Players on Nintendo Switch will get to experience the procedural universe of No Man’s Sky when the sci-fi title comes to the platform later this year. Third-party Switch titles continue to make their way to the platform, though with some concessions. Games like Kingdom Hearts rely on cloud streaming to run on the Switch’s comparatively less powerful hardware. Native Switch ports can be hit or miss with optimization. Such is the case with Apex Legends’ port, which struggles to run well in the console’s handheld mode.
Developer Hello Games launched the latest major update for No Man’s Sky in the form of Frontiers. The update gave players the ability to become Overseers of a procedurally generated settlement. Once becoming an Overseer, the player would be in charge of guiding and protecting settlers from Sentinels and aggressive fauna. Base building received an overhaul, giving players a more responsive and intuitive interface to create more advanced settlement buildings.
According to a press release from Hello Games, No Man’s Sky will come to the Switch in Summer 2022. The release says a small team has developed the port in secret for several years. Challenges for the port arose due to the limitations of the Switch’s hardware—namely, with the procedural generation. Because No Man's Sky relies so heavily on procedural generation, the developers had to pull out multitudes of technical tricks to make the game run smoothly in both docked and handheld modes. All of the updates that No Man’s Sky received over the past five years will be available at launch, and it will also be eligible for any future updates the title receives. Along with the announcement, Hello Games released a new trailer on its YouTube channel showing No Man’s Sky running on Switch.
Before the inception of No Man's Sky, Hello Games made its debut with the Joe Danger series—a side-scrolling stunt racer similar to the Trials games. The debut title of Hello Games was a popular game on mobile before Apple removed older games from its latest devices in the App Store. However, Hello Games resurrected Joe Danger for iOS and Android after receiving fan mail from the parent of an autistic player.
Hello Games’ dedication to delivering worthwhile experiences for its community has helped No Man’s Sky become the game it is today. Continuous free updates, both large and small, have surpassed the original vision for the game, and more are still in the works. It will be interesting to see what the developers have in store for No Man’s Sky this year as it gets closer to version 4.0.
Source: Hello Games, HelloGamesTube/YouTube