Rather than naming its latest update with a numerical value, Hello Games has tagged the next major update for No Man's Sky as No Man's Sky: Beyond. Why? Because at this stage the current (and future) game is essentially a shadow of of its former self.

We announced this update was coming back in March, and today Hello Games has released deeper information on why, and what with the now available BEYOND update:

Well, where do we start?

After the NEXT update in July 2018, we started work on a series of smaller, more focused updates. You saw the first of these with our Exocraft rework, with Abyss and with Visions. We’re very proud of these updates, but we realised that by focusing on one area at a time we were missing out on the chance to make something bigger. And so here we are, nearly a year later, with the results.

The early work on virtual reality got us really excited and convinced us that we couldn’t just tick the box. The chance to truly experience an alien world, to be totally lost in these strange lands – it was an utterly perfect fit for the dream at the heart of our game. The chance was there to do something very special which could set a new benchmark for VR.

Meanwhile, the multiplayer team had conceived of a whole new social hub – The Nexus – which enables you to meet up with friends (VR and non-VR alike), explore together, build bases together, complete missions together and much much more. Every time we played together, we could feel how much it brought to the experience. And so this too began to grow in ambition and scope…

At the same time a longer list of features and updates, large and small, was growing. Rolling them all together helped us to see the bigger picture, to listen to how people played the game, to not only add more but to remould the game in a hundred tiny ways. These, of course, began to fit together with an expanded multiplayer experience, and began to lift the VR experience to another level.

With 2.0, we saw a way to fill in some of the details and pull all the different strands of No Man’s Sky together into a cohesive whole. We think it makes this the perfect time to play No Man’s Sky, as a new player or a seasoned explorer.

Here is just a brief summary of what you can find in BEYOND:

• Virtual Reality support
  
• VR user Interface
  
• VR user interactions
  
• VR controller support
  
• 16-32 multiplayer
  
• Multiplayer missions
  
• Ambient multiplayer
  
• A new social hub
  
• New traveller NPCs
  
• Dynamic NPCs
  
• Alien Languages
  
• New alien encounters
  
• Technology trees
  
• Gameplay Balance
  
• Discovery Page overhaul
  
• Planetary Charts
  
• Creature taming/riding/milking
  
• Multiplayer missions
  
• Cooking & Recipes
  
• Cooler Aliens
  
• Improved base building
  
• Power & Logic & Industrial Bases
  
• Optimisation
  
• Starship enhancements
  
• First person exocraft driving
  
• Vulkan
  
• PC graphics options
  
• Expanded controller support
  
• Sitting
  
• Version 2.0

There are even more patch notes that can be found right here, and while our early impressions of the game, and many others' could have seen the team abandon it, it's great to see they stuck to their space guns and continue to iterate, innovate and evolve the experience.

Watch a video highlighting the above, embedded below.