Zapp Blog

We're very excited to be able to tell you more about No Man's Sky: Beyond. A major free update coming in summer 2019 and the next big chapter in our journey. Beyond is the culmination of several different strands of development. The first component, No Man's Sky Online, was announced a few weeks ago. A dramatically updated multiplayer experience means players will be able to explore and play together like never before. Today we're thrilled to announce the next major component of Beyond: No Man's Sky Virtual Reality. As creators of No Man's Sky, we are in love with everything sci-fi. Virtual reality feels like a science fiction become real, and has always seemed like a perfect fit for this futuristic game of ours. It's completely unique to land on a world that no-one has ever seen before and to really feel as if you're there, and the team has worked so hard to make this a true VR experience rather than a port. Grab the joystick and thruster to fly your starship over an unexplored alien planet as you peer out of the cockpit at the view below. Reach into your backpack to grab your multitool, touch it to switch to terrain manipulation, and carve out intricate shapes with unprecedented control. Play in multiplayer and casually wave to your non-VR friends or fist bump your PSVR peers. No Man's Sky Virtual Reality is not a separate mode, but the entire game brought to life in virtual reality. Anything possible in No Man's Sky, NEXT or any other update is ready and waiting as an immersive and enriched VR experience. No Man's Sky Virtual Reality, like all the parts of Beyond, will be free to existing players. However, we're excited to announce that the release of Beyond will see an exclusive retail release of the game on PlayStation 4. This physical edition will come with the base game, VR support, and every update so far, including Beyond. No Man's Sky Virtual Reality will bring the experience to PlayStation VR and Steam VR, and will be released simultaneously on both platforms. By bringing full VR support, for free, to the millions of players already playing the game, No Man's Sky will become perhaps the most owned VR title when released. This amazes us, and is utterly humbling. The team is working so hard to live up to the expectations that creates. We are excited for that moment when millions of players will suddenly update and be able to set foot on their home planets and explore the intricate bases they have built in virtual reality for the first time. As well as Online and Virtual Reality, No Man's Sky Beyond contains a third major feature set that we'll be talking more about when we can. This is an exciting time. Thank you so much for being with us on this most ambitious chapter of No Man's Sky.

As many of you might already know, Astroneer just concluded its first year in Early Access with a Sale on Steam and the Microsoft Store. That means there are now thousands of new Astros roaming the solar system, building bases, deforming planets, and having fun with friends. Since we have lots of new faces getting initiated to Exo Dynamics, as well as some old faces returning after a long hiatus, we wanted to spend some time answering some of the big questions new and returning players might have about Astroneer. What does Alpha mean? Astroneer is an Early Access game that is now in the "Alpha" stage of development. That means different things to different people, but for us, that means the scope of the game is pretty much sorted out, and we are working hard to consistently implement and present our players with new features by updating regularly. (about once a month or so) That also means the game has bugs, crashes, and overall, is incomplete. While we see lots of players with 100's of hours in the game, we totally understand that you might play 10 hours and feel like you have seen all there is to see. As we keep adding content, we hope that you come back around and try the new stuff we are adding to make the game deeper, more complex, and more rewarding. Speaking of... Where can I see how the game is developing? The best place to track how development is going is through our vlogs and checking out our roadmap. We try and be as transparent as possible, and showing you what is happening inside the studio is the biggest way we do that. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel here, or watch one of our most recent development vlogs below! If YouTube is not your thing, we have a roadmap posted on Trello where you can see everything in the pipeline, as well as ideas for content we want to explore once we reach 1.0! We will do a post in the coming weeks walking you through what it all means. You can also keep up with us in these places: Twitter - Facebook - Reddit - Discord - Forums - Youtube - Steam Forums I found a bug in Astroneer! What do I do? The single most helpful thing you can do is head over to our forums and let us know. More often than not, someone else has run into the bug you are seeing, but you might have info to help us crush it! Stuff like, what you were doing when you encountered the bug, providing steps to reproduce it, and specs about what kind of hardware/OS you are using can all be vital to helping us track down its cause and get it worked out. I love the game, but I am seeing performance issues after playing for a while. Why? Because Astroneer allows you to deform entire planets and place as many things as you want into the world, performance can degrade over time as your bases get bigger or you cover lots of ground. Although we do develop with performance in mind (just ask Zabir) we simply cannot spend the amount of time we would like optimizing the game every update for both platforms. That being said, we are always trying to make performance better as we go. Every month during bugfix week, the team looks at smaller ways they can make tweaks that will impact the game without pushing back deadlines or content. When we get closer to 1.0 we will do a full performance pass and are committed to delivering market standard framerates, more options for tweaking graphics settings and providing a high level of detail at great distances. I am playing but I am not sure how to do something. How do I find out? While we continue adding large new features to the game, there will be a bit of a learning curve with new content. The Research update fundamentally changed the way the game is played, and old players coming back might have been a bit overwhelmed. For this reason, we added a tutorial "cheat sheet" into the game that you can invoke anytime by pressing "F1" or the "View" button on Xbox One! We also know that it is not always enough. In the future, we hope to have more in-game tutorialization to make sure players know exactly what is going on. For now, let us recommend some great content creators out there making videos & streaming about new Astroneer content. We made a playlist of some videos that might help you on your quest to become the best Astroneer. I have an idea that will make Astroneer better! One of the best parts of the Early Access process is that we are still in development. If you have feedback or ideas that you want to see in the game, once again, the forums are the best place to get your ideas heard and tracked. There is an entire subforum dedicated to putting your suggestions out there, as well as discussing them with others. If you already see your idea there, don't fret! Just respond with your thumbs up to let us know more people want to see a certain feature or item. It is one of our most posted in subforums, and we appreciate all of the input! Thanks for reading! Hopefully, this clears up some of the most burning questions you have, but you can also ask me questions anytime on Twitter, or jump into the Astroneer discord where a member of the community is almost always there to provide an answer.

We have just posted two new openings on our website. We are looking to fill three positions: Lead Designer, Associate Producer, and Tools & Infrastructure Engineer! If either of these sound like you head over to our career listings to submit an application!