No Man’s Sky Day One Update Gets Detailed
In the current generation of consoles, it’s not uncommon for a game to go “gold”, or be given the go-ahead to get launched in stores, and then have the team work on a patch for the game that’ll coincide with the launch. This is referred to as a “Day One” patch. Usually this happens with massive games that would take a long time to fix, and would thus delay the launch. So for developers, a Day One Patch is preferable.
This apparently includes No Man’s Sky, which launches tomorrow, and has been confirmed to be getting a massive Day One Patch that’ll include many fixes and gameplay additions.
Sean Murray posted on the Hello Games website and explained the patch, as well as gave many details about what’s in it:
“When we went gold five or six week ago, we posted on twitter, and literally every reply was like “hope you are going on a nice holiday!”. Some of us have, but I didn’t want to, not yet. I pictured myself somewhere staring out the window thinking about this game I’ve been working on for five years.
We’re under a pretty intense spotlight right now, and hopefully it’s easy to imagine how hard it would be to switch off from that, or how deeply we care about people’s first impression of the game.
In fact most of us were back here the day after we went gold, working on this update. We’re already proud of what we put on a disk, but if we had time, why not continue to update it?
Hello Games will continually update No Man’s Sky this way. This is the first of many.”
A snippet of the update is below, the rest can be seen on the blog post:
“Beware these notes contain some spoilers. Here are some things our little team has been up to over the last four or five weeks:
- The Three Paths – there are now new, unique “paths” you can follow throughout the game. You must start the game on a fresh save, with the patch, as early choices have significant impact on what you see later in the game, and the overall experience.
- The Universe – we changed the rules of the universe generation algorithm. Planets have moved. Environments have changed biomes. Galaxies have altered shape. All to create greater variety earlier. Galaxies are now up to 10x larger.
- Diversity – Creatures are now more diverse in terms of ecology and densities on planets.
- Planets – we’ve added dead moons, low atmosphere and extreme hazardous planets. Extreme hazards include blizzards and dust storms.
- Atmosphere – space, night time and day skies are now 4x more varied due to new atmospheric system, which refracts light more accurately to allow for more intense sunsets.
- Planet rotation – play testing has made it obvious people are struggling to adjust to this during play so it’s effects have been reduced further…
- Terrain generation – caves up to 128m tall are now possible. Geometric anomalies have been added. Underwater erosion now leads to more interesting sea beds.”