Since last months Atlas Rises release, five more patches have been delivered to the space exploration game, No Man’s Sky. The developer, Hello Games, has fixed a multitude of problems the game was suffering from and included some new features that many fans have been waiting for.
We’ve decided to take a look at excerpts from the patch notes – changes that really stood out to us.
Features
- One of the most interesting features added in the latest patch was ship handling. Now you can expect your starship to handle differently depending on its class and type. Thus meaning, your shuttle is going to be slower and steadier than your zippy little explorer. I’ll admit, I hadn’t read the patch notes and was pleasantly surprised to find my explorer was a lot quicker to get around. In addition to this, you will now be able to see your ships handling on a screen within the cockpit. “Each individual ship now has procedural handling and speed characteristics, based on their type and class,” says developer Hello Games.
- When at a global trading station, you will now be able to quickly change between buying and selling, which is a welcome addition seeing as before you had to back out of the entire ‘conversation’ in order to re-enter it to sell or buy.
- Another feature added to the game is the ability to see which words have been translated whilst in conversation with an alien life form. It’s nice to see this, as it can be quite confusing to get to grips with how much of a sentence you can understand. Colour coding is always fun.
- PC players will now find that it’s a lot easier to navigate menus with this patch. Q, E, W, S, A and D controls have been refined.
These are just a few of the new features added to the game, with a whole host of others being bundled into the patch. Including flashlights in caves, menu and popup tweaks, item transferring and item crafting.
Bug fixes
- Many players will be relieved to hear that they are finally going to be able to save their games again. The bug that has been squashed previously prevented players who had been playing for a long time from saving their game, which proved annoying and almost made the experience, literally, unplayable. Now, there should be no more issues.
- Another bug which players are happy to see has been squashed, were the annoying white markers that would permanently pop up over points of interest, and would never disappear – proving to disrupt gameplay heavily.
- Another smaller bug that’s been squashed are the ‘?’ waypoint markers that appear when you scan the planet surface from inside your ship – I personally found my ship was ‘finding’ places of interest that were on the opposite side of the planet. Waypoints should be a lot more reachable now.
Of course, this is only scratching the surface of all of the new little features and bug squashing that Hello Games has been working hard to deliver. Read the full list of changes in the patch notes.
If you’ve been holding out on playing No Man’s Sky – especially after the more than rocky release – I would absolutely recommend picking it up now. Well, maybe not at the price it currently sits at, but if it pops up in a sale, be sure to snap it up.