If you've been one of the few fortunate enough to explore No Man's Sky in the past few days, prepare for an entirely new experience when the game launches in full on Aug. 9.
On the No Man's Sky website, director Sean Murray revealed that the game is getting a massive day one patch. In fact, referring it to as a mere patch hardly touches upon the changes that will be coming to this game when it releases, as it's less of a patch and more of an overhaul that affects a significant portion of the game,
The patch notes detail everything that will be getting changed on Tuesday, and among those changes will be the expansion of ship and personal inventories (by multiples of 5 and 2.5, respectively); planets will have a wider diversity of creatures; and those creatures now have a diet, with how they're fed impacting how they interact with the player. Furthermore, the universe generation algorithm has been altered, causing the planets to move and thus bringing greater variety to the galaxies, which will now be "up to 10x larger" following the patch.
These changes are just the tip of the iceberg, however. The patch will also introduce three unique story paths, which players can progress through depending on some of the choices they make early in the game, as well as rewritten combat mechanics and a wider variety of ships.
For the vast majority of players, these changes mean little since the most interaction they've had with the game was watching it on a stream hosted by someone who got an early copy of the game (such as that guy who paid $1300 for one). However, those who played the game early will need to delete their save files lest they miss out on the changes. Granted, it will still be possible to play the game on a pre-launch file, but Murray himself notes that the game offers a better experience in its latter form.
"If you had an early copy somehow, your save game will technically work post update, but you will miss out on new content and experiences if you don't delete your save before updating (should be obvious why from notes below)."
He also mentioned that the No Man's Sky servers were wiped Sunday, Aug. 7, and will get wiped again on Monday.
In related news, while the game has been one of the most highly anticipated games since it was announced three years, it hasn't been without some controversy. On one hand, there were the concerns about just how long the game is when one user reached the center of his galaxy — the presumed goal of the game — in a playthrough of about 30 hours (though this hardly matters now that the game is getting overhauled). Then on the other end, there were the issues that arose after Sony revealed it would be holding back review copies of the game because of the now-confirmed day one patch.
No Man's Sky launches Aug. 9 for PlayStation 4 and Aug. 12 on Windows PC.
