The original launch of No Man?s Sky was rife with controversy. Many gamers expected a massive sandbox set in space, where you could venture out and group up with friends, or terrorize others as you saw fit. What launched instead was a much more modest game. While still a technical marvel, featuring quintillions of planets across perhaps as many solar systems, plenty of people outright hated the game, some demanding refunds. Hello Games stayed quiet to the controversy, which certainly didn?t help matters. That is, until, the Foundation update landed, setting the stage for the developer to claw back some goodwill via multiple updates. Fast-forward to last week, and No Man?s Sky NEXT launched, bringing with it a lot of multiplayer-focused features, but also just a ton of tweaks and quality-of-life updates fans are sure to love. We?ve spent almost a week with this update, and have our impressions ready for you below. It’s Elemental
There?s so many updates in NEXT, that it?s difficult to figure out where to start. Perhaps the basics will suffice. No Man?s Sky is a crafting survival game at heart, not unlike Minecraft. However, No Man?s Sky takes a more sci-fi approach. It has an element-based crafting system, featuring dozens of different elements such as Carbon, Oxygen, Sodium, Dihydrogen, and more inventive elements or compounds such as concentrated Carbon, Pure Ferrite, and many more. A couple of elements, such as Thamium9, have been removed, having been replaced by se...