Uh Oh, there’s terrible in PC gaming land, with the release of No Man’s Sky. While I haven’t gotten a chance to fire up the game just yet, there are reports that the game is constantly crashing and port performance. Sure there may be a bit of overreacting, however, people have already compared this to the terrible Batman: Arkham Knight port from WB Games.
It seems that regardless of what video card you are running, there are serve fps drops massive hitching and stuttering issues. Others are claiming that they aren’t even able to start the game. There have also been some reports that once you alt-tab out of the game, you won’t be able to get back into the game. Mind you, a lot of the complaints are coming from those with above average specs. We’re talking GTX 980 and above, high-end Intel processors and tons of ram. No one is able to run the game at an acceptable level at the moment. So this is more than just a “hardware” related issue, something which was originally blamed for the initial bad performance issues.
Number two issue so far is players who have out of date GFX drivers, or none installed. Please install latest drivers from AMD and nVidia.
— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 12, 2016
Thankfully, Hello Games has started working on a patch, which is available as of now. Just restart the game, if you were able to launch it previously and it will update. The verdict is out on if it does address the various issues so far.
As much as I respect Hello Games for jumping into what is causing the issues, this is no excuse. Releasing something in this state just sends a bad message, regardless if it was intended on not. This is what Q&A is supposed to pick up on, especially before release. Sure, bugs will slip through, yet with issues that are being noticed, especially the start-up issues, they should have been caught. As it stands, I can’t recommend picking up No Man’s Sky on the PC and if you must play it, I hope you have access to a PlayStation 4.
At least the PS4 version runs circles around the PC version, for the moment. I have no doubt that Sean Murray and crew will correct the issues, however, at what cost. From all the hate and complaints going around on multiple PC-centric forms and sites, especially on the Steam forums this is going to be a hard sale.
But truth be told, I’m still a fan of the game. I may be reserving my judgement at the moment, but I’ve seen the work and time that was put into this game. I truly hope that once the issues have been resolved that the PC gaming community gives this game a fair chance. Hello Games has been really receptive about the complaints and frustration and that should show how committed they are to the game’s success.
