No Man’s Sky update aims to fix one of the most controversial games ever released

The new version of the game brings many of the things that were expected in the first version of the game and never arrived

Andrew Griffin
Monday 28 November 2016 12:43 EST
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No Man’s Sky, the hugely controversial game, has received an update that its makers hope will soothe some of players’ complaints.

The game was released earlier this year too much fanfare. But complaints rushed in when players finally got their hands on it, with complaints that developer Hello Games hadn’t delivered many of the features they had shown off in pre-release videos and posts.

Now the makers hope to fix at least some of those problems with version 1.1 of the game, labelled the “Foundation update”. It’s called such because it lays the foundations for base building – one of the central features of the game, according to early ads, but not one that actually appeared when it shipped.

That lets people build their own structures on home planets, which are also a new addition. Those bases can serve as places to store things, as well as bases for research and shelter.

It means that it builds on some of the promise of the game being a space version of Minecraft, a game known most for its building features.

As well as bases, the new update adds things like a survival mode, which makes it much harder for people to live on foreign worlds and so depends on people playing against the harsh environment.

Hello Games and creator Sean Murray haven’t said much about the game since that controversial first release. Both Twitter accounts have been mostly silent, save for a now-deleted tweet that referred to the game as a “mistake” and which was later explained away as part of a hack.

But Sean Murray posted on Twitter soon after the release, suggesting that it was intended as a a way of delivering on some of the promises he and the developers had made in advance of the game.

He also said that anyone would have “lived our lives over the last months” would know “how meaningful” the new update is.

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