The latest No Man’s Sky update has me excited to play again, six long years later
Hello Games has launched another big update for No Man’s Sky, a game that I’ve spent six full years telling myself I’m going to get back into one of these days. For one reason or another, Interceptor has been the perfect excuse to finally make good on my personal promise, and I’m happily exploring the colorful worlds of its procedurally generated galaxy.
For Travelers who’ve been playing along this whole time, Interceptor introduces a bunch of tough new enemy variants: There are now corrupted versions of those damnable Sentinel drones who wander around most planets, zapping you if they catch you tripping over the wrong pebble or space bunny. Picking fights with these corrupted Sentinels will lead Travelers off on a whole new adventure, hunting new multitools, starfighters, and even sweet new jetpacks with Transformers-style wings on them.
That’s all still quite a way off for me, though. Over all the years I’ve had No Man’s Sky in my Steam library, I’ve only put in about 30 hours—and probably a good eight of those have been in the last week. I’m still working my way through the story in Survival mode, filling my first real base with scientists and engineers, gradually upgrading my gear and trying to figure out whatever happened to poor Artemis.
Every time I’ve tried getting back into No Man’s Sky, I’ve always struggled a bit. It has its own weird language and its own way of doing things like crafting and inventory management, and those have changed over the years as well, which makes it doubly disorienting to return to them after months or years away. Playing on survival mode means dealing with these systems quite a lot, and the initial couple hours in that mode have been known to be a bit of a slog from the outset.
But I’ve got to say, now that I’ve got my ship put back together, enough upgrades in both it and my exosuit to allow me to explore most planets at will, this is one hell of a game now. It’s taken years of work, but No Man’s Sky has managed to chart an arc of redemption from its launch as a “great disappointment” to I daresay fulfilling its own lofty promises—and it just keeps growing.
Last year, I had the opportunity to talk with Hello Games founder Sean Murray about the launch of the 4.0 patch, and I asked him specifically about how he feels that the phrase “pulling a No Man’s Sky” has entered the gaming nomenclature. This game, after all, represents more than eleven years of his career and life’s work, and its story is hardly one anyone could have predicted.
Murray told me that he just feels lucky that he gets to wake up every day and keep working on this game. That redemption arc story is one that’s mostly for people outside Hello Games, he said, for journalists and comments sections.
“The team here are just doing what they’ve always done, which is really enjoying making a game and getting excited about it,” Murray said. “I’m super proud and really lucky to work with that team. Nothing has changed from that point of view. That is the constant in my life, feeling really lucky to work with them.”
The fact that Hello Games has simply continued to pour its collective creative energies into No Man’s Sky is, I think, a major part of what makes stepping into it now feel so magical. As much time as players have spent charting its planets and cataloging its goofy alien dinosaurs, there’s always been more to discover. There are always new expeditions to go on together, new updates to figure out, new weird stuff to look at. That sense of a constantly expanding horizon helps make No Man’s Sky feel big in a way few games can manage without feeling empty or dreary as well.
No Man’s Sky is a big game, in the conventional sense, of course. Updates like Interceptor make it feel even bigger than it is. It’s been the welcome nudge I needed to get back into No Man’s Sky, and there sure is a lot to see.
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