It’s been a few months since we’ve heard from No Man’s Sky. Expedition 8: Polestar has been done for a while, and that has No Man’s Sky fans itching for news on the next update and what we assume will be the next expedition as the two often go hand-in-hand. Normally around this time we’d get some cryptic emojis from Hello Games studio head Sean Murray (no relation), but this time Murray has been a bit more specific about when to expect the update."No Man's Sky Switch is releasing on Oct 7th - that's really soon," he said on Twitter. "Switch is our next big release and marks the moment No Man's Sky ticks over to version 4.0."Announced back in February, Hello Games has said that the Switch version of No Man's Sky will include every update over the past six years, but it won't include multiplayer. Murray has called the Switch port "a real moonshot for our small team," explaining in a past interview that it was an incredible challenge getting No Man's Sky to work on the Switch's humble hardware.
"No Man's Sky is built around procedural generation, which means the console generates everything you see," Murray explained. "This makes it so much harder to bring our game to something like the Switch but I think this team never seems happier than when they are trying to do near-impossible things."
As for what we can expect in 4.0, that will be anyone’s guess. Given that it will arrive at the same time as the Switch version of No Man’s Sky, and that the Switch version won’t have multiplayer functionality, expect this update to add features that don’t require other players to truly shine. We might also expect a ninth expedition that will be a similarly lonely affair.
No Man’s Sky 4.0 and Switch release arrives October 7.