Even better than finding an interesting planet in No Man's Sky is finding an interesting system, where the planets form something of a theme. In my early days of playing, I found an Earth-like planet with a moon that looked a lot like our own (at least from space). While exploring the Next expansion this week, I discover another cool system. It has two planets, one of which my ship's scanner considers a 'Paradise Planet,' while the other it calls a 'Forsaken Planet.' Good and bad. Goofus and Gallant.

It seems like a nice duo to compare against one another, but then I notice a third planet further off in the distance. My scanner labels it a 'Terraforming Catastrophe'. That's a designation that's been in the game before Next arrived, but I still want to check it out. So I land and discover the saddest, shabbiest planet I've ever visited.

When I enter the atmosphere and approach the surface, it's like the color drains out of the entire game. That image above, that's not a filter. That's just how it is here. It's like Dorothy leaving Oz and going back to Kansas. Here's a short video to show you what I mean:

There are plenty of lifeless, airless, somewhat dismal planets in No Man's Sky, but this one feels much different. My first impulse is to leave, but I'm sort of intrigued by the world. Not only is it colorless, it also makes me colorless, draining the vibrancy out of my ship, my rockets, even out of my own character. It's almost monochrome, except for the water which looks brown like... well, sewage certainly come to mind. Also interesting is that unlike a lot of the darker, more morbid planets I've visited in No Man's Sky is that there's actually life here, both plant an animal.

What there isn't, however, is any joy to be found, even in normally enjoyable tasks like scanning creatures and plant life. The plants are tall and bulbous and expel clouds of fumes into the sky, which is the color of a fart (if farts had a color). Storms roll in every few minutes, not dramatic ones, just a bit of wind and rain and fog that dampen what little color there is here to begin with. I get into the habit of looking through my scanner simply because it adds some green and blue tint to the world, but the moment I stop everything is dull and gray again. 

I decide to feed one of the little crab critters scuttling around just to give something on this planet a little happiness. The critter eats and the smiley face icon appears. Less than a second later he's mauled to death by another creature, which then starts to eat him. As the predator feeds on the dead crabbie, I burn it with my laser. It doesn't run away as my mining laser burns it. It doesn't even look up or care that I'm killing it. It just eats while it's dying, and then it dies. Anything to escape this planet, I guess. I feed another crab and it too is summarily killed by another predator. What the hell, man? Is happiness against the law here?

I fly around a bit more, thinking maybe I'll stay a while and scan every species, maybe even find something that appears not quite so miserable. I take a swim into toilet-water sea, finding a few drab sharks and some squids whose heads inflate to propel them around. I eventually find eight of the nine species, and head out to try to locate the ninth.

I fly around landing here and there, seeing only the same crabbies and turtle-panthers and boars and sharks, the same fart blossom plants, and not much else. I kill a few fart blossoms and no sentinels even fly over to scrutinize me. Even the extremely touchy metal guardians of galactic flora don't care about Sadworld, which is what I name the planet. Blow up whatever you like.

Half the world is brown ocean, so I check out more of the coastline and some islands. Islands are always nice, right? Even those floating in a sea of toilet water? Most of the islands on Sadworld are completely bland circles, the least imaginative kind of island you could picture. On one I find a single tree, a single crab, and a single boar. The boar promptly kills the crab. I didn't even get a chance to feed it.

One island looks just like a Google Maps indicator. It's just pointing to more brown water, though, as if to say "Want to visit? Well, this is all we've got. Toilet water, a bunch of it. It's right here. You probably don't want to visit, though. Whatever."

I finally locate and scan the final creature of Sadworld. It's half-boar, half-fish, and it's swimming in an awkward circle in the poop ocean, completely alone, which feels appropriate. I can't think of anything else to do here but leave. I climb out of the sea and pause before getting in my ship, admiring the view of the ringed paradise planet above.

Clouds immediately roll in and block it from view. Of course they do! There's no happiness allowed here on Sadworld. Not even for a moment. 

So, yesterday was weird. No Man's Sky sat atop the global top sellers list on Steam at a price of $60 while I sat there endlessly refreshing Sean Murray's Twitter, waiting for the download to begin. It was like it was 2016 again—though No Man's Sky did go on sale for 50% off and this time players could actually see each other in the game.

I wasn't the only one blasting off into the Next expansion: at its peak yesterday, No Man's Sky had 41,861 concurrent players on Steam. Naturally, that's not close to the all-time peak after the 2016 launch, which saw over 200 thousand concurrents. It's still twice as many the Atlas Rises update drew in 2017, which pulled in around 20,000 concurrents, according to Steam Charts.

With No Man's Sky selling well this week, it's impossible to say how many of these players are trying it for the first time and how many are returning after a break to check out the new features. And of course there are those who have been playing regularly all along. At this moment, No Man's Sky is the tenth most played game on Steam.

Update: Because of the delay in bringing multiplayer support to No Man's Sky on GOG, it is offering an extended refund policy on the game. Until 3 pm PT/6 pm ET on July 29, NMS owners can request a refund regardless of when they purchased the game.  

Original story:

Owners of the DRM-free version of No Man's Sky, which is only available on GOG.com, will not have access to the game's new multiplayer features until later this year. That's according to a joint statement made by GOG and Hello Games on the GOG forums, where the news was released roughly three hours ago.

"From launch, the DRM-free edition of No Man's Sky will include all single-player content introduced by NEXT: third-person mode, upgraded visuals, better base building, player customization, and more," the statement reads.

"However the multiplayer component will not be ready at launch; we expect it to be released later this year as full multiplayer parity remains in the pipeline."

The post goes on to explain the delay, pointing to the complexity of adding the functionality across a variety of platforms at once. The Next update has rolled out  across Steam and PS4, this week as well as launching with the newly released Xbox One version."For a small, independent studio, developing the feature across multiple platforms is a hugely ambitious and technical challenge which resulted in this delayed release," the statement reads. "Hello Games is however joining forces with GOG.COM to introduce full multiplayer via the GOG Galaxy platform. We appreciate your immense support and patience."

No Man's Sky Next went live earlier today, and Chris has already experimented with the game's frankly weird player customization feature. Expect to hear more from him on the update shortly.

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.