I've spent the bulk of the last few days playing No Man's Sky following the release of its Next expansion, and you know what? Next is almost entirely good, including some of the features it adds that I don't personally enjoy. As with the three earlier expansions, Next doesn't rebuild No Man's Sky as an entirely new game but instead adds new features and supports new and different ways to play it.

Here are my thoughts on No Man's Sky Next after about 25 hours of play this week.

The deeper focus on crafting is ultimately a good thing, even if you hate crafting

Creative Mode or Normal Mode? If one element of No Man's Sky is going to push you in a specific direction it's the crafting and resource gathering, which has been both overhauled and expanded in Next. It always felt odd to me that a space exploration game began with you running around with your head down shooting rocks and plants for an hour, and now it becomes an even longer process since it takes a few extra steps to get your ship up and running. You no longer just need to gather resources, you need to refine them.

Even though I don't care for the crafting in No Man's Sky (and honestly never did), it's a much better system now. As someone who just wants to fly around and look at weird alien stuff, having to constantly refuel life support, hazard protection, weapons systems, ship systems—even needing to gather resources to fill the mining laser you use to gather resources. The crafting always felt at odds with the nature of the game: here's a few quadrillion planets to visit, but here's a few quadrillion speedbumps in your way.

For people who really dig crafting in general, the old system wasn't great, either. It was far too basic. Now it's more robust and satisfying. There were already items that required several ingredients and steps to make, like warp fuel, but the complexity has extended down to other items as well. There's now a refinery process, a piece of equipment you need to place on the ground, add fuel to, then process raw materials with, and sometimes you even need to process the resulting materials a second time to make something else. It feels like you're really crafting instead of just murdering rocks and trees and sticking their broken corpses into a gas tank, and for those that enjoy a bit more complexity Next is a great overhaul.

To be clear: I don't like it! But I respect it. And now that there's actual co-op multiplayer, people who do enjoy that aspect of the game can work on building projects together. (Me, I'll be sailing around in Creative Mode.)

It looks and sounds even better than it did

No Man's Sky was always a staggeringly lovely game, a lush and colorful intergalactic postcard generator. Land on a planet, look around, and you're bound to find the cover of a pulp science-fiction novel just waiting to be photographed. 

Its looks have improved over the past two year and Next drops still more beauty into your eyes with new cloud systems, more impressive storms, better planetary generation systems, and improved textures. Planetary rings, which appear in just about every star system now, are the icing on the cake. Whatever algorithm generates beauty, Hello Games definitely worked it out early and keeps refining it.

There's new music and sound too, and it's all lovely, from the ambient planetary sounds to the indecipherable broadcasts of a freighter fleet to the haunting and stirring soundtrack. This is one of the few games I will always wear a headset for.

The menus are still pretty awful, though

To switch from first-person to third person, you have to press a bunch of keys to cycle through what I think is intended to be shortcut menu. It's a pain. When fueling and loading a refiner, one act requires you to press X and the other a mouse click. It's also a pain, and a confusing one. There's a menu you can't scroll at all without using the W and S keys despite having a mousewheel. It's a pain. No Man's Sky needs way more hot keys and way more thought put into mouse and keyboard controls.

This is stuff that can (and I hope will) be adjusted in future patches, because it's deeply unintuitive and cumbersome now (though perhaps it makes more sense on a controller). Flying in third-person mode with a mouse and keyboard is also extremely ungainly at first, though I've found a couple days into Next it's feeling much more natural.

Alien creatures are no longer front and center

One area No Man's Sky has still never quite realized its original promise is when it comes to alien creatures. That original E3 trailer with it's lumbering alien dinosaurs and flitting butterflies and massive sandworms—the game just never came close to living up to it, and despite everything the expansions have added, it still doesn't.

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but after landing on dozens of planets since Next arrived this week it seems like creatures simply don't appear as often. They're still present on most planets, but there seem to be fewer of them, and fewer variations of them, and they're typically smaller (large creatures had a lot of trouble walking on procedural terrain with procedural legs and usually wound up looking stupid). It feels as if they've just been dialed back as a whole because, quite frankly, they simply didn't work that well. If another big expansion arrives someday, I hope it focuses on making alien creatures something more wondrous so they can take center stage again.

Whatever your playstyle is, it's now supported

Solo play, co-op, survival, crafting, exploration, base-building, money-making, ship collecting, fleet management, farming, radiant task-based missions, and no-hassle creative mode wandering—the updates to No Man's Sky haven't just added new stuff but support for the different ways people want to experience the galaxy. Letting you join up with friends or connect with strangers gives us another experience to try, and you can always disable it if you still want to pretend you're alone in the galaxy.

You're not, though: Tens of thousands of others have either tried No Man's Sky for the first time or returned to it this week, and it's easy to see why. There are still plenty of rough patches to smooth out, and obviously not everyone is going to be digging the new, more complex crafting system. That's what's great about the current state of the game, though: there are lots of different ways to play.

I’m addicted to No Man’s Sky all over again. Since the Next update I’ve sunk ten hours into Hello Games’ colourful space game, and I’ve been taking snaps along the way with the excellent photo mode. Here are my personal highlights.

This really, really red system

This was my view the instant I warped into this system. That pristine, Earth-like world and its dazzling rings set against the piercing red of space stopped me in my tracks. If this was the cover of a sci-fi book I’d read it.

This massive water world

I’ve never seen a planet like this. A vast, endless ocean dotted with small, scattered islands, some of which were perfectly round, as if they were man-made. And on one of them, a lonely tree.

This cool rock

There are a lot of rocks in No Man’s Sky, but this one stuck out. I like it when the algorithm throws up a shape like this that looks kinda unnatural on the horizon. I spotted this thing miles away and just had to take a closer look.

This floating island

Floating islands like these are quite common, but there was something about the size and shape of this one that caught my eye. I love how ominous it looks just looming there silently against that burning orange sky.

These massive plants

Officially the biggest living thing I’ve encountered in No Man’s Sky. This lush, lively planet was covered in weird, enormous plants, but these were my favourite. I was half expecting it to eat me, but thankfully it didn’t.

This collection of planets

There’s something striking about seeing a bunch of planets in close proximity to each other. The one at the bottom-left of the screenshot is the water world I mentioned earlier. I think I’ll make this my home system.

This dark system

No Man’s Sky is defined by its vivid colours, but sometimes you’ll jump into a system like this. It’s a nice change of scenery and gives you an idea of what it might’ve looked like if Hello went for a more trad sci-fi aesthetic.

This giant avocado

Another cool rock, this time shaped like a scooped-out avocado, but one made of stone and roughly the size of a skyscraper. I don’t know if shapes like this are an accident, but I’m glad the algorithm occasionally coughs them up.

This amazing sky

I mean, look at it. What a view. I began a creative mode save and this was my starting planet, so I didn’t even have to look for it. The game just handed it to me. Another one that could be the cover of a vintage sci-fi novel.

This absolute unit

I don’t spend much time for looking for interesting creatures in No Man’s Sky, but I had to snap this guy. He was aggressive too, so moments after I took this he charged at me. Looks like someone skipped head day.

This stormy planet

Boiling hot rainstorms every minute made being stranded on this planet with no thruster fuel a bloody nightmare. But surviving, gathering enough resources to craft some, and escaping was immensely satisfying.

This, uh... whatever this is

This is one of the most bizarre and otherworldly planets I've landed on, covered in floating purple spores and  the strange plants pictured above. I mean, I assume they're plants. They could be intelligent life for all I know.

This crashed freighter

There’s something evocative about the image of a crashed starship. This one was absolutely massive, although I was in creative mode so I didn’t feel the need to go down and scavenge. I wonder what I would’ve found.

This orange planet

Similar to Chris’s depressing planet, this place seemed to change the entire colour palette of the game. The planet itself was kinda boring and lifeless, but the fiery colour scheme was cool to look at for a while.

This planetary ring

I found myself flying over this enormous planetary ring as the sun set over it, which was like something out of one of Roy Batty’s dying memories. The entire game is basically a procedural Roy Batty memory generator.

This big canyon

I love a good canyon, and this one felt particularly deep and wide when I stood on the edge. See that little starship flying through it? That’s a pal I was playing multiplayer with, which should give you a sense of its scale.

This abandoned starship

I found this dazzlingly yellow ship sitting in the middle of a green field, and I’m glad I was in creative mode so I could easily repair it and take it for myself. That ring around the engines is such a cool design element.

This ringed planet

This reminds me of when the Nostromo approaches LV-426 in Alien. There's something intimidating about this planet, shrouded in darkness, floating in a dark void. But when I landed it was actually quite nice.

This weird rock

This looked impressive from orbit, and when I swooped down I discovered that it was a giant floating island that was a few miles wide, covered in minerals ripe for mining. For some reason it reminds me of a giant game controller.

This vast desert

This desert had some really nice rock formations. I seem to land on a lot of desert worlds, but I love them. They usually have long, uninterrupted lines of sight, which makes the universe feel somehow more massive.

No Man's Sky has enjoyed a wave of positive Steam reviews following this week's NEXT update. But a number of PC players have had issues with game-breaking bugs tied to what appears to be corrupted save files. Patch 1.51 was released today to address the corrupted save issue. There are also fixes for bugs that were causing crashes plus some other small tweaks and improvements, including the ability construct Frigate Terminals in Creative Mode, which was absent.

See the complete patch notes below. These were tested on the No Man's Sky experimental server, so those experiencing the corrupted save issues will hopefully find this solves their problem. Players can also submit bug reports here.

• Fixed an issue where players who saved after partially repairing some items of technology would be unable to load that savegame. Please note that if the game has not been resaved, then progress has not been lost and will be recovered.
• Fixed a crash caused by memory corruption
• Fixed a crash in the animation system
• Fixed a crash when saving on a freighter
• Fixed a crash when fleet expeditions end without their capital ship present
• Fixed a number of memory leaks
• Fixed an issue where warping in multiplayer could cause players to spawn on a planet rather than in space
• Fixed an issue where freighter bases would be in the wrong position
• Fixed an issue where the build menu could crash if there was nothing available to build
• Fixed an issue where players would be unable to warp during the antimatter stage of the tutorial
• Fixed an issue where the mission destination would be incorrectly reported as in another system at the Hermetic Seal phase of the tutorial
• Fixed an issue where upgrade modules installed in the main Exosuit inventory would not be saved correctly.
• Fixed an issue where portable refiners placed near each other would share inventories
• Fixed an issue where the cockpit of some ships would continually open and close
• Fixed an issue where new controls were missing from the controls page
• Fixed a crash in creature routines
• Fixed a crash when multiple players put ammunition into a refiner
• Fix for occasional crash when receiving mission rewards
• Fix for crash when adjusting anisotropic filtering settings in the graphics options menu
• Fix for potential crash in geometry streaming
• Improvements to texture caching for AMD GPUs
• Fixed an issue where some players still had physical nanites in their inventory that could not be spent at vendors
• Granted players nanites when they dismantle their Obsolete Technology – spend nanites on new upgrades in Space Stations
• Added a tutorial mission to guide players through the restoration of their old base
• Fixed an issue where players were unable to build Frigate Terminals in Creative Mode
• Fixed an issue where S-Class ships changed appearance
• Fixed an issue where players were unable to build the Base Cache on their freighter to retrieve compensation for the loss of their freighter base
• Fixed an issue where some Exosuit technology was not converted to Obsolete Technology. Please note this does not apply retroactively to save games that have already been upgraded.
• Improved the mapping of old substances to new substances during the save upgrade. Please note this does not apply retroactively to save games that have already been upgraded.

"Can we give this game a round of applause for being one of the biggest redemption [stories] in game history?" reads one of No Man's Sky's most recent Steam reviews. Having launched its NEXT update earlier this week, players have returned to the space explorer in droves—many of whom seem to be enjoying their experience.

Of the 3,432 people that reviewed No Man's Sky on Steam over the last 30 days, 84 percent did so positively. As Murray points out above, this has raised its Overall Steam review rating to Mixed. And as Chris says, it seems that, two years later, the hype for No Man's Sky is back. Compare these figures to launch day, when 15,875 Steam reviews praised NMS for what it was; while 18,663 did not.

From now through 10am PST / 6pm BST, No Man's Sky is half-price on Steam—selling for £19.99/$29.99, down from £39.99/$59.99. 

Follow the link above if you fancy it, but, before you do, check out Pip and Chris's hands-on thoughts. The former explains what it's like to explore No Man's Sky Next with three other people. The latter asks: Is multiplayer really what No Man's Sky needs?

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.