The update will coincide with No Man’s Sky’s launch on Nintendo Switch on the 7th of October
No Man’s Sky, an action-adventure game created by Hello Games, was initially met with merely middling reviews before becoming a hugely popular game.
This year saw three significant revisions that rank among the most significant updates in the game’s six years of existence.
Hello Games has also been working hard to bring the game to numerous new platforms, including Nintendo Switch, PSVR2, iPad, and MacOS. The first of these platforms will be the Nintendo Switch on the 7th of October.
Longtime PC players may not find the Switch version earth-shattering, but No Man’s Sky’s 4.0 update will bring improvements regardless of the platform you play on.
Sean Murray said about the update:
“People are arriving, new players and we sort of want to tidy up our house. Something I see online occasionally, people will say, ‘I like the game, but it feels overwhelming to come back, 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.
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.”
There are no level caps in No Man’s Sky, but there are features like voyage milestones that monitor things like alien encounters, combat data, and time spent on worlds with harsh weather.
In version 4.0, these milestones have been increased so players can aim for new objectives. Murray noted that the inventory has been “streamlined” to make it easier for new players. It’s also been “massively expanded” to allow players who have already acquired all the saves to unlock even more.
The upcoming patch will include a brand new game mode called “relaxed” mode. This will offer players the sandbox experience of No Man’s Sky, but with less focus on survival.
The relaxed mode won’t be as difficult as the normal or survival mode. But it also doesn’t have all the unlockable content that creative mode does.
Murray said about “relaxed mode”:
”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.”
Existing saves can be transferred to the new mode and transferred back if the player decides they don’t like it.
They have also revisited Survival mode to provide a greater challenge and Murray says:
“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.”
Lastly, Murray said that the new patch will give players the opportunity to control the balance of the game themselves.
He stated:
“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.
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.”
You can look forward to the No Man’s Sky 4.0 patch, on the 7th of October. This is an exciting prospect for all fans of the game.