After teasing big things with No Man’s Sky’s Pathfinder update, Hello Games has finally delivered on its promise. The studio has started rolling the long-awaited update for Playstation 4 and PC, offering a whole lot more than hinted and expected.
The update raises the game to version 1.2, and for the first time allows bases to be shared online – adding a social element and allowing other visitors to visit your outposts and leave messages.
What’s New In No Man’s Sky’s Pathfinder Update?
It also brings three new land vehicles or ‘exocraft’, allowing you to quickly travel and explore vast landscapes. These land-based vehicles – Nomad, Roamer, and Colossus – give new a meaning to planetary navigation, combat, and mining – and can be summoned from anywhere on the planet they were constructed upon. And most importantly, you can even set-up your own race course for them, when done the exploring.
In terms of graphic improvements, the pathfinder update brings a major revamp for PS4 Pro owners and high-end gamers. It adds 4K rendering and subtle graphic improvements such as data color compression and automatic depth buffer decompression. Moreover, as touted by Hello, high-res imagery, HDR mode, and meticulous lighting effects are also some tidbits that make up the visual refresh of this update.
Among other things, the update also includes a dedicated photo mode and a Permadeath mode. The photo mode lets you change the time of day, cloud cover and filters to add the effect of your choice, while Permadeath, as the name suggests, ends your game if you meet an untimely fate.
While Hello Games is promising that this is not the end, with hints of 1.3 patch to follow in coming months, we can surely say that the latest update has made the game far meatier than it was on the launch.