A year ago, No Man’s Sky players were disappointed to find out that they could not see each other even if they were in the same location at once. Now, after the latest update, players are finally meeting each other in-game. It’s kind of magical.
In the run-up to No Man’s Sky’s release, players wanted to know whether or not they’d be able to find other players in game. When players found out that no, in fact, they could not, they were not happy. While the game has taken huge steps towards improving its gameplay and winning back its audience, multiplayer hadn’t been factored into that until the latest update, called Atlas Rising. To be clear, this isn’t traditional multiplayer, but something that takes a step toward it. The new feature, called “joint exploration,” allows players to see up to 15 other players in their general vicinity and interact with them over voice chat. As the game has updated, it has edged into ways to allow players to interact with each other, including sharing bases and leaving other players messages. This is the first time players can actually talk to each other in real time. One player, DesignationG, was able to meet someone shortly after the update launched, and here they are building a monument that commemorates their meeting:
According to DesignationG, he wasn’t able to see what this other player was doing to the environment, but on his stream you can hear them talk to each other. “It wasn’t even on my mind to check out the multiplayer features at first, but I was fairly confused when I saw the green player icon show up,” he said. “At first I thought it was a suit upgrade, but then I saw the username and it dawned on me.” This gave DesignationG a chance to roam around with this fellow traveler and test the limits of interaction (he said on Reddit the two of them could not see each other changing the terrain with the new terraforming tools).
DesignationG says that after that first player, he soon met another. Part of this is probably because he also actively participates in the Galactic Hub subreddit, which is a group of players dedicated to mapping out a portion of No Man’s Sky’s vast galaxy. The goal of the project isn’t to find every single thing in their portion of the Euclid Galaxy, but to create a hub for players with a lot of documented landmarks. Its community is pretty close knit and enthusiastic about the project. In fact, DesignationG said his first instinct was to head to the capital planet in the Hub after the update, and clearly other people thought to do so as well. “I would say that without the Galactic Hub that a meeting like this would be taken a very long time to occur,” he said. “The Galactic Hub has already proven to be such a fantastic community to be a part of and for me personally, was already providing that sense of ‘joint exploration.’”
This limited multiplayer doesn’t have a lot of utility, but it’s still exciting to see the game take shape. Hopefully we can get a real party going on the Hub over the weekend.