No Man’s Sky 4.0, also known as the Waypoint update, has arrived with major design changes to cater to veterans, as well as a new game mode aimed at players new and old.
Update 4.0 is out now for PC (with Steam Deck and VR support), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X (including Game Pass), and now Nintendo Switch, with Waypoint ringing out on the long-awaited Switch port. It’s the twenty-first “big free update” for No Man’s Sky, and developer Hello Games also acknowledges that it’s “perhaps our biggest generational leap yet.”
“Starting off as we intend to continue, No Man’s Sky launches on Switch with its first major update, and it’s no coincidence that many of our changes are focused on making No Man’s Sky a more fun experience for players new and old on that platform. mobile,” Hello Game says of the Switch update and launch.
Waypoint is described as a seminal revision that “lays the foundation for the future”. For starters, there’s a huge inventory overhaul that streamlines all the clutter with clearer categories and icons. The update has also “drastically expanded” inventory sizes and increased level caps for ships, weapons, and characters that consume all of your resources.
Hello Games promises “hundreds” of player-requested quality of life improvements, such as a new “continuous” autosave system, more accessibility settings, additional control options, as well as detailed customization with sliders for basics like combat and crafting. You can adjust the abundance of resources, the damage your builds take, the consequences of death (from not losing items to having your damn savings wiped out), and much more on a granular level. These difficulty settings can also be adjusted at any time, so if something seems too hard or too easy for you, you can always adjust it.
These difficulty settings are part of a package of new game modes intended to expand the experiences that No Man’s Sky has to offer. As part of that push, Waypoint has also added a “relaxed mode” preset that focuses on exploration and storytelling “with reduced danger and minimal grind.” At the other end of the spectrum, veteran players can take on new survival challenges and chase new milestones.
Check out the full patch notes (opens in a new tab) for a deeper breakdown.
We recently spoke with the head of Hello Games Sean Murray on bringing No Man’s Sky to Switch. Spoilers: It wasn’t easy.
