Hello Games is bringing massive spacefaring sim No Man’s Sky and most of its updates from the past six years to Switch on October 7, the company announced this morning. A physical edition of the complete, remastered PlayStation 5 version is also planned for the same day.
“No Man’s Sky on this tiny portable device feels both completely natural and also totally improbable at the same time,” said Hello Games director Sean Murray. “This has been a real moonshot for our small team. No Man’s Sky is built around procedural generation, which means the console generates everything you see. This makes it so much harder to bring our game to something like the Switch, but I think this team never seems happier than when they are trying to do near-impossible things.”
Folks who pick up No Man’s Sky on Switch will be able to experience all the content through the game’s “Prisms” update from June 2021, if the rapid montage of logos in today’s trailer is anything to go by. Hello Games has released three additional updates–“Frontiers,” “Sentinel,” and “Outlaws”—since then.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the major updates and content No Man’s Sky players on Switch can look forward to:
- Foundation (November 26, 2016): Base-building, farming, creative and survival modes, purchasable freighters
- Path Finder (March 8, 2017): Land-based exocraft vehicles, permadeath mode, ship and weapon specialization
- Atlas Rises (August 11, 2017): New storyline, missions, terrain editing, increased planet variety
- NEXT (July 24, 2018): Multiplayer, third-person perspective, character customization, freighter fleets
- The Abyss (October 29, 2018): Aquatic environments with their own wildlife and biomes, submarines, improved swimming mechanics
- Visions (November 22, 2018): New planetary biomes, new creatures, more colorful and varied environments, archaeology
- Beyond (August 14, 2019): Expanded multiplayer, social hub, better tutorials, technology trees, dynamic NPCs, creature-riding and -harvesting, recipes and cooking, first-person exocraft driving
- Synthesis (November 28, 2019): Starship upgrades, custom outfits, more storage, personal refiner
- Living Ship (February 19, 2020): Biological starships, more story missions, more space encounters, talkative space NPCs
- Exo Mech (April 7, 2020): Mechanical walker exocraft with increased exploration capabilities, the ability to summon exocrafts from your freighter, further exocraft customization
- Desolation (July 17, 2020): Derelict, procedurally generated freighters, more story content, combat improvements, freighter customization, new lighting effects, player titles
- Origins (September 23, 2020): New planets, multi-star solar systems, improved user interface, more diversity in biomes and wildlife, cloud and weather variety, revamped photo mode, marshes, volcanoes, firestorms, meteors, gravitational anomalies, tornadoes, lightning, giant insects, wild robots, sandworms
- Next Generation (November 10, 2020): More fleshed-out worlds, complex base-building, 32-person multiplayer
- Companions (February 17, 2021): New creatures to adopt, tame, and breed
- Expeditions (March 31, 2021): A brand-new, mission-based, multiplayer game mode, overhauled space station missions, milestone patches, weekend events, Sentinel combat enhancements, new HUD
- Prisms (June 2, 2021): Improved visuals, meteorological rewards, furry and rideable companions, dramatic starfields
While the work Hello Games has put into No Man’s Sky over the past several years is impressive, getting the game running on Switch is a new level of awe-inspiring. Stay tuned for more details.