiting for: this is the launch day for No Man’s Sky: Beyond, a massive game-changing update that massively expands the multiplayer offerings, adds new gameplay mechanics, and introduces full VR support for the entire game. Join us as we play it live!
(Archive) Thursday, August 15th 2019 – No Man’s Sky VR, Playing the Beyond Update on Rift S
Back in No Man’s Sky VR again. This time though we’re going to try and cram as many UploadVR writers and editors into the game as we possibly can. You’re welcome to join us as well! It’s gonna be wild.
You can see lots of our past archived streams over in our YouTube playlist, which is where you can watch gameplay highlights. There’s lots of good stuff there so make sure and subscribe to us on YouTube to stay up-to-date on gameplay videos, video reviews, interviews, and more original content!
And please let us know which games or discussions you want us to livestream next! We have lots of VR games in the queue that we would love to show off more completely.
Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today, we want to know if you think the release of No Man’s Sky VR support in the Beyond update is the most important VR game yet?
On August 14 when the Beyond Update releases, No Man’s Sky VR support will become a reality. It’s something we fantasized about three years ago when the sci-fi epic first released on PS4 and now, over half a dozen game-changing updates later, it’s finally about to be here. We’ve played it and we can’t wait to sink our teeth into it more.
Sean Murray has said that over one million current owners of the game already have a VR headset which should immediately make it one of the most-owned VR games out there. When you combine that with the fact that all VR players will co-exist in the same universe as all the non-VR players, it starts to paint a staggering picture of just how massive this game is going to be.
We already asked what you plan to do first when No Man’s Sky: Beyond releases, so, we now pose the following question: Is No Man’s Sky VR the most important VR game to date? We asked this question about Firewall Zero Hour last year, a game we liked so much we awarded it Game of the Year and it’s since gone on toe receive tons of updates and support — we hope No Man’s Sky VR is just as good, if not better.
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Will we ever see No Man’s Sky VR on Oculus Quest? That might be down to the game’s community… and the headset’s hardware.
Last week we went along to Hello Games to see the No Man’s Sky Beyond update. It hits this Wednesday, but we got to play the VR support early. We also sat down and talk with the team’s Sean Murray. We’ll have the full interview to read through this week but, naturally, we had to ask about the possibility of an Oculus Quest version of the game, no matter how impossible it may seem.
“I’ve been playing it a lot, actually, and it’s lovely,” Murray said of Facebook’s new standalone headset.
“There is a future there, right, for that kind of device, right? People tend to think of, when you release a game, and it’s the thing I always want to hammer home to people, when you release a game that ‘that’s it’.”
He continued, explaining that the team’s work on the VR version is far from done. “This might be version 2.0 for the game, but it’s version 1.0 for VR,” Murray said. “There’s a lot that I expect people will want, and we’re going to see a lot of new players playing a lot of different ways.”
Many of those updates will apply to the gameplay itself, but Murray did leave the possibility of new hardware on the table.
“It’s really hard to predict but we’ll follow that. Whether it’s people wanting much more controller options, much more headset options or whatever. We’ll see. Because it’s very much a hobbyist space, especially on PC. There are so many things that are potential ways for us to go.”
Still, given Quest’s limited horsepower No Man’s Sky might never fit onto the device. Murray’s comments certainly suggest it might come to a future, more powerful iteration of the device, though. For now, No Man’s Sky Beyond is arriving as a free update with support for Rift, Vive, Index and PSVR.
Generally, the VR Job Hub is all about finding the best vacancies at companies obsessed with virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) content from around the world. Sometimes though, you don’t need to look that far, finding plenty of excellent positions right here in the UK.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
There’s a strange sight in the new No Man’s Sky trailer, especially for someone that hasn’t touched the game since they put in 20 hours or so back in 2016.
The planets, vegetation and creatures all appear the same; brash and vibrant, molded in the images painted by early science fiction. What really catches me off guard are the people. There are lots of them.
I know No Man’s Sky has enjoyed multiplayer support for a while, but next week’s Beyond update ups the player count to 32 explorers. Suddenly these worlds I’ve known to be isolated, often hostile and always alien appear to be brimming with life and civilization. At first it gives me pause for thought; I know lots of people want this kind of social experience, but there is something to be said for the solitude of solo adventuring, especially in this dystopian universe.
Sean Murray isn’t concerned. Not only can you confide yourself to single-player should you so choose but, in Murray’s mind, this brings the game a little bit closer to his original vision. Going out into the intergalactic wilderness on your own, then venturing back to a thriving hub of activity where resources are traded and victories are hyperbolized?
“That’s sci-fi,” Murray says.
Go Beyond
It also speaks to the versatility of Beyond, an update that simultaneously adds three core new features and hopes to provide a fresh start for players old and new. It’s the latest in a long line of exhaustive additions that have been built on top of the original version, adding expanded multiplayer and, of course, VR support.
“All games as a service games kind of have this problem,” Murray says. “You add another new thing and another new thing and with each thing you go “This is the main thing.” And you end up with a game which isn’t necessarily cohesive, it’s not how you would have built it if you had been building it from day one with those things in.”
Instead, Beyond wants to level that playing field. That’s why Hello Games is calling the third core pillar of the update — previously unrevealed until now — No Man’s Sky 2.0. Think of it as giving the entire game a tune-up. In Murray’s words, it’s a chance to “really fill in the detail and deepen some of the ways of playing” whilst also making sure new and returning users don’t get lost.
He presents a comically long list of tweaks, changes and additions that address all areas of the No Man’s Sky experience. It includes things like creature riding, farming, cooking, new galactic maps, NPC encounters on planets, bigger bases and much, much more. There’s even a logic system in place which the Hello Games team has used to build their own take on Rocket League on one planet. Murray tells me the list of changes is more than twice as big as 2018’s No Man’s Sky Next, which was no small update either.
A New VR Universe
Obviously, we’re here to talk about the VR, but these changes are just as crucial to that part of the game. As you probably already know, everything we’re talking about here applies to the VR version of No Man’s Sky, from the multiplayer to the farming and, yes, the creature riding. Not only have these been carefully inserted into an already massive game, they’ve been tamed and optimized for the unwieldy world of headsets. It sounds like a herculean effort but, from what I’ve seen so far, the implementation is nothing short of magnificent.
I remember watching Murray talking about the possibility of No Man’s Sky in VR all the way back in 2014 when PSVR was Project Morpheus and Oculus was still on its second development kit. It was a time when the industry was beginning to establish the ground rules of VR development, and one set out very early on was simple: no ports.
And yet, No Man’s Sky VR rarely shows the seams of post-launch integration. Reacquainting myself to the game in a radical new form with Valve’s somethings labyrinthine Index controllers is initially overwhelming, but step-by-step you begin to lose yourself. Everything from the motion controller support to the scale of worlds and user interface feels almost native. This, Murray says, has been far from easy.
“The scale, oh my god,” he says of initial development. “Our character does technically fit inside the ship and fits inside the vehicles, all of that kind of thing. You just play it and you think “No, in my head the ship was really big.” And it’s really fucking small! It’s mind-blowing, going through doorways and stuff. Technically the character does fit through it, but I feel like I’m going to bump my head. I feel like “Oh my god, that crate! How low down has that crate been?””
Reshaping VR
And so Hello Games had to set about scaling up its ships and vehicles, along with adding extra details to their interiors that would stand up to the scrutiny of VR. “And it’s made us make the non-VR version a lot better,” Murray adds. “You just have more of a sense of scale.”
I get a sense for that with the mining, which lets you burrow into the surface of planets. It’s an immediate wow moment, housing yourself in a network of caves you yourself created. Other moments, like surveying a snowy landscape as three teammates jog across it, and marveling at the never-tiresome transition from atmosphere to orbit are just as transfixing.
VR’s necessity for new language has also made for some surprisingly intuitive translations. To turn on the analyzer mode I put my hand up to my head and pull the trigger/grab, for example. You jump out of a cockpit by actually lifting your ship’s windshield up. Better yet, to interact with items you point at them with your hand, hold grip, and then pull your hand towards you. It’s a step towards a strange sort of spatial interface, perfectly in-stride with Hello Games’ novel-inspired take on sci-fi.
Perhaps the most unexpectedly exciting element, though, is how well VR support fits with the expanded multiplayer. Beyond brings a lot of new features to No Man’s Sky’s online offerings, including a space station where the 32 players on a server can all meet up to connect, chat and go out on missions together. It’s here that you can show off your ship, teleport to yours or other people’s bases and even form squads with groups of players to start going on missions with. Murray says Hello Games will start hosting community missions that everyone can take part in, week-in, week-out.
Hello Worlds
If you’re here for the VR support, there’s a chance your mouth may be drooling at this point. This is something that a lot of VR fans have wanted for a long time; an expansive virtual universe with endless amounts to see and do, all with a friend at your side. I can see now why Murray has been so keen to tout that over a million No Man’s Sky players already own a headset. It’s especially fascinating to hear that, in Q&A and developer sessions, the team has even seen VR and non-VR players split up and designate tasks depending on what jobs best fit their mode of play. VR support could bring about some fascinating behavioural changes to this community.
It’s not the only shift I’ll be keen to observe in the coming months. Next Wednesday, Hello Games snaps its fingers and an entire VR universe goes online. No tricks, no workarounds, no Early Access; this is the real deal, built upon three years worth of refinement. I suspect a lot of patient people are about to be handsomely rewarded.
When the No Man’s Sky Beyond update was announced earlier this year, we knew it would include three core pillars.
The first of those, obviously, is VR support. Hello Games’ entire sci-fi adventure has been ported to headsets. Another key feature is expanded multiplayer, bringing the player count up to 32 and increasing the ways for you to explore together. For the past few months, though, the developer remained silent on what the third pillar is. Today, it’s announcing No Man’s Sky 2.0.
No, No Man’s Sky 2.0 isn’t a separate update. Instead, it’s Hello Games’ umbrella term for all of the many, many additions, tweaks and fixes the team is making to Beyond.
What Is No Man’s Sky 2.0?
The idea is to create the most robust, stable version of the game yet seen whilst also streamlining its structure to make it accessible to players old and new. Hello Games wants to give people starting out fresh the chance to find their own playstyles, and make sure returning players from three years ago don’t get lost in the swarm of additions.
Some of the additions, which we’ve further detailed in our extensive pre-launch preview, include creature riding, improved base building and a new cooking system. As Hello Games’ Sean Murray alluded to online earlier this week, it’s a subtler feature than the other core pillars.
“If we were doing one thing I think it would have been really concerning for us because there’s no one thing that people seem to resonate [with],” Murray told me when I visited the studio this week. “One person will say “Better trading!” or something like that and other people will say “Oh, I have no interest in that!” and you just constantly see it.”
So, yes, everything in 2.0 applies to VR, but Hello Games’ aim is to make sure it’s not overwhelming.
“What we’ve been trying to do is one: make it more cohesive, make it easier to come back to, make it easier for new players. But two: really fill in the detail and deepen some of the ways of playing,” Murray added.
We’ll find out very, very soon whether or not they succeeded. No Man’s Sky Beyond launches this Wednesday, August 14 across PC, PS4 and Xbox One. It’s a free update for existing players. Full PC VR and PSVR support is included.
There’s less than a week to go until Hello Games launch No Man’s Sky: Beyond, quite possibly the biggest update to the title since it launched three years ago. With incoming virtual reality (VR) support, the studio has just released a new trailer highlighting the expanded online element of the experience.
No Man’s Sky: Beyond is an ambitious enhancement to this procedural universe, hoping to keep current players happy, interest lapsed players in coming back and hopefully enticing new ones into the fold.
Affecting all players is the improved multiplayer aspect which the trailer solely concentrates on. No Man’s Sky always had an online multiplayer element but that could involve simply bumping into another player in the vast void of digital space. As the video demonstrates, this no longer seems to be a problem. This is mainly thanks to a new shared social area called the Nexus. The Nexus has been designed as a social hub for friends to meet up for missions or for meeting random space wanderers for a mission. Or if the moment calls for it, players can show off their rare spacesuits or display their spacecraft they’ve spent so many hours fine-tuning.
Whilst this feature will make No Man’s Sky a less lonely experience, it’s the addition of VR which should get enthusiasts of the tech excited. Offering support for PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Valve Index, the update will put players in the No Man’s Sky universe like never before, potentially offering VR players the most expansive videogame to date.
When we made No Man’s Sky, we always wanted it to feel like you had stepped into the cover of a science fiction novel. Beyond is another step closer to that goal,” said Sean Murray, Hello Games Founder on PlayStation.Blog.
No Man’s Sky: Beyond is scheduled for release on 14th August 2019, free for anyone who owns the base videogame. If you haven’t bought the title yet and have been toying with the idea, currently it’s 50% off on Steam, dropping the cost from £39.99 GBP down to £19.99. For any further updates ahead of launch, keep reading VRFocus.
