No Man’s Sky’s Free Upgrade Is Good Enough To Be A Switch 2 Launch Title

Hello Games has made a surprising last minute announcement for the Switch 2.

No Man’s Sky is getting a Switch 2 Edition, but as a free upgrade for the Switch version. If you have the game on the Switch, Game Card or digital, you just need to get it on your Switch 2 and get the free upgrade!

Hello Games also shared information about the update in a new deep dive trailer. They revealed this in the trailer description:

We’re rendering significantly more than before at a much higher resolution and at an increased frame rate. We’ve upped texture density across the board. Cross-save, cross-play, gyro controls, touch screen and MULTIPLAYER are all there from day one, along with 9 years of updates.

They shared even more interesting, and honestly, astounding, details in the trailer itself. As Hello Games CEO Sean Murray explained, they were the only developer to take the effort to push the Switch’s graphical capability using FSR. Murray claims they have carried over this work to the Switch 2, which means they chose not to leverage the Switch 2’s native DLSS.

There’s definitely a lot that we would want to know about this. In particular, one wonders if Hello Games was able to leverage the Switch 2’s tensor cores for FSR, or if sticking with it has some cost to performance. That may be the case, but Hello Games did other things to make that performance cost invisible, at least to most players.

This will be of interest to Switch gamers even if they have no interest in No Man’s Sky itself. It’s possible that most third-party AAA games on the Switch will carry over on the Switch 2 using FSR. If those games won’t have any material real changes to them, such as, for example,  Red Dead Redemption, maybe we’ll only see improvements. But the potential performance cost could also hamper these games in the new console, as opposed to getting new native Switch 2 ports.

Hello Games also only had a year to work on this upgrade, but that’s only a continuing testament to the incredible ability of Hello Games’ dev team in optimization. They already proved their mettle with the original Switch port, but moving to the Switch 2 is like this studio removing their metaphorical ankle and wrist weights to show their true power.

No Man’s Sky is also getting it’s next big update today, called Beacon. Beacon is live on all platforms, and it adds to the overwhelming nine years of content with things like new robot settlements and getting to play as an Overseer. These things will definitely be mysterious to anyone who hasn’t played the game this whole time, but you can learn about it here. You can watch the official No Man’s Sky Switch 2 Edition trailer below.