No Man’s Sky didn’t get off to the best start, but eight years after its controversial release, Hello Games’ exploratory space sim has reached a significant milestone, finally earning enough rave reviews from players on Steam to change its overall rating to “Very.” . Positive”.
When No Man’s Sky launched in August 2016, player sentiment was such that it was quickly doomed with an “Overwhelmingly Negative” rating on Steam. It took two years and a series of major updates for No Man’s Sky to get enough positive reviews for its average to tip toward “Mixed,” and then three more years to reach an all-time user review average of “Mostly “. Positive” in 2021.
As Hello Games’ Tim Woodley explained at the time: “Each percentage point becomes exponentially harder to earn as you go up the ratings. Going from 20 percent positive to 21 percent positive may require only a few hundred reviews. positive reviews, while going from 69 percent to 70 percent needed 10,000 positive reviews. That’s why it’s so rare for games to change their all-time rating and why we assumed maybe we never could. do it”.
Another three years (and a total of 35 free content updates) later, No Man’s Sky finally achieved the seemingly impossible: turning its initial rating from “overwhelmingly negative” to “very positive.” That means 80 percent of its 245,857 Steam reviews are positive, meaning it earned 196,686 blue approvals versus 49,171 red approvals. Addressing the milestone, studio head Sean Murray wrote: “Shit guys, it happened. ALL THE REVIEWS: Very positive. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You have no idea what this means to us.”
No Man’s Sky’s next challenge, then, will be to enter the prestigious “Overwhelming Positive” category, inhabited by the likes of Sekiro, Persona 5, Baldur’s Gate 3, Stardew Valley, Hades, Dead Cells, the Silent Hill 2 remake and Half . -Life: Alyx. However, that’s a significantly more difficult goal, as it requires 95 percent of lifetime reviews to be positive. In other words, assuming No Man’s Sky doesn’t receive a single negative review from now on, it will need a total of 983,420 positive reviews, or 786,734 more than it has now. At what point does the current The universe could be 16 minutes away from destruction.
Regardless, the change to “Very Positive” is still an incredible achievement and a testament to the incredible work Hello Games has put into its space simulation over the past eight years. The most recent update for No Man’s Sky was released earlier this month, featuring cross-save support, PlayStation 5 Pro improvements, and the return of Normandy from Mass Effect. It’s the sixth major update this year, following October’s hair-raising The Cursed (which, among other things, introduced flying saucers to players), while other 2024 additions included fishing, revamped space stations, and a massive generation overhaul. world.
Next up from Hello Games is their procedural planetary adventure Light No Fire, which we’ve had no updates on since last year’s reveal. Maybe we’ll finally see more during December’s The game Awards, but either way, it looks like No Man’s Sky’s journey is far from over.
