No Man's Sky's PC launch has been highly anticipated, as players had to wait several extra days before they got hold of what they expected to be the definitive version of Hello Games' space-age odyssey. Unfortunately, things haven't panned out the way they expected, and the PC version is riddled with an assortment of technical issues that have made the game nigh-unplayable.
It's quite the unfortunate situation: the PC version was supposed to include a variety of customization options missing from the PS4 release, such as 4K resolution support, the ability to remove the HUD and options to adjust the field of view. Instead, players are lucky to just get to the loading screen safely.
The easiest way to see just how poorly No Man's Sky's PC release has been so far is to look at the reviews on the game's Steam page. As of writing this, there are 25,072 reviews, 43 percent of which are negative. So, technically, the reviews are mixed overall, but the fact that many of the negative complaints consist of people saying they can't even play the game is cause for concern.
*For reference, the minimum specs are as follows:
– OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit versions)
– Processor: Intel Core i3
– Memory: 8 GB RAM
– Graphics: Nvidia GTX 480, AMD Radeon 7870
– Storage: 10 GB available space
"Crashes on open every time. gg," thelordvalor stated.
"If you like the first 5 seconds of the opening screen over and over again, this game is for you," Rectomb Wrecker stated. "As for the gameplay, i have no clue because apparently its to hard to implement a game after having it finished for a long time."
"I literally opened and let the game crash about 100 times so I could get the five minutes 'play time' required to write this review," Neves_Meid added.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, however, as there are many who have been able to actually play the game, but are coming across a multitude of issues while doing so.
"You're severly wrong about the minimum system requirements, replace them with this," said user Dr. Dangledick. "Mimimum — A computer made by jesus christ himself but it'll still struggle to hit 20 fps."
"Dropping to 30fps for looking at a rocksli 980s-5930k at 4.2ghz," said space was disappointing. "The frame rate cap is so to 90fps. The issue is drops and stuttering."
Lastly, here is a rather humourous and succinct review:
"No Man's PC can handle it," stated imgay.
For what it's worth, there is an update, but it doesn't seem to be working all too well, with many of the complaints about the PC version still persisting.
"Biggest issue reported so far is players without the Visual C++ Redist 2010. First PC patch released already! Update and restart if needed."
In the meantime, Hello Games' Sean Murray has addressed some of the other issues on Twitter.
"Number two issue so far is players who have out of date GFX drivers, or none installed. Please install latest drivers from AMD and Nvidia."
"Number three please make sure your GFX card is above the min spec. OpenGL 4.5 is required to play No Man's Sky."
Of course, many of these fixes still don't seem to help the situation, staining what was poised to be a monumental launch.
Sadly the PC launch of No Man's Sky is unacceptable. People are pissed. It wont launch, dips and freezes. They need to patch it ASAP.
— Destin Legarie (@DestinLegarie) August 12, 2016
Amusingly enough, due to all these errors, the PS4 has become the best way to play No Man's Sky — for the time being, at least.
