No Man’s Sky: 10 Huge Changes That Finally Make It Worth Playing

9. Multiplayer Exploration

Like the Half-Life 3 of this generation, the "will they?/won't they?" question surrounding whether a tiny 13 person team like Hello Games even could design a multiplayer component for the whole world has finally been answered.

Now, the multiplayer that exists is entirely exploration-based, and your character is seen by other players as a floating orb - as they are to you. The devs have said "more is coming", but for now, letting up to 16 players all journey across planets together - with proximity-based voice chat - is a way for them to test their servers.

After all, if NMS started advertising itself as having large scale multiplayer dogfights, chances are it would be disconnects for days, and we're back to square one.

In all fairness, Sean Murray only ever talked about these sorts of interactions anyway, "meeting up with friends" or "seeing other players", rather than anything close to letting groups of users rule the skies by blasting hapless newcomers to smithereens.

Time will tell, but this more than delivers on the pre-release comments from 2016.