Both PlayStation 4 and PC versions of No Man’s Sky received a quiet update earlier this week, but development studio Hello Games only just released detailed patch notes explaining what was actually fixed.
The news, in short, is major for many players. Patch 1.09 makes the game “much more robust at recovering corrupted save files,” the studio announced in today’s patch notes, after six weeks in which countless players on both platforms reported lost and damaged saves, potentially setting back hours of progress in No Man’s Sky‘s vast, procedurally generated universe. Another issue — which plagued some on their second playthrough, if they didn’t happen to acquire the Antimatter blueprint on their first run, leaving them stranded on their starter planets — is also “no longer possible,” according to the patch notes.
The full list of fixes is actually quite long, though most changes are minor: stability improvements, audio issues, inventory, and so forth. It’s great to see that the studio is still hard at work on the game, especially considering the long and arduous road to No Man’s Sky‘s release, but frankly, it’s alarming some of these got into the shipped game in the first place:
- “Issue where pressing and holding a button would cause the game to crash under specific circumstances.”
- “The player can no longer buy multiple products when they do not have enough slots to do so, preventing loss of both the unit cost and the extra products.”
- “Planets featuring 15 creature types can now reach 100% completion.”
To be clear, this isn’t meant to mock the development team. Hello Games is a small, independent studio full of incredibly hard-working people who have had to overcome ridiculous levels of adversity just to get to this point. If anything, it feels like the titanic expectations built around this game pushed the studio into shipping before No Man’s Sky was ready, and now — more than six weeks later — the team is still scrambling to keep the ship sailing.
(h/t Polygon.)
