With the end of the year looming, Hello Games’ exploratory space sim No Man’s Sky is – in an occurrence that’s rapidly becoming a bit of a tradition – revisiting all its limited-time Expedition events from 2024 over the next ten weeks. That means you’ve got another chance to whizz through and earn their various rewards if you missed them the first time around. And I do mean whizz. While Expeditions ordinarily last around six weeks, No Man’s Sky’s latest Redux event is racing through this year’s offerings at a pace of one a fortnight. Furthermore, things are already underway with Omega – which kicked off 2024’s Expeditions back in February – now live and running until 11th December. Omega (as is the case for all future Expeditions) can be accessed via the terminal in No Man’s Sky’s communal Space Anomaly, and – among its many rewards – gives players the opportunity to earn the rather flashy Starborn starship. Before we cover the highlights of each Expedition, though, here’s the upcoming Redux schedule in full: No Man’s Sky’s spooky The Cursed expedition arrived in October.Watch on YouTube Omega: 27th November – 11th December Adrift: 11th December – 25th December Liquidators: 25th December – 8th January Aquarius: 8th January – 22nd January The Cursed: 22nd January – 5th February Rewards for Adrift, which sees players stranded alone in an empty universe, include a haunted frigate known as the Ship of the Damned. Liquidators, meanwhile, features organic chitlin armour to earn as players embark on a Starship Troopers-style bug hunt across the stars. As for Aquarius, it’s a fairly leisurely Expedition primarily concerned with introducing No Man’s Sky’s new fishing system, and rewards here include the Lost Angler’s fishing equipment and a octopus-inspired bobblhead for your starship’s dashboard. As finally, there’s The Cursed – a horror-themed Expedition set in a collapsing reality populated by spectral entities. Rewards here are pretty nifty, including the Cthulhu-esque Horror Exosuit customisation, bioluminescent pets, and the UFO-like Boundary Herald starship. Hello Games’ Expedition Redux event is now underway on all platforms, and it follows yesterday’s news that No Man’s Sky has finally – eight years after its rocky launch – managed to hit the “Very Positive” reviews threshold on Steam. Reaching the coveted “Overwhelmingly Positive” ranking will be a bit of a challenge given the way Steam ratings are calculated, but who knows – Hello Games has confirmed it still has “much more in store” for No Man’s Sky.
Category: 505 Games
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Eight years after its rocky launch, No Man’s Sky finally hits “Very Positive” reviews threshold on Steam
No Man’s Sky didn’t get off to the smoothest of starts, but eight years after its controversial launch, Hello Games’ exploratory space sim has reached a significant milestone, finally gaining enough favourable player reviews on Steam to shift its overall rating to “Very Positive”. When No Man’s Sky released back in August 2016, player sentiment was such that it quickly found itself damned with an “Overwhelming Negative” rating on Steam. It took two years and a number of significant updates for No Man’s Sky to secure enough positive reviews that its average tipped over to “Mixed”, and then a further three years after to that to reach an all-time user review average of “Mostly Positive” in 2021. As Hello Games’ Tim Woodley explained at the time, “Each percentage point becomes exponentially harder to earn as you move up the ratings. Moving from 20 percent positive to 21 percent positive may only require a few hundred positive reviews whereas moving from 69 percent to 70 percent needed 10,000 positive reviews. This is why it’s so rare for games to change their All-Time rating and why we’d assumed that we might never be able to.” This year’s biggest No Man’s Sky update overhauled world generation.Watch on YouTube Another three years – and a total of 35 free content updates – later, No Man’s Sky has finally achieved the seemingly impossible, turning its initial “Overwhelmingly Negative” rating into “Very Positive”. That means 80 percent of its 245,857 Steam reviews are positive – which is to says it’s secured 196,686 blue thumbs up versus 49,171 red thumbs down. Addressing the milestone, studio boss Sean Murray wrote, “Holy shit you guys – it happened. ALL REVIEWS: Very Positive. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You have no idea what this means to us.” No Man’s Sky’s next challenge, then, will be to nudge into the prestigious “Overwhelming Postive” category inhabited by the likes of Sekiro, Persona 5, Baldur’s Gate 3, Stardew Valley, Hades, Dead Cells, the Silent Hill 2 remake, and Half-Life: Alyx. That’s a significantly tougher goal, however, requiring 95 percent of life-time reviews to be positive. In other words, assuming No Man’s Sky doesn’t receive a single negative review from this point forward, it’ll need a total of 983,420 positive reviews – or 786,734 more than it has now. By which point the actual universe might be 16 minutes away from obliteration. Regardless, the shift to “Very Positive” is still an incredible achievement, and testament to the incredible work Hello Games has put into its space sim over the last eight years. No Man’s Sky’s most recent update released earlier this month, introducing cross-save support, PlayStation 5 Pro enhancements, and the return of Mass Effect’s Normandy. It’s the sixth major update this year, following on from October’s spooky The Cursed (which, among other things, introduced flying saucer ships for players), while other 2024 additions have included fishing, refreshed space stations, and a massive world generation overhaul. Up next for Hello Games is its procedural planet adventure Light No Fire, which we’ve not had an update on since last year’s reveal. Perhaps we’ll finally see more during December’s The Game Awards, but regardless, it sounds like No Man’s Sky journey is far from over.
DF Weekly: Death Stranding’s surprise Xbox port impresses on both Series X and S hardware
In this week’s DF Direct Weekly, we take a look at the surprise reveal of last week – a full Xbox Series X/S port of Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding. Released on the same day as PS5 Pro – which may look provocative – the launch is exactly five years on from the launch of the original PS4/PS4 Pro version. That’s the more likely explanation for the Xbox release: the chances are that whatever console exclusivity deal Kojima Production had expired, so the firm went ahead. And what a surprise it was: we had an email from 505 Games and that seemed to be the extent of the marketing. The game is currently 50 percent off on the Xbox Store, meaning I bought it for just £17.49. That’s amazing value for a genuinely superb game, assuming that the port is of sufficient quality. We have good news for you there: it’s great.
So, please bear in mind that this release came out of nowhere and Digital Foundry has plenty on its plate at the moment, so impressions on this one will be somewhat limited to just a morning of testing. However, despite the PlayStation origins of the Decima Engine and its prior console exclusivity, the truth is that Death Stranding on Xbox Series consoles is looking good, whether you’re playing on the premium X console or the more cost-efficient S.
- 0:00:00 Introduction
- 0:01:08 News 1: God of War Ragnarök PS5 Pro patch tested!
- 0:13:36 News 2: Nintendo confirms Switch 2 backwards compatibility
- 0:25:27 News 3: Death Stranding lands on Xbox
- 0:38:11 News 4: No Man’s Sky patched for PS5 Pro
- 0:47:49 News 5: Sony INZONE M10S impressions
- 1:05:53 News 6: Sonic Generations can run at 60fps on Switch
- 1:11:42 Supporter Q1: Will you use the 9800X3D for high-end gaming benchmarks?
- 1:16:21 Supporter Q2: Will PS6 use 3D V-Cache?
- 1:17:32 Supporter Q3: Will Alex and John switch to 9800X3D?
- 1:22:15 Supporter Q4: Why is Game Boost falling short of the promised 45 percent increase to PS5 Pro raster performance?
- 1:29:21 Supporter Q5: Would AI frame extrapolation make native frame-rate unimportant?
- 1:32:30 Supporter Q6: What do you want out of Steam Deck 2?
- 1:38:32 Supporter Q7: Why didn’t you spend more time analysing the PS5 Pro’s actual box?
Kojima Productions’ port is based on the Director’s Cut, and it’s good to see that all of the content and features from the PS5 release are available on the Xbox consoles. There are quality and performance modes (both targeting 60 frames per second) and the option to run in standard 16:9 or in 21:9 ultrawide with black borders top and bottom remains in place. Adding to the good news is that Xbox Series S is also feature complete. One might imagine that the game’s PlayStation 4 origins makes the port less onerous for the Series S.
Looking at the PS5 Director’s Cut up against the new Series X version, we used the intro sequence running in quality modes as a benchmark of sorts. The cutscene begins as a 4K 60fps cinematic, but transitions mid-point into engine-driven rendering that can’t quite sustain its target frame-rate. Both PlayStation and Xbox versions lose frames at similar points in the sequence, and while PS5 is generally a touch faster, there are moments where Series X can take point too. What we’re seeing here amounts to a summary of cross-platform development across this generation – either machine can outperform the other, but generally they are very similar.
In quality mode, PS5 may have some kind of dynamic resolution scaling in effect across both axes, while Xbox scales horizontally for sure in a range between 3584×2160 to 3840×2160 based on the samples we have. Perhaps this explains the small performance differential. In performance mode, both consoles almost hit the target 60fps and both are use dynamic resolution scaling across both axes: the range seems to vary between 2880×1620 to 3200×1800. It should be noted that outside of the cinematics and intense combat, quality mode tends to hit 60fps, while performance mode almost runs at 60fps across the board. Where it doesn’t, once again, PS5 and Series X trade blows, as the gallery below reveals.
Attribution
Xbox Series S is absolutely fascinating. It’s an accomplished port that scales very, very well indeed to the junior console. The quality mode doesn’t resolve as much detail and from the resolution metrics, we can see why – it’s using a dynamic resolution scaling range between 900p and 1080p. What’s quite remarkable here is that the drop to pixel count for the 4TF machine results in output frame-rate that’s faster than the quality mode equivalents on Series X and PS5. And maybe that’s a good thing, as the chances are the Series S owners are less likely to have VRR displays – so the closer it gets to a locked 60fps, the better.
Meanwhile, performance mode is equally intriguing, running at a target 60fps with a DRS window that seems to sit within 810p to 900p. However, run the intro sequence in quality mode vs performance mode and it’s fascinating to see just how close the metrics are – there’s very little in it, which makes me wonder whether the performance mode could simply increase the DRS window to quality mode’s upper bounds of 1080p.
Quite how Kojima Productions has achieved a port of this quality isn’t fully clear, but it’s as good as I would have hoped for on Xbox consoles. Perhaps it’s the case that the game’s existing (and highly performant) PC version running on the DirectX 12 graphics API may have given the developers a strong foundation on which to deliver an Xbox version of the game. And right now, with the game available to buy at £17.49/$19.99, what you’re looking at is a title that’s still very different and original, still looks fantastic, runs beautifully and won’t cost you the earth. Yes, we’ve only spent a very limited amount of time with the game, but the class of Kojima Productions is self-evident.
From here, with console exclusivity a thing of the past, you have to wonder where Kojima Productions will go next. Obviously, there’s a sequel in the offing (though what kind of exclusivity deal is in place remains to be seen) but of course, the smart money would be on some kind of port to Nintendo’s upcoming Switch successor. The regular Digital Foundry audience may recall that I tested Death Stranding on a downclocked RTX 2050 mobile graphics chip, which represents the closest thing you’ll get to the leaked Switch 2 T239 GPU specs. I was able to run the game at console equivalent settings at native 720p, using DLSS upscaling to hit both 1080p and 1440p – and it looked great. While the Xbox ports may look like a definitive end point for potential Death Stranding versions, I’d say that Switch 2 is absolutely a viable target.
This has been an interesting diversion from the launch of the PlayStation 5 Pro last week, which – and let’s be honest here – has been the focus of attention from Digital Foundry. And there’s more of that in the Direct. John Linneman roadtests the new Pro patch for God of War: Ragnarök, which features the ability to swap between TAAU and PSSR upscaling at any point, opening the door to a fascinating comparison of the computational cost of PSSR up against the much ‘cheaper’ TAAU. Meanwhile, I took my PS5 Pro into my garage where my old 8K LG Nanocell TV sits gathering dust, looking to check out No Man’s Sky‘s excellent 8K 30fps mode.
We also share our thoughts on the announcement of Switch 2 backwards compatibility with the existing Switch library, while John gets very, very excited about Sony’s new Inzone M10S 1440p monitor with 480Hz and G-Sync support. We’ll have a separate Eurogamer article about this in due course, but he reckons it’s one of the most impressive displays he’s ever seen. There’s also some great discussion in our Supporter Q+A section. Will Alex upgrade to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D? Will John finally leave Intel behind for his next workstation? And when it comes to the next console unboxing, should we provide a technical analysis of the cardstock and materials used? Can we in any way elevate content that is essentially about removing a plastic box from a cardboard one? It’s all in this week’s DF Direct. Join us!