Tag Archives: Sky UK

No Man’s Sky Goes Roguelike With Leviathan Space Whale Update

Screenshot: Hello Games

The next No Man’s Sky expansion is all about space whales. Well, okay, there’s a whole new, roguelike-style expedition for players to tackle too but come on. Space whales, baby.

Today’s update, called “Leviathan,” sees the immense No Man’s Sky universe get a little bigger with the introduction of the aforementioned megafauna and a challenging mission that players will need to overcome together. Losing your one life means starting the whole thing over again with a new loadout, but the further into it the No Man’s Sky community gets, the easier reaching the end will be for everyone.

Here’s how No Man’s Sky studio Hello Games describes what the Leviathan update brings to the table:

Difficulty has been turned up in a variety of ways, but every death means a reset of the loop and a new proc-gen loadout. To make it easier to complete the eventual goal of breaking out of the loop with just one life, the community can work together on a persistent, global goal that permanently improves the quality and frequency of upgrade rewards found during each loop. It’s so different to anything players have experienced in No Man’s Sky before and brings a new vibe to the universe.

A story reveals itself as players work together along with Specialist Polo and the “Leviathan,” a large and imposing space creature shrouded in myth and mystery.

No Man’s Sky players who conquer the update’s challenges can look forward to unlocking new cosmetics as well as adding a tentacled space whale to their frigate fleet.

The Leviathan update comes hot on the heels of previous No Man’s Sky update “Outlaws”, which added a host of criminal underworld-related activities and improved the constantly growing game’s space combat in April.

It’s become something of a cliché these days to talk about how far No Man’s Sky has come since its disappointing 2016 launch, but goddamn. I sure hope the folks at Hello Games are remembering to take breathers and drink water every now and then, because it’s starting to seem like they spend every waking moment working on this impressive space sim.

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Sean Murray Is Already Hyping Up No Man’s Sky Successor

Sean Murray presenting No Man’s Sky at E3 2015
Photo: Christian Petersen (Getty Images)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: During a recent IGN interview, Hello Games managing director Sean Murray talked up the studio’s new venture as “something pretty ambitious.”

“Similar to No Man’s Sky, it’s the kind of project that even if we had a thousand people working on it, it’d still seem impossible,” Murray said.

No Man’s Sky, as you may recall, was sold with the same kind of effusive language. However, a huge list of features Murray promised pre-launch, such as being able to see other players online, were infamously missing when the game arrived on store shelves.

And sure, while much of the disappointment can also be attributed to an unchecked pre-release hype train and the harsh realities of making games, it’s hard to ignore all the times No Man’s Sky’s scope was exaggerated. Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida even admitted shortly after release that the grandiose PR strategy behind the Sony-published game “wasn’t great.”

When he broke his silence two years later, Murray agreed, but also talked about the damaging effects the vitriolic response to No Man’s Sky had on Hello Games.

“This team that made the game is incredibly talented and they made something that’s really interesting—and that [controversy] should not be what defines them,” Murray told Eurogamer during a 2018 post-mortem. “No Man’s Sky should be the game that was super ambitious and was made by a small team and went on to grow bigger and have a cool community around it. That’s what I want to talk about.”

In the years since, Hello Games has managed to shift public perception of No Man’s Sky by releasing several widely popular, free-of-charge updates, the latest of which overhauled space combat and expanded upon the game’s criminal underworld. It won a BAFTA for “Best Evolving Game” just last week.

Murray, for his part, says he’s learned his lesson about promoting a game too early in development—and for what it’s worth, he isn’t yet sharing any details about the studio’s ambitious new project—but I still can’t help but see shades of the same mistakes he made with No Man’s Sky in these latest comments. Hello Games’ obvious talent aside, it feels like Murray’s talk of making an “impossible” game is setting up yet another series of rakes for them to step on. Why would you even say something like this after all you went through last time?

The next part of this story is just for Sean Murray, so please go read something else.

Seriously, the blog is over if you’re not Sean Murray from Hello Games. Close the window. Thank you.

Sean, I like you. You seem like a really sweet, earnest guy. But we’ve been down this road. Sometimes, your eagerness can get you in trouble. I don’t want you or anyone at Hello Games to experience the same crap as those terrible months after No Man Sky came out.

The next time you want to say something wild about whatever it is you’re developing, maybe take a beat and ask yourself if now is the right moment to share that with the public. As an ostensible member of the press, it’s okay if you just ignore us for a while. We’ll understand.

 

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Netflix is raising prices by $1-$2 a month

Netflix!
Photo: ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images

Netflix announced tonight that it’s raising the prices for all of its subscription tiers by $1 to $2 a month. It’s been roughly a year and a half since the streamer’s last price hike, which hit in October of 2020.

The increases—which will “roll out” for existing subscribers in coming months, as part of the company’s ongoing efforts to not get torch-and-pitchforked every time they do this—break down like this: Premium subscribers, who currently pay $18 a month for 4K content and 4 screens at once, will be knocked up to $20 a month. Standard plan members (HD content, 2 screens) will be jumped up a buck fifty, from $14 to $15.50. And Basic members, who don’t get HD content, will now be paying $10 a month for the privilege.

The price increases come at an undeniably weird time for the service, which is simultaneously riding about as high as it’s ever been, while also finding itself facing down stiffer competition than it’s ever seen. On the one hand, Netflix’s subscriber base is about as good as it could conceivably be at the moment, with the service currently supporting some 200+ million subscribers planet-wide, and 74 million in the U.S. and Canada—where these latest price increases are aimed.

The problem is that Netflix’s subscriber base is also, well, as high as it can conceivably be at the moment; when you’re already installed in the homes of basically every internet-enabled home in a decent chunk of the planet, it’s hard to carve out that pesky “growth” that shareholders crave. Hence, partly, the price increases, which put Netflix on par (or a little past, for Premium) HBO Max, which has generally been the priciest plan in the game at $15 a month. (For comparison, Disney+ remains at $8 a month, Paramount+ at $10 a month, Apple TV+ at $5, and Hulu just kicked its own prices up to $13 a month last year.) (That’s for the non-ad versions of the services, to be clear.)

And the mere length of the above parenthetical demonstrates the other issue Netflix is currently facing down: There are a lot of other companies out here right now trying to house its lunch. And while its multi-year head start in the streaming wars is obviously a boon, the company still needs to keep throwing as much money as it can at original content to keep subscribers happy. (Especially since studios who were once eager to license their shows to the streamer for some quick post-life profits are now far more reticent to feed a rival the content that it needs.)

The upshot of all of that being: Expect that little monthly bill to get a little less little in the coming months.

[via The Verge]

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