Developer Hello Games has announced No Man’s Sky: Beyond, a massive update that will include a free multiplayer mode dubbed No Man’s Sky Online. While multiplayer is already available in the game, Hello Games has promised that Beyond, which is expected to arrive this summer, will transform it into “a radical new social and multiplayer experience which empowers players everywhere in the universe to meet and play together.”
The teaser trailer for the Beyond update doesn’t give much — or anything, really — away about its contents. A ship is shown in one of the game’s colorful docks, and the camera zips to the entrance before fading to the title card.
Despite the overhaul to multiplayer, the game will remain completely free and no new microtransactions will be implemented as a result.
“These changes are an answer to how we have seen people playing since the release of [previous update] Next, and is something we’ve dreamed of for a long time,” Sean Murray, the game’s director, added.
No Man’s Sky is a drastically different game now than it was at launch in 2016, and with the upcoming Beyond update, developer Hello Games is set to transform how players experience multiplayer and interact with each other.
Next arrived in 2018, and gave players far more control over how they played the game. Content additions included base building, multiplayer, and more storytelling. The latter was particularly important, as the game launched in 2016 with almost no incentive to keep playing other than to see the “end.” It also launched with limited options for customization and players were forced to play by themselves across its procedurally generated universe.
It appears that the particulars regarding Beyond’s content are still up in the air, as Murray said Hello Games will only reveal them when the team knows it “can be precise.” We should hear more over the next weeks and months, and the studio plans to continue supporting No Man’s Sky for the foreseeable future.
No Man’s Sky is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Hello Games is now working on an adventure game called The Last Campfire, which is due to be released for unannounced platforms at some point in 2019. The game was created and designed by just two people.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.