The No Man's Sky Next Upate has arrived, giving us both co-op multiplayer and a third-person perspective. It's also given us something new to consider: how we look to ourselves and others. When you visit a space station, you'll find an Appearance Modifier terminal which lets you not only choose your race—Gek, Vy'keen, Korvax, Traveler, or Anomaly (boring human)—but also lets you pick from a number of helmets, heads, eyes, and beaks, plus a bunch of boots, gloves, backpacks, and armor. In the video above (and here on YouTube), I cycle through a number of the interesting options available to you.

The Traveler race, in particular, has some weird heads to consider. Also, keep in mind that playing as a Gek, for example, won't let you become instantly fluent in the Gek language. If you want to converse with aliens, you'll still need to pick up the language the old-fashioned way.

But at least now you can look the part. 

After a bit of a delay—we were expecting the update to arrive at 6 am Pacific—the No Man's Sky Next update has arrived and can be downloaded on PC. While you're waiting for it to download, you can take a look at the patch notes to see what Next includes.

The Next update includes third-person perspective and multiplayer—still described as playable with a 'small group of friends' rather than stating the specific number of players. As Pip told us when she got some hands-on time with it last week, you can play with friends right from the start of the game, including the tutorial. As for running into other players randomly, the notes say the following:

Communicate with other players vocally using a headset, and / or converse using text chat on PC. While wandering the galaxy solo, continue to experience chance encounters with strange floating orbs.

So it sounds like you see your friends as fully realized characters, but see strangers as orbs. I think? I guess we'll find out today, as soon as two players who aren't friends run into each other.

New mission types have been added, including photography missions (which sounds like just the sort of thing I'd enjoy), hunting, archaeology, freighter attacks, and more. The patch notes state that creature movement and AI has been improved as well, and it also sounds like sentinels may now be easier to battle.

Base-building has been expanded with hundreds of new parts and teleporters can be placed anywhere on a planet. Players can also own multiple bases, and they can be built anywhere. 

Since you can now see your character in third-person view, a character creation tool has been added, available on space stations. You can play as a Vy'keen, Gek, Korvax, Traveler, or Anomaly (human). You can also customize specific parts of your appearance like your head, torso, gloves, boots, backpack, and so on. (Note that playing as a certain species doesn't mean you will automatically be able to read the language of that species. I watched a console player streaming, and he played as a Gek but still couldn't understand their language.)

Rather than a single freighter you'll now be able to command a fleet, and even conduct real-time missions with them, call them in to help out with space battles, and get their assistance while exploring systems.

Crafting has been overhauled as well, with new resources to find and a system based on a planet's biome and classification. There are also resource refineries to convert raw substances into other materials.

Visual improvements include new clouds, ringed planets, improved hazardous storms, and planetary changes that will allow for bigger and deeper oceans and buried ruins to discover and explore. There are also changes to the UI and scanner, and an improved build menu, plus enhancements to the audio and sound effects.

Hello Games is also planning weekly community events, and have set up a pretty nice looking Galactic Atlas website to pinpoint community hubs, events, and discovery stats. 

"The chances of two players ever crossing paths in a universe this large is pretty much zero," Sean Murray tweeted on August 8, 2016. The very next day, two players met. Or at least they tried to. In what would become something of a defining moment for No Man's Sky, the two players (on PS4) wound up just a few solar systems apart, and arranged a face-to-face fleet-cute on a nearby space station. Even standing on the same spot at the same time, they couldn't see each other.

At the time we weren't told if it was an issue of overloaded servers or a feature that didn't work properly, but now we know it was a feature that simply wasn't there to begin with. In August of 2017, that was remedied to some degree in the Atlas Rises update, which added limited co-op where players could communicate and travel together, but only see other as orbs of light.

Tomorrow, to the delight of many, we're getting multiplayer for No Man's Sky. In some ways the new expansion, called Next, feels like a promise to rewrite that disappointing moment where two players tried to see one another but couldn't, to provide the missing puzzle piece that will let people finally play together. For a solo player like myself, however, I'm left wondering if multiplayer is really what No Man's Sky really needs to pull me back in.

In March of 2016, I interviewed Sean Murray at a pre-launch event for No Man's Sky. We spoke, among other things, about how the game was designed to push players relentlessly on, from planet to planet, system to system."In terms of features,” Murray told me, “in terms of design, decision-making, and stuff, we always say ‘Does this encourage exploration or does it not?’, basically. And we use that to cut out features. So things like base-building: we don't have base-building. And the reason is, it would just make people want to stay where they are and not explore."

Base-building, among other features, has been added to No Man's Sky since then. That's not surprising: in the same interview Murray said he planned to support updates based on what players wanted and how they played the game. “Now after it comes out, you're right, maybe people will say ‘Hey, I just want to settle down and go fishing,’" he told me at the time. "And you know, maybe we'll support that then if there's enough of those people. Right now, it is about pushing people far apart, it is about exploration."

For my part, I was perfectly content to play No Man's Sky the way Murray originally envisioned. I found plenty of habitable, picturesque planets on my travels that would have made good homes, but never felt the desire to settle on one. I dabbled a bit with base-building, but not for very long. I wanted to play the game as an explorer, to keep moving and restlessly searching. The problem was, I wanted to find something out there, something amazing, and I rarely felt like I did.

While the procedural generation in NMS means every planet and creature is different, those differences didn't necessarily make them exciting, and after visiting a couple dozen planets and discovering a twice that many creatures, it began to feel like I wasn't really finding anything new. I was just seeing a slight rearrangement of everything I'd seen before. So for me, when it comes to updates for No Man's Sky, it's never been bases or vehicles or co-op or lore I was interested in, but improvements to the core of No Man's Sky: more exciting, interesting, and majestic procedurally generated planets and creatures. That's what's been missing for me, the feeling that I've found something incredible, something that could really capture my imagination. 

The biggest thrill for me in any of the updates so far came from coming across one of the synthetic planets added in the Atlas Rises update. It felt like a real discovery, finally spotting something truly different than I'd seen in the course of the thousands of planets in the hundreds of systems I'd been through already. I felt my pulse quicken, felt the first real sense of wonder since the initial launch of the game. It was a surprise, in other words, in a game where nothing had felt particularly surprising for a very long time. This was followed by a few more odd planet types that had been added, which made exploration feel exciting the way I'd always hoped. If the last three updates to No Man's Sky had done nothing but add new planet types and creature parts, I'm pretty sure I'd have been entirely happy.

I am interested in No Man's Sky's new multiplayer features, but I don't expect them to transform how I play the game. Maybe I'm in the minority, because long before Next was announced, players had already found ways to play No Man's Sky cooperatively. The Galactic Hub Project was founded, where players formed a community to explore a specific region completely, fully mapping out and categorizing the planets and life. A Federation was formed, and group projects like community farms and organized exovehicle races appeared. There's clearly a very strong desire to experience No Man's Sky with other people.

I'll be trying out the co-op features of Next along with everyone else tomorrow, but I'm guessing I'll quickly revert back to Murray's original concept of the game: restless and constant exploration, always moving on to the next planet instead of settling down on the one I'm standing on. It's not other players I want to find in No Man's Sky, it's something else entirely. Whatever it is, I hope it's out there somewhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I looked at the Steam Top Sellers list yesterday morning and noticed that No Man's Sky was sitting at number 12. This was just for my region—on the global top sellers it sat around 34th place at the same time—but it represents a bump in recent sales of Hello Games' space sandbox. And surely those sales are the result of the trailer for No Man's Sky's fourth free expansion, Next, which shows the upcoming multiplayer features.

While Steam doesn't give us any indication of how many new copies are being sold, it still feels kind of remarkable to see NMS climbing the Top Sellers list because Next hasn't arrived yet: it comes out on July 24. In a way, this makes copies of No Man's Sky being bought now a bit like a pre-order—you can obviously play the game and first three expansions, but you'll have to wait until next week to see how the multiplayer in Next really is.

Which means the game that came out in the summer of 2016 that deeply disappointed so many players who had pre-ordered it based on its impressive trailer is once again selling copies (and still, by the way, at the launch day price of $60) based on an impressive trailer. Round and round we go.

The hype and excitement for No Man's Sky is back! Yes, it's definitely (and thankfully) a dim shadow of the stratospheric hype prior to the original launch, but a look through the No Man's Sky subreddit (which has gained 2,000 new followers this week), and the fact it's creeping back into the Steam's Top Sellers list show that a lot of people are incredibly pumped to play Next when it arrives.

This reaction isn't out of the blue. Hello Games has spent the time since that troubled initial launch working (mostly very quietly) to produce three big, free updates. Those expansions added a lot of new player-requested features like base-building and base-sharing, ground-based vehicles, new lore and story quests, additional planet types, interaction tools for players to communicate with each other, plus a ton of tweaks, fixes, and improvements that have enhanced everything from the visuals to the UI. The updates have been well-received, which is reflected in No Man's Sky's 'recent' Steam reviews, most of which are positive. (This is including a sizable spike in positive reviews over the three days since the trailer appeared.)

There are also plenty of players for whom the hype has never really subsided: lots of people who enjoyed No Man's Sky from day one and have continued to play it since its release in 2016. They've been supportive and positive (and patient!) throughout the entire life of NMS. So, it's natural they're pumped: the game they've always enjoyed is getting even more free stuff.

Being hyped for a game you already own that's getting a bunch of new stuff added is perfectly understandable, but if there's something that worries me a bit, it's posts like the one shown in the image at the top of the page that reads: "Next is everything I wanted and more." And I've seen a few posts from people saying they're thinking about buying the game now, before Next actually arrives.

It's those kinds of posts and comments giving me this "here we go again" feeling. Deciding No Man's Sky was everything we wanted based on a trailer that didn't accurately reflect the game at launch, putting expectations so sky-high that they had so much farther to fall, is what made the reaction to No Man's Sky so explosive the first time around.

It's not quite the same situation with Next: we've seen and played No Man's Sky, we've seen steady improvements over the past two years, and the expansions so far have been, as far as I can tell, faithful to what we were told they'd be. I'm guessing, at the absolute minimum, the multiplayer features described will actually be in the game this time. I am fairly confident this will not be a repeat of 2016.

So, sure, yeah, we can get pumped! We can be excited and we can be hopeful. Heck, I'm excited to try the expansion, too. The multiplayer in Next both looks and sounds like it could be a lot of fun, and I'm personally eager to check it out myself. It also doesn't sound like Next is the end of the road for No Man's Sky: the post on Hello Games' site states it's "just another step in a longer journey", so it sounds like further expansions or improvements could be next (after Next).

But by now we know, or at least we should know, the dangers of too much hype and the peril of expecting a game (or expansion) to be everything we want it to be (and more!) before we've actually played it. Be excited, be hopeful, but let's not launch the hype rocket before the actual launch of Next.

No Man's Sky's NEXT update rolls out next week. Billed by the devs as its "largest so far", it brings with it overhauled graphics, a new third-person perspective and full multiplayer support. Read Pip's words on what it's like to explore No Man's Sky Next with three other people, and know that a "very light" multiplayer component was envisioned, but spiked, before launch. 

In conversation with The Guardian, Hello Games head honcho Sean Murray discusses No Man's Sky's turbulent launch—which led to personal death threats and bomb warnings at the developer's office. He speaks about the angry mob nature of the internet, and acknowledges he and his team's mistakes with regards to communication pre-release. 

One particularly contentious issue for players at the time was the space explorer's absent multiplayer—a feature some players expected from the off.   

“A very light multiplayer was envisioned for launch," Murray tells The Guardian, "and we fought right up until the end to add it, but it was immensely challenging and we knew it was something that only a handful of people would experience due to the size of the universe.

"We later added a version of it for the Atlas Rises update, and it was nice, but not hugely impactful to people’s enjoyment. What players really wanted was the kind of multiplayer we are adding now."

When asked specifically about the absence of multiplayer at launch, Murray tells Eurogamer that Hello Games "talked about the earlier than we should have". He speaks to Hello's small team, and that certain aspirational, but not practical, features were axed along the way. 

"We would go way down some routes sometimes and they wouldn't turn out to be a good idea," Murray tells EG. "Other things we were fighting to get into the game until the last breath, basically. Multiplayer was one of those things. To be super clear—multiplayer at that time was the way we had talked about it. 

"It was something that'd happen to people super infrequently. In play-testing it was of almost no value to the player—it was just a cool thing, a cool moment that some people would have, and we talked about it with the press that there's this cool thing that would maybe make a story sometime. But it's a big complicated thing for that payoff. We were fighting for it until pretty much the final hours of the game."

Murray reckons NEXT's multiplayer "totally changes the game"—which is doubly important, given it feeds into its pre-existing features. Murray explains things like base-building, riding in vehicles, and owning freighters weren't intended at launch. "None of these things existed," he says, "and we've kind of had to build the game out for multiplayer to make sense."

Check out both The Guardian and Eurogamer's interviews with Sean Murray via those respective links. 

And let me again point you to Pip's words on what it's like to explore No Man's Sky Next with three other people—which also includes commentary from Murray. 

If you know anything about No Man's Sky, you'll likely know it was criticised at launch. For some, what shipped didn't reflect its pre-release promotional material—a backlash that was later investigated and dismissed by the UK's Advertising Standards Authority. With its pre-launch promo in mind, Redmas' Origins mod for NMS Atlas Rises "aims to restore the original vision of the game."

On the project's Nexus Mods page, the creator says: "I've restored the original 1.0 biomes, and tweaked them to look like pre-release footage. I've also packed some of my most recent mods from 'Space Adventures'."

It's worth noting that Redmas hasn't created Origins as a way of slighting Hello Games, but is instead a fan of both the developer and NMS itself. 

"I've been following the development of No Man’s Sky since pre-release," reads their Nexus bio. "[I've] always supported Hello Games before and after the release, being a developer myself, I know it must have been a lot to go through for a small team. I love the game, and had one of my best gaming moments with this game."

Here are some stills:

More information on Redmas' No Man's Sky Origins mod, including installation instructions, lives on its Nexus Mods page. The space explorer's NEXT update—which adds third-person perspective, multiplayer, and a visual overhaul—lands on Tuesday, July 24. 

Three of the four of our little squad are huddled in a tiny cabin, waiting out a life-threatening blizzard on a snowy planet. I’m playing No Man’s Sky Next—the fourth update for the game since launch and the one which brings true multiplayer to the game’s enormous universe—with three of the development team. All four of my team started a new game for this demo so everyone is working through the new version of the game’s introduction. We’re learning the basics of resource gathering and tech creation needed for the meat of the experience: base-building and adventuring. To that end it introduces you to base-building and freighters earlier than before.

But right now I’m out of Sodium—a new harvestable resource which I need to recharge my exosuit’s thermal protection—and my life support system is also perilously low. Hence hiding in a cabin after collecting a piece of tech I need to repair my starship. The jog here nearly killed me so the jog back seems a bit of a gamble. 

Where I’d usually have to figure out a survival strategy on my own, multiplayer offers a new lifeline. One of my new friends drops a heap of Sodium (and some Oxygen for my life support) into my inventory and I’m suddenly good to go. 

To share resources you hover over the element in your inventory and can choose to transfer it to a fellow player in your immediate vicinity. Sharing is also why the game now lets you split stacks of resources, so you don’t need to absolutely inundate someone with all the Carbon you own when they only need enough for a floor tile. I attempt to return the favour at a later date, offering up a supply of Copper as we build the necessary bits to unlock a base computer. 

A base computer is what you need to start a base and thus we start throwing up walls, floors, lights and goodness knows what else, with surprising speed. I decide to build a magnificent bridge from the slope we’re on to another peak. I run out of Carbon after placing about five floor tiles and curse my hubris. Luckily my squad helps out and, by the time I return from another round of mining, it covers a far more impressive distance. 

Obviously, co-operating like this is the nicer way to play. The devs are helping me rather than e.g. letting me die slowly; a courtesy they don’t always extend to one another, if my eavesdropping on their chat is accurate. To be fair to them, though, given the choice between saving a friend and letting them die hilariously and unnecessarily, I’d always pick the more amusing option. I also notice I’m tempering my own worst impulses. I mean, I ask what would happen if I shoot them with my mining beam rather than just opening fire like I normally would. (Apparently it would hurt them a bit.) 

Because we’re working through the tutorial bits we’re all doing similar activities, but Hello Games’ managing director, Sean Murray, explains that you can dip into multiplayer with friends or random travelers using any of your existing saves, across any of the game’s modes. “You can have played for a hundred hours. I can join you on your game and if I collect stuff or do stuff then I have that and that’s in my save when I go back to playing single-player.” 

You can pursue the No Man’s Sky story path together or just explore or muck about, racing exocraft, creating scenic trails, taking on missions as a group, or building extravagant structures.

The ability to experience the world alongside other people is turned on by default. Players can switch it off if they want to be truly alone, but the way Murray explains it, having it enabled won’t suddenly lead to those strange agglomerations of player characters you see in MMO questing hotspots. 

Instead, it’s about the game’s universe feeling more real, more alive. He describes a scenario from his own experience:

“There’s a new marketplace in our space stations which looks really cool and has got loads of NPCs dotted around and whatever. I had this fucking amazing moment where I went in there and there was somebody else at one of the shops. Initially I just assumed it was an NPC but they’re not normally there. I was like, ‘It’s another person! It’s one of the team!’ It was so good! I didn’t know what to do with myself. But that then coloured the whole rest of the time I was playing.”

He comes back to that story later in the day to illustrate how the existing No Man’s Sky experience sets up slightly different multiplayer expectations than other games.

“In any other game that [moment] wouldn’t be surprising, but because of the scope of No Man’s Sky it’s like, ‘Fuck! I’ve been playing for eight hours and never seen anyone,’ and it just takes you by surprise. In another game you might instantly think to kill that person. But with this it’s like, we’re both having a moment and doing a silly little dance of ‘What should we do with this? Let’s go and build a base together!’ It’s cool to have those feelings.”

I only reached base building towards the end of my hands-on with the game (partly because there was a certain amount of hiding in cabins, barging one another with starships, and deploying all of the emotes in the quick task bar to see what they did). So it was in conversation with Murray where I learned about the rest of what Next will bring.

Until now you could only set up home by finding an abandoned habitable base on a planet, so you weren’t able to just set yourself up near an attractive cave system or a glut of useful resources. You could also only build your base out a certain distance from that point. Next will remove both of those restrictions, letting you build anywhere and letting you sprawl all over the place. 

For a brief rundown: there are hundreds of new base building parts and you can own multiple bases per solar system and per planet. From what I saw, the new building components also make the building architecture look very different—they tended to be more angular and more wood-focused, although that could be due to the materials available or what gets unlocked early versus later as you research new parts.

There’s potential for cities, or at least neighborhoods of some kind, as other people can build bases alongside your own, or you could simply throw down another base computer and start a new structure yourself. Given my particular group of friends, it’s also good to know that when playing together there’s nothing too destructive they can really do to my base, and when I’m not online they can only see my base, not edit it.

Personally, I’m most interested in setting up a base underwater, so I ask if there are any extra restrictions there in terms of pressure or oxygen. “What is it with you and underwater bases?” he asks. “Nope, you just build underwater if you want (I means it’s harder to do, and harder to get to, but you are safe once inside).”

Murray says that you can now assemble fleets of frigates, too, walking around on them, repairing them and specialising them for discovery, trade or combat. He adds that you can also build rooms for captains on freighters and then deploy them on missions. 

Depending on your fleet you can take on different missions, explains Murray. “When you send them off they go to those places for real. You can follow them round, they sometimes get into trouble—things like that. And when they return they will potentially give you rewards, they will give you a big report of everything that’s happened which is quite fun. 

“They send you messages when they’re away as well and sometimes call you for decisions. When they come back, as well as getting rewards and stuff, they might need repairs—you can fly out to them and repair them—and they can level up so you can send them on more missions.”

In terms of the missions you and your team of human players can take on, I see things like resource collection and scanning creatures on one list, but apparently there are also activities like freighter battles. 

While we’re on the subject of freighters, Murray points out that you can now land on them. The layout has changed too, to make it more obvious that you can base-build in freighters. I gather that’s something people often missed, like the adjacency bonuses you can get by organising your inventory in a particular way. 

To go back to my hands-on experience, I was tentatively excited by how quickly the experience slipped into that “titting about with mates” headspace, sniggering as a copper deposit I’d tagged but then mined out led a companion to an empty hole. The mood felt somewhere between Viscera Cleanup Detail (a game about being a space janitor which you can play with your friends and ruin their clean floors by treading blood everywhere) and Minecraft (where I tended towards pottering about on a server, occasionally collaborating, but mostly working on my own projects). 

It’s impossible to say how the experience will settle over the longer term—over the hundreds or even thousands of hours the No Man’s Sky community pours into save files—but the foundations feel promising to me. And I say that as someone who has previously played a determinedly lonely version of the game, just skipping from planet to planet and making videos of particularly dorky animals or taking screenshots of weird landscapes. 

The community is getting a particular shout-out after Next launches, thanks to the Galactic Atlas website. It seemed to be part travel guide, part activity hub from the screenshots I saw. The idea is to be able to offer context for the galactic map, pointing out places of interest or information about galactic hubs and their discoveries. 

There’s also a shop. Not in the sense of a microtransaction or loot box experience, but as a place where players can spend in-game currency earned through doing community missions. The idea is that people can pick up unique cosmetics, emotes, base building parts and so on which mark or celebrate their community involvement. It made me think of the emblems and shaders I amassed in Destiny as a kind of “I was there!” statement for raids. 

Speaking of cosmetics, you can also customise your player character, either taking on the form of a space traveler in the human astronaut vein, or as one of the game’s NPC races, like the Gek or the Vy’keen. Customisation feels more important in Next than other updates, partly because in multiplayer it’s nice to be able to tell people apart at a glance instead of using a default form and relying on the coloured markers on your HUD, and partly because the game will now default to a third-person camera view, meaning you’ll spend a lot of time looking at your character unless you switch back to first person.

As with the previous mega updates, Next feels too big to be able to summarise everything here, and a lot of the changes which will make a lot of difference to players will be under the quality of life heading rather than the eye-catching trailer stuff which gets prioritised in top-level explanations. For example, I’m excited about being able to build a base underwater, but ecstatic about being able to drag and drop resources from one inventory slot to another.

After Next launches, the team will be watching to see what players do with multiplayer. “It’s such a different stage,” says Murray. How players engage with the game, with these new tools and experiences, will inform how it evolves. But it will start to do so on via a smaller, more regular cadence. 

Until now we’ve seen massive updates which tend to rewrite both the philosophy of the game and large parts of the player experience. But shortly after Next is out in the wild, Hello Games will switch to weekly updates as the team continues to work on the game. There’s no confirmed date for that yet, though.

“It’s really important for us that people look at the game, look at Next, and they understand that this is a game that continues to evolve,” says Murray. “This isn’t like us saying here’s Next and it’s finished now. Maybe one day I’ll think No Man’s Sky is finished, but I don’t currently feel that way—the team doesn’t, I think.”

The trailer for No Man's Sky Next arrived yesterday, and feel free to give it another viewing above before reading on because there's a lot to take in. Hello Games provided a rundown of what its fourth free expansion will contain, including the long-awaited multiplayer feature and third-person perspective, but it can't hurt to dive in deeper and see what other details we can wrangle out of the footage.

Here's a breakdown of everything we spotted in the trailer, as well as a few things we didn't see.

Co-op appears to be four players max

It appears as though the multiplayer or team cap may top out at four. The only thing I've seen Hello Games say in terms of numbers is 'a small group' or 'a small team.' The screenshots shown contain no more than four players, and the various trailer scenes show a total of four players at any given time (with one possible exception I'll get to in a bit).

This could mean your team is maxed out at four, but what's unclear is what happens if you run into another team or solo player? Or two other teams? Or, like, 10 teams? I assume we'll find out very soon after Next arrives, as dedicated NMS players have already begun planning mass meetups.

One of the players is a Gek

There are four factions in No Man's Sky: the Korvax machine race, the grouchy Vy'keen warriors, the Travelers (players), and the birdlike yet aquatic Gek. Except in the trailer, one of the players is a Gek rather than a Traveler. Or, at least is a Gek who is a Traveler.

That's pretty cool, and I'm curious to see if players can also choose to be Vy'keen or Korvax, and if it's simply a cosmetic choice that can be swapped at will or if it has some deeper impact on the game.

Underwater bases?

There were random structures that could spawn underwater in No Man's Sky, and players have been able to build bases underwater with some clever terraforming, but water would still fill all the chambers of the base. It's hard to tell from the opening scene in the Next trailer, which shows players swimming around near some underwater buildings, if those structures are player-made or randomized spawns.

There's also a frame or two where you can see a much larger structure that looks like it could possibly be a player-built base:

According to Hello Games "Bases can now be built anywhere on any planet." This is great since it sounds like we won't need to have to find a randomly placed habitable outpost to begin building, but I'm hoping it also truly means anywhere, including at the bottom of an ocean where you could construct an air-tight habitat.

Are those pilotable mechs?

Hm.

So, near the end of the trailer there's a cool sight: one player and three big stompy robots. I'm not sure they're player-controlled, though—a car can be briefly spotted in the same scene, which I assume is driven by a player. So if there is a four-player team cap, and one is in a car, and one is running around on foot, there probably wouldn't be three more players piloting mechs at the same time. Unless you could have more than four players on your team, or if this shows a team of four encountering a fifth player. I don't know. I don't know!

Those mechs just might be extra-large sentinel bots (there's a small quadrupedal bot as well) on the lookout for anyone blowing up trees or stealing expensive resources. They might all be chasing the guy in the car for some infraction of the planet's guidelines (you can see a few standard hovering sentinels following the car, too). But it would be pretty cool if we could pilot those stomping bots around as a new exovehicle. And if not, I'd be surprised if some modders didn't make it happen in the future.

Portal pals

It's not clear how you'll be able to link up with your friends in the vast expanse of No Man's Sky. It may be as simple as inviting a friend to a session and having them appear beside you. If not, it could require using portals to crew up, which were dormant in the original game and only became functional in the Atlas Update. There's a brief glimpse in the trailer of a couple players strolling out of one.

NMS looks great in third-person

We've been able to see our ships in third-person perspective since the Pathfinder Update added a photo mode, but we could only use it while the game was paused. It made for some great screenshots, but it's exciting to think about running and flying around in real third-person mode in Next. It looks like some thought has been put into extra effects you wouldn't normally see while flying in first-person, like the wake the ship leaves when flying over the water.

(Also I think that pilot hit a tree.)

At last, ringed planets

The best planets are ringed planets. Scientists agree on this (probably), and so do I. I'm personally in favor of a mission to blow up our dumb boring moon and turn it into a sweet rocky ring around the earth. Please call your congressperson and help make it a reality.

Modders addressed the ringed planet shortcomings of No Man's Sky long ago, but it's still nice to see long-overdue official rings around planets. I'm interested to see what they look like up close: is it just an effect or are rings made of actual, mineable rocks?

Exterior freighter docking pads

Being able to dock on a freighter (and buy one) was introduced in the Foundation Update. But I sort of didn't care for the way you docked with them: fly too close to the entry port and you sort of automatically get sucked into the interior landing area, which is a bit of a hassle if you didn't intend to actually land.

At the end of the trailer, we see what appears to be a couple of exterior landing pads (I slowed it down in the gif above) outside the freighter with some ships parked on them. That feels a lot nicer than having to always park in the garage.

This little backpack dude lookin' around

I'm guessing this is just a cute animation of our suit's scanner, but this little pod attached to the player's backpack looking around is a nice touch. Like visiting an alien planet with a curious kid sitting on your shoulders.

What we didn't see much of

If there was a big disappointment at the initial launch of No Man's Sky for me, it had to do with the randomized alien lifeforms. Once you saw a few, you began to recognize the base parts and pieces they were mathematically cobbled together from, until each life form just became a familiar mix of limbs and beaks and claws you'd already seen dozens of times before. There just wasn't much magic to them, and when they were strolling around the randomized terrain on procedural legs, they often appeared clumsy, graceless, and completely artificial.

There's not a lot in the trailer showing off alien creatures. There are one or two in the background, and one scene lasting a few frames (slowed down above) with players attacking one of them. I'm hopeful there's been some work done on creatures along with everything else, and that we'll see some exciting and truly different lifeforms in Next. It's certainly not shown in the trailer, though, and not mentioned in the post on the official site.

"You can help friends to stay alive, or prey on others to survive." That's something Hello Games listed as a feature in NEXT, but it's hard to say how it will work or if any of it is included in the trailer. There are a few quick pew-pew spaceship scenes, but I can't tell if it's NPCs or players fighting each other. Certainly no face-to-face PvP combat is shown.

If you can prey on others to survive, does that mean you can take their loot? Their ships? Their bases? We don't know yet, but it won't be long until we find out: No Man's Sky Next arrives on July 24.

No Man's Sky's NEXT update is its "largest update so far", so reckoned developer Hello Games earlier this year. It's due next week—Tuesday, July 24—and has a new trailer. Feast your eyes on that above first, and we'll discuss what's new below. 

NEXT brings with it NMS' long-requested multiplayer support, unlimited base building and, as you can see above, improved graphics. The space explore-'em-up is now fully playable in first or third person—both on foot and inside your ship.

"Team up with a small team of friends and explore the universe together, or be joined by random travellers," says Hello Games on the game's much-anticipated multiplayer. "You can help friends to stay alive, or prey on others to survive. You can build tiny shelters or complex colonies that are shared for all players. 

"Fight as a pirate or a wingman in epic space battles with friends and enemies. Race exocraft across weird alien terrains, creating race tracks and trails to share online. The character customisation allows you to personalise your appearance." 

The developer explains curious adventurers can now assemble and upgrade fleets of frigates, which can be commanded from the bridge of their freighter. You can then send your fleet out into the vast expanse, or use them to explore specific systems. You can invite pals on missions too, says the dev—all of which allows for a "truly custom capital ship." 

Hello Games describes its NEXT update as an incredibly important one, but also "just another step in a longer journey". If you fancy taking the next step with them, No Man's Sky's NEXT is due July 24.