No Man’s Sky has been a popular title ever since it was announced three years ago, but this week the space exploration game finally saw the light of day, as it became available for the PlayStation 4. It’s also coming to Steam on PCs this Friday.
Despite a lot of positive reception from critics and players alike, Hello Games, the game’s maker, says that major changes might be coming to the long-awaited title. In an interview, Sean Murray, the game’s co-director said that thanks to the upcoming launch of the PlayStation 4 Neo, the experience from No Man’s Sky may change in a fundamental way. Referring to the upgraded internals expected on the PlayStation 4 Neo, Murray said:
So more powerful hardware doesn’t just mean upgraded textures or a higher framerate. It means we can fundamentally change the experience. With more powerful hardware, we can have more trees, more leaves on those trees. The density or immersion of worlds, or new types of worlds could exist.
While more leaves and more trees doesn’t exactly sound like a revolutionary new experience, being able to utilize more rendering power may prove very important in a procedurally-generated exploration game. After all, for a computer there may be little difference between one tree or a thousand, but from a player’s perspective that might be a huge change.
Then again, changes much more radical than that is not likely. Sony has stated time and time again that there will be no Neo exclusive titles and that all games will need to work both on the upgraded console and on the existing PS4.
PlayStation 4 Neo will be unveiled at a technical event on September 7th, with dev kits going out around the same time, so don’t expect to see any of those major changes come to No Man’s Sky anytime soon.
Source: Daily Star