No Man’s Sky’s free Next update piles on the improvements. The team at Hello Games has breathed new life into it, with special attention given to the overall look and feel of the exotic environments that you encounter. But, if you’re playing on PC, I have some bad news for you. The in-flight controls with a mouse and keyboard are among the worst I’ve encountered, and coupled with very aggressive enemy AI, that presents some serious problems. You’ll want to start flying with a controller as soon as possible. When No Man’s Sky first came out in 2016, fans immediately noticed that there was something screwy with the flight model. The most offensive aspect to many was that the game simply didn’t allow you to fly close to the ground. If you got too low, it would force your nose up like you were hitting an invisible floor a couple hundred feet off the ground. To get anywhere below that artificial floor, you had to tap the button to land, which would automatically bring your ship to rest on the surface of the planet. That meant that during a dog fight, you felt less like Will Smith in Independence Day, dodging green shit in the Grand Canyon, and more like someone pulling levers on Dumbo’s Wild Ride. With the latest update, that’s all changed. Now you can hug the earth and even crash into it, causing serious damage to your ship in the process. And now No Man’s Sky even lets you fly underground, deep within the tunnels and caverns below a planet’s surface. But during my first time out of atmosphere this week, I came upon the hard limits of the mouse-and-keyboard control style right away. On PC, you use the WASD keys to control forward and backward thrust and roll. Pitch and yaw are on the mouse. But the acceleration seems off on the mouse aspect, which caused me to shoot wildly around my target rather than at it. you can fly through caves now... pic.twitter.com/03vpOrKenh — Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) July 26, 2018 Once I switched to my attached Xbox One-style controller, the problems went away. In fact, the controller actually gave my character a neck, extending my field of view in all directions as my avatar turned toward the direction I was steering. After switching back and forth between the two, I came to the realization that no matter how I remapped the controls the mouse-flight simply wasn’t going to work for me. Of course, your mileage may vary, but you can’t deny that the two control styles feel completely different from one another. As far as flight stick and throttle compatibility, we’ve reached out to Hello Games for more information. There are some hacks that worked with the game’s older versions, but I’m not sure if they work with the new and I’m having too much fun right now to give it a try at the moment. Also, if you’ve picked the game up on GOG, which is issuing refunds due to a lack of multiplayer, and don’t have a controller for your PC perhaps consider picking the game up on console instead.<doc-sep>The latest No Man’s Sky update has made huge improvements to the game, but it’s also causing players’ save files to be wiped. Advertisement Update - 3:42pm, 7/27: This issue has been resolved on all platforms. Some players across all platforms are finding that when they try to load their game, they’ll see their hours played logged correctly, but their save will start a t the beginning of the game, meaning they’ve lost all progress. Loading from a previous auto-save or manual save from the affected game doesn’t appear to resolve the issue. Players on PC have found a workaround for this issue by editing their saves, but no such fix exists for PlayStation or Xbox. Kotaku video producer Paul Tamayo, who lost his progress yesterday on PlayStation 4, was able to load a previous save he had backed up on a USB drive to recover his progress. He said that loading from a cloud save did not work as it automatically uploaded as he was playing, and he recovered his save from the PlayStation we use at the office by loading that save onto a USB stick, and then starting his game from that save. No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games did not respond to a request for comment last night. Update - 10:33 am: Hello Games has said that hotfix patches are incoming for PC, though updates for PlayStation and Xbox will be slower. The last time No Man’s Sky received a huge update, Hello Games pushed several small bug fix patches in the weeks afterward. Hopefully this bug will be fixed quickly and players can get back to exploring the galaxy without the fear of losing what they’ve done so far.<doc-sep>Some No Man’s Sky players are having issues with their saved games after the latest update, but it looks like the problem has already been fixed. In the short term, however, be careful if you run into this bug. “A whole bunch of people, including myself, have run into a bug in Next that prevents you from loading an existing save file. Instead of putting you back into the game at the point you saved, the game simply restarts you on a new planet with the ‘Initializing’ white screen,” a player wrote on Reddit. “Reloading does nothing,” they said. “The game shows the save time and the time played, but it simply loads to a new planet every time you try to load it.” The rest of the thread details possible fixes for the issue, but they may not be necessary. The good news is that two updates have already been pushed to the experimental branch of the game on Steam, and these should fix the issues for most players. “Fixed an issue where players who saved after partially repairing some items of technology would be unable to load that savegame,” Hello Games wrote in the patch notes. “Please note that if the game has not been resaved, then progress has not been lost and will be recovered.” The patch will give live for all PC players “soon,” according to a tweet from Hello Games. A new build has been sent to experimental on PC. This will go live to everyone on PC soon. Hot fix patches are in flight for PS4 and XBox (MS/Sony cert means this is a tiny bit slower, but will be with you asap) https://t.co/wm30JeWt5W — Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) July 26, 2018 For now, update the game as soon as possible, don’t resave your game if you run into this issue and be careful if you have partially repaired parts.<doc-sep>
Some players are reporting “No Man’s Sky”‘s latest update is wiping their progress. As detailed by Kotaku, even though the “hours played” summary on the save data appears to be correct, affected save files are reverting to the beginning of the game. The issue has been reported across all platforms, and usually cannot be resolved by loading a previous save. While some savvy PC players have found a workaround for now, unless console players have an old save backed up on disc (rather than a HDD or cloud save), it appears the issue cannot be fixed for those playing on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. A new build has been sent to experimental on PC. This will go live to everyone on PC soon. Hot fix patches are in flight for PS4 and XBox (MS/Sony cert means this is a tiny bit slower, but will be with you asap) https://t.co/wm30JeWt5W — Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) July 26, 2018 Founder of Hello Games, Sean Murray, has responded to the issue, confirming the developer is working on the issue. “A new build has been sent to experimental on PC,” Murray wrote on Twitter, responding to the issues on Thursday. “This will go live to everyone on PC soon. Hot fix patches are in flight for PS4 and XBox (MS/Sony cert means this is a tiny bit slower, but will be with you asap).” At the time of writing, Hotfix 1.51 has been deployed on PC, which includes a “fix for [the] save game issue”. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One patches are currently with the respected teams awaiting certification. Hello Games asks players to “note that if the game has not been re-saved, then progress has not been lost and will be recovered”. “No Man’s Sky’s” big 1.5 update – called “Next – rolled out earlier this week on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. The patch adds a large number of new features and quality of life improvements to the two-year-old space survival game, including a co-operative multiplayer mode.