So after over two months of silence Hello Games have come out and announced an update coming to No Man's Sky this week.

There isn't a lot of information. They call it a foundation patch and detailed patch notes should be coming soon.

Here's the full post: http://www.no-mans-sky.com/2016/11/development-update-2/

I was hoping when they broke their silence they'd have something more substantial than this sounds but I'll wait and see what the full patch notes are.

EDIT: The patch is available now. You can see the full patch notes here.

And here's a video with all the details on the patch:

To me that is too little too late.

And as the article already says, what is the point of base building if a) there is no multiplayer and b) you hop from planet to planet very fast.

What a waste

Way too little too late. They could do a million updates, but the luster is gone and the lies were too grand. I enjoyed the game when it first came out, but it wore thin after about a week. I've had no desire to go back to it, and there's not really anything they can do to bring me back, especially just adding things that other survival games already have.

I'm interested to see how they handled the base building, if it will at all be an extensive gameplay feature or just kind of meaningless.

Well the update is literally called foundation so I doubt it'll be anything substantial.

Especially since it's a game where you never really stay in one system for a prolonged period of time. It's all about moving forward. What's the point of having a base on a planet if you're going to be leaving it in an hour or two?

Weird.

This just shows that the game was launched more or less in Early Access but without actually telling anyone. I could imagine a version of this game that would be fun to play, but honestly base building isn't where I'd start. I'd start with improving the combat (there's a reason so many games base gameplay around combat...it can be really fun if done well) and then by creating some kind of narrative drive. I'm not even talking about a "story", just, I don't know, some missions or something and some NPCs you can interact with multiple times.

If they do add base building they are going to, at the very least, going to have to let you fast travel to your base and back, sort of like town portaling in Diablo, otherwise the system will be at odds with everything else in the game. If it takes me 30 minutes to travel back to my base I'm just abandoning it and moving on.

This game is one of the most disappointing pieces of software I have ever purchased. I am willing to give them a chance to turn it around, because the fundamental technology IS pretty cool, but I am skeptical.

The problems with No Man's Sky are:

A) Nothing you do (with the possible exception of learning languages and collecting upgrades) is inherently fun

B) There's nothing driving you to do anything except discovery, and the discoveries start to blend into one another after about 3-5 hours of gameplay.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

sigh

Fuck, I don't think that's what people wanted to hear. I think Jeff was right when he said that Hello Games should be quiet until they released a substantial update that would address most of the games shortcomings. Until they have such an update they shouldn't say anything.

People are angry, some people way more angry than they have right to. Sending death threats because of a game is never okay no matter how angry you are. And people have lost patience and faith with Hello Games. Releasing a patch note that basically tells people to be patient for things to come... boy.

I fear No Man's Sky is a lost cause at this point.

Hopefully publishers will think more carefully about what they push developers to show and tell about an unreleased game from now on. Don't make promises you can't keep.

It'll be interesting to go back to it. I'm definitely going to dive back in again. It's good to see they're still working on it. It's going to be hard for them to regain everything they lost.

I really don't understand why they would put base building into this game...

Isn't the whole point of the game to jump from planet to planet and see new stuff? Why would I want to invest time into building a base on a planet I may never see again? Or at what point would I want to return to a planet I've already explored?

I'm gonna guess it will be some sort of warp point, where you can fast travel to your base from anywhere in the galaxy, but again, why would I want to go backwards? They need to put in a big incentive to even build a base otherwise this update may be pretty pointless to a lot of people.

Cool. As someone with no interest or investment in this game at all, it's at least interesting to see what they plan on trying to do to it. I'll be curious to see what their idea of fun base building is and how it fits into this game. It doesn't sound like something that will suit the game from the little I played, but we'll see.

no man's sky is definitely a game that needed to come out "when it's done." no 2nd chance to make a first impression. i own it so ill try out what they got, hopefully they can inject some life into it. damn shame, if they had a year or so more i think things may have been different.

i think maybe your ship should be your base, so to speak, and you should have more diverse options to craft it. either that or a diablo hub.

My guess is the goal is to make it into a 3d space terraria at some point.

Sounds like fun...

Sounds good. I enjoyed my time with No Man's Sky and continual updates would probably get me to play it again.

People will build bases for no good reason beyond creativity. See Fallout 4's walking dick tanks.

@zombie2011 said:

Because right after that leaked copy and the response that followed their tiny echo chamber fostered for years in that small team, where I'm sure they kept telling themselves that the game was fantastic, was finally shattered.

Then despair set in and they were like "well... the kiddies like base building on all those survival thingies right?? RIGHT???!?! let's do that!!"

But I'm absolutely positive that whatever it ends up being it will be just as shallow and worthless as 90% of all the systems in this game... my hope for it == -99999

At what point? 2035?

They can't really make this into space Terraria because they don't have persistence. The world is generated by algorithm, and only keeps track of things like resource extraction and the like in your immediate area, everything else is either naming (which doesn't take up much data) or a binary "have you touched this language stone yet?" type thing.

It's not designed for persistent Minecraft building. If they try to make a complex system they're going to run into problems. There's a reason that Minecraft limits the size of its world and instances out all the servers.

@xchairmandrekx: That's a bit much. A disappointment, sure. Some might even say a bad game, and they are likely right. But saying one of the biggest disappointments in gaming history just makes me think you're new to gaming. Or never developed the healthy skepticism that comes from being disappointed by products in this industry in the past.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

@mezza: That's the part I have trouble understanding. Not that people would be upset over manufactured hype and deceptive marketing, but that they'd be absolutely incredulous about it.

@bigsocrates: well i have no clue if they can actually do it, but i wouldnt doubt thats what they are going for.

I'm totally interested in base building purely for creativity - but they have to add a super easy way to get back to the planets you choose to build upon...

But this also doesn't change the fact I got burnt out on the game as a whole. I didn't have super high expectations in the first place but the core loop got old.

I don't know, teh game just isn't any good at its core. Why would I want to build? all the planets are boring and you just finish on one and go to the next, the concept of making a base your home seems so silly since its all dumb and you can't do anything on planets

I was really hoping for something more substantial than this to lure me in to finally buying this game. Guess I'll keep waiting.

Good for them. Hopefully they can make the game better. Can't really get upset by them working on an update.

@mandude: I think that's been whats most interesting to me about the whole thing. A lot of the people wrapped up in the situation act like they've never been burned by a dev before. It reminds me of when I first started to get into watching video coverage on games. I was used to just reading reviews and magazine articles that mostly filtered out that kind of dev hype, and I didn't know any better until I was stuck with a game I couldn't return. At least people could get a steam refund here. I guess it could be a case of this being a relatively new generation with a new generation of gamers, but that doesn't really excuse everybody. Hopefully they at least learned a lesson while raising those pitchforks.

These updates always sound so frightened. Hi angry people, we still work on making this game fun. By the way, we made 7 updates with our small team while you guys were being angry at us. Please give it a look. We think it could be cool at some point. We just want to create a fun game. Don't be angry anymore please.

I guess i'm just too used to more typical PR people writing these things.

I doubt it. This same exact thing happened in 2014 with Destiny (and arguably Watch Dogs before that), Fallout 4 and Battlefront in 2015, and here we are in 2016 and now it's Hello Games' turn with No Man's Sky.

People will continue to fall for the hype, get burned, and then take to message boards like the latest disappointing game is the the most disappointing game to ever be released.

It may not be next year, but you can count on history to repeat itself.

This seems like the best way to handle it.

An apology without seeming too moochy and hurt, the promise of an update soon and more in the future, and a nice professional tone about it.

Honestly, if I were them, I wouldn't want to engage with the community right now anyway. Too much of the actual, meaningful criticism gets completely drowned out by the insane anger and negativity of the masses. They can probably gleam just as much info from the discourse at a safe distance as they could in the middle of it.

@babychoochoo: Yeah that's true, I guess a better thing would be to say hopefully some of them learned a lesson for next time this kind of thing comes around. Like you said, as a whole there will always be a hyperbolic mob mad about some game.

The game is on sale for $14.99 on Amazon last I checked, for those who are interested. That price is still a bit too steep for me considering the game just looked boring to me, even back when people were really excited about it.

I feel bad for the people still working at that company.

For me I already put in my time with the game; a little over 20 hours. I actually had fun with the game, but once I saw enough of the moving gears and procedural cogs I was done. There's not much they could do to bring me back either, short of turning it into another game entirely. I don't hate the dev or sean murray, but I do feel they over promised and undercompensated for said promises. I had a relatively good time with the game, but even with promises of an update that may or may not be pointless, (Building bases on disposable planets seems like a bad idea to me) I can't see it being on any of my end of the year lists or short hand gaming sessions.

I've purchased some mediocre yet very cheap games this year for almost nothing more than collection sake, but NMS is the only game I regret buying. I didn't hate it, but pc launch issues and just kind of "oh this is way more boring and lifeless than we expected" for 60 bucks. It was fun and I want to play some more, sometime, but could've easily waited for months on patches and price coming down. I wanted to be in that launch window for such a big game and got burned, but if it can be made even somewhat better that's atleast worth doing.

Seems like it's here already? Seen reports of people downloading the patch..

I'm pretty impressed by what they've added: http://www.no-mans-sky.com/foundation-update/

But I'm still missing some key gameplay loop. Maybe this game needs a hardcore rogue-like mode or something. With leaderboards. See how far you could travel until you're getting eaten by some creature or killed by space pirates.

I see myself getting back to this game once they've added some more stuff.

@dussck: Those changed seems pretty cool, a base on a home planet where you can store stuff and teleport too seems t fun. I dont know if its enough to make me go back and play it, but after a couple more patches maybe.

Also, they are adding a survival mode which seems what you are after. Its absolutely not what I like to have from this game, I actually might play their easy mode where you don't have to collect shit constantly.

If this accomplishes even half of what they're saying they will accomplish, I will be staggered. I was wrong about Hello Games.

If this update actually does go a long way to fixing the game and people actually begin talking positively about the company again, they should shoot the elephant in the room while riding the wave (well, one of them at least). Just say that the synchronus multiplayer was never a launch feature. Maybe it was planned to be, but a certain point it was decided that it wasn't and that still lying about it was a bad thing to do to your potential customers.

That all being said, I don't know why I'm seeing such positive vibes for this update already, especially with that Youtube video. I just feel like people should be far more skeptical of any gameplay put out by HG.

Give it 1-2 more years of updates and then people should be content with whats there.

Also they need to just get over themselves and allow friend matchmaking, especially now with this base building.

This seems like a substantial update. I was a bit skeptical about the utility of base building, but being able to warp back at any time and build inside your freighter would appear to justify the feature. I really enjoyed the base game for what it was, so I'm willing to jump back in and give this a shot.

Trailer and info for the patch, patch is live, just updated on PS4:

https://blog.eu.playstation.com/2016/11/27/no-mans-sky-update-adds-base-building-new-game-modes-and-freighters/?emcid=social_20161127_68235956&adbid=802829596370423809&adbpl=tw&adbpr=36969785

I've played around in 'Survival' for a while and my start is very rough. It's kind of hard to get to my ship even, since radiation on this planet is a constant factor. So I have to hide in caves all the time and when the suit finally recharges (takes ages) I can get out, mine some stuff and hide again, waiting for it to recharge. I don't know why the recharging has to take that much time to be honest, could've been instant. Now I'm just doing crossword puzzles while waiting to be able to do anything..

I'm not going to lie, that update actually seems quite significant. Okay maybe I will keep tabs on this game after all

The upate seemes fucking HUGE!

No Man's Sky

Still not something that gets me interested but I think it looks like a substantial update for what they were offering before. To me the game should have had more of this type of stuff from the jump.