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It’s little secret that No Man’s Sky has been one of the biggest redemption stories in modern gaming history. What started off as a tiny indie project quickly gained too much momentum for its own good when Sony debuted it at the 2014 E3 press conference. While the game was over-promised and under-delivered at launch, updates eventually turned it into a must-have game for anyone interested in science fiction and exploration-type games.
A recent interview with LADbible revealed much about the game’s development progress and where No Man’s Sky would be taking us next. After giving players the ability to discover billions of procedurally-generated planets, developers had to look at additional features to add instead of just new resources or areas. Fall 2018’s NEXT update delivered a full multiplayer experience, base building, command of freighter armadas, a graphical overhaul and quite a few additional features that ended up selling the game to millions of additional players through additional platforms like the Xbox One.
Developer Hello Games had originally planned on making NEXT the last major update to the game, but unexpected commercial success of the title changed their minds and is showing the true dedicated the company has had for its game since the launch 3 years ago.
Summer 2019’s update is called Beyond, and it’s the one set to deliver a full VR experience to players that’s going to immerse people into the universe like never before. A surprising tidbit of information that came out in this interview revolves around the number of players expected to experience the virtual immersion in the Beyond update. Hello Games estimates that over 1 million current owners of No Man’s Sky already have a VR headset and machine capable of running the game on said headset, building up the idea that this new content update is going to be a massive boom to the multiplayer gaming population in the virtual universe.
That equates to one in four players having the chance to experience the game all over again as if it were something new, and this doesn’t even account for new players that will likely be jumping on board once it lands. Several threads on Reddit have proven the game’s popularity, and several more have indicated that players have or will be purchasing the game specifically for the upcoming VR update, furthering the idea that No Man’s Sky could very well be the most popular VR title of all time.
What’s most impressive about everything here isn’t the content itself, rather it’s the developer’s dedication to making No Man’s Sky one of the best games to play in any given year, all without additional monetary investment from its player base. Few developers will deliver more than just bug fixes for free, and even fewer will deliver a single massive content update for no cost. No Man’s Sky might be one of the best gaming investments in modern history, thanks to Hello Games unwavering support of the title and their initial vision for the rich experience that the title should deliver.
There’s no date on the Beyond update other than “soon”, but we’ve been told to expect it this Summer, which means it should be landing sometime in the next 2 months.