Who says you need a mouth-breathing psychopath in black armor and a gross, pale old ghoul in a hood to have a Death Star? No Man's Sky continues its seemingly endless parade of free updates today with The Swarm, which introduces a new threat to the universe: a massive space station called the Hive of Glass that controls an army of angry drones.

And yeah, like the Death Star, the Hive's got a really big laser, too. Here, I'll let Sean Murray tell you about it:

"The Hive of Glass protects itself by releasing swarms of robotic drones, creating an awesome spectacle of battles with hundreds of ships," Murray says. "The Hive itself is a weapon too, with the iris opening to release the largest weapon we’ve ever seen in No Man's Sky. A laser capable of destroying freighter fleets and perhaps even something as large as a space station…"

Don't expect to take on the Hive all by yourself like some kind of friendless Luke Skywalker: travellers will have to work together to neutralize the threat.

"Players are going to need a combined community effort to figure out what is going on," Murray says. "A war effort is being launched from the Nexus, with defenses rapidly being constructed, and a new bulletin page tracking progress. Your contribution to the face-off with the Hive is being logged for all to see in both the Anomaly and the Galactic Atlas. Travellers will want to keep a constant eye on which squad is contributing the most to the war effort."

If huge space battles aren't your thang, no problem. There's plenty to do on the ground too, like salvaging and researching the drones that have been shot down—and the gravity gun Hello Games added to No Man's Sky a few updates ago will come in handy there.

"There are miniature planetary swarms to defeat, and research efforts to sabotage the swarm's network. The secrets of the Hive's origins and weaknesses can be uncovered and shared with your fellow rebels," Murray says. "We can't wait to see how this plays out."

There's a whole lot more in the free update, like a new armor set, a fancy new jetpack, a sick-looking rifle, a bunch of bugfixes, and some stability and optimization improvements. The update is live now.

A weirdly enjoyable side effect of a massive game launch is that it shakes up the most-wishlisted games on Steam. Subnautica 2 has been perched (haha, fish pun) atop the most-wishlisted games on Steam for ages, probably since Hollow Knight: Silksong was released in September 2025.

But as of last week, Subnautica 2 is out! There must be a freshly crowned most-anticipated PC game on Steam! A new king of the hill!

And there is—but that new king shouldn't even qualify for the most-wishlisted games list in the first place. Because it's friggin' Deadlock.

I know Valve likes to pretend its third-person MOBA hero shooter hybrid isn't out yet, but, like… it is. Deadlock has been out for almost two years already. It's updated regularly, including with new characters. It has a peak concurrent playercount of 171,490, and on average more than 50,000 people are playing it at any given time. Millions of people, probably, have already played it at some point.

That qualifies as "out," and when games are out, they drop off the most-wishlisted list, just like Subnautica 2 did when it launched into early access last week. But at the top of the list right now: friggin' Deadlock! It's Schrödinger's game: it's never been released and yet it's one of the most-played games on Steam.

So yeah, real talk, Valve: your weird Team Fortress-ass MOBA is out and you can't keep pretending it isn't. Deadlock isn't "unreleased" or "coming soon" or "to be announced": it's flippin' out, in early access—you know, the term you made astoundingly popular with Steam?

Hell, Deadlock is even in my Steam library despite the fact that I don't like MOBAs and don't have friends. I have no idea who even invited me, but someone did. I've played it. Not much, but I've played it. In 2024, on the same day it should have dropped off Steam's top wishlists page.

Anyway. This is a long-winded way of saying what I actually wanted to say, which is that since Subnautica 2 has launched, the new most wishlisted game on Steam—the real one, I mean—is Light No Fire. Congratulations to Hello Games! Feels like the perfect game to top the list: it looks great, it's got lots of followers, and most importantly, it hasn't been released yet.

I'll just give it to you straight: No Man's Sky is Pokémon now. There's nothing you or I can do about it. Today's update, Xeno Arena, will let you amass a little cadre of vicious alien beasts and pit them against one another in holo-arenas, presumably to the holo-death.

"Xeno Arena lets you raise, train and battle the alien creatures found across the universe," says Hello head honcho Sean Murray. "You have everything from dinosaurs to flying cows to robots to gaseous blobs [in No Man's Sky]. We started with this thought that you can discover them and name them... but what if all that variety had a gameplay purpose? What if you could collect them, breed them, have them as pets... but also battle them?"

So now, when you stumble across a weird bit of fauna in some far-flung corner of No Man's Sky, you'll be able to assess its viability as a warbeast. That is to say, you'll be able to check out what abilities they have and see if they're useful in your quest to become the galaxy's greatest animal-battler.

The arenas can be found in space stations and the Nexus, and Hello really makes it sound like a whole new aspect of the game you could conceivably devote the bulk of your playtime to. "Players can battle their pets against friends, strangers and NPCs for huge rewards," says Murray. "It's a genuine path for players to progress in the game, with daily challenges to compete in for ultimate rewards. This is an entire multiplayer game all of its own, with absolutely tons of depth, now existing within No Man's Sky."

Hello's wearing the Pokémon inspo on its sleeve—-different creatures will have different elemental affinities, and those will be informed by the planetary biome they evolved in. There are also super-rare creatures out there for you to find, like some kind of NMS-style Deoxys. You'll also be able to build an actual xeno arena to fight your pals in.

Hello also wears the Pokémon inspo on its sleeve by, well, directly acknowledging Pokémon and the world's various Poke-likes: "We are huge fans of Pokémon, Palworld and pet battling in World of Warcraft."

It all sounds like an excellent idea, to me. I'm not a survival game guy and NMS has never quite managed to ensnare me, but the notion of dedicating my life to collecting rare shinies? I'd be lying if I said I wasn't very tempted.

Hey, Traveler! You've been exploring No Man's Sky's quintillions of planets for a while now (almost 10 years, if you can believe it). You've dug holes in those planets, exploited their resources, built bases and settlements on them, and spent hours either killing their lifeforms or taming and riding them.

Did you ever think about, you know, cleaning some of those planets up? Hmm? Is that so much to ask?

No Man's Sky's new update, called Remnant, is all about cleaning up hazardous space debris. And don't worry, it's not a completely altruistic endeavor: it'll be well worth your while.

"Salvage and debris that could always be found on planets can now be collected and recycled for rare and highly prized resources," Sean Murray says. "New trucks, tipping flatbeds and haulers can be constructed, to transport resources back to industrial yards for reclamation. You can work alone or join a salvage crew with friends. It creates this really fun and tactile new loop of searching for wrecks, loading trucks full of cargo and hauling across the alien landscape to industrial yards to gain new loot and rewards."

And that's not all. The game that seemingly has everything now truly has everything, as Hello Games has added the best tool in the universe to help you with your new career in galactic sanitation: a gravity gun. Check it out in the Remnant trailer:

"The Gravitino Coil is a powerful new anti-gravity module for your multi-tool. It turns No Man’s Sky into a physics playground. Allowing you to grab large objects and fling, toss or carefully carry them around the world," Murray says. "Our gravity gun is an industrial tool, but it can also be used as a ballistic weapon, grabbing sentinels or fling heavy objects, turning them into projectiles."

As always, the update is free, and it comes with a limited-time community expedition that "brings travellers together in convoys to clean up and reclaim a planet covered in wrecks and salvage," Murray says. "Perhaps you’ll be a hauler, or the gravity gun wielding ground crew or maybe a scrap yard operator."

Perhaps. Or perhaps I'll just start grabbing trash and flinging it at weird aliens.

Next time a commenter points out a typo in one of my articles, I'll just say it's to make potential plagiarists look stupid. After No Man's Sky players on Reddit (via GamesRadar) questioned the provenance of an asset in survival MMO Once Human—suggesting it bore a marked resemblance to a similar object in No Man's Sky—Hello Games' boss Sean Murray seemed remarkably at-ease about the possibility he'd been the target of an asset heist.

"Joke's on them," he wrote, because the original No Man's Sky asset is all jacked up anyway.

The asset in question is NMS' base teleport module, a big, lens-looking thing that players can use to quickly jaunt between areas. It's essentially a big circle studded with rivets and bars, and looks very similar to, ah, Once Human's big circle studded with rivets and bars, which you can pick up if you happen to roll lucky on one of its shinier lootboxes. Once Human's is white and seems to contain someone's discarded Peloton bike, but that aside? The resemblance is striking.

It wasn't long before NMS players accused Once Human of dodgy behaviour, noting that it has, in the past, been dinged for using assets that look to have been copy and pasted from Rainbow Six Siege for a battle pass reward, which was eventually quietly removed.

Has it pulled the same trick twice? It certainly seems that way. I reached out to NetEase for a statement, and was told, "We take this very seriously and want everyone to feel confident in the creative work that goes into the game. We are committed to ensuring that our work remains original and respectful of the broader creative community. Honouring original creativity is fundamental to who we are and how we operate.

"With this in mind, we will replace the asset in question. We are undertaking a thorough review and will be using this moment to strengthen our internal art and design policies. We genuinely appreciate the community members who brought this to our attention. This feedback helps us to improve."

For his part, Sean Murray doesn't sound too bothered. As I mentioned before, the NMS model in question is a little less than perfect. Specifically, Murray notes that Hello "forgot to LOD those rivets" that stud the teleporter's rim.

Murray accompanied his post with detailed pictures of the rivets in question, revealing a set of studs composed of a frankly terrifying, computer-sweating number of polygons. No, really, where most of the base teleporter module is composed of simple, large surfaces, the rivets look to be made up of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of polygons.

So if you're playing Once Human and your new lootbox tchotchke brings the game to a screeching halt then, well, case closed.

The end of the year is hurtling toward us like a rampaging sandworm that devours time, and that means every game you own is currently pitching you hard to vote for them in the Steam Awards. And not just the new releases, either—thanks to a category called "Labor of Love," you can nominate games that have been "out for a while" provided the devs have continued to "nurture and support their creation."

No Man's Sky certainly falls into that category: it's been out for nine years and it's still getting updated regularly multiple times a year with new features. In 2025 alone, there have been updates that added new planets to explore, fossilized skeletons to dig up, a settlement management system, and huge new customizable starships. And as always, these updates are completely free.

But there's another game's labor we want to hear about, right? In the midst of celebrating the year's accomplishments in No Man's Sky, Sean Murray also mentioned the other project in the works over at Hello Games: the planet-sized open world sandbox of Light No Fire.

"In the background, another tiny team at Hello is continuing at pace on our next Labor of Love, Light No Fire, and we know a lot of you are keen to hear more," Murray said on Steam.

Unfortunately, he declined to let us hear more. "For now, it suffices to say that I am really pleased with the progress we are making and I think it’s going to be something really special," Murray said.

That's not exactly a geyser of information, but the sum of those two sentences might be more than the parts. For instance, referring to the development of Light No Fire as happening "in the background" is interesting, or perhaps deflating if you were under the impression that the entire team at Hello Games was elbow-deep in the game. It sounds like No Man's Sky is still largely the focus for the studio.

Likewise, the term "tiny team" isn't all that encouraging either, if you were hoping, for example, that Murray might be announcing a release date for Light No Fire at The Game Awards next month. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it doesn't sound like we'll be lighting no fires anytime soon.

Finally, "I think it’s going to be something really special" isn't the type of thing you'd say if, for example, it was 95% done and was just being polished for release in the near future. I feel like it might be described as "it is something really special" instead.

Unless, of course, you're deliberately lowering people's expectations just so you can utterly blow them away by announcing at The Game Awards that the game is done and it's out right now! So, maybe it's just a bluff? Half-Life fans are twisting themselves into pretzels to predict that Half-Life 3 is imminent, I don't see any reason Light No Fire fans shouldn't do the same.

You can read Murray's full post on Steam.

It's been a big year for No Man's Sky, although you could argue that every year since 2016 has been a big year for Hello Games' spectacularly redeemed space exploration sim. 2025 brought another helping of reworks to its universe simulation in Worlds: Part 2, as well as space palaeontology in its Relics update, stellar towns you could preside over in Beacon, and multi-crew spacecraft and ship design in Voyagers—which apparently brought in the highest number of concurrent players since No Man's Sky released.

As 2025 approaches its end, Hello Games is in a reflective mood, and has decided to rerun all four of the expeditions that accompanied each update. On top of that, it's currently rerunning 2021's Beachhead Expedition, giving players another opportunity to claim Mass Effect's Normandy SR-1.

For those unaware, expeditions are timed community events that take place in a pocket version of No Man's Sky's universe, which require players to complete a set number of objectives in exchange for rewards. There are 5 "phases" of objectives in each expedition, culminating in a major reward at the end, which in Beachhead's case is a pilotable version of Mass Effect's iconic starship.

The Beachhead Expedition is already underway—having commenced on N7 Day—and runs until November 18. This will be followed by the Titan expedition, which focusses on exploring the planet types introduced in Worlds: Part 2, and rewards players with a "living ship" among other things.

Once Titan concludes on December 2, Relics will kick off the following day. As you'd expect, this involves searching for ancient fossils as part of the Galactic Palaeology Society. This will be followed by Corvette which commences on December 17 and runs through the Holiday period, tasking players with assembling a Corvette class starship as they evade a Sentinel horde.

Finally, No Man's Sky will usher in the New Year with a redux of Breach—which has only just concluded its initial run. Here, players explore an abandoned universe as they follow the heat signature of the Fireship Arcadia. It's probably the most atmospheric of NMS' expeditions since Adrift, which made players the sole sentient lifeform in the universe.

If you play No Man's Sky regularly and missed any of these expeditions, the next few weeks offer a good chance to catch up. As for what's coming to No Man's Sky in 2026, Hello Games doesn't specify. But it sounds like there's plenty in the pipeline. "We already have so much more content planned and in active development," teases Hello Games' cofounder Sean Murray. "We can't wait to share it with you.

2026 will also likely bring more insight into Hello Games' next project, Light No Fire. The studio has been relatively quiet about it since its reveal in December 2023, but Sean Murray provided a crumb of information in August, stating that Light No Fire's Earth-sized planet will have "real oceans" that players will need "large boats and crews" to cross.

A new update for No Man's Sky, called Breach, introduces space wrecks, expanded ship building, and a unique expedition. It also arrives with a press release from your man Sean Murray, who immediately cranks up the organ and starts singing mournfully about the "tiny team" that's "poured a lot of love into it", which makes me wonder if Hello Games is now staffed by Oompa Loompas.

In all seriousness, Hello Games long ago completed the redemption arc for No Man's Sky, (which now sits at "Very Positive" on Steam with around 170,000 reviews) and for years now has been on a well-deserved victory lap. We can have a laugh about Murray's inability to leave the 'we're just the little guys' schtick behind, but at the same time there's no doubting that love has been poured into this game over just shy of a decade.

No Man's Sky received the major Voyager update just over a month ago, adding the ability to build and customise giant spaceships known as Corvettes that you can get your mates to act as crew on. A really nice touch is that you can set your destination and then, just like Star Trek, go for a little walk around the ship's interior, have a chat, and fiddle around with the ship's layout.

Murray says the reaction has been "incredible" and saw the game hit its "highest player numbers since launch" (it's currently got around 27,500 people playing, per SteamDB, which is not bad going). He says they've been loving the creative ships players have come up with, "and just floating in space outside of your ship has really resonated with players and provides these tranquil moments of calm that I love."

The strength of that response meant the Oompa Loompas were sent straight back to the salt mines, and now No Man's Sky has a new update called Breach that zeroes-in on the whole space-walk / space-float thing.

"We’re introducing space wrecks to explore, leaning into that thrill of space-walking, and giving players more excuse to enjoy it," says Murray. "Salvaging these wrecks unlocks a huge array of new ship building parts which has been greatly requested. We’ve also improved and expanded ship building in response to watching players spend so much time in the workshop designing their dream ships."

Breach also adds a new expedition where players have to "voyage to the end of space" to find a mysterious wreck and salvage some unique ship-building loot. I kinda thought the whole point was that space doesn't have edges, but I suppose they had to stick the wreck somewhere.

The update also adds "purple-star solar systems", which boast planets with "deeper oceans, incredible terrains and volatile gas giants." The main reason you'll want to head here though is they guide you towards some of the new space wrecks and rare parts. Across the universe, Breach also adds randomly scattered wrecks containing various parts.

The full patch notes for Breach are here, and it's live now for all players. And if you've never been tempted but space-walking around space wrecks sounds like a good time, No Man's Sky is 60% off on Steam until November 3.

Every few months the No Man's Sky community gets a treat: a new update is announced that introduces new features and systems for the sci-fi sandbox. Something else that happens every few months: the Light No Fire community gets its hopes up that the announcement will actually be about Hello Games' upcoming Earth-sized fantasy sandbox.

Today both communities got their wish. (Note: I'm pretty sure the No Man's Sky community and the Light No Fire community are the same community.) Yes, a big new No Man's Sky update has arrived, called Voyagers, but Sean Murray also gave all those eager Light No Fire fanatics a tidbit of information, too.

The No Man's Sky Voyagers update means players can now build custom starships for the first time. These ships are big enough for several crew members and allow players to get up and walk around inside their ships. Essentially, they're flying bases that can be edited and customized even while you're traveling between planets, which Murray says wasn't easy for the team at Hello Games to bring to life.

"The technical challenges they have had to overcome to make any of this possible have been immense. Almost every part of the game has had to be reworked to accommodate these relative spaces," Murray said in an email sent to PC Gamer.

The new ship building system won't just be used in No Man's Sky, either.

"Much of the technology we’re introducing with Voyagers is shared with our next game, Light No Fire, which is a truly open world, a shared Earth-sized planet, with real oceans to traverse, needing large boats and crews," Murray said. "We love that we get to share this technology with players early."

I've been thinking a lot about mountain-sized mountains when it comes to the 1:1 scale of Light No Fire's planet, but I hadn't given oceans much thought until now. The idea of taking a voyage across an ocean the size of an actual ocean is pretty exciting, especially in a custom-built boat full of pals. I'm definitely curious to see the fantasy version of Voyagers' sci-fi ship-building tech whenever Light No Fire comes out.

This isn't the first time Murray has talked about tech being shared between the two games. "The team is extremely busy on Light No Fire," Murray said back in January when unveiling a new terrain system for No Man's Sky. "Each time we push our engine to new places though we have this urge to share it with the community, with No Man’s Sky."

You can see the mention of Light Not Fire at about 1:51 in the Voyagers update video below.

How many bases do you need in a single game? Ask someone who likes base-building, like me, and they'll probably say "As many as you can give me."

No Man's Sky already has a few kinds of player bases. Base-building was added to the space sandbox in 2016, along with freighters that can be parked in orbit and customized. Settlements can also be built and managed, which is like making an entire alien town your base.

And in the new No Man's Sky Voyagers update, you can build and customize huge new ships called Corvettes that are big enough to fly around the galaxy with your friends acting as crew. You can even get out of the cockpit while in flight, stroll around the ship, and edit the layout while you're in transit.

"These ships have real interiors, med-bays, sleeping quarters, war rooms, radars, teleporters. It comes with you everywhere, which totally changes how you play. Decorating it with your friends gives you a space that you share together," Sean Murry said in an email sent to PC Gamer. "Having multiple Corvettes flying over a planet together is incredible, especially when you pop the hatch and spacewalk or skydive from one ship to the other!"

Yep, you can jump right out and float around in space, or if you're in the atmosphere, do a bit of skydiving, as you can see in the Voyagers trailer below.

For those of you who were hoping this announcement from Murray would involve Light No Fire, well, the planet-sized fantasy sandbox did get a mention, too. The same ship-building tech will appear in Light No Fire, though there it'll be for the boats you need to cross the realistically massive oceans.

Along with the trailer, you can watch a more in-depth video about Voyager below. The update is live right now, and includes a new expedition so you can get started building your new mobile spaceship base.

In late 2023, Hello Games announced Light No Fire, a grand fantasy follow-up to sci-fi hit No Man's Sky. The reveal promised a sprawling world—literally the size of our own Earth—to make your own in a survival adventure. It was a huge promise, perhaps too much for a studio with a history of overpromising.

Since then we've got nearly nothing. No more big promises, no more trailers. No fuel for some immense, terrible beast of a hype train destined to destroy itself upon release. Just some moderate fan art output.

Naturally, this is anathema to the modern gamer, who demands frequent development updates. I'm afraid, then, to report that Light No Fire watchers are likely entering the early stages of what I'm calling Silksong Syndrome—the uncontrollable craving that consumed fans of Hollow Knight after years with no major news about its expansion.

The Light No Fire subreddit is a key place to see it in action, where a handful of posts speculate over year-and-a-half-old trailer stills and post cryptically about the "bacon" and post very sad images of facepalms and talk about "huffing copium" because they saw nothing Light No Fire-related during Summer Games Fest 2025.

"Now I understand Tweakers," says one post among many.

I can't really blame Hello Games for not saying too much because, again, it's famous for that one time No Man's Sky failed to meet the expectations its marketing and fan speculation built for it. (Though it has since become one of gaming's most famous comeback stories.)

You can see everything we know about Light No Fire on our dedicated page for that. It's interesting, but it's not much. God help the early superfans of this game. They probably have a long road ahead of them.

For as long as mankind has gazed up at the stars, it has been seized by a dream: to journey out there, into the void, to stand eye-to-eye with God, to slip the surly bonds of Earth, venture into space, and establish responsible local government.

No Man's Sky's latest in a frankly unbelievable line of updates is called Beacon, and it promises to let you become Overseer—or space mayor—of "up to four settlements, managing townships on the frontier of multiple worlds—each with their own set of citizens and challenges."

Your stellar towns are yours to muck with. You can construct and upgrade buildings, resolve disputes between citizens, hold festivals, and generally do what I've decided to call 'mayor stuff'. I've gotta be honest, I think Hello Games might have turned NMS into some kind of citybuilder/management game when we had our backs turned. At some point those guys are going to turn this game into a JRPG and then where will we be?

It's not all about your new mayordom, though. It's just mostly about that. On top of your new roles and responsibilities as planetary potentate, Beacon also marks the introduction of "robotic Autophage settlements." These towns have their own thing going on: a rough, robotic style that you can make your own if you take an Autophage town into your remit.

The good news is, your toil as mayor can pay off in the form of resources. Put those ungrateful citizens to work in the mines and reap the rewards, I say. The downside, though, is that they're all weak and feeble, and you'll need to defend them against incursions by miscreants. To do that, you can "hire a squadron of wingmen, who will now defend towns when they come under attack from roving pirates."

It all sounds pretty involved—the kind of thing most studios would put out as costly DLC rather than a free update—and I won't pretend I'm not tempted to leap back into No Man's Sky. It's about time someone brought some peace and stability to the galaxy; it might as well be me.

It may seem strange for a developer that created a galaxy filled with trillions of planets to follow it up with a game where there's only one. But No Man's Sky developer Hello Games is doing just that: Light No Fire, its next open world survival adventure, will be contained to a single planet. Thing is, that planet is big. Real big.

No Man's Sky was huge in a lot of ways. It was a huge hit, a huge controversy, and it was just plain huge in nature: a galaxy with more procedurally generated planets than millions of players could ever explore in a lifetime. But making a game that takes place on a single planet is still plenty ambitious, because that planet is legit the size of Earth.

Interested? Yeah, we are too. Here's everything we know about Light No Fire, including its announcement trailer, gameplay details, and a few quotes from Hello Games founder Sean Murray.

Is there a Light No Fire release date?

The release date of Light No Fire has yet to be announced, and at this stage we don't even have a release window locked down. The game was announced at The Game Awards in 2023, where Sean Murray said Light No Fire had been in development for "the last five years."

With now seven years of development time, we hope it won't be too much longer to wait, but if Light No Fire is coming out in 2026 or beyond, we simply don't know yet. Worse, it was confirmed by Sean Murray in a No Man's Sky blog post that only a "tiny team" at Hello Games are currently working on it.

The full quote reads: ""In the background, another tiny team at Hello is continuing at pace on our next Labor of Love, Light No Fire, and we know a lot of you are keen to hear more. For now, it suffices to say that I am really pleased with the progress we are making and I think it’s going to be something really special."

Light No Fire trailer

The announcement trailer from The Game Awards is, so far, the only real look we've gotten at Light No Fire. The Steam store page doesn't give us much else: all the screenshots are taken right from the trailer. There have been no other teasers or art, so drink in that trailer: it's really all we've got right now.

Luckily it shows us a lot, and what's there looks pretty interesting.

Light No Fire setting and genre

Light No Fire features

Light No Fire multiplayer

While October might have been a better time to introduce spooky scary skeletons to No Man’s Sky, I don’t think anything is ever going to stop Hello Games in their quest to turn their once-bare-bones space sandbox into the home of all things to all people.

The Relics update, which rolled out today, adds a whole bundle of archaeological and paleontology-themed content to the universe, including alien fossils to unearth and showcase in your own private museum. Plus, the occasional piece of cursed ancient machinery that’ll try to murder you, as you can see in the trailer below.

“We wanted players to feel like true paleontologists”, says Hello Games. Digging deep beneath planetary surfaces will unearth valuable relics and mysterious new bones of all shapes and sizes, which you can then showcase in paleontology displays in your various facilities and ships. Of course, you don’t have to properly match the bones, allowing you to mix and match skeletons and create your own, wildly inaccurate natural history of each world to share with other players for giggles.

Not all fossils are made equal, and you can trade the fancier ones away at a new NPC you can find in space stations. Or if you’re already swimming in skeletons, you can swap some of yours with him to round out your collection. It’s just one more layer of cute roleplaying potential added to an already-intimidating game. Although as of the previous update (and updated further with this one), more solipsistic spacefarers can opt to wander a universe devoid of intelligent life, so maybe the bones will give you somebody to talk to in those cursed universe.

As a more action-oriented player, my main interest goes to the new threats you can dig up while playing in the galactic sandbox. There are a bunch of new things that can try to kill you, starting with the rocky Stone Ghosts, which appear to be a bit more tangible than your average apparition, and significantly more capable of punching you to death with big rocky fists. There are also huge Stone Golem boss-class enemies to dig up, so you might want to bring your own combat/excavation mech on digs, just in case you unearth something ornery.

Also mentioned briefly in the trailer (but not shown) are Skeletal Companions, which are exactly what you'd hope: Animated, rideable space-dinosaur skeletons that want to be your friend, and available as a reward for completing the expedition launching with this update. Less friendly-sounding are the Titanic Boneworms, because knock-off Shai-Hulud weren’t menacing enough, and now the universe is plagued by their undead cousins.

As is customary with No Man’s Sky, the new update will be accompanied by a new Community Expedition, giving more goal-oriented players an excuse to get together online and complete a bunch of paleontology-related challenges in exchange for a new round of special cosmetics that probably do belong in a museum.

This all comes just weeks after the release of the Worlds (Part 2) update, a sweeping overhaul to the game’s planet generation code so extreme that instead of scrungling existing worlds, they just doubled the number of planets in the universe, with fresher worlds more likely to contain more extreme environments populated by weird new creatures. It’s not all out of the kindness of Sean Murray’s heart, of course (although it is very generous), as it seems that No Man’s Sky is also being used as a testbed for new technologies to be used in the studio’s upcoming fantasy giga-sandbox Light No Fire.

Peanut butter and chocolate, macaroni and cheese, Omar Little and Brother Mouzone… those are a few of my all-time favorite team-ups. At The Game Awards tonight, an exciting new dynamic duo appeared, and one I never would have expected: Ghost Town Games, maker of frenetic co-op cooking game Overcooked, have teamed up with No Man's Sky studio Hello Games.

No, it's not Chefs in Space, but it still looks pretty great: Ghost Town Games announced its new local and online co-op game, Stage Fright, and Hello Games is publishing it. How about that! Check out the reveal trailer below:

"The game is packed with co-op mechanics–Overcooked style chaotic moments mixed with escape room style cooperation," says an email from Hello Games sent to PC Gamer. "Nothing else really played like Overcooked when it came out, and Stage Fright is just as innovative, but in a really different direction." Hello Games also describes Stage Fright as "Luigi's Mansion meets Overcooked with a really charming story."

So, why the heck is Hello Games involved at all? Turns out the No Man's Sky studio has been friendly with Ghost Town Games for at least a decade when they all played an early demo of Overcooked together, after which Hello Games helped secure a deal for the game with publisher Team 17.

"When we played an early version of Stage Fright we got the same buzz as we had with Overcooked all those years ago, it’s just something we wanted to be involved in," Hello Games says. That's how great team-ups happen.

"The codename of Stage Fright was Project Attic, because Phil, Oli and Gemma [the trio of devs behind Ghost Town Games] have been in the attic at the top of their house working on this new game for the last five years, joined by a small team of talented contributors," Hello Games says.

According to Hello Games, the original Overcooked attracted over 50 million players, so Stage Fright has some pretty big shoes to fill. No release date has been announced, but you can visit its page on Steam in the meantime.

Earlier this week, No Man's Sky finally managed to reach a very positive rating on Steam. It only took eight years and a ridiculous amount of effort to get there, but it turns out that even after this great milestone, the developers aren't planning to end development anytime soon.

"Our tiny team at Hello Games has grafted and then grafted some more, and although 'very positive' might be just a few words, it means an awful lot, especially since we aren’t even close to being finished yet," engineer programmer Martin Griffiths says. "Thank you to all players who believed in us and those of you who continue to journey with us."

Griffiths explains that working through all the issues and problematic public reception of No Man's Sky wasn't actually as hard as you would think, but that's mostly thanks to how he was brought up.

"Growing up in a small, pretty rough town in South Wales, I was lucky to have amazing parents who taught me resilience and to try and try again if you initially fail," Griffiths says. "Shortly after the initial release of No Man's Sky, I had a meeting with Sean [Murray, founder and managing director of Hello Games] in a pub in Guildford, and everything he said during that lunch echoed what I had been taught as a child. I’m thankful for that synchronicity."

The unrestricted expectations that surrounded No Man's Sky may have hindered it at first, but it became apparent rather quickly that the developers were willing to go the extra mile to remedy all the issues. We awarded No Man's Sky Ongoing Game Award in 2017, and the game also got a nomination for Best Community Support at The Game Awards 2023, although Baldur's Gate 3 ended up taking home the win in that category.

Over the years, No Man's Sky introduced multiplayer, brought players countless new quests, and finally added fishing to the game. All the work that has gone into it over the last eight years has been done to either deliver on promises that were made before the game launched or just to show players what was possible. And honestly, I'd say all the work paid off years ago, so I'm impressed that the devs still have more to do.

Cyberpunk 2077 is often held up as the greatest redemption arc in videogame history, but I think No Man's Sky has a legitimate claim on the crown too. More than eight years after it landed with an ugly thud on Steam—a "supernova of negative backlash and disappointment," as we put it at the time—Hello Games' sci-fi exploration epic has clawed its way up to a "very positive" rating on Steam.

The rating means that at least 80% of all user reviews of No Man's Sky are positive, and that's a far cry from the game's early days. Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, this is what it looked like in August 2017, one year after No Man's Sky came out—positive reviews are coming in, but the overall rating is stuck in "mostly negative" thanks to the great, weighty mass of early negative reviews.

That's a massive mountain to climb, but Hello Games stuck with it, releasing bug fixes and major updates alike that slowly but surely made the game into what players had expected from it since the very beginning. It took five years and 17 free, "game-changing" updates to hoist the game into a "mostly positive" overall rating, and earlier in 2024 the next step on the ladder came within view: Hello Games head Sean Murray said in April, "I never thought it possible, but guys we might hit 'Very Positive' (80%) one day," although he also cautioned that "mathematically each % point is much harder to gain than the last."

And yet, here we are. "Holy shit you guys—it happened," Murray wrote on X. "ALL REVIEWS: Very positive. Thank you thank you thank you. You have no idea what this means to us."

It is, as we said earlier this year, "a great symbolic win" for Hello Games, but not really a game-changer in any practical sense. No Man's Sky is already a big sales success and widely regarded as an outstanding game: It's among the very few games to hold spots on our "worst launches" and "best games" lists at the same time. That Steam rating isn't going to have any real impact on the game's future fortunes, but symbols matter, and this is a big one.

The next step up in Steam's rating system, "Overwhelmingly Positive," requires at least 95% positive reviews, and that's likely going to be out of reach: By my extremely rough calculations, another 100,000 positive reviews—and no negatives—would nudge the rating up by five points, which would still leave it well shy of the mark. As Murray said, the math is tough. But even if that final number isn't attainable, this new milestone is a hell of an achievement by any measure.

Hello Games also kicked off Expeditions Redux today, a chance to replay (or play, if you missed them) the year's community expeditions "in a 'reduxed' form such that they can be completed and rewards unlocked with relative ease." The first, Omega, is live now and runs until December 11. And if you don't already have No Man's Sky in your library, it's on sale now for $24/£20/€24—60% off the regular price—in the 2024 Steam Autumn Sale.

Interplanetary exploration epic No Man's Sky has announced that a feature literally years in the making will finally release for the eight-year-old game: Cross-save between its many, many platforms.

That's not an exaggeration. Developer Hello Games earns double the manys by noting that their cross-save support will work on platforms "including PC, PlayStation 4 & Xbox One and Series X/S, Game Pass, GOG, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, PlayStation VR 1 & 2 and PCVR."

Also, a collaboration years in the past will return as the famous SSV Normandy SR1, from Mass Effect, returns as a spaceship that players can collect on Mass Effect's fan holiday, N7 Day, which was yesterday. You'll be able to complete a heavily adapted and revised version of 2021's Beachhead expedition to get a Normandy as a mid-size Frigate in your very own collection of ships. The event will be available until November 21.

"Adding the ability to transfer saves between platforms via a server is especially difficult for No Man’s Sky, as the work involved increases with each platform supported and how long folks have already been playing for. Both those numbers are large for our tiny team," said Hello Games in a press release.

The amount of work to make cross-save function has only increased over the years as more platforms were added and players built ever-more-meticulous and detailed base designs with ever more widgets to spin and mech walkers to stomp around in.

"We also have players who played once at launch, eight years ago, suddenly loading up that save on a platform that didn’t even exist back then!" said Hello Games.

Because of the scale of the task, cross save functionality will only be offered to a limited number of players at first. "We are now ready to start rolling cross save out to a small number of players. From today, all No Man’s Sky players can link their different accounts together at https://cloud.nomanssky.com/cross-save. A subset of players will be enabled to then select their saves from multiple devices on the in-game save screen. In the coming weeks all players will be invited to do so," it continued.

It has been a wildly busy year for No Man's Sky, releasing the big old 5.0 Worlds update that included a sweeping update to tech across the entire game. There was also the addition of fishing, meaning that we can finally consider it a real videogame, and a bit of cosmic horror over Halloween.

What's the biggest save disaster you've ever had? I still wake up in a cold sweat remembering the cold April day in 2009 when I quicksaved in the final level of Max Payne a nanosecond before a bullet took my head clean off. Was that my only save? Yes. Was I an idiot? Yes. Did I learn anything from it? Absolutely not.

But I only lost about eight hours of progress. That's a pittance compared to the 611 hours—or 25 days—that was recently at risk for one No Man's Sky player who recently submitted a broken save to Hello Games in search of a fix (via GamesRadar).

Their problem wasn't a mistimed quicksave, though. As No Man's Sky engine programmer Martin Griffiths details over on X: "Today I received a 611 hour save that reproduced a flickering bug that has been reported half a dozen times on my posts here." Naturally, said Griffiths, "when a player has put that much into our game it deserves the engineering fix… and this then trickles down to all our future long term players," who promised to "hawk that bug and fix it". You can see a video of the glitch in action below.

The good news is that Griffiths managed to save the player's, uh, save. In a further update, he posts a video of the game running flicker-free in the same area on the same save. Per Griffiths, the problem was a "general engine bug/limit being reached," which means that his fix will "probably help other large bases that had this issue on Xbox."

So good news for whoever it was that almost had to start from scratch after nearly a month of playtime, and also for anyone who might have run into the problem in future. Oh, and if you're thinking '611 hours is rookie numbers,' you're not exactly wrong. According to Griffiths, the record length for a busted save received by the tech support team is 4,000 hours. No word on if they managed to repair that one. Gulp.

The new No Man's Sky expedition is a space horror outing where, instead of evading space pirates and mysteriously cute aliens, the boundaries of reality are out to get you. The Cursed, which launches today, takes place at the threshold between realities in a place called the twilight realm. It looks super pretty—much prettier than the dead planets I invariably encounter when I return to the game every six months or so.

What does this mean in practice? It means creepy stuff is everywhere but also, maybe it's actually not. Because your exosuit is now fitted with an Anomaly Suppressor, which keeps you sane and thus presumably guarded from some of the worst aspects of unreality. This module needs to be maintained, and if you don't take care of it all the peaceful octopi floating around in the sky will start to lash out.

Travel is restricted too: instead of warping between star systems with hyperdrive tech you'll need to use the "ancient portal network" as you travel around the galaxy, doing the bidding of mysterious haunting voices whose motives are unclear. As far as No Man's Sky goes, it sounds like a pleasantly guided experience.

There are rewards for completing it: a bunch of decorative posters for your base, an Anomaly Seal base part, which doesn't do anything in normal No Man's Sky but looks nice, an ink-stained jetpack trail and—my favourite—a bioluminescent companion.

This is the 16th No Man's Sky expedition, and it'll run until November 7. It follows the Aquarius update which added fishing to No Man's Sky.

It seems impossible to comprehend now, but in 1969 three government employees climbed into a rocket and blasted themselves to the moon—even though there were no fish there. They bounced around, they drove a buggy, they picked up rocks, but the journey was ultimately pointless because there were no space ponds and no moon fish to catch. Why do you think we stopped going?

Fast forward to today, and it's exceedingly rare that I'm even gonna bother to play a videogame if there isn't a fishing minigame in it. Y'all playing Deadlock? Cool, have fun with that. Let me know when they patch in some fishin'.

So I'm excited to see infinite space sandbox No Man's Sky has apparently run out of other things to add to itself and finally patched in the one thing it always truly needed: fishing. The Aquarius Update arrives today, and all you intrepid Travelers now have a legitimate reason to restlessly explore the trillions of planets in No Man's Sky. The new space race is on: who can find the most serene and beautiful fishing spot in the galaxy?

The fishing trailer looks great, especially considering how much water in No Man's Sky was upgraded in July's Worlds update, and I can't wait to cast my line and see what I catch. There's not a lot of actual fish-catching shown: mostly some nibbles as the bobber, well, bobs, so it's hard to say if it's just a reflex game where you tap a button to make your catch, or if there's more to it.

The trailer shows more fishing-related features, like a deep-water jetpack, messages in bottles, fishing traps you can set and return to later, and new fishy cooking recipes. Maybe the coolest feature is the fishing skiff, a hovering platform you can use to chill out on over the waves while you cast your line. There's also a new multi-phase community fishing expedition with goals and rewards

You can also see a logbook that keeps track of your catches. The log is an 8x4 grid, and it looks like it contains 6 pages, which means there's (probably) about 192 fish to catch. The types of fish look pretty varied: jellyfish, sea snails, octopuses, starfish, turtles, sea cucumbers, and since you're fishing across countless alien worlds, there are plenty of weird ones, like the "Singing Sea Snail," the "Magma Shark," and most intriguingly, the "Hypnotic Octopus."

The No Man's Sky Aquarius update is out now. Save me a spot at the fishin' hole.

At this point, I think No Man's Sky might be the most developed non-MMO in history. Hello Games is hard at work on a whole new open world the size of the actual Earth, and yet, somehow, the siren song of the studio's initially disastrous (and subsequently more than redeemed) space sim keeps pulling it back for more updates.

The latest one? Worlds Part 1, or No Man's Sky 5.0. The patch notes have just gone live, and it's set to make the galaxy prettier than it's ever been before. Introducing "new technology, new flora, new fauna and new gameplay," Hello Games says it's installed a whole bunch of highfalutin new graphics tech to make the universe sizzle like never before. "I think we’re adding things the community has almost given up hope on ever happening," says Hello boss Sean Murray.

"New water technology can create waves, reflections," says the studio, meaning "ocean planets feel completely new." On top of that, planets now have simulated wind patterns, and the waves on those fancy-looking seas are now "dynamic and react to weather." There's also new "volumetrics and atmospherics" across the surfaces of planets, and "Rolling fog, rain, blizzards, lava sparks, combine with wind and clouds. It changes how planets feel to explore, [and] adds so much more life."

So, you know, a whole lot of stuff that makes planets totally pop off, but all of that comes with new gameplay stuff, too: Ships can land on water now, there's new flora and fauna, and Hello has put in a new, "very Starship Troopers-inspired" expedition for you to embark on. I'm pretty sure every game even tangentially associated with space has to stick in some Starship Troopers stuff in the wake of Helldivers-mania.

You can watch Murray go through all the changes in the No Man's Sky deep dive video (above) the studio helpfully assembled to show off all the new tech it's putting in. And don't worry, just in case you thought this one might finally sate the company's mad lust to keep developing this game (and hey, I'm not complaining), Murray notes that the update "is called Worlds Part 1, because I guess obviously… more will follow." 

Remember when Thanos snapped his fingers and killed half the life in the universe? Well, imagine he had Infinity Gauntlets on both hands, and maybe Infinity Booties on his feet, and he just kept snapping, tapping, scatting, and bebopping like crazy until all life in the universe was nothing but dust. Everything except you.

That's the tone in Adrift, a new Expedition for No Man's Sky, where you'll "explore an abandoned universe" all by yourself, with "no other lifeforms, no shops, no help." Those cute little aliens? Gone. Bustling space stations? More like busted. You're on your own, Traveler. Have a look at the unsettlingly lonesome trailer above.

It's worth pointing out that the "no lifeforms" claim isn't quite what the trailer makes it out to be. Immediately you can see several types of those weird wriggling tentacle monsters, a sandworm abruptly leaps through the air, and other winged creatures appear in the sky. So there are still critters to discover and catalogue, but there's no intelligent life out there: no NPCs, no traders, no friendly aliens or robots to chat with or buy ships from or stumble upon in a remote outpost. Any buildings you find will be rusted and abandoned, and space stations will be damaged and empty. 

But all hope isn't lost. You can get around the eerily abandoned universe in style with a customizable new kind of spacecraft called the Iron Vulture, which looks pretty sick in the trailer, especially with those the new propulsion types. There's also a "ghostly new frigate class" that looks like a heavily damaged starship you can add to your fleet, so that's at least a little company and the lonely void.

"Though everyone will awaken on the desolate, worm-infested planet Iapezuk, you will not be together in the usual sense," Hello Games tells us in a press release. "The boundaries between realities have thickened. Communication is consumed by static. Even the usually-bustling Space Anomaly is eerily silent.

"In this forsaken universe, deprived of support from merchants and traders, self-reliance is more critical than ever. Survive a spread of repair, exploration, and combat challenges—and meditate upon the darkness of deep space."

As a survival experience it sounds like an interesting and probably quite challenging way to play No Man's Sky. If there really are no shops, that means no galactic terminals, too. That's mostly what I use to buy and sell the stuff I need—If that's not part of Adrift, I can imagine it being pretty darn difficult to progress.

I do like the idea of being the only intelligent life in the universe, though. It was a little weird when No Man's Sky first launched that every planet you went to was dotted with structures and outposts and landing pads and other buildings. It really took away from the feeling of being an explorer when every time you landed on some bizarre, far-flung planet you'd immediately find an outpost with a Gek dude just chilling there. It made it feel less like an unknown frontier and more like a galactic parking lot.

Completing the Expedition will reward an exclusive set of collectibles—"the gnawing scuttler companion, a supply of starship stealth paint, a ghostly frigate, and the unique Iron Vulture starship". And as with other time-limited Expeditions, those rewards will become available in all your other saves from the Space Anomaly.

Adrift launches today, and will run for seven weeks.

As reported by GamesRadar, Hello Games head Sean Murray took to Twitter to celebrate No Man's Sky clawing another point in its "All Reviews" rating on Steam to 78% positive, noting that as time goes on and more reviews are added, each tick up is harder to earn.

"Guys we just ticked up to 78% positive in All Reviews," Murray wrote. "2021 we hit mostly positve (70%) which took five years. Mathematically each % point is much harder to gain than the last⁠—I never thought it possible, but guys we might hit 'Very Positive' (80%) one day."

That insight into the lifetime evolution of a game's Steam review score is fascinating to me⁠—right at a game's release it can be such a fluid thing, vacillating wildly in response to reviews, discourse, microtransaction controversies, made-up controversies, you name it. Eight years on and with nearly 224,000 reviews in the bank, the needle is just that difficult to move for Hello Games and No Man's Sky.

An 80% score would be a great symbolic win for the once-embattled space sim and its developer, but it's not nearly as existentially important for Hello Games as it might be for other devs on Steam. No Man's Sky and its redemption arc are a pretty known quantity for gamers at this point, and the game's already sold extremely well. For more obscure developers, positive reviews and wishlists are key metrics that translate directly into sales, with algorithmic discovery being necessary to cut through the cacophony of new releases on the platform.

Here's hoping that the studio's follow-up, Light No Fire, has a shorter path to acclaim⁠—maybe it'll just be good, no "redemption arc" necessary. Murray seems to be playing to his reputation for grandiose claims with the "Earth-sized" upcoming RPG, but as PCG executive editor Tyler Wilde has pointed out, did we really want or expect a sober, chastened Murray to come out and say "Hey guys, we're just making a normal one this time." 

No Man's Sky nearly burned up on its atmospheric entry back in 2016—it promised the universe, and only delivered a sort-of-okay space game. PC Gamer gave it a middling 64 at launch in our No Man's Sky review, with Christopher Livingston remarking: "I’ve touched an infinite universe and walked away with some nice vacation photos."

Despite that, developer Hello Games has done a bang-up job polishing it over the years, pouring gallons of elbow grease onto a game that would've otherwise faded into security via a whole heap of updates. Its overall Steam reviews are now "Mostly Positive" on Steam—an unthinkable reality eight years ago.

And now it's free—until February 19, that is. To celebrate the launch of its newest expedition update, Omega, Hello Games is allowing everyone to download the game and play it in a charitably long weekend.

The update has a freight load of new stuff to get your grubby little space mitts on: overhauls to expeditions and the Atlas Path (a central story mission), new items, decorations, procedurally-generated missions, pirates, and the titular Omega community expedition.

In case you have no idea what a community expedition is: it's a limited-time event that's akin to something like Diablo 4's seasons, encouraging players to start new save files and collaborate towards a shared goal—though you can start them using your existing save, now. Expeditions usually have specific rules or limitations relating to the objective—for Omega, the name of the game's exploration and jolly cooperation, with PvP decidedly turned off.

There's also been a whole host of quality-of-life improvements, including UI tweaks and bug fixes. Players will have two new ships to snag—the ground-skimming Starborn Runner and a hulking dreadnought, which you can pilfer after boarding a pirate ship and defeating its captain.

If you're like me and missed the initial No Man's Sky boat—now's a risk-free time to finally get on board. While I'd always heard great things, I've had plenty of games flooding my library in those interim years, with neither the loose change or the time to check out Hello Game's eventual labour of love. Time to see what all the well-deserved fuss is about.

Last month at The Game Awards we finally got our first look at Sean Murray's followup to No Man's Sky—and it's a huge one. In its next game, Light No Fire, Hello Games is trading infinite procedural planets for a single world, but that one open world is going to be the size of an actual planet.

That's a big promise, and there's plenty of healthy skepticism about Light No Fire. At the same time, there's lots of genuine excitement (it's already in the top 20 of Steam's most wishlisted games) and no small amount of speculation about how the Earth-sized survival adventure will work. Apart from that one trailer we still don't really know all that much about Light No Fire yet, except that it's fantasy themed rather than science fiction: players will fly around the open world with dragons instead of spaceships. 

In that information vacuum, and without a release date or even vague idea of when they'll be able to play it, fans have been keeping their eager hands busy by drawing their own version of Light No Fire's dragons. Lots of them.

In fact, there's currently an unofficial dragon drawing contest happening on the Light No Fire subreddit, though I don't think that's the real motivation. I think people are just excited for the game and looking for a way to express it. Here's a few dragon drawings that caught my eye:

This dragon art by Rigogen is so good it was shared by Hello Games on Instagram:

Light No Fire from r/NoMansSkyTheGame

The dragon created by The_Good_Guy_Two  could easily be a stained glass window in a church. A church devoted to worshipping dragons, that is:

Blazing blue - I hope you like him guys (hes very strong) from r/LightNoFireHelloGames

In Light No Fire players can be human, but they can also be bipedal rabbits or frogs. I think you can tell which one Hanrahubilarkie wants to be based on this art:

Hey guys! Watch this! from r/LightNoFireHelloGames

This one from tyrannosaur85 is great because not only does it have a dragon but it shows the planet-sized planet of Light No Fire behind it:

Char Lee just went fishing and is now going home to have a nap in his cave. from r/LightNoFireHelloGames

I like achievable art, so this one from bobdabioengineer is legit one of my favorites:

Giving that other guys masterpiece a run for its money from r/LightNoFireHelloGames

Similarly, FoxPeaTwo got to work on some notebook paper just like I used to do while zoning out in school:

I don’t want this masterpiece to dissuade anyone else from entering the contest. from r/LightNoFireHelloGames

TherealProp is working on a game about dragon riding, too, and shared some art for the occasion, which gives off some pleasing D&D manual cover art vibes:

Sorry if this uploaded twice. Here's one of my Yellow Dragon Riders with a ballista. from r/LightNoFireHelloGames

As much as I enjoy all the dragon drawings, I'm personally more interested in a different kind of mount. Dragons are a little, I dunno, standard when it comes to fantasy worlds. I'm after something different when it comes to a mount. What caught me eye in the trailer were a few glimpses of the giant birds we'll also be able to ride:

 So I'm happy to see someone else in the community appreciates them, too: 

Just a Birb (Last thing for a while) from r/LightNoFireHelloGames

If you skipped out on No Man's Sky this year then now's your chance to jump back in and see all the goodness they rolled out, as developers Hello Games are taking the holiday season to replay all the expedition events and offer up their rewards. There's even a return of a 2021 expedition, complete with limited-edition golden starship to claim.

December 8-15 will see the return of Utopia, where you can rebuild an abandoned colony for the mysterious utopia foundation. Dec 15-22 is Singularity, the precursor to the Echoes update, where you'll delve into a mystery that touches on the concept of artificial intelligence and the nature of living.

December 22-29th is the return of Cartographers, the "community favourite" update from 2021, that has you stranded on the planet Coul Major and trying to repair your starship. Finally, the Voyagers expedition will replay from Dec 29 to Jan 8, having you search out unique and remarkable places on a variety of worlds from their ocean beds to mountaintops, cataloguing your findings along the way.

No Man's Sky has had a pretty big year, down to adding a robotic species in its Echoes update. The Autophage, as they're known, are mysterious traveling robots that players can now get to know, learn crafts from, and eventually become.

In case you missed it, Hello Games also announced their next game: Light No Fire, a cooperative fantasy epic set in an open world that's the actual size of a real world. One very, very large procedurally generated open world for everyone to faff about and do open world stuff in. The announcement is, of course, not without characteristically absurd overstatements like "the first real open world." 

You can read more about Light No Fire's announcement here on PC Gamer.

(Nice spot by the way, Eurogamer.)

No Man's Sky has been spitting out cosmic adventures for seven years and, despite not meeting expectations at launch, has evolved into an incredibly varied sandbox thanks to Hello Games' fantastic post-launch support. With free, expansion-sized updates coming out every year, it keeps beckoning players back.

This month, according to Hello Games founder Sean Murray, is actually its "biggest" in the last few years, despite competition from the long-awaited Starfield, another sandbox that ticks a lot of the same boxes.

This is across all platforms, says Murray, but on Steam alone it's had its best month since September 2021, and one of its best months overall. It's quite the achievement for a game of this age. It's worth noting that its largest update of the year arrived in late August, followed by a new Expedition at the start of this month, so both of these things are major contributing factors. 

A narrative is already forming that this boost is due to disappointed Starfield players migrating over to No Man's Sky, but there isn't much to back that up aside from some anecdotal claims from Starfield's detractors. With a launch the scale of Starfield's, it's common for games with similar features to see a bump as they benefit from the increased visibility. A lot of comparisons have been made between the two, so it's only natural that lapsed players will jump back in, while new ones decide to see what all the fuss is about.

That said, there are undoubtedly some players who haven't gelled with Starfield who are now seeking their space kicks in No Man's Sky. I'm among them. While No Man's Sky doesn't have the type of hand-crafted RPG stories Starfield boasts, both games tout a multitude of worlds waiting to be explored, and when it comes to that aspect No Man's Sky is hands down the stronger game. 

It's also had the benefit of seven years of post-launch support, of course. So many of the things that I enjoy about No Man's Sky, from the flexible base building to the vehicles to the fleets did not exist at launch, and while the sandbox exploration of its galaxy has always been better than what Starfield offers, if we compare both games at launch, I've got to admit that Starfield is overall in a better position. 

What this really shows is that, reassuringly, space is big enough for more than one massive cosmic sandbox. Starfield might be the biggest launch of the year, a game that every site, including PCG, is covering extensively every day, but that doesn't mean there aren't interesting things happening in other games, or lots of players still enjoying them.

Two years before Starfield was announced, the sprawling sci-fi epic No Man's Sky launched to a decidedly mixed reaction: It really wasn't quite what was promised by the pre-release hype. Seven years later, Starfield is just a week away from release, and No Man's Sky has evolved into a genuine hit, and has now dropped yet another major update, Echoes, that adds an all-new race of robots to the game with "rich new story content" for players to explore.

The robotic Autophage are the first new race to be added to No Man's Sky since it launched in 2016, and developer Hello Games said it hopes they—and the rest of the Echoes update—will help "breathe new life into the universe." Players will be able to learn the language of the Autophage, explore their mysteries and perform their rituals, and collect mechanical parts that will ultimately enable them to create a unique ceremonial staff and even a full robotic avatar.

Combat in space also gets a major overhaul in this update, enabling battles between freighters for the first time. Naturally, pirates have freighters too, and you'll need to defend fleets from their predatory ways—in a single-seat fighter, of course: "Fly through enemy trenches to sabotage their shields, and destroy them!" Because that's just how things are done in space.

There are numerous smaller changes in the Echoes update—you can, for instance, search for, trade, and scrap weapons to become a "Multi-tool scrap merchant," if that's what you're into—but maybe the most impressive thing is the fact that this update exists at all. No Man's Sky seemed destined to be remembered mainly as a cautionary tale against hype when it first came out, but years of patches and updates have produced a genuinely remarkable turnaround.

A full breakdown of the No Man's Sky: Echoes update is posted at nomanssky.com. The patch notes are below.

THE AUTOPHAGE

• A mysterious new race of mechanical constructs, the Autophage, now await discovery at hidden sites all across the galaxy.
• Uncover their secrets during an expansive narrative-based mission that probes the Convergence, the Atlas, and the deep truths of the universe.
• Complete this mission to earn your own Voltaic Staff: a brand new Multi-Tool with its own unique animation set.
• The Autophage are tracked as their own faction within your Journey Milestones, with associated medals and missions.
• Autophage lurk at planetary sites on many worlds. Earn the appropriate technology and your scanner will reveal their hidden camps.
• The Autophage have their own unique language to learn, with hundreds of words to collect and catalogue.
• Improve your standing among these mechanical beings to earn exclusive new player titles.
• Travellers with good standing among the constructs may undertake a new series of procedurally generated missions for each individual Autophage, earning reputation, new words, unique rewards, and more.
• A vast new range of Autophage customisation options have been added. Earn Void Motes by assisting the Autophage, and use these to unlock these new customisation options at any construct camp.
• The Autophage offer access to new procedurally-generated Exosuit technologies.
• In addition to robotic parts, players can earn new cloth-based customisation options, including drapes, hoods, and face masks. Once earned, these can be mixed with any other customisation setup, allowing for a vast array of new looks.
• Once of sufficient standing, Travellers can earn and select from a huge array of parts and assemble their very own customised staff Multi-Tool.

MONOLITHS

• Players who have become acquainted with the Autophage can now discover secrets within Korvax monolith sites.
• Infusing these relics with Atlantideum allows access to new stories and lore, revealing the history of both the Korvax and the Constructs.
• In addition, a rare new class of Atlantid Multi-Tool can be found at these sites, assembled in exchange for nanites.
• As well as unique visuals and stats, these Multi-Tools come equipped with a Runic Lens, a fusion of mining beam and cloaking device.

WONDER PROJECTOR

• A new base part, the Wonder Projector, has been added. Research this part aboard the Space Anomaly.
• This holographic device can be used to decorate your base with 3D projections of your favourite discoveries.

CAPES

• Players on Nintendo Switch may now equip capes.
• Switch players who would have otherwise earned a cape from a previous Expedition have had their saves upgraded to reflect this, and have been credited with capes they could have redeemed.
• All players using a Vy’keen appearance may now equip capes.

MULTI-TOOL DECOMMISSIONING

• Visit the Space Anomaly to use the new Multi-Tool salvage station.
• Multi-Tools can now be broken down into valuable scrap, freeing up slots and earning upgrades and other resources.

QUALITY OF LIFE & UI

• An upgraded version of the Personal Refiner has been added, available to research aboard the Space Anomaly.
• This advanced refining unit allows players to combine multiple substances while on the move, unlocking mobile access to more sophisticated recipes.
• A number of new refining recipes have been added, including basalt and runaway mould.
• The flow for creating and assigning Custom Wonders has been refined for speed and clarity.
• Wonders relating to planets will now show the Portal glyphs among the planet details in the popup.
• The camera framing of interactions with Vy’keen NPCs has been improved.
• NPCs now exhibit a greater variation in bodyshape and height.
• The legibility of the Galaxy Map colourblind filters has been improved.
• When starships are stationary or moving backwards, readouts are now provided in distance-based units rather than time-based units.
• Pirates will no longer begin strafing runs upon the player’s position while the player is locked in an interaction.
• When missions suggest players use the galaxy map, they now use the galaxy map notification icon when the map is accessible.
• Fixed an issue that prevented adaptive trigger support from working when using a DualSense controller on PC.
• When joining another player with a brand new save, players now have the ability to fully customise their difficulty settings.
• Fixed an issue that made the Traveller grave interactions difficult to read when playing VR in high resolutions.
• Fixed an issue that caused the shop interface to appear in an awkward position when playing VR in high resolutions.
• Fixed an issue that caused the UI for interacting with various crates and containers to appear in an awkward position when playing VR in high resolutions.
• Fixed an issue that caused a number of options that do not apply to VR to appear in VR options menus.
• Fixed an issue that caused incorrect buttons to be suggested as the way to close some UI elements when using Move controllers.
• Fixed an issue that caused the “GENERAL” heading to appear in lowercase on the controls options page.
• Fixed an issue that caused frigate captains to speak to the player as if their frigate had already been recruited when they present their vessel for hire.
• Fixed an issue that caused some NPCs to be given the wrong title on a small number of UI screens.
• Fixed an issue that caused the “Target Locked” text on the starship targeting screen to become clipped on Nintendo Switch.
• Fixed an issue that caused a distorted icon to appear in some popups when playing in PSVR2.
• Fixed a number of miscellaneous text issues.

SPACE COMBAT

• Players can now balance power modes in their starship; switching between a balanced setup or prioritising weapons, shields, or engine systems.
• All capital ships now benefit from heavy-duty shielding systems, protecting them against would-be pirates.
• A bespoke UI has been added when engaging capital ships in battle, to better track their overall shield and hull integrity.
• All capital ships are now entirely destructible, offering additional rewards beyond simply eliminating their cargo pods.
• Destroying cargo pods will apply a certain amount of damage to the freighter’s main hull.
• Fixed an issue that could allow players to destroy small freighters without alerting the rest of the civilian fleet.
• Fixed an issue that allowed recruitable frigates to contact the player at inappropriate times, such as while landing or during space combat.
• Fixed an issue that caused the starship to apply brakes while flying close to a freighter during space combat.
• Fixed an issue that could prevent landing during space combat for players who use the Auto-Follow space combat setting.
• Fixed an issue that could cause players to lose standing if an AI pirate destroyed a civilian ship while they were present.
• During space combat, your final weapon will never be damaged by incoming fire. In addition, combat-based technology damage will never leave the starship with rockets as their only functioning weapon.

OUTLAW FACTION

• Outlaws are now listed as a faction alongside the various guilds, as part of the Journey and Catalogue pages.
• A range of earnable medals have been added for the Outlaw faction.
• Outlaw medals and standing will now earn a range of exclusive player titles.
• Missions have been added to provide guidance for players wishing to improve their standing with these pirates.
• Raiding civilian fleets will now improve your standing among the Outlaws.

RENDERING & PERFORMANCE

• Nintendo Switch now supports a bespoke implementation of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 technology, providing high image quality and improved framerates.
• Dynamic Resolution Scaling has been added for Nintendo Switch. This technology allows the game to maintain a consistent framerate across all scenarios.
• Support has been added for foveated rendering when using PSVR2.
• Utilising eye-tracking technology, foveated rendering concentrates rendering resources at the centre of your vision, sharpening and beautifying the details you focus on.
• A number of significant rendering optimisations have been introduced for VR on all platforms.
• Creature navigation has been optimised on all platforms.
• A number of significant systemic optimisations have been introduced for all platforms.
• Introduced a number of memory-usage optimisations for PS4.
• Introduced a significant number of memory-usage optimisations for Nintendo Switch.
• Introduced a number of systemic memory-usage optimisations for all platforms.
• Introduced a significant optimisation for sky rendering on Nintendo Switch.
• Improved the quality of sky rendering on Nintendo Switch while moving relative to the sky.
• Optimised a specific asset in use on some barren planets.
• Introduced a specific optimisation related to AI starships.
• Introduced a specific optimisation for freighter hangers.
• Introduced a specific optimisation for turret targeting systems.
• Fixed a number of visual issues with fog and atmospheric rendering, particularly when in space or low-planet orbit.
• Fixed a number of visual issues with the way depth of field effects interact with the sky.

PIRATE CAPITAL SHIPS

• Pirate Dreadnought capital ships can now be encountered while exploring the galaxy, particularly within outlaw and high-conflict systems.
• These huge vessels prey upon civilian fleets with a range of unique technology. Defeat them to earn significant bounty payments and large standing gains with the local lifeforms.
• Dreadnoughts lay siege to civilian freighters with colossal heat cannons, blasting high-powered lasers over long distances. Destroying these cannons offers a way to protect the vulnerable merchants.
• Bounty payments are significantly reduced in the event of the destruction of the civilian fleet.
• Dreadnoughts come equipped with power deflector shields, preventing hull damage from conventional starship weapons.
• Fly beneath Dreadnought shields and into their superstructure to target their shield generators, exposing both their hull and the delicate exposed fuel systems beneath.
• Unique frigates form a supporting pirate battle group. These powerful ships deploy torpedoes that have the potential to wreak havoc upon the civilian fleet, and must be intercepted as a matter of priority.
• Dealing enough damage to the Dreadnought will force it to flee. Disabling its power warp engines will prevent escape and allow you to land the killing blow.

VOYAGERS EXPEDITION

• A brand new expedition, “Voyagers” will begin shortly after the release of the Echoes update.
• The Voyagers expedition will see players seeking the deepest oceans, tallest mountains, most idyllic planets and strangest alien creatures, and much more besides.
• Rewards for this voyage of discovery include a set of unique posters; an exclusive electric jetpack trail; a salvaged accessory for your creature companions; a set of new Autophage-related base parts; and brand-new mechanical companion.

OUTLAW FRIGATES

• A new class of outlaw frigate now accompanies pirate capital ships into battle.
• Destroying these vessels will significantly reduce the damage output of the outlaw fleet, as they are responsible for launching devastating torpedoes at opposing capital ships.
• Once their commanding vessel has been destroyed, many frigates will surrender and offer to join your own fleet.
• Recruit these survivors as a powerful new class of combat frigate, ready to undertake missions from your own freighter.

TWITCH DROPS

• A new package of Twitch drops will begin shortly. Sign up and link your platform accounts on the Twitch Drops page, then tune in to Twitch to earn exotic base parts, high-tech starships, companion accessories, appearance modifications, and more.

MAC IMPROVEMENTS

• The range of game controllers supported by No Man’s Sky on Mac has been improved.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a shimmering outline when viewing objects against the sky on Mac.
• Fixed an issue affecting controller rumble on Mac.
• Fixed an issue that could prevent some keys from being rebound on Mac.
• Fixed an issue that could cause shadows to flicker on Mac.
• Fixed a crash related to anti-aliasing on Mac.
• Fixed an issue that could cause the screen to go black when warping on Mac.
• Fixed a number of visual issues with the skybox on Mac.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a significant number of crashes related to memory management.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when leaving a planet’s surface and accessing the Galaxy Map.
• Fixed a crash related to wind.
• Fixed a rare interaction softlock.
• Fixed an issue that could cause large sections of freighter meshes to be removed during combat.
• Fixed an issue that prevented derelict freighter turrets from targeting players currently using a cloaking device.
• Fixed an issue that caused other players’ weapon audio to play far too loudly in multiplayer.
• Fixed an issue that could prevent group member’s freighters from being loaded correctly in multiplayer when first joining a session.
• Fixed an issue that could leave players unable to take off from their freighter or the space station if their ship was damaged and using unconventional technologies, such as the living ship or sentinel interceptor.
• Fixed an issue that caused some specific particle effects to be missing when loading a save aboard the Space Anomaly.
• Fixed an issue that caused some dropship cockpit exit animations to play at the wrong speed.
• Fixed an issue that could cause portals to appear active when they were not, if they had been previously activated.
• Fixed an issue that caused terrain deposit icons to fail to highlight correctly when tagged as the primary marker in the Analysis Visor.
• Fixed a number of rare mission issues that could occur when target NPCs or buildings were in distant systems.
• Fixed a number of base NPC mission issues that could occur when joining multiplayer games.
• Fixed a rare mission blocker that could occur in the Living Ship missions after participating in a multiplayer session.
• Fixed a rare issue that could cause the mission or Atlas paths to go missing on the Galaxy Map.
• Fixed a rare blocker for the Trace of Metal and/or Artemis missions if both missions required speaking to Nada or Polo at the same time.
• Fixed a number of issues that prevented buildings from being correctly marked as visited, allowing later missions or charts to direct players to sites they had already explored.
• Fixed an issue that prevented crashed ship sites from being flagged as visited, causing players to occasionally be directed to crash sites without ships.
• Fixed an issue that caused two instances of the crashed freighter salvage mission to be started when visiting a crashed freighter.
• Fixed an issue that could cause the crashed freighter salvage mission to shut down early.
• Fixed an issue that caused Cadium to refine to Chromatic Metal in the wrong ratio.
• Fixed an issue that prevented supercharged inventory slots from being correctly displayed in a newly purchased freighter’s inventory until the game was reloaded.
• Fixed an issue that could cause frigates to fully repair themselves when teleporting aboard.
• Fixed a number of text issues with missions that required use of a refiner.
• Fixed an issue that caused text clipping on the refiner page in some resolutions.
• Fixed an issue that could cause the catalogue mission that guides players towards basalt to pick a planet without any basalt.
• Fixed an issue with various catalogue and journey guidance missions that caused them to display an Objective Complete notification as soon as they started.
• Fixed a rare issue with some pinning missions that caused the current amount / required amount numbers to be displayed the wrong way around.
• Fixed an issue where the wrong item amount could be suggested in the description text in tech installation popups.
• Fixed an issue that could cause Sentinel Interceptors to fail to display their full serial number as part of their name.
• Fixed an issue that caused untranslated text to appear when attempting to switch ships while aboard another player’s freighter.
• Fixed an issue that caused the number of pages/dots to be calculated incorrectly when looking at crafting lists or inventory transfer popups.
• Fixed an issue that caused the dots to overflow when looking at shops with extremely large arrays of items, such as the Twitch or Expedition Rewards sections at the Quicksilver Synthesis Companion.
• Fixed an issue that could allow text to overflow rather than scroll in some Expedition Milestone popups.
• Fixed an issue that incorrectly suggested players could craft more than one item at a time when viewing crafting steps in the tree format.
• Fixed an issue that caused the camera to still automatically adjust to slopes when the Camera Movement option was set to manual.
• Fixed an issue that allowed the Multi-Tool to overheat too early while the mining bonus from extreme cold storms was applied.
• The large artefact crates found at buried ruins no longer report themselves as damaged technology in need for repair, and instead suggest that they be unlocked with a key.

For the many flaws No Man's Sky had at launch, I really liked the way it zeroed-in on the feeling of discovery. 

My first dozen hours of naming planets, scanning weird tentacle horses, and cataloging unremarkable rocks was a real delight, so it's no surprise that Bethesda has something similar in the works with its epic space RPG, Starfield. We have, after all, been doing this sort of thing for a very long time, snapping Dewgong in Pokémon Snap or scanning Shadow Moses as Solid Snake. 

I am, however, a little surprised that Starfield's version of scanning creatures doesn’t just remind me of seven-year-old No Man’s Sky, it looks almost exactly like it.

We saw a bit of Starfield’s scanning in action during last month’s Starfield Direct, but the familiarities didn't register with me until Bethesda tweeted this short clip of planet scanning yesterday. Everything about how the binocular interface looks, the way objects glow as you scan them, the mostly-useless-but-fun peripheral trivia you learn about things by scanning, and the small bits of XP you get for cataloguing perfectly mimic the experience of data gathering in No Man’s Sky. In Starfield, it looks like you can judge a creature's likelihood to attack you by its listed "temperament." In No Man’s Sky, this same information is labeled"Behaviour."

Surveying isn't the most exciting way to spend your days in Starfield, but it sounds like a lucrative one. As the tweet points out, completing a planetary survey in Starfield allows you to sell that info for credits, like in No Man's Sky.

I can't tell if I’m more happy or annoyed about this. I like scanning things in No Man’s Sky and will probably enjoy it just as much in Starfield, if not more because between all those procedurally-generated flora and fauna are hand-authored RPG cities and fully-voiced characters. Scanning adds a lot to the fantasy of a space frontier, especially for those who’d rather be lauded for their exploration prowess than their deadliness. At the same time, it’s a little disappointing that Bethesda’s vision of gamified discovery is basically "just do what Hello Games did and don’t mention it."

Games steal smart ideas from each other all the time, but I think what bothers me is how devs (especially on big-budget games) often neglect, or resist acknowledging it. Bethesda is no different than any other big studio for doing this, but the higher profile the game doing the borrowing, the more awkward it looks. That mining laser from last year's gameplay showcase sure does look like No Man’s Sky’s multi-tool. 

Part of it is practical—developers speak generally when promoting their games because saying explicitly "this bit works exactly like it did in No Man's Sky" isn't helpful to those who haven't played it, nevermind awkward for an Xbox-owned studio (No Man's Sky came to Xbox about two years after it released on PC and PlayStation 4). The more likely reason for a dev to politely not acknowledge a copied idea is that it can be seen as unflattering to the game.

Maybe that’s true according to a well-researched marketing deck, but being upfront about an obvious imitation would score some serious points with me. 

No Man's Sky is getting a new update, a mere month and a bit after it got its last one. The 4.2 Interceptor patch, which releases today, brings new enemies, new resources, and a new starship class, which Hello Games says is No Man's Sky's "most varied starship to date". It also makes a few performance and visual tweaks, especially for users in VR.

The update introduces new "corrupted planets," which have fallen prey to "a darkness" that is spreading through the Sentinel horde. "Many fortified worlds have succumbed to corruption, with strange crystals sprouting from the earth and their robot guardians twisted into bizarre new forms," reads the Interceptor update's announcement, inviting you to "explore these purple-hazed worlds to find new buildings, crashed interceptors, secret equipment and more".

Those planets are home to some of the new "huge spider-like enemies" or—and this is not a phrase I was thrilled to read—"their small crab-like children". The patch also introduces plain old corrupted drones, too, who are neither spider- nor crab-like, but are armed with "stealth tech, flamethrower and explosive weaponry".

You'll need to harvest the shards that grow on corrupted planets to fuel your salvaged Sentinel tech. That includes that new starship class—a range of Sentinel Interceptors you'll be able to salvage for your own use—which you pilot from the security of its "unusual vestigial cockpit," another combo of words that makes me slightly uncomfortable.

If you're feeling particularly foolhardy, you could try using one to take on a Sentinel capital ship, which can now be damaged and destroyed. If you manage to pull it off, you'll clear your wanted status and net yourself some high-value rewards. If you don't, you'll be dead and it won't really matter that you didn't get a reward, so it's a win either way.

There are plenty of other little additions, which you read about over at the official page for the No Man's Sky Interceptor update, plus a whole bunch of tweaks and bugfixes. The update goes live today, free on whatever storefront or platform you happen to have No Man's Sky on.

I'm beginning to worry that Hello Games can't stop working on No Man's Sky at this point. It just put out No Man's Sky's 163rd update—which it's calling Fractal—bringing a new starship, a new expedition, a robotic companion, and other bits and bobs to its space-based exploration and survival game.

The update has been timed to coincide with the release of Sony's PS VR2, so the game is getting a "virtual reality overhaul" on all platforms. That means the UI has "been completely remade for virtual reality," and a bunch of in-game interactions have gotten "special VR-only options" like lifting up your cockpit by hand, grabbing objects in the world, or straight-up punching aliens you come across.

The new ship is the Utopia Speeder, a blocky, X-Wing-looking thing that will let players "skim across planet surfaces at high velocity," which I thought sounded pretty dangerous until I realised it's actually just describing a plane. It presumably has something to do with No Man's Sky's new expedition, named Utopia, that will "[challenge] players to work together and rebuild an abandoned solar system for the mysterious Utopia Foundation". If there's one thing I've learned from fiction, it's that institutions promising utopias are inherently very trustworthy, so that's doubtless all above-board.

A grip of rewards awaits you at the end of that expedition. Stuff like a new helmet, a drone companion, and other goodies can be unlocked by following the new questline through to its conclusion. You can also document the things you see along the way in the game's new Wonders Catalogue, that will let you keep a book of the coolest stuff you've seen on your adventures, "from tallest mountain to strangest creature," and allow you to compare notes with other players.

Aside from all that, Hello has implemented a suite of accessibility changes, like "a range of tools to adjust visual effects, cameras, and controls," and options for bigger, more readable text. We've also got support for gyroscopic controls on Steam Deck, too, if you're tired of that right analogue stick. Now, please, someone let this studio get some sleep.

Hello Games is now known for its epic development journey with No Man's Sky, but the studio's starting point was a stuntman. Joe Danger was a simple, fun, and polished indie game that was initially sold on PC and consoles before finding its way to mobile, and its success saw multiple sequels before Hello's gaze became fixed firmly on the stars.

Until recently, at least. Around this time last year the studio returned to Joe Danger for a true gaming feelgood moment, updating and revamping the old Joe Danger games on iOS after the dad of one of its biggest fans got in touch. Hello Games had somewhat understandably been focused on building out the universe of No Man's Sky and the Joe Danger games had been left to languish. But the reminder that people still cared has clearly had an impact.

Hello Games has now relaunched Joe Danger Touch and the sequel Infinity as free browser games, basically preserving the best of the title that launched the studio in perpetuity.

"It's sad that many games slowly die," said Sean Murray, both Hello Games' founder and Joe Danger's creator. "And we've been trying to think of a way to let Joe live on forever, and reach the most people possible. This is hopefully one way of doing that. We owe this and more to him."

If you haven't played Joe Danger, imagine an autorunner (auto-motorbiker?) starring an action figure of Evil Knievel. The games are unabashed sunny good times, and diverting enough even now that I've just spent half an hour testing that the browser versions work properly. I'm relieved to say that they do.

It's another feelgood moment from a studio that, after the low of No Man's Sky at launch, has motored forward and proven time and again how committed it is to its titles. The only slightly melancholy element is nothing to do with Hello, but thinking about how many other games have recently been lost in practical terms to things like iOS updates: few of which will receive the love that Joe Danger has.

As well as looking back, of course, Hello is looking forward to the future. The studio's next game will not be a No Man's Sky sequel, but every bit as ambitious. This time, however, Hello will probably be doing everything it can to dampen the pre-release hype.

Here's modding magic for you: A standalone app that allows No Man's Sky players to design large bases, then use a save editor to put them in the game. Dedicated base-builders will find it not just a simpler, but faster, way to make impressive constructions than using the array of tricks and exploits that players use in-game to easily make big stuff.

Modder Charlie Banks, aka DjMonkeyUK, posted the mod to Twitter and Nexus Mods , noting that the tool is very much a work in progress. "There are some missing things compared to the Blender add-on. So bear with any potential bugs and missing things compared to Blender," he said. Nonetheless, playing around with the app is surprisingly simple, even for me—an pretty inexperienced 3D modeler.

The magic here is that it lets you use simple proxy parts in a basic sandbox. You don't have to learn to 3D model, you don't have to learn Blender: You just make it. Banks describes it as a Townscaper-esque, and that's pretty spot on. 

The tool enables you to rotate, angle, and position parts just as you can in-game. The trick is that it also goes further, letting you do builds you'd never get away with because of their size and scope—there's just no real way to make a model of the Iron Giant without spending a ton of extra time fiddling around with getting yourself in the right positions.

The broader No Man's Sky community is very impressed with the mod, and social media reactions are overwhelmingly positive. It's an impressive enough creation that No Man's Sky creator Sean Murray tweeted about it in a simple phrase: "holy moly." Banks said he was "humbled" by the response from the community overall.

The creator of this little No Man's Sky hack is also an indie developer, currently working on his own game: Tales from the Dancing Moon is a "casual story-driven RPG that has elements of life-simulation, crafting, building and survival."

Anyway this is my nomination for this year's Nobel Prize in mod development.

What do you mean there's not a Nobel prize for mod development?

No Man's Sky hits its next big "point zero" update today, this time in the form of No Man's Sky 4.0: Waypoint. Hello Games is promising "an overhaul of design and balance" in this patch, which introduces a new 'relaxed mode', sweeping inventory changes, and various tweaks to help people who have been away from the game ease back in. Oh, and the game's getting a Switch release too, if you're into that.

The new relaxed mode promises to let players meander through the No Man's Sky universe at a, well, relaxed pace. It tones down the game's survival elements for players who "just want to chill out". It's basically a stop-gap between the game's normal and creative modes: letting players kick back for a bit but without unlocking everything and eliminating challenge almost entirely. As if to compensate, survival mode has gotten a few tweaks to make it a bit more challenging.

Most interesting for me—someone who last played No Man's Sky some time in the Mesolithic Period—is the emphasis that Waypoint is putting on welcoming back returning players who might be baffled by the myriad updates the game has received over the years. Players coming back to the game will find a log that summarises No Man's Sky's story thus far, as well as a "new milestone system, new collectibles and improved mission content" to ease re-entry into the game.

There's a spate of other updates too: inventories have been expanded and streamlined, and ships, players, and weapons have received increased level caps. Plus, players can now fine-tune various difficulty settings themselves: you can now toggle discrete settings like permadeath even within modes that don't usually have it.

The Waypoint update was described as a bit of a house-cleaning for No Man's Sky when Hello Games' Sean Murray chatted to PCG recently, and it's certainly true that 'inventory changes and a new mode' doesn't have quite the same flagship feature pizzazz as 'ridable sandworms'. But the little things add up, and it sounds like the game's 21st major update will have serious impact on a game that was once in a pretty dishevelled state all those years ago. You can check out the full patch notes here.

Six years after its launch, No Man's Sky has nearly reached another milestone, version 4.0. This comes as Hello Games' galactic sandbox prepares to expand onto yet another platform, Nintendo Switch, on October 7. 

A Switch debut may not feel planet-shaking to longtime players on PC, but the 4.0 update will bring a number of changes to No Man's Sky no matter what platform you play on. And while this update might not look as dramatic as the addition of living ships or ridable sandworms or cosmic whales, there's still a lot to it.

"People are arriving, new players, and we sort of want to tidy up our house," Sean Murray said when we chatted over Zoom about the 4.0 update last week. One of the concerns for Hello Games was not just how the game will appear to new players on Switch but to returning players on PC who may have been away for a while, potentially even years.

"Something I see online occasionally, people will say, 'I like the game, but it feels overwhelming to come back,'" said Murray. "And I want [both new and returning players] to say 'This makes sense. This feels cohesive, and it doesn't feel like a bunch of disparate updates.'

"And so we dug into that a lot. If you come back to the game [in 4.0] there's actually a log where you have a summary of the story so far," Murray said. "We have an info portal that will collect together everything that you've done so far, everything you've unlocked, all of that, and give you more info on it, so that you can dig into it."

Longtime players who may feel like they've accomplished everything will find a new source of motivation in update 4.0. While No Man's Sky doesn't have level caps, it does have features like journey milestones that track everything from alien encounters to combat stats to time spent on planets with extreme weather. These milestones have been expanded in 4.0, giving players new goals to aim for. Inventory has been "streamlined" to make it easier for new players, but Murray said it's "also massively increased," so players who have unlocked the maximum amount of storage slots will be able to acquire even more.

And there's a new game mode in 4.0, called "relaxed" mode, which will give players the sandbox experience of No Man's Sky but with less of a focus on survival. Murray thinks it will be a good mode for new players to start with but he also hopes it appeals to longtime players who have played in normal or survival extensively but "just want to chill out" while continuing to progress forward. Relaxed mode won't have the challenge of normal or survival mode, but it won't unlock everything the way creative mode does.

"I don't want to oversell it and say it's a reimagining of the game or anything like that. But it is a different balance of survival sandbox," Murray said. Players will be able to swap existing saves into the new mode, and swap back if they decide they don't like it.

Survival mode itself, meanwhile, has been revisited to provide a greater challenge. "Over time, as you got better at the game and leveled up, it stopped being as difficult, so we've also revisited that and actually crank the survival element way higher."

Maybe most importantly, No Man's Sky 4.0 will give players control over the balance of the game themselves. "If you want to dial [the challenge] slightly differently, if you want to have permadeath in relaxed game mode, or whatever it is, you can do those things," Murray said. "You can change a ton of things to do with controls, a ton of things to do with difficulty, survival, crafting, you know, you can balance those your own way."

No Man's Sky update 4.0 will coincide with the game's launch on Nintendo Switch, which is happening later this week on October 7.

A new No Man's Sky update called Endurance has now gone live, bringing more of a Star Trek vibe to tootling around the stars. As with every other expansion for the game since its launch six (!) years ago, Endurance is free. It's a name that Hello itself acknowledges is "fitting" for the journey the developer and players have been on since launch.

This one leans into the true Trekkie fantasy (or mine anyway) of being your own captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise. The Foundation update previously introduced the ability to captain your own freighter, but the Endurance update takes another pass and overhauls the whole experience of being in charge of a capital ship.

The update introduces NPC specialist crewmembers to your ship (yes!), a new bridge on the command deck with instant access to warping and teleportation (yes!!), external windows to watch the stars float by (yes!!!) and then exterior space walkways so you can walk around the outside of your giganto-ship and admire the view (yes yes yes!!!). I mean, as spaceship fantasies go, this is a good one.

In terms of the NPC crew: "Freighters now bustle with specialist crew members walking around your base. Engineers, biologists and technicians display their thoughts as they patrol the base, and your hired frigate captains and squadron pilots visit your capital ship between their deep-space excursions."

You can also now do much more with the interior of the ship itself, with new themed areas for growing food and manufacturing, as well as new technology that will let you scan and analyse planets from space without having to set foot on them.

The update also makes changes to what Hello calls the "space atmospherics", which is to say that asteroids are now more varied and numerous than ever before, and now thousands can appear on-screen at once. As well as this there are "Interstellar-style black holes, nebulae" and more to admire from your new fancy windows.

There's a new expedition, which focuses on a capital ship voyage, and some new combat focused Nexus missions to boot.

"Endurance coincides with No Man's Sky's 6 year anniversary and it remains amazing to us to see players still clocking up a bewildering number of hours in the game all these years later," writes Hello Games co-founder and CEO Sean Murray. "We are eternally grateful for the support."

The full patch notes are as follows:

Capital Ships

• Capital ship hangars have been visually updated, with additional details, features, NPCs and VFX.
• The freighter bridge has been visually refreshed with new lighting, VFX and detailing.
• A teleporter has been added for instant access between the freighter hangar and the bridge.
• The mandatory corridor in freighter bases has been removed, allowing players to fully customise their freighter base layout.
• Freighter exteriors have been updated with enhanced textures and detailing.
• Your freighter is now displayed within the warp tunnel when making a jump between systems.
• Lighting and shadow quality throughout freighter bases has been significantly improved.
• Players may now warp directly from their fleet management terminal to any individual frigate. New terminals have been added to frigates to allow quick return to the freighter bridge.
• Markers are now placed on Fleet Command Terminals in need of debriefing.
• Players may now teleport to their freighter base from any other base or space station teleport terminus.
• Capital ship engines can now be customised from the existing freighter recolouring UI, accessed on the bridge.
• Capital ships can be now reset to their default colours.
• The customisation camera for freighters has been improved with better lighting and a wider viewing angle for large ships.
• Player-constructed freighter bases are now populated dynamically by specialised crew members, as well as hired squadron pilots and frigate captains.
• Freighter crew can now move around the base.
• Freighter crew periodically display thoughts related to their current task.
• Non-player freighters now come with a variety of pre-existing bases.
• Freighters now have a Cargo Hold inventory, allowing the storage of even more items.
• A new technology, the Singularity Engine, has been added for freighters. This powerful warp augmentation is activated by speaking to the freighter’s captain, and will slingshot the freighter through a wormhole.
• The visual quality of salvaged freighter technology icons has been significantly improved.
• Players may now summon their freighter while the Pulse Engine is active.
• Freighter landing and takeoff trajectories have been improved to prevent accidental docking.
• Players are no longer blocked from summoning their freighter if another player has their freighter active.
• Players can now dismiss their own freighter in order to visit the freighter base of another group member.
  

Freighter Base Components

• Freighter base building has been totally overhauled. Players now have access to a variety of pre-built room modules (which they can further customise).
• Rooms come in a variety of pre-decorated themes, allowing players to quickly assemble a visually varied and distinctive base.
• Empty room variants are available for players who wish to more manually customise their freighter base.
• Existing freighter bases have been preserved, and legacy freighter parts are fully compatible with the new pieces.
• New freighter rooms include:
• The Scanner Room, which pings all nearby planets and automatically discovers them.
• Single and Double Cultivation Chambers, which allow players to plant directly into the room itself. Cultivation Chambers come with the ability to mass-harvest nearby plants.
• A Nutrition Room, allowing players access to cooking facilities while on board.
• The Stellar Extractor, a specialist manufacturing unit that extracts a variety of resources from the interstellar medium.
• Additional rooms have been added to replicate existing base functionality, but in room-sized modules:
• A dedicated Galactic Trade Terminal room, allowing quick access to trade facilities.
• A Teleport Room, allowing players to teleport from their freighter, as well as return via any other teleportation terminus.
• The Appearance Modifier Room, for player customisation.
• The Fleet Command Room, for managing frigate fleet expeditions.
• All the terminals for Base Specialists, such as the Overseer.
• The Orbital Exocraft Materialiser, which allows players to summon any of their Exocraft while their freighter is in the system.
• A specialist large industrial refiner room.
• Storage Rooms, with access to stowed materials.
• Players can now place exterior windows in their freighter bases, allowing a view through into the stars.
• Players can place internal windowed walls to divide up their base into aesthetically pleasing sections.
• Players can now place doors in their freighter bases, both between rooms and out to the exterior of their freighter.
• A variety of catwalks and exterior viewing platforms are now available to build within and around the freighter base.
• Freighter corridors now come in both plain and glass versions.
• Freighter corridors now come as one dedicated part that will automatically bend or add additional doors in order to connect to nearby rooms.
  

Organic ships and frigates

• Players with a frigate fleet may now receive plans for a Dream Aerial from a successful fleet expedition.
• Constructing the Dream Aerial will grant players access to a new mission to unite with an organic frigate. This living vessel will be customised according to the player’s choices while on this mission.
• Players can continue to discover additional organic frigates to fill out their fleet.
• Organic frigates come in a variety of procedurally generated colours and tentacle configurations.
• Players can feed their organic frigates various cooked foodstuffs. Feeding the frigate will adjust its mood and may cause it to generate new abilities or traits.
• Sending a living frigate on a fleet expedition has a chance of generating a special anomalous event result.
• Anomalous fleet expedition results result in various organic implants for living starships.
• Living ship upgrades have been adjusted. Procedurally generated weapon modules now do more damage, and the Grafted Eyes can now leech energy from enemy starships.
• Living ships can now evolve Neural Shielding, granting them the ability to resist hostile cargo probes.
• Living ships can now evolve a Chloroplast Membrane, which will automatically recharge its Neural Assembly using sunlight.
• Living ships can now evolve a Wormhole Brain, which allows them sight into the economy and conflict levels of unvisited systems on the Galaxy Map.
• Players may now acquire and use a Spawning Sac to add additional inventory slots to their living ships.
• Fixed an issue that could cause living ship upgrades to choose a lower quality band than intended.
• Fixed an issue that prevented procedurally generated living ship upgrades from automatically selecting the starship inventory page when deployed.

Base building

• Base parts which automatically switch between hidden variants (such as visually distinct parts for the top/middle/bottom of walls, or the freighter corridor that automatically bends and adds doorways to form connections) can now be placed manually. Relevant parts are marked within the base building menu and can be expanded to view all variants.
• While in editing mode, pre-existing parts can be now swapped out for any other part that matches its placement conditions, allowing bases to be quickly altered without having to delete and replace parts.
• Players may now quickly toggle between placement and selection mode even when no part was previously selected from the list of parts.
• Quick cycling parts within placement mode now displays the name of the newly selected part.
• A number of base building error messages have been edited for clarity.
• Many decorative parts that were not previously available to build on a freighter are now accessible in the build menu.
• ByteBeat modules can now be built on board freighters.
• Short-Range Teleporters can now be built within a freighter base.
• Lights now automatically receive power on board freighters.
• Freighter base part deletion now more strictly checks player navigation, fixing a number of cases where players could find themselves accidentally falling into space when deleting parts.
• The freighter base now has a walkable bottom level, allowing players who intentionally jetpack out of their base an opportunity to recover to safety.
• Players may now toggle snapping and collision checks when placing decoration on their freighter base, allowing more freedom and flexibility in construction.
• While on a freighter, the preview hologram is now visible behind other objects, allowing players to more easily preview the location of new rooms and corridors.
• Fixed a number of visual glitches with the preview hologram.
• Fixed a number of visual issues and glitches with wiring.
• Objects that are moved or deleted now clean up their attached wires.
• Storage Containers now display their custom name (if applicable) in the Build Menu.
• Biofuel Generators now provide power for a significantly longer amount of time.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the Ceiling Light part from being powered correctly.
• The Archaic Habitation Heater now actually provides protection against extreme cold.

Visual improvements and space atmospherics

• The planetary decoration system has been significantly optimised and improved, allowing props, plantlife, rocks and other objects to be drawn at both far greater distances and at a higher quality.
• Planetary objects such as trees and rocks are now visible from low orbit.
• Players may now encounter storms and other space atmospherics while in asteroids fields, in open space, or when encountering derelict freighters in deep space.
• Players may now encounter brightly coloured nebulae while exploring deep space.
• Black hole visuals have been overhauled and significantly improved.
• Derelict freighters VFXs have been significantly improved. Existing environmental and combat effects have been enhanced, and additional atmospheric details have been added.
• Atmospheric effects have been added and enhanced within the space station.
• Starship landing and takeoff effects have been improved.

Asteroids

• Asteroid draw distance has been significantly increased.
• Asteroid field density has been significantly increased.
• Individual asteroid visual detail and variety has been greatly increased.
• Asteroid destruction effects have been improved.
• Players may now encounter systems with a large number of rare crystalline asteroids.
• Players may now occasionally disturb the nest of strange space creatures when destroying asteroids.
• Passing starships may now enter asteroids fields alongside players and begin mining nearby asteroids.
• Asteroid density patterns have been adjusted so that there are larger areas of space with few to no asteroids.
• Players can now use the starship’s scanner to locate nearby fuel-rich asteroids, in the event of an adverse fuel situation when outside of an asteroid field.
• Fixed a number of issues that could cause asteroids to intersect with other objects, such as freighters.
• The rewards for destroying rare asteroids have been improved.

Missions

• A new class of mission is available at the Nexus. Work together to raid a Sentinel Pillar and defend a planet from the constant threat of the Sentinels.
• Players can now take on a new combat mission from the Nexus to visit an infested planet and purge it of its infection.
• Players visiting infested planets may now occasionally stumble upon the hungering tentacles of the many-mouthed vessel…
• Infested planets now have an increased chance of titan worm activity.

Quality of life

• Players can now reposition items within storage container inventories.
• Fixed a number of issues that prevented full access to certain inventories when using UI popups.
• Players may now deploy upgrades to their fleet expedition from any inventory.
• The freighter inventory screen has been adjusted to better fit the model of the player’s freighter.
• A new starship technology, the Flight Assist Override, is now available from Iteration Hyperion aboard the Space Anomaly. This module reduces the effect of automatic trajectory correction while flying in space.
• Procedurally generated upgrades for the Analysis Visor may now generate bonuses for mineral discovery rewards, matching the existing upgrades for flora and fauna.
• Increased the number of stat bonuses available to illegal-grade procedural technology upgrades.
• Reduced the spread between maximum and minimum stat values for Positron Ejector procedural upgrades.
• Players can now adjust the sensitivity of cursor controls as well as look and flight sensitivities.
• The “Combat” section of the guide has new, more in-style icons.
• Combat frigates deployed from the fleet to assist the player in space combat now launch specialised ships with their own visual flair to help distinguish them while in flight.
• Pirate raid frequency has been reduced.
• Fixed an issue that could cause pirate and Sentinel attack timers to reset each other, resulting in too many hostile incidents in space.
• The base speed and acceleration of the unupgraded Nautilon has been increased. Upgrades have been proportionally decreased as appropriate to keep overall upgrade effectiveness in the same range as before.
• Procedurally generated technologies for the Nautilon now give more generous fuel usage reduction bonuses.
• Fixed a number of issues that prevented Exocraft and Nautilon scanners from revealing nearby planetary objects as intended. These scanners should now reveal not only standard scanner resources, but also other objects of interest usually identified via the Analysis Visor.
• Increased the amount of time objects are marked by the Exocraft and Nautilon scanners.
• The stack size of Creature Pellets has been increased.
• Viewing player companions through the Analysis Visor now displays more specific information.
• The Multi-Tool and starship reticles now display overheat and ammo warnings.
• Early-game Sentinel waves have been adjusted to be slightly fewer in number.
• When selling items to technology merchants, prices are now correctly listed in nanites.
• The space station scrap merchant’s shop now displays your current Tainted Metal reserves.
• Building Part item popups have been slimmed down to cut out unnecessary information.

Polestar expedition

• The Polestar expedition will take players on a cruise across the galaxy in their capital ship, forsaking starship warping and planetary base building in favour of the life of a heavy shipping freighter captain.
• The Polestar expedition offers the chance to earn an exclusive freighter engine customisation; new base parts (including a flaming barrel); a unique cape design; a mysterious jellyfish companion; and much more besides.
• Players who have entirely completed an expedition may now end the expedition early and convert the save to normal mode.

Have you ever thought to yourself that the one thing No Man's Sky really needs to make it great is cryptocurrency? Maybe not—probably not—but some players have, and they've taken it upon themselves to create one. According to this Vice report, though, the goal isn't to make money, and in fact the people responsible for the project hope to keep it worthless.

The cryptocurrency was created by members of Galactic Hub, a No Man's Sky community that operates across Discord, Reddit, and of course No Man's Sky itself that aims to provide a deeper deep-space co-op experience that the game does on its own. The group has been around for more than five years, building itself up into a significant presence and inspiring other groups to create their own in-game societies.

HubCoin, as the group's cryptocurrency is known, is intended as an extension of that community-building effort. It's aimed at players in No Man's Sky's endgame who have effectively transcended the need for the game's built-in currencies but "still desire access to those things which can only be achieved by player activity," Galactic Hub founder 7101334 said.

"They want to commission ByteBeat tracks under certain parameters, they want to pay for an artistic canvas in their base, they want a PC player to save-edit a custom fauna companion for them, they want a skilled architect to help design their base or do interior decoration, or maybe they just want the simple convenience of not gathering their own resources."

The goal of HubCon is to fill that void by incorporating a cryptocurrency that's not a real currency, but instead runs on an Ethereum "testnet." It's kind of like a crypto-PTR: It works the same as "real" cryptocurrency but has no actual value. That means players can't cash out, which dramatically reduces the likelihood of the game being turned into a moneymaking grind. 

Rather than being bought and sold on exchanges, HubCoin is earned through activities like posting on the Galactic Hub Discord and subreddit, using the Galactic Hub wiki, posting on Twitter, and taking part in certain in-game events. Once earned, it can be used for things like purchasing in-game goods and services, tipping players for assistance or information, betting on Galactic Hub Star League events, or shopping on the Galactic Hub Marketplace. It's especially valuable to console players, who don't have access to the same in-game tools as PC players and thus must rely on them for custom assets.

The number of players using the currency is quite small—just 149, according to the report, which represents a little more than half the total number of Galactic Hub citizens, and inflation is a risk as that number scales up. But the bigger potential problem is that even though HubCoin has no official value, there's nothing stopping players from assigning it themselves: If I have a bunch and you want some, you might be willing to throw me a few bucks to hand it over, and I might be willing to take it. To help reduce that likelihood, the Galactic Hub says it will blacklist any player who's caught selling or purchasing HubCoin for real money, in any format.

In response to concerns about the environmental damage caused by cryptocurrencies, the Galactic Hub also switched to a "proof-of-authority" testnet before launching publicly. Proof-of-authority uses less energy than the "proof-of-work" typically used for crypto mining, but it's not clear exactly how much less energy is being used—and less of a bad thing is still, by definition, a bad thing.

Despite the drawbacks, it's an interesting bit of emergent meta-gameplay that could, if it avoids various pitfalls and establishes that it's not contributing to the ruination of the planet, demonstrate the value of crypto as a community tool. I'm not convinced that the system needs to rely on cryptocurrency in order to work, but I'm definitely curious about where it's all going to be in a year or two.

Space is, modestly speaking, pretty bloody big. An infinite expanse of strange new worlds orbiting unknown stars, filled with wonderful scientific marvels and an existentially terrifying dose of absolutely nothing. It is a setting games are well-versed in exploring, but why do we always do so from behind the barrel of a gun?

First-person shooting among the stars has been on my mind a lot lately. I recently dove back into Elite Dangerous: Odyssey, a game whose 1:1 scale recreation of our own galaxy is so vast that the sheer concept of bringing a shotgun to its billions of explorable worlds feels absolutely laughable.

But that replay came on the heels of attending EVE Fanfest, where developers CCP Games once again announced that it's still trying to make the EVE FPS happen—despite previous efforts that either languished on PS3 or were so boring as to never make it past early alpha. Star Citizen's never-ending mission to be every single game all at once has also seen it introduce first-person gunfights (with accurate bedsheet deformation on those bullet-ridden bunks), and even No Man's Sky's peaceful pastel galaxy still has you blasting robots and bugs every now and again.

Listen, I'm not against the idea of shooting things in space. Games have been shooting things in space forever, from Doom to Halo to Titanfall 2, and we've been using space to create some incredible backdrops for blasting aliens, demons, and each other.

But those are first-person shooters, not grand galactic simulations. When a game can render up hundreds, thousands, even quintillions of worlds but can't imagine a scenario where you don't view them through iron sights, it feels like not only a failure of imagination, but a lack of confidence in the galaxy you've created. Do EVE's hypercapitalist fleet commanders really need to be poking each other with shotguns?

That we're spoiled for good shooters these days doesn't help much either, of course. When Elite Dangerous: Odyssey dropped, it was immediately clear that this wasn't a team well-versed in gunplay, weightless and clumsy and scattershot as its outpost fights were. Having to fend off Sentinels on No Man's Sky's planets has never not been a chore. If I want to shoot things, I'm going to play a game that's about shooting things, not something half-heartedly tacked onto a game that's more interested in spaceflight than gunplay.

It's probably unrealistic to imagine things could ever be otherwise. Taking our violence to the stars has been a thing for as long as sci-fi has been a genre, and even Star Trek's supposedly utopian vision of the future involves high bodycounts. Space is our wild west frontier, with bounty hunters and outlaws duking it out on space stations. Packing a pistol is a core part of the spacefaring fantasy, and games are simply a lot better at crafting satisfying firefights than trying to create compelling gameplay loops out of, say, exobiology.

But I want to see them try. When I land on a planet 20,000 lightyears from home in Elite, I want to be able to make meaningful discoveries about what life may lurk under a rock. This is something No Man's Sky attempts, but ends up weighed down by due to sheer, impossible scale.. What if space travel itself was fraught with danger, pitting you against the vacuum of space in a vessel that frequently needed fixing by hand?

Games are already doing this, of course. Objects in Space treats spacecraft more like the complex, windowless void-faring submarines they are in reality, while Outer Wilds turns a single solar system into a clockwork puzzlebox where each world has its own quirks and secrets. But I want to see these approaches tackled on a galactic scale, one where I can truly feel like I'm taking an interstellar voyage into the unknown.

Games can take us to weird, wonderful, and impossible ends of the universe. I'd just rather not view them from behind the sights of a laser rifle.

There's something big coming to No Man's Sky. Quite big.

Space whales? Yes, space whales. A new No Man's Sky expedition has added an alien leviathan colloquially referred to as a space whale, which some eagle-eyed players have already predicted due to Hello Games founder Sean Murray Tweeting a whale emoji a few days ago.

But these aren't the type of space whales that paddle around in space oceans. They float through the sky like blimps and soar through outer space like starships. You can catch a glimpse of a few in the trailer above and the image gallery below. (I personally think they look more like space squids thanks to all the tentacles, but they're still cool looking.)

Space whales aren't the only unusual thing about the new expedition, called Leviathan. This mission is set in a time loop and functions a bit like a roguelike. If players die during the expedition, they lose all their progress and restart at the beginning with a procedurally generated loadout. The entire community can work together to reach goals that make more powerful upgrades available during the expedition. Eventually, players will become powerful enough during a loop to make it through without dying and complete the mission.

That definitely sounds different! Rewards for completing the Leviathan expedition include a new "Whalestalker" cloak, an organic frigate for your base (presumably it's like those freaky organic ships, but larger) and a your very own gigantic space whale you can add to your fleet. For more details, check out the patch notes here.

Twitter got all excited the other day when No Man's Sky creator Sean Murray posted a tiny pirate flag emoji. That's all it took for the hype to get dialed up as fans speculated this must be the dawn of some new space pirate update on the brink of release, with cargo smuggling, pirate missions, and black market features.

Turns out, a lot of that was correct. The new No Man's Sky update is called Outlaws and you'll finally be able to live the life of a space pirate in the infinite cosmos. No Man's Sky's seedy underworld will be explored in the update, including pirating missions, black-market technology, contraband smuggling, and pirate-run spaceports in outlaw star systems.

Also there are cape physics. Because there are capes. Check it out in the trailer above.

I remember an update (I don't remember which update) that added dormant space stations. They were lit with spooky red lights and were completely abandoned: no vendors, no NPCs at all. From the trailer it looks like those stations may be populated with space pirates now. That's where you'll acquire new pirate missions and black-market tech. "Like-minded players can even acquire a forged passport that will allow them to by-pass the authorities," says developer Hello Games.

To go along with your new life as an outlaw, how about some new ships? For the first time since the Living Ship update, a new class of starship has been added, and they look pretty darn sick with those extendable solar sails. You won't have to ditch any of your current ships when you find a new solar ship, either: the maximum number of player ships has been increased from six to nine.

Naturally, smuggling contraband will attract the attention of trigger-happy sentinels, but that's not all you'll need to worry about. Just because you're now a pirate doesn't mean you won't still have to fight other pirates, because stealing from thieves is a good way to make a living. You won't be alone in battle, however: AI-controlled squadmates can be hired to act as your personal wingmen, and they can even be upgraded over time to improve their flight and combat skills. You'll be leading a real space pirate gang.

To go along with all this extra pew-pew-pew you'll be doing, combat has been overhauled. "Handling has been improved, weapons have new visual effects and enemy starships now have shields," says Hello Games. "Depth has also been added to weapon selection with a variety of specialist secondary effects, such as slowing enemy engines or disabling shield systems."

"Ship-to-ship combat can now occur within a planet’s atmosphere too—and pirates may raid your settlements. For those who find Space Combat difficult, flight accessibility has been significantly improved with a new Auto-Follow mode."

Are you ready for a life of crime? Space crime? The Outlaws update arrives today, and, as always, is free for owners of No Man's Sky.

Hello Games continues to crank out the updates for No Man's Sky, the latest arriving yesterday, and it doesn't look like the conveyor belt of free content is stopping anytime soon: Studio head Sean Murray says they've just got too many ideas.

"As many updates as we've done since launch and as many bucket list items we've checked off, our list of things we're excited about never seems to get any shorter," Murray told IGN. "The team are always coming up with new things that they want to do with the game: new content and features and areas for improvement.

"I'm amazed that the energy levels are as high now as they've ever been. We tend not to talk about what's on that list publicly but suffice to say we're not done yet by a long shot."

Lucky old Sean also has his own Steam Deck, which the Sentinels update added full support for, and showed the game running on Valve's new hardware.

2021 was a hell of a year, once more, for No Man's Sky. After one of the most difficult launches in history Hello Games has created something players love (it even finally reached 'positive' Steam review status!), and its ambition with new updates continues to exceed expectations.

"I like to think that No Man's Sky is such a large game that we have to paint in broad brush strokes," Murray added. "And then each update comes along and fills in some finer detail but also paints more new broad strokes. That's certainly the case here. If you look at our patch notes, you'll see an absolute ton of refinements, but also huge new features too."

Here's our full breakdown of the Sentinels update, and here's a mod that lets you fill the game with Sean Murray's lovely face. No Man's Sky aside, Hello Games was most recently in the news after returning to its first game, Joe Danger, for a real feelgood moment.

Hello Games continues cranking out free updates for space sandbox No Man's Sky nearly six years after it launched, and the first patch of 2022 centers around those pesky planetary guardians: the sentinels. Bad news: there's a really big, mean sentinel now and it has a lot of different ways to make your planet-hopping adventures a living hell. Good news: you've got a lot of new ways to fight it, and some cool rewards when you beat it and strip it for parts.

Combat in No Man's Sky has never been particularly complex, mostly boiling down to a bunch of pew-pew laser battles, but the new Sentinel update aims to change that. 

"Combat has been significantly improved to create a faster-paced, more varied and dynamic experience," says Hello Games. "Tweaks include changes to camera settings, Sentinel health, Traveller and Sentinel weapon speeds and fire rates, hit indicators, rumble and camera shake, and more."

New weapons? Check. An upgrade to your multitool will let you fire stun grenades that can disable enemies caught in the blast. There's also a neutron cannon that unleashes a cone of destruction when charged, and can also be fired rapidly for less damage but a quicker attack. And if you want to avoid a fight altogether or gain an advantage during one, you can go full Predator. By researching the new camouflage tech on the Space Anomaly, you can activate a cloaking device that renders you invisible to enemies, even in the middle of a fight. 

Don't think your new combat upgrades are going to let you easily conquer the galaxy. Sentinels, those killjoys of No Man's Sky who get deeply offended if you kill trees or abscond with pearls, have been upgraded as well. There's a brand new sentinel added to the mix, and it's a big one. The towering robot is about the size of a Minotaur (your pilotable mech) and it can fly, roast you with a flamethrower, and launch mortar attacks. Good luck taking it down.

If that weren't enough, there are also new sentinel repair drones. In battle, they'll fly around fixing up the other sentinel forces you're chipping away at, so you might want to eliminate them first. The new summoner drones, meanwhile, aren't much of a danger themselves but they can call in reinforcements. So… you might want to take them out first. You're gonna have your hands full, I think. On some planets you'll even find sentinel pillars, which are massive, well-guarded structures where you can find new weapons and tech and learn more about the origin of the sentinels through story missions.

There's a reward for battling all these robotic pests—they've got technical blueprints you can use to craft your own AI-controlled bodyguard. Collect all the parts and your Minotaur can be rebuilt as an autonomous combat partner so your mech will follow and fight for you even when you're not piloting it. And you're definitely gonna need some backup.

Personally, I'm more about flying around the galaxy in creative mode and taking pictures, but I know some No Man's Sky fans have been waiting for more combat options for quite a while. Hopefully they'll find this update to their liking. 

Here's a breakdown of what's in the Sentinel update, with far more detail here.

Sentinel Hardframe Mech - Battle against a brand new robotic enemy - the huge, heavily armoured Hardframe mech. Equipped with lasers, terrain-destroying grenades, and a plasma-powered flamethrower, this fearsome new Sentinel launches itself across the battlefield with a high-powered jetpack. 

Total Visual Overhaul for Weapons - All Multi-Tool systems, from the Mining Laser to the Scatter Blaster, have received a significant visual overhaul, benefiting from new projectiles and beams, muzzle flashes, lighting effects, refraction, new impacts and more!

Advanced Combat Upgrades - New upgrades add depth to combat, with the ability to add stun or incineration effects to your existing weapons, or to set up your Multi-Tool to deal extra damage to targets you've previously tagged. Or, take advantage of the new Cloaking Device to vanish mid-fight and gain the strategic upper hand.

AI Robotic Companions - Players can reassemble and reprogram their own friendly robotic drone companion, or go one step further and salvage Sentinel Hardframe parts to build their own autonomous AI-powered giant mechanical escort.

New Stories and Missions - Work with the crew of the Space Anomaly on a substantial new story-driven mission, or raid the sinister Sentinel Pillars to access their archives and probe the secrets of the Atlas and the World of Glass...

Combat Flow and Feel Improvements - A vast list of tweaks and refinements have been made to weapon feel and flow, making for a more dynamic and impactful combat experience.

New Drone Enemies - Regular Sentinel units have been overhauled, with heavy combat and shield drones, dedicated repair drones, and even advanced summoning units joining the existing patrol drones. 

These days, Hello Games is known mostly for No Man's Sky. An over-reaching procgen galaxy jaunt that was almost toppled by its own ambition, before one of the great comeback stories saw it over many years evolve into the experience it is now. Before No Man's Sky, however, Hello Games started off with a smaller project: Joe Danger.

This Evil Knievel-channelling 2D stunt racer was initially released on consoles and PCs before making its way to phones and touchscreens. It was a success from the start and a great sequel and spinoff saw Joe and pals build-out their world just as Hello was preparing to blast off into space. Without Joe Danger, there's probably not a No Man's Sky.

Out of nowhere, a remastered Joe Danger appeared yesterday sporting improved visuals, a higher frame rate, multitouch improvements, ProMotion and Gamepad support, and even localisation updates. It caught most folk by surprise, and the reason why it happened is that Hello itself got caught off-guard by a message from a big fan. 

Or to be more precise, the dad of one.

Hello Games' Sean Murray anonymised the letter so we'll call our writer dad, and he begins by saying that his eight year-old son Jack has been diagnosed with autism. "One of the things that has enabled Jack and I to bond is our shared love of video games, specifically Joe Danger. Jack LOVES Joe. He loves everything about him. He has a collection of toy motorcycles that are his "Joe Dangers;" every motorcycle we see on the street is "Joe Danger". One of the first things I hear everyday when I walk in the door after a long day at work is "come on, daddy, let's go play Joe Danger!"  Just being able to say that sentence is a MASSIVE deal for [a] child with autism."

Dad goes on to explain that Joe Danger is a coping mechanism for Jack in stressful situations: He gets to play on the phone for a bit if he gets through things. Unfortunately, thanks to iOS updates, Joe Danger was one of many apps that had basically been rendered inoperable and disappeared from the App Store.

"The App store, rather casually I must admit, suggests "contacting the developer" to update the app to get it work, as if that were something that was done everyday," writes dad. "But Jack asked me to do it for him, so here I am."

On getting Jack's message, Hello quietly set to work breathing new life into the game that was the launchpad for its own success.

"As game devs it's so easy to underestimate the impact even your smallest games can have," Seams Murray wrote, announcing the new version of the game. "It blows my mind that something you make can be someone's first game they played, hit at an important time or even be their favorite thing for a while "

The Joe Danger Action Pack remastered is out now, and free to the million or so people who already own the original.

All the props in the world to Hello Games: You can guarantee this is the best news of the year for one young player.

As Murray notes, it's sad that Joe is only one of many games for which this is the case. I was much more into phone gaming years ago, and most of the games I used to love either don't work or are just gone. Farewell Tomena Sanner, we hardly knew ye.

Joe Danger was never a world-beater, but it always had charm and, most importantly, it was always unabashedly fun. It's lovely to see a game that played such a big part for its developers get the treatment it deserves, and the reason why it happened. It's a feelgood moment and, these days, everyone can use one of those.

Despite their notable absence at launch, No Man's Sky has some bloody great worms hidden across the galaxy these days. The interstellar sandbox's next expedition now tasks you with hunting down the greatest of these wriggly lads, figure out how to ride them, and perhaps become a worm yourself.

Introduced back in March, Expeditions are a kind of structured, seasonal adventure to embark upon, bringing players to the same worlds to take on community activities. Coincidentally (or not) arriving at the same time as Denis Villeneuve's Dune adaptation, the latest season is all about the Emergence of colossal Titan Worms.

While a narrative sees players tracking down a worm-loving cult and halting the spread of these slimy giants, the update itself greatly increases the variety of worms scattered across the universe. Eventually, you'll be able to live out your Fremen fantasies and ride them across worlds.

To further celebrate worms, No Man's Sky is also offering a bunch of worm-based paraphernalia. The expedition will eventually let you don a wormy Feasting Casque head yourself, with other unlocks including a ghastly green jetpack trail and the uncomfortably named "Flesh Launcher". Less grim are improved effects for particles like meteor strikes and muzzle flashes.

Expedition 4: Emergence is available now, so go on. Get out there and ride the worm.

Before the release of No Man's Sky Frontiers and its new settlement system (which is filled with extremely sad alien settlers), a player who goes by Winder Sun started modding Sean Murray's face into the game. 

It was a playful form of protest, mostly just to kill time until the Frontiers update arrived, and each day Winder Sun replaced another object with Murray's head. First they stuck it on an exocraft, then onto portals and warp effects, then on the very grass that covers the surface of planets. Things got very weird, very quickly.

The Frontiers update arrived only a week after this bizarre Sean-injecting project began (a coincidence?) but that doesn't mean the fun needs to end there. Winder Sun has made a mod so you too can add Sean Murray's smiling face into just about every aspect of No Man's Sky. It's called, appropriately enough, Sean Sean's Sean - Sean Overhaul. 

And there's an excellent trailer, too. That's not sarcasm. This trailer is outstanding.

Want your character to look like Sean? How about your multitool? How about giant sand worms, or the very ground you're standing on? The space anomaly can be Sean's head, and you can fly into his mouth to land, and inside you'll find it filled with Sean. Yes, it's disturbing.

And pretty much everything else from objects to effects can be replaced with Murray's noggin, if you like. Frankly, I think Sean Sean's Sean should be made into an official expansion. (The head used, by the way, comes from the Everyone is Sean mod, which only turns other players into Sean.)

As an added bonus, on the back of the Frontiers update No Man's Sky has at long last achieved a positive rating on Steam. That's definitely something for Sean to smile about.

It's not exactly controversial to say No Man's Sky had a rough landing. But five years of free, massive updates later, the game's Steam reviews finally reflect what the objectively correct among us have been saying all along—that No Man's Sky is good, actually.

While we'd hate to admit it, the small Steam reviews tag can have a huge impact on your first impression of a game. But after years of sitting with "Mixed" overall reviews, Hello Games founder Sean Murray yesterday shared the news that No Man's Sky had finally crossed the threshold into "Mostly Positive", meaning that at least 70% of Steam reviews rated the game positively. 

To be clear, No Man's Sky has been viewed relatively highly for some time. The game's recent reviews sit at Very Positive following the launch of settlement management update Frontiers, though sentiment took the biggest turn when Hello finally added multiplayer back in 2018. 

But it's hard to understand just how hostile the response to No Man's Sky was at launch, the developer assaulted with accusations that it had deceived fans with a grossly unfinished game. That reputation stuck with the game for years, as evident in it taking a full half-decade for the game to reach a positive consensus despite years of massive updates that fundamentally reimagined what No Man's Sky could be.

That said, it's also a little bittersweet for those of us who fell in love with what No Man's Sky was at launch—a lonely, meditative experience where every sight felt truly your own. I'm glad No Man's Sky found the audience it deserved, it just stings a little that the game had to utterly reinvent itself as a live, settlement-building social sandbox in the process.

Thanks, Kotaku.

What a journey No Man's Sky has been on, to the extent that where players once frothed at the mouth about Hello Games they now rent billboards saying 'thanks' and mod Sean Murray's head into the game in mock-protest at the wait for the next big thing. Well, time to say goodbye to all those locales festooned with an Irishman's head, and hello to the next major update: No Man's Sky Frontiers is now live, and is a  6.6GB download.

There have always been little points of interest scattered around the procedurally generated planets of No Man's Sky: monoliths, shelters, observatories, wrecked spacecrafts, and occasionally a little depot or manufacturing facility. But nothing that would really convince you to land your ship there and stay there for a good long while.

That's about to change. No Man's Sky Frontiers will add "living, breathing Mos Eisley type settlements" to the game's alien planets.

And you can do more than just visit these settlements. You can become the mayor and manage the alien outposts, and even grow them into proper towns. You'll find these new alien settlements on all inhabited planets in No Man's Sky's galaxies. Check out the sweet-looking Frontiers trailer above.

"These are little towns, filled with NPCs with their own tasks and problems," says the announcement from Hello Games. "Travellers can choose to help these settlements, and to even lead them. Ensure their future prosperity and happiness and maybe even develop these fledgling towns into even larger settlements." 

Fallout 4 may have turned me off the idea of settlements but I'll give sci-fi colonies a go. The addition of settlements means you'll be seeing lots of new procedurally generated buildings, and that means the base-building system has been overhauled with "hundreds" of new building pieces, along with new building controls and a grid menu to make planning and construction easier. 

But mayors of alien towns don't just build, they manage their flocks. "Citizens will look to you to help solve their problems, make important decisions, keep them safely below sentinel radars, and help defend against drone attacks."

That all sounds (and looks) pretty darn good. Especially since I never really got into base-building, I'm excited to find a nice little alien town and help it out rather than building my own joint from scratch. And apart from the new settlements and building system, Frontiers is also ushering in a new Expedition, which is called Cartographers and will focus on "planetary mapping and exploration." That sounds like a winner, too.

Fraser hopped into his ship and took a quick look at the update when it arrived, immediately finding his first settlement. A distress signal directed him towards it, where he found colonists under siege from Sentinels and horrible, deadly weather. Settlements in dire straits can be rescued, making the residents love you so much that they'll put you in charge. 

It's hardly a paradise, but with a bit of work and community spirit, maybe it can become one. 

The ambition of Hello Games (and its achievements thus far) is hard to fault. Here's the rundown of what you can expect in Frontiers:

Planetary Settlements: Clusters of pioneering aliens have banded together to build planetary settlements. These little communities, bustling with life and promise, can now be found on all inhabited planets across the galaxies.

Found your own settlement: Submit your management credentials to become overseer of a settlement, rename it, and assume leadership over its citizens. The settler population will look to you for town planning, treasury management, policy decisions and conflict resolution.

Each settlement unique: Every settlement is procedurally generated, with unique buildings, neighbourhood layouts, colour schemes, and interior and exterior decoration.

Help settlements grow: Ungoverned settlements start off small and modest, with a sparse population and only a few buildings scattered around their town centre. Provide resources to construct new buildings and transform your ramshackle collection of dwellings into a flourishing town!

Resolve citizen disputes: Settlement life is not always harmonious! As overseer, you will occasionally be called upon to help resolve disagreements between settlers. Fair and compassionate judgements will result in happier citizens!

Hundreds of new base parts: Construct your own settlement-inspired bases with a huge array of new base parts. New structural sets of timber, stone and alloy pieces create a tremendous range of possible building shapes. Over a hundred new decorative parts create all-new ways to add personal character to bases.

New Expedition season: This community adventure has a different feeling from previous expeditions. Travellers will begin their journey with a technologically unique starship, featuring an advanced waveform engine and powerful frameshift catapult.

Breathtaking nebulas: Interstellar clouds have gathered in deep space to form spectacular multi-coloured nebulas, making space skies more beautiful than ever.

Enhanced effects: Almost all of the game’s visual effects have been revisited, revamped and improved. Weapons and explosions feel much more punchy and add a new visceral element to combat.

Base building improvements: Introducing a clean, minimal, contextual HUD to place, scale, rotate and recolour base parts. See all your building parts in an easy-to-parse grid. You’ll notice some you forgot about! You can now pick up and move base parts you’ve placed, duplicate parts, or build impossible new structures in free place mode.

Twitch campaign: Coming soon another round of in-game No Man’s Sky rewards will be available to earn by watching streamers play the game on Twitch.

There's plenty more included in the update, naturally. Here are the complete patch notes. 

This week marked the start of Beachhead, the second expedition since No Man's Sky's Expeditions update launched back in April. Because each expedition tasks you with completing certain milestones and offers unique rewards at the end, the community has been wondering what the big reward could be, and today Hello Games revealed that each player who completes Beachhead can permanently add Mass Effect's Normandy SR-1 to their frigate. "We are thrilled and flattered that Bioware and EA let us pay tribute in this way," the official statement reads. "As huge fans of the series, it's a lovely moment for sci-fi fans." 

Players spent the week trying to figure out what the expedition was pointing towards, and speculation grew after Hello games founder Sean Murray posted a message in No Man Sky's language just yesterday which read "Look to the monolith, the weapon is coming." The name of the expedition, Beachhead, is itself a hint, as it is a term describing the landing point of an invasion.

Despite giving it their best, the No Man's Sky community hasn't worked out that both these hints ultimately point to Mass Effect: Beachhead refers to the Reaper invasion and the monolith is likely a reference to Andromeda's monoliths, even though this particular plotline isn't part of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the release of which Hello Games is also celebrating with this easter egg.

Hello Games has already hinted at further surprises to celebrate No Man's Sky's 5th anniversary.

For Mass Effect fans, seeing the Normandy and being able to add it to their frigate is a cool treat, as the Normandy is a visual symbol of Shephard's journey and their crew—every sci-fi saga needs at least one recognisable ship, after all. You can undertake Beachhead and get the Normandy until the expedition's end on May 31.

Pack your bags and charge your oxygen tanks, spacefarers. No Man's Sky is embarking on a trip across the stars with today's free Expeditions update—and everyone's invited.

Arriving as a new game mode alongside Normal, Survival and Creative, Expeditions start all players out on the same planet with a random assortment of tech, equipment and ships. A path of milestones is laid out, tasking you with objectives like establishing bases or discovering creatures, with rendezvous planets set up to bring the community back together at certain intervals.

It sounds like a good way to give yourself some direction in No Man's Sky, one that'll also bring you closer to the community. But it's also a route to unlocking cool new ships, cosmetics and commemorative patches—with every Expedition phase's reward shared across all your No Man's Sky saves.

Expeditions are effectively seasons, resetting with a new rewards track, theme and timeframe with each new venture. If you've fallen for a particular expedition character, though, you'll be able to continue a save past the Expedition's end as a normal NMS save (though Expedition rewards will no longer be available for unlock).

Intergalactic road tripping might be the Expedition update's headline feature, but the patch also adds a slew of smaller changes and improvements. Rather than following objective icons, missions will now give vaguer directional cues, with quests themselves being reworked for "greater depth and interest."

Expedition-class ships have also been given a visual overhaul, as has the game's HUD. Sentinel combat has been reworked to be a bit less point 'n' shoot, ships can now be swapped out, and discoveries are now shared across all platforms (with older discoveries taking precedence). The Expedition Update site has a sizeable list of additional bug fixes and changes.

But most importantly of all, those massive bipedal Sentinel walkers will now "Titanfall" in from orbit. Titanfall is a verb now. You heard it here first.