No Man's Sky dev 'desperate to communicate better', plans season of free updates

Two years later, the hype for No Man's Sky is back reckons our Chris. The space exploration game is on the cusp of the NEXT update—its "largest so far", due tomorrow—and Hello Games is "desperate to communicate better" with its players. Better still, the developer will launch a season of free weekly updates.

Relayed in a blog post titled 'a message to the community', Hello Games head honcho Sean Murray says he and his team "always wanted No Man's Sky to grow and develop after it released."

Despite the criticism levied at the game and its creators at launch, Murray highlights the fact one million players played its Atlas Rises update at release—and that 90 percent of those players rated it positively.

Likewise, the average playtime of Atlas Rises is 45 hours, 20 percent of its players have played over 100 hours, and 5 percent hit over 1000. "We know that over 200 million hours of No Man’s Sky have been played to date," says Murray. "It makes us happy, but desperate to communicate better."

The "first" season of free weekly updates and community events will be free to all players, without microtransactions.

"We are also launching a new website dedicated to the community, which we’re calling the Galactic Atlas," Murray adds. "The site features points of interest in the No Man’s Sky Euclid Galaxy, all nominated by you through the survey we created earlier this month. This will grow in functionality and expand over time, in part through your feedback."

Murray explains said survey is open till the launch of NEXT—tomorrow, July 24—and that while he hopes NMS can be considered "finished" one day, he and his team have "so much more" they want to do till then.

Read Pip's words on what it's like to explore No Man's Sky Next with three other people.