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

6. Factional Warfare & Standing With Various Alien Races

Another of Murray's lies pre-release was describing how the alien races work in tandem with one another. He mentioned that you'd have to build up standing with them to even have a conversation, and how you might warp into a new system, only to get embroiled in a space duel between two factions.

In the 2016 version, none of this was present outside of being told your 'standing has increased', and having to learn words of specific alien languages to better understand what was said (it never truly limited your interaction). However, across both the Atlas Rises patch and past updates, space fleet dogfights are now a thing, as is a proper system of faction alignment, so you can choose who to befriend and why.

Journeying across the cosmos will unlock various words in these alien languages, factoring into which missions you can take on from who, and which items, weapons and suit upgrades you'll unlock in tow.

You can hop into the pause menu Guide to get a basic breakdown of where each race lies when it comes to ideology and space history, but I'd recommend spending some time with them before actually picking a side.