Why no ‘planetary variation overhaul’ updates in recent years? — I think HG prioritized their focus on adding any remaining platforms and devices first, while refining and adding other feature requests in the meantime. Because with no paid DLC updates and microtransactions, game sales (and now some merch) are how they get paid. So now when they release a planetary variation overhaul update, which is at the top of every NMS player’s wishlist, numerous players will be driven back to the game and they’ll see all these updates for the 1st time in years and think this is all one update, and HG will maximize profit across all these platforms. Well deserved!
Do I think NMS is coming to Apple and Android smartphones? — Well, it came to the miracle of Nintendo Switch, and it’s coming to Apple tablets soon, so I think it’s perfectly safe to speculate NMS on cellular, too.
Having all these platforms out of the way and their next big game released soon enough…
I think the future of No Man’s Sky is about to get crazy!
Should we feel guilt for all their hard work and all these free updates? — HG make money off “a generation shift of new players,” and more platforms mean more players, means more profit. And more profit means more updates, especially since updates drive excitement, more activity, more players, and likewise more sales.
So early updates focused on improving the overall experience of NMS, recent updates brought NMS to more platforms and more devices, and thus future updates will focus on the top of every NMS player’s wishlist…
I don’t think “everyone” is clamoring for a planetary variation overhaul. Even the group that wants that is fragmented.
Some want “better” ProcGen results.
Some want less simularity among types of critter’s in the universe.
Some want multiple biomes on worlds
Some want more “dead” worlds
Some want planetary resources to vary by distance from the local star (an alpha stage original concept)
Some want more planetary variety of worlds closer to the galactic center vs. those further out.
Some want added planetary variety among galaxy types
While my primary focus is on exploration, discovery, and xenophotography, I also would prefer No Man’s Sky not to become like other games. One redittor remarked that they loved Elite Dangerous, but now that space combat is “better” they were coming back to No Man’s Sky. Yet that’s the opposite of what I hope for. No Man’s Sky should not have to mimic another game’s mechanics or play to “be good.”
I would like the game to be a unique one.
Even when added features are not on my personal wish list, though, there is at least some new aspect of discovery and photography.
I keep hoping for improved Photo Mode features such as a toggle that shows an overlay of different composition guide lines (rule of thirds, golden ratio, golden spiral, diagonals, etc.). Those would be an excellent help in better photo composition.
I would also like it if there were a clear reason to move out of Euclid galaxy. For instance frequency of finding some key items would be much greater in specific galaxy types. Or specific galaxies could be “home” for pirates or for our new RoboFriends. Or, similar to how we travel to a star system with a certain star color to get certain resources, certain items or resources could only be found in certain galaxies.
I’d personally prefer that type variety to added planetary variety and I think it would contribute more to increased play time by many (most?).
Planetary improvements…cool. But wont make me play longer. I need reasons to play. Things to accomplish.
For me my top 10 are still:
TerraForming
Base Defense (turrets for fighting off pirates)
Base Utility (Weather protection zones, more electicity/logic items, extremally rare resources collecting that need complicated machines to pull out of ground)
Base Survival (Food production, water harvest)
Base Energy Appropriate for Planet (Air, Solar, Vegetation, Thermal with more complex machines to harvest)
Ship Customizations, not just new classes all the time
Privacy Base options - Locks
Planetary Events - Acid Rain, Floods, Lava, Earthquakes, Cave Ins
More things to do to give purpose to play. Such as “dungeons” of sorts. Or perhaps long procedurally generated underground bases similar to the desolate freighters but just 5 times larger/longer to explore, contain puzzles and codes to unlock doors and contain unique loot that can be found in them based on the planet you are on.
Ship customisation. But make it so that building one out is engaging and makes it feel custom to you. Perhaps by getting parts from expeditions or by finding procedurally generated parts at NPC part shops.
Make the atlas more explorable. When your in the atlas station and look off into the distance, I start to wish there were rooms and halls to walk through in there and maybe a mini puzzle you need to do to steal atlas batteries that are worth a lot.
Planet variation based on distance to the center again. However, I also want more “unnatural” formations to be able to be found, but rarely and contain an interaction with them. Such as a large head of a Gek popping out of the terrain(formed using the terrain) and/or a stone gek head the size of a small base. And if you can find an press 3 secret buttons on it on the correct order, the mouth opens up and you can enter it to find a treasure map that can lead you to a hidden underground chest.
Ship Customization:
Ideally for me… you dismantle a ship, you unlock schematics for the parts. Each part has costs, materials to fabricate. Some parts exclusive to rewards (quicksilver, expeditions, story, whatever) Paint jobs etc are possible. Should have a section on stations…like a garage…or a specialize room you build on freighters / bases.
This has been on my ideas list since the lead up to Atlas Rises and knowing Portals would be working soon.
Unique instances tied to Portals. E.g You need to go to a facility floating in space amidst the debris of korvax prime to track down something, or a portal misfires and sends you hurtling to a previous iteration during the great disconnection aboard a freighter currently under attack by the gek dominion.
Unique story based scenarios tied to the lore we’ve been discovering. It would require them to make bespoke custom built maps and areas not accessible via the galaxy map but it’s something I’ve always wanted. And I don’t even code but I know via portals and some string commands or “keys” tied to active quest could facilitate this easily.
Portals that are plametside likely will remain such. But some (or new & different) portal “gateways” in space could lead other places.
Another possibility is adding a feature to some or all existing planetside portals:
If you offer a faction’s relic at a faction’s portal plus have a specific Multitool, you get a hidden option to choose a different teleporter option. (The MultiTool would relate to the original plan to open a portal using a specific Multitool.)
Travel options might include transport to a “nice” planet in a faction system, travel to a faction space station in another system, etc.
oh yeah, but I want something in game. lazy. Pen is effort. clicking bunch of symbols is chore. Finding a portal is a chore. Probably why everyone just uses base teleporters.
Should have special planets only accessible by portal, bases cannot be built.
My new and biggest request, which is probably on their list of things to do, is unique animations for the staff so the right arm is at least holding it under arm like a staff when you fire.
Although most wizards either hold out a staff vertically or else point it. They don’t normally tuck it under their armpit like a rifle. To me this staff is more like a wizard’s staff.
The right hand should be turned palm facing skyward and gripping the staff similarly to the front hand, with the pole aligned to the under arm and between the arm and torso.
Unless this is an ancient wizarding technique where you grip with one hand and use your other arm as a prop for balance
The staff is really strange looking in VR. We hold it one handed like a pistol, except we are holding onto an invisible grip. Sort of a muscular thumb pinch grip.
Exploration and discovery on an infinite level — an infinite number of things to see, and do.
Or might be at the top, if properly executed. We consume too quickly and bore too easily.
“You can code an infinite universe, but can you code an infinite number of things to do?”
I dare to say, “YES!” — 𝓓𝓻 𝓒𝓻𝓲𝓶 𝓒𝓢𝓓
The problem is what we perceive this to mean, “MORE OF THE SAME THING.”
100 hours: “Exciting! Never seen or done that before!”
600 hours: “Seen it, done it, next update, please!”
You must be thinking I’m talking about visual aesthetics and adding more of everything. If only it could be that simple, but it’s not. We have this broken concept of exploration and discovery, but the solution is vast.
Clarification:
What do I mean by ‘planetary variation overhaul’ coming soon?
I am not simply referring to more of everything, because that solves nothing. The problem is how quickly we consume everything. So we have to spread everything out better, which ultimately involves adding more of everything. I’ll try to explain briefly: “EVERY GALAXY PROCEDURAL.” Every galaxy has to be made truly unique, (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%), every asset, aspect, what we see, hear, do, etc. and yes, what we “DO.”
What do I mean by ‘variation overhaul’ coming soon? — Far more than planets, to be sure. Stated simply…
“Variation Everything”
I explained these matters in full, years ago.
See Game Progression and then Multiverse…
Or we could let the legacy of our late Xxiou Games live on, as he did a great job of explaining to us what’s coming soon…
4chan leak
How much longer until we start considering this…
“An Official Leak of Future Updates”
Because everything from this supposed leak has either come true, or is coming true, or is close enough, including details about a new alien race (Was that Autophage?) and much more coming soon, like rivers, new waters, “the ability to revisit worlds of past eras,” which may be referring to the ability to revisit past update ‘universal terrain gen reset’ eras, (See my MULTIVERSE wish above), “a new enemy race” (quite possibly teased during the Prisms update with the inclusion of the Horrific Flesh-Helmet; See MULTIVERSE for details about this race), “storyline about the breakdown of the simulation, where Loop16 (Atlas) will be on its last minutes and seconds, literally and figuratively,” (quite possibly teased during this very update, when you consider the Atlas in the center of the Echoes Book Cover image; See image below), and so it goes on…
Does not the Atlas appear to be crumbling away, as if on its last minutes and seconds?
Could this be hinting at our next update and the final part of our ARG? — We shall see!
Yeah, last year I was a bit ahead of myself. — That ‘4chan leak’ had me thinking perhaps they were going to drop everything in a single 4.0 update. Specifically, that long overdue community-wide anticipated, “planetary variation overhaul” and/or otherwise “variation overhaul.” Of course, my thinking behind a “variation overhaul” is MULTI-GALACTIC, unlike most thinking “more of the same thing.” But I sure did question, “How?” How could they cram all that into a single 4.0 update? Were they to hire outside help? They’ve done it before, but on a smaller scale. — I long speculated Nintendo Switch, but remained unsure about the whole idea, because examining the matter it seemed not impossible, but highly improbable. But sure enough, what they dropped was the miracle of NMS on Nintendo Switch, Macintosh, “iOS coming soon,” and managed to squeeze a whole bunch more into all that year. — Certainly, HG work hard, and this is an understatement!
So who was our “Anonymous” 4chan user? - “Was that you, Sean?” - No, because they got a few details wrong, like the name of 4.0 being DOWNFALL (which ultimately became WAYPOINT, “another point along the way”) and were a little ahead of themselves in thinking, like I did, that they’d drop everything in a single 4.0 update.
So perhaps they really are a friend of HG, as they so claim to be, and maybe this was all planned out, as SM and HG’s way of teasing what would ultimately become 3+ years of hard work under development. Might they have wished to speak, to tell us of everything they were working on, but were too afraid to do so, because we might hold them to it? So they opened up through a friend, or an otherwise “Anonymous” SM, HG.
Might they have wished to release it all sooner, but could see it was all dragging on and would take more time? Bringing NMS to all these platforms and devices kept taking priority. Might they still need more time? Could that explain their delayed expeditions and an Anniversary update, being part-way through an ARG of sorts?..
“What lies at the end of an ARG?”, is like asking, “What lies at the end of an anomalous rainbow?”
But regardless of what’s coming, I’m proud of HG and what we have, and can’t wait for what’s coming.
Looking at several views online, many seem to have the player gripping a piece that points downward – like a weapon grip. Not like a “staff.” as I’ve always thought of them.
To me the closest analog seems to be the Ma’Tok from stargate.
As such, tucking it under the arm would seem very appropriate.
Incidentally, the feature I would like to see most, is a journal. Where I can put down my own notes. I’m missing that in almost every game I ever play.
On one hand, the best place to keep all that would seem out of game and stored on our device. This way if anything were to ever happen to the game or our saves, we still got our screenshots, portal addresses, journals and/or otherwise notes. On the other hand, that’s never convenient, it’s not even a semi-automatic process.
It’s manual labor requiring effort…
Organizing screenshots
Organizing journals / notes
However, screenshots do automatically organize according to date, so I would call that semi-automatic.
“Do our notes become obsolete without our saves?,” is like asking, “Do our screenshots become obsolete without our saves?” Both our notes and our screenshots have historical value, their something to look back on, much like family photos or YouTube videos long after someone has passed. Call them “echoes” from the past.
So we say, “if you just backup your saves,” but even that’s semi-inconvenient, which means it’s semi-convenient.
Notes take effort, playing takes effort, work takes effort, cooking takes effort, life takes effort. So we attempt to automate what we don’t enjoy and extend time into what we do enjoy. Some may like to manually take notes…
and HG will maximize profit across all these platforms. Well deserved!I think the future of No Man’s Sky is about to get crazy!
And more profit means more updates, especially since updates drive excitement, more activity, more players, and likewise more sales.
I meant how a traditional wizard holds their staff. Too bad we don’t get that choice.
“Exciting! Never seen or done that before!”
“Seen it, done it, next update, please!”
(quite possibly teased during the Prisms update with the inclusion of the Horrific Flesh-Helmet; See MULTIVERSE for details about this race), “storyline about the breakdown of the simulation, where Loop16 (Atlas) will be on its last minutes and seconds, literally and figuratively,” (quite possibly teased during this very update, when you consider the Atlas in the center of the Echoes Book Cover image; See image below), and so it goes on…
“What lies at the end of an ARG?”, is like asking, “What lies at the end of an anomalous rainbow?” 
