No Man’s Sky is joining the Switch 2 launch party. The 2016 sci-fi survival sim has spent nearly a decade evolving, and Hello Games announced the live-service game’s latest milestone: a major new update called Beacon and a Switch 2 version that massively improves the game on Nintendo’s platform. The best part is that the upgrade, like all of No Man’s Sky’s updates, is free for fans who already own the game on Switch.
Beacon goes live on June 4 across all platforms and overhauls space settlements, adding a whole new layer of civic life and conflict to galactic exploration. It sounds like it’s going full Fallout 76 and then some. In addition to new robotic settlements and sci-fi buildings, Beacon features town settlements where you build and upgrade buildings, customize the atmosphere with jukebox bars and starship shops, and NPCs you can talk to. Players will have to manage disputes and protect the settlements, even enlisting wingmen to repel pirate raids.
The Switch 2 upgrade, meanwhile, drops on June 5. In a trailer for the new version, Hello Games studio head Sean Murray said the team had been toiling away locked in a hidden room with a secret Switch 2 dev kit for over a year to bring No Man’s Sky to Nintendo’s next console generation. That means gyro controls, better resolution, framerate, draw distances, and pixel density. Also multiplayer support which wasn’t previously available on the Switch version. It’ll feature crossplay and cross-save on day one, so players from any platform can continue their journeys uninterrupted.
No Man’s Sky’s free Switch 2 upgrade is in sharp contrast to some other “next-gen” versions of existing Switch games that are charging for things like improved framerate, resolution, and the addition of Joy-Con mouse controls and Game Chat support. We’ll have to see how they look in practice, but it certainly sounds like No Man’s Sky on Switch 2 will be the experience the game was always meant to be on Switch 1 when it arrived in 2022, but which the older hardware struggled to deliver. It’s nice to see that Hello Games isn’t charging for finally delivering on that vision.
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