Today Sean Murray announced that PC No Man’s Sky players that have opted into the Experimental branch can now download a new performance-enhancing update called “Vulkan“. Vulkan is a graphics API that is intended to replace OpenGL in order to optimize resource allocation, increase framerates and improve overall game performance.

You can read the full announcement here.

The Vulkan update will first be rolled out to PC users on the Experimental branch and will be released to other platforms in due time. This technical overhaul will be instrumental in deploying Beyond later this summer with VR support.

Last night SXSW Gaming hosted their 2019 Gaming Awards show where the gaming community voted for the best games in a wide variety of categories. Among these categories, No Man’s Sky NEXT was nominated for “Most Evolved Game”. The Portal Repository is happy to report that No Man’s Sky won this award, beating other popular games like Destiny 2: Forsaken, Fortnite, Overwatch, and Pokemon Go.

As someone who has been playing No Man’s Sky since the 2016 release, it’s easy to see why Hello Games won this award. After a rocky launch, the developers behind No Man’s Sky were faced with a choice, listen to the constructive criticism of their fans and continue development, or listen to the disparaging comments and quietly let No Man’s Sky die. In the face of immense adversity Hello Games chose to double-down and show all the critics what the game had the potential to be.

A steady stream of free updates continued to roll out over the next several years, incrementally improving many aspects to the game. In the summer of 2018, just before the two year anniversary, Hello Games released an update titled NEXT, their most significant update since launch. NEXT was the result of general community feedback and direct player input from surveys sent out by Hello Games themselves during the Waking Titan ARG.

No Man’s Sky was also previously nominated for the “Labor of Love” Steam Award, and “Best Ongoing Game” at The Game Awards show. Although No Man’s Sky might not be all things to all people, Hello Games have demonstrated time after time that they listen to their dedicated fans and incorporate their feedback into each new (and free) update. It hasn’t always been rainbows and roses, but no one said evolution was painless. No Man’s Sky NEXT was the clear choice to win the “Most Evolved Game” award and Sean Murray and the developers at Hello Games should be very proud of this achievement.

Today Hello Games announced the next update to No Man’s Sky, called Beyond. This new update will feature 3 major components, the first of which is “No Man’s Sky Online”.

No Man’s Sky Online includes a radical new social and multiplayer experience which empowers players everywhere in the universe to meet and play together. Whilst this brings people together like never before, and has many recognisable online elements, we don’t consider No Man’s Sky to be an MMO – it won’t require a subscription, won’t contain microtransactions, and will be free for all existing players.

The other two components remain unknown at this time, but Sean Murray assures us that all will be revealed in due time. Beyond is expected to be released sometime in the summer of 2019. The Portal Repository will continue to post new information as it becomes available.

Read the original announcement from Hello Games.

I’m very excited to announce that The Portal Repository has officially reached over 1000 addresses!

Here’s a breakdown of some of the stats:

• 1002 addresses as of Feb 11th, 2019
  • 490 addresses on PC
  • 412 addresses on PS4
  • 100 addresses on Xbox
• October 17th, 2017 was when the first address was published
• 461,319 page views since the site was launched (if you don’t count browsers with Do Not Track active. In reality it’s closer to 900,000 views)
• 360 addresses were posted during the Atlas Rises version (pre-NEXT)
• 656 players registered
• 83% of post-NEXT addresses are in Normal game mode
• 27 civilizations posted at least one address
• 15 different galaxies
• 16 people financially supported this website (see the footer for full list – thanks!)

This site has growth substantially in just over a year since inception and it’s all thanks to the dedicated players that have shared their portal addresses! The popularity of No Man’s Sky waxes and wanes with each update, but the core of the community is solid. Even during the quietest times this site doesn’t go more than a day without a new address being uploaded.

I’d like to congratulate two players in particular, Elmseeker and Vangelis2019 for posting the addresses that took us over 1000:

Linasia Home by Elmseeker

Reol Minor by VangelisLA2019

Thank you to everyone who’s contributed to The Repository so far! Let’s go for 2000!

Hello Games have released a new patch, version 1.77 to introduce a new Community Mission, new collectible items and several bug fixes. Unlike previous Community Missions this one is scheduled to last 28 days, right through the Christmas and New Year holidays. Given the length of this Community Mission it’s likely that this will be the last update this year. Hopefully the staff at Hello Games will get some much-deserved time to relax with their loved ones over the holidays.

2018 has certainly been a monumental year for No Man’s Sky. For the first six months of this year the community spent a great deal of time playing through the second season of the Waking Titan ARG while Hello Games quietly worked on the biggest update since launch; No Man’s Sky: NEXT.

NEXT was released in late July 2018 and received generally high praise from the players. NEXT also thrust Hello Games back into the spotlight of the wider gaming community by introducing key features like multiplayer, better base building and the Xbox console release. The favorable response to the NEXT update was so profound that it finally tipped the the lifetime reviews on Steam from “Mostly Negative” to “Mixed”!

Yet the story doesn’t end there. After acknowledging that their silence and lack of communication was a mistake, Hello Games have taken proactive steps to improve their public relations by publishing more frequent content updates and engaging on social media. Since NEXT launched they have published two other significant updates, The Abyss and Visions, both of which address key gameplay issues requested by players.

With each new patch Hello Games always mentions how they are still planning and working on even more updates in the future. Needless to say, Sean Murray and the team at Hello Games are dedicated to this game. It’s clearly a labor of love for them. Sometimes it’s good to take a step back and marvel at what they have been able to accomplish. In my opinion it takes some extremely talented developers to pull off a triple-A quality game like No Man’s Sky with the limited resources of a small indie studio. If 2018 is any indication of the future direction of No Man’s Sky I can’t wait to see what Hello Games have in store for 2019!