No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games has announced the game’s next big update. The free expansion is named Synthesis because, the company says, “it’s a collection of features that create a connected whole.”
These features include the ability to upgrade your ship or salvage it for parts. The VR and non-VR versions of the game have been unified, meanwhile, meaning “VR players can now ride creatures and take photos, and non-VR players can drive vehicles in first person.” The inventory and UI have also been streamlined, Hello says, along with plenty of other small interface changes and 297 “bug fixes / small features / bits of polish”.
The update will be released on Thursday, November 28. You can read the full patch notes over on the official website.
“Beyond was a really nice moment for us,” studio head Sean Murray tells PCGamesN. “We had a ton of people playing VR for the first time, and two million players in the seven days after release. Since then we’ve been releasing frequent community updates, with new weekly missions and rewards, meanwhile in the background we’re working on what’s next.
“When you do something big, like Beyond, there’s always so many bits on the cutting room floor. We have some really impactful future plans, but we had a whole stack of changes and improvements we were working on that we knew the community would be excited about. It felt like Thanksgiving was a fairly apt time to release that.
“We’ve bundled those into what we’re calling the Synthesis update. It’s whole bunch of smaller features and improvements, like nearly three hundred small tweaks, that just make the game so much nicer and more fun to play.”
Beyond launched in August, bringing VR support and a bunch of extra multiplayer options to No Man’s Sky. Synthesis appears a smaller update in terms of the magnitude of new features, but the smaller enhancements will likely be welcome nonetheless.
Additional reporting by Carrie Talbot.