During his keynote at dev conference Develop: Brighton, Hello Games' Sean Murray offered some advice for developers facing the type of troubled launch that No Man's Sky experienced when expectations and reality collided. It's simple advice but undoubtedly harder than it sounds: stop talking. 

"We went about two years without talking to press at all", Murray said. "And we went about three months without saying anything to the community, either. That was really hard. I sat down so many times and wrote the perfect blog post that was going to explain everything about the game's development, and the road map going ahead. But I could see that it didn't hold credibility with regards to where we were at."

No Man's Sky was huge and beautiful, but confusing and aimless and burdened with expectations that Hello Games did a bad job of tempering. In the face of review scores that were all over the place and a lot of negative player feedback, the studio remained staunchly silent, for the most part, until it had something concrete to offer. Since then, No Man's Sky has evolved into a much richer, welcoming game that still retains an air of mystery. 

Over the last year there have been several high-profile launches that went poorly, and in those cases the studios have been a lot more communicative. With Fallout 76, Anthem and Sea of Thieves, the respective teams were on Twitter and giving interviews acknowledging the issues and promising changes, followed by roadmaps and piecemeal updates. 

"I can see EA, Microsoft,or Bethesda try to placate players by just talking to them, but for right or wrong, it just doesn't really work. You see this all the time when a big publisher will talk to the community and try to solve the problem and then get embroiled, taking up more and more of its head space."

Quietly working away ended up being the right way for Hello Games to do things, but it's definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution. Anthem's taken a beating this year, but whenever BioWare shares its plans or discusses the issues, there's a wave of goodwill from players who want to know where the game is going. And there's one significant difference between No Man's Sky and Fallout 76, Sea of Thieves and Anthem: it's not really a multiplayer game. At launch, it didn't even have co-op. 

MMOs and games as a service have in-game events and generally a greater cadence of updates and hotfixes than singleplayer games. An MMO developer going radio silent just invites confusion and frustration. Just look at what's been happening in EVE Online, where an ostensibly interesting event has become a grind that's interfering with players' own stories and wars. The longer CCP remained silent, the more the mood turned sour. 

In the case of Sea of Thieves, Rare has managed to turn the game around and keep players informed. Even last year, it was starting to show its potential. A year later and it's still popular, the community is largely happy and it's heading in a similar direction as No Man's Sky. Even Fallout 76, the butt of jokes for a while, is starting to look promising, and having a roadmap that lets players know NPCs are coming or when they were able to start setting up their own stores kept people interested, even after the initial disappointment.  

Valve, not normally very chatty anyway, isn't going to be doing any talking about Aritfact in the near future, instead focusing on figuring out where it went wrong. It had lost most of the players that picked it up at launch by the time this happened, though. With autobattlers being the new trend, it feels like people have really just forgotten about it though. If it comes back, I'm not sure anyone is really going to care.

Murray's approach seems to still be working for No Man's Sky, however. Hello Games isn't radio silent now, but generally it doesn't share too much until there's something fairly tangible to show off. That middle ground it's found sounds more realistic for other developers, where players are informed but their expectations are managed. 

Cheers, GamesRadar.

Here's a nice update to a story we published back in June (which you can read in full below). A crowdfunding effort by No Man's Sky fans to buy a billboard thanking Hello Games for its hard work has come to fruition.

The billboard is officially up, not far from the Hello Games studio in Guildford. Pretty spectacular timing, too, since No Man's Sky Beyond arrived this week and we've all been riding alien creatures and trying to impress alien food critics.

The larger-than-average 'thank you' did not go unnoticed by Hello Games. Sean Murray stopped by today on his way home from work to grab a snap.

Due to the positive response to the crowdfunding campaign, the organizer raised the amount from $1,750 to $6,000, and as promised, the surplus money was used to buy games for kids at the Children's Hospital at Westmead.

Original Story: 

It's been a heck of a journey for No Man's Sky: From massive hype to major letdown, consumer complaints, feelings of abandonment, weird ARGs, big promises, more hype, and a slow, relentless effort to build the game into something resembling its early promise. It's actually pretty close to that mark now, and the No Man's Sky fanbase is doing something pretty cool to express its gratitude to Hello Games for sticking with it. 

The billboard isn't actually up yet, and the design seen in the image is a mock-up created by GoFundMe organizer Cam G, who said they're open to changing it to ensure everyone who backs the campaign is happy. But the campaign is live now because the billboard has to be locked down well in advance of when it's actually posted.

"Billboards are booked months even up to years in advance, we were lucky enough to be offered a 2 week campaign within a 2 minute drive of the Hello Games office in Guildford, UK," they explained. "The closest available time slot was a 2 week period from 12 Aug 2019."

A portion of the funds will also go toward buying a case of beer and lunch for Hello Games, which is a nice touch. But I don't think Cam anticipated just how much cash he'd have to divert to non-billboard purposes: After less than 24 hours, the campaign has already raised far more than its $1750 goal. With that surplus likely to grow significantly, he announced plans to launch a "charity drive" to help bring games to sick children. 

"I thought if we have already achieved this in half of a day imagine what we could do to help kids who really need the joy, escape, and most importantly the beautiful shared experiences that you get in playing and simply talking to others who will listen," they wrote.

"I just want to say thanks to everyone who donated, all excess funds will be going toward giving games to sick kids. I'm really excited to share my vision for this cause. I'll be updating everyone on the process of this through the GoFundMe page, Reddit and on Discord." 

Cam G said a detailed plan would be shared in a GoFundMe update and on r/thegiftofgaming, but there's no formal framework currently in place. That might be a little off-putting—big ideas are nice, but execution is what matters—but that's the nature of crowdfunding anyway: You find a cool idea, throw some money at it, and hope the guy at the other end doesn't run off with it in the night. 

And I really hope this one goes smoothly: Even without the charity element, the billboard is a lovely idea, and the response to it genuinely heartwarming. Hello Games had a very rough ride with No Man's Sky at launch, but it followed through on its commitment to stick with it (which we can all be forgiven for having some doubts about), and it kind of reaffirms my faith in humanity to see that effort recognized by the community. 

This week's tragic fire at Paris's Notre-Dame Cathedral has inspired one No Man's Sky player to recreate the iconic building in space—and the results are seriously impressive. 

The player, posting on Reddit as user 258100, built the model out of thousands of parts using Blender, and then exported it into the game using the Base Builder Plug-in for Blender mod. 

It's just a facade, meaning you can't explore inside, and the player says it's "not great looking" if you view it from a side angle. But it's still a majestic sight, and you can see an album of images here, complete with some neat filter work. They say they'll "recreate the entire thing" if base building in No Man's Sky is improved.

You can see it for yourself if you're willing to go to the effort: 258100 shared its co-ordinates, which are ETAT:055A:0076:0E31:01D4, and you'll be able to visit if you use a mod such as the Online Location Manager.

They weren't the only ones paying tribute to the cathedral following the fire—Ubisoft has been praised for donating €500,000 towards restoration efforts, and is giving away its Parisian adventure Assassin's Creed Unity for free until April 25.

Thanks, GamesRadar.

Part of the No Man's Sky Beyond update will include a full overhaul of the graphics rendering API, switching from OpenGL to Vulkan. While the final release of the Vulkan update won't be available until Beyond is finished, Hello Games is excited enough about the improvements it's seeing that it has made the Vulkan update available on the experimental branch. I haven't played NMS for a while, but with the announcement I thought I'd perform some quick tests to see how much the update does—or doesn't—improve performance.

First, to install the experimental branch, you'll need to open up the NMS properties panel in steam, go to the Betas tab, and input "3xperimental" into the text box. Once you've pressed the Check Code button, you should be able to select the "experimental - Experimental" beta from the dropdown list. That should also initiate a 3.8GB update to NMS, and once it's complete you can give the Vulkan patch a try.

Hello Games recommends backing up your saves before playing with the experimental branch (they're in your AppData\Roaming\HelloGames\NMS folder), as switching back to the standard branch with an updated save file could cause problems. Also note that switching back to the main branch will download a 5.6GB update, so you probably don't want to switch back and forth several times. (Don't ask me how I know this.) But let's talk numbers for a minute.

I tested No Man's Sky on a GTX 1080 Ti and a Radeon VII at maximum quality. These two graphics cards should have relatively similar performance based on testing in other games, though to be fair we're comparing a two-year-old discontinued Nvidia card with AMD's latest and greatest. I ran around on a planet for a minute or so, logging frametimes, and did this at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K.

Without Vulkan, the GTX 1080 Ti scored 155/109 fps at 1080p (that's average and minimum fps), 119/80 fps at 1440p, and 66/46 fps at 4K. So far so good. AMD's Radeon VII meanwhile was a shockingly bad experience. The first run at each resolution had frequent stuttering, with minimum fps dipping into the teens at all three resolutions. 1080p ran at 59/14 fps, 1440p at 48/12 fps, and 4K at 35/12 fps. A second run of each resolution (right after the first) did better, but still nowhere near what I expected: 1080p got 71/45 fps, 1440 at 61/37 fps, and 4K at 40/24 fps. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Radeon VII without the Vulkan update is running at roughly half the expected framerate. Ouch.

The Vulkan update basically fixes things. Once that's installed, the Radeon VII scores 146/110 fps at 1080p, 110/86 fps at 1440p, and 61/48 fps at 4K. Average framerates are still slightly slower than the GTX 1080 Ti, but that's about what I expect. Meanwhile, for Nvidia (at least on Pascal architecture GPUs—I didn't test any RTX cards), the Vulkan update appears to drop performance a bit: the GTX 1080 Ti gets 147/108 fps at 1080p, 107/74 fps at 1440p, and 59/45 fps at 4K. That's about 10 percent lower, whereas the AMD GPU nearly doubled its performance.

Obviously the results can and will differ with other GPUs, but since this is a beta Vulkan build I didn't go any further. There's still work to do before the Beyond update is out, but if you want to give it a shot (and you should if you're playing NMS on an AMD GPU), Hello Games is also accepting reports of bugs and issues with the experimental branch.

We found out last week that No Man's Sky VR is coming this summer as part of the Beyond expansion. This is great news for anyone who already owns the space exploration game and has a VR headsest: No Man's Sky VR is a free update, just like every other expansion released so far. There's no need to buy a new copy of the game: if you own No Man's Sky, you'll soon own the VR version of it too.

There's no reason to even start over from the beginning (unless you want to). When No Man's Sky VR arrives with Beyond, you'll be able to jump right into your current save file where you left off, only now you'll be able to use a VR headset. You can visit your existing base and all your favorite planets without missing a beat. You'll also be able to play co-op with friends—even if they don't have VR headsets of their own.

And there's more good news: I tried No Man's Sky in VR at the Game Developers Conference last month, and it's fantastic.

I wasn't stunned when I first put on a VR headset in No Man's Sky and stepped onto an alien world. My mouth didn't drop open, I wasn't frozen in awe and wonder, and it wasn't jarring or shocking to suddenly be seeing the game in a whole new way.

I mean this as a compliment. No Man's Sky is such a great fit for VR that suddenly experiencing it in virtual reality felt completely natural to me. The key to tricking your brain in VR, I've found, is for the experience to feel as intuitive and normal as possible. Even though work on No Man's Sky VR isn't yet done, I already felt perfectly at home inside it. Whatever voodoo is required to make a game feel just right in VR, Hello Games seems to have nailed it.

I didn't take long to get used to the controls. To use the mining laser you reach over your shoulder, as if it's holstered there John McClane style, and squeeze the grips. Menus can be accessed by holding up your hand in front of your face, which brings up a small display which can then be selected with the finger of your other hand. Climbing into a spaceship or exocraft is done via gesture: reach one hand out to it, squeeze the controller's grip, and pull your hand back toward yourself. These motions and controls are the kind you only need to do once, and then you've just got it. They're natural and intuitive.

I spawned a Roamer, the four-wheeled buggy, climbed inside, and went speeding over the landscape, zipping up hills and then feeling my stomach drop out as I plunged into a valley. If felt great driving, even at high speeds over procedurally generated terrain. Climbing out of vehicles is fun and intuitive too: I just looked to my left, saw a lever, grabbed it, and pulled it up, which lifted the cockpit window and deposited me back on the planet.

Maybe the coolest part was using the terrain tools, the manipulator that lets you tunnel through the planet's surface or mold it into shapes. Pointing the gun at the ground in front of me and then instantly raising a towering spire of rock, it's just cool. I'm not much of a base-builder or terrain molder in my own game, but it's hard not to feel the magic of changing the face of the world by simply pointing at it and moving your arm.

As you'd expect, flying a spaceship around is the highlight of No Man's Sky in VR, though I did have some issues steering. Maybe I'm just used to having more pinpoint control using the mouse, but moving the virtual flightstick around felt a bit sluggish to me. Still, the work on NMS VR isn't done, so hopefully it will feel more responsive when the update arrives this summer.

After cruising through space for a bit, shooting asteroids and admiring the planet I was standing on a few minutes earlier, I flew to the nearest space station and walked around using normal locomotion rather than teleportation. That felt great too, smooth and fluid in a way a lot of VR games haven't seemed to master. As another nice little surprise, I noticed the alien NPCs were actually walking around the space station themselves. After a few years of seeing hundreds of Korvax, Gek, and Vy'keen either sitting or standing motionless, it was downright delightful to see them striding around and it made the station feel dynamic and alive.

When Beyond arrives this summer, I don't think it'll be a case of me playing No Man's Sky exclusively in VR, or even mostly in VR. At the core of the game there's just too much inventory management, and even though NMS VR handles it well, and it's easy to pull up the menus, cycle through them, and make your selections, the last thing I want to do in VR is spend half my time poking around menu screens. 

But I am going to fly around in creative mode a lot. I'm going to revisit all my favorite planets and experience them again in VR. I'm definitely going to drive that Roamer around again, I'm going to pilot my submarine around and stare at some procedural fish, and I can't wait to take the hovering Nomad for a spin, too. As a way to experience the boundless exploration of a beautiful procedural universe, I honestly have a hard time imagining a better fit for VR than No Man's Sky.

Sure, just yesterday Wes says Stormland is shaping up to be the best VR game of 2019. Well, fine. I guess I'll just say No Man's Sky is shaping up to be the best VR game of 2016, then. If you're a fan of No Man's Sky and own a VR headset, you should be as excited as I am. If you don't own a headset, this might be the excuse you've been looking for to get one.