LAST EDITED ON Feb-15-24 AT 10:56 PM (EST)
I can't recall if it's ever come up here--I don't think so--but I've been a No Man's Sky player for years. I think I picked it up a year or two after launch, after the worst of the launch bugs had been ironed out, but at a point when it was still fairly barren and nobody in the gaming press was really ready to admit it might be a good game.Since then, I've piled up nearly 700 hours on the PC version. Over that time a lot has changed, and I don't put in obsessive hours with it any more; but any time there's an update I revisit for a while to check it out, and for the last couple years I've made a point of playing the Community Expeditions when they're live (even though I play with multiplayer disabled Because Reasons).
I think the devs have cottoned on to the fact that Expeditions are (arguably) the most fun way to play the game, because as part of the launch of the new update that just dropped today, they've made this weekend free-to-play. From now through the end of this coming weekend, people who haven't bought the game can download it for free and try out the current Expedition that goes with the update.
They're also doing a new thing with this Expedition that I'm looking forward to. In previous ones, to make sure everyone starts on the same footing, you could only play them by starting a new save. The rewards earned at the end became available to all your other saves, but anything else you picked up along the way (multitools, starships, etc.) stayed with the Expedition save. Since Expedition saves turn into normal ones upon completion of the Expedition, this wasn't terrible, but once you had a few of them under your belt, it got kind of annoying keeping track of which save you had which rare drops and so forth in.
As part of the Omega update, they've finally implemented both the ability to start an Expedition from an existing save, and a mechanism for moving loot between saves. I haven't seen either one in action yet, and probably won't have time to until this weekend, but I can already see myself spending... some time consolidating my plethora of prior-Expedition saves. :)
So yeah! I'm pretty intrigued by the stuff listed in the link above, both in terms of what's in the update for new content and the various QOL features and bugfixes mentioned near the bottom. A few are things I've been hoping they'd do for a long time (such as the ability to flip through the cycling notifications in the HUD to find the one you want, instead of just waiting for it to come back around naturally). I recognize that NMS isn't for everyone, but I think it's a really fun and absorbing game, and if any of you have been wondering about it but not to the extent of paying money for it, I hope you'll consider taking advantage of the free weekend to check it out.
Oh yeah, one other thing I think is worth plugging, because it's so at odds with the usual publisher MO these days: This game has no DLC. These big updates that add a bunch of new stuff, of which there have been two or three per year throughout its seven-year history to date, and for which a publisher like EA would charge at least $30 a pop, are free. They have titles, but they aren't separate store items or anything; when they drop, they just... become part of the game. This, at least to me, effectively answers the occasionally-voiced complaint that a seven-year-old game is still priced at $59.99 on Steam (and presumably similarly on the other platforms where it's sold).
Also, it's $29.99 until the 26th. :)
--G.
I will acknowledge that it's quite a large download.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.