No Man’s Sky in VR feels like a whole new game, by Andrew Webster

I’ve played well over a hundred hours of No Man’s Sky since the game first debuted in 2016. I’ve touched down on countless planets, swam beneath alien oceans, and ran from a hostile robotic police force. But nothing I’ve done up until now has felt as thrilling as jumping into the cockpit of a ship, pulling down the glass enclosure with my hands, and pushing the throttle to blast off into the sky.

This is the promise of No Man’s Sky in virtual reality.

The new VR mode for the game was announced last week, and it’ll be available as a free update this summer as part of the game’s extensive Beyond expansion on both PlayStation VR and Steam VR. According to developer Hello Games’ Sean Murray, it’s also a feature the team has been thinking about for some time.

“There were things that we wanted to do and needed to do first, that always took priority, but this was like dessert,” he says. “Just because of the proliferation of headsets, we knew it wasn’t going to be for everybody, so we wanted to make sure we were in a really good place with the game first. It felt like a nice thing for us to be able to support.”