Interplanetary exploration epic No Man's Sky has announced that a feature literally years in the making will finally release for the eight-year-old game: Cross-save between its many, many platforms.
That's not an exaggeration. Developer Hello Games earns double the manys by noting that their cross-save support will work on platforms "including PC, PlayStation 4 & Xbox One and Series X/S, Game Pass, GOG, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, PlayStation VR 1 & 2 and PCVR."
Also, a collaboration years in the past will return as the famous SSV Normandy SR1, from Mass Effect, returns as a spaceship that players can collect on Mass Effect's fan holiday, N7 Day, which was yesterday. You'll be able to complete a heavily adapted and revised version of 2021's Beachhead expedition to get a Normandy as a mid-size Frigate in your very own collection of ships. The event will be available until November 21.
"Adding the ability to transfer saves between platforms via a server is especially difficult for No Man’s Sky, as the work involved increases with each platform supported and how long folks have already been playing for. Both those numbers are large for our tiny team," said Hello Games in a press release.
The amount of work to make cross-save function has only increased over the years as more platforms were added and players built ever-more-meticulous and detailed base designs with ever more widgets to spin and mech walkers to stomp around in.
"We also have players who played once at launch, eight years ago, suddenly loading up that save on a platform that didn’t even exist back then!" said Hello Games.
Because of the scale of the task, cross save functionality will only be offered to a limited number of players at first. "We are now ready to start rolling cross save out to a small number of players. From today, all No Man’s Sky players can link their different accounts together at https://cloud.nomanssky.com/cross-save. A subset of players will be enabled to then select their saves from multiple devices on the in-game save screen. In the coming weeks all players will be invited to do so," it continued.
It has been a wildly busy year for No Man's Sky, releasing the big old 5.0 Worlds update that included a sweeping update to tech across the entire game. There was also the addition of fishing, meaning that we can finally consider it a real videogame, and a bit of cosmic horror over Halloween.
