No Man's Sky's Reviews on Steam are Now Mostly Positive

Five years after release, No Man's Sky is getting mostly positive reviews on Steam. The six updates in 2020 have dramatically changed the perception of the game.

Five years after the game's release, it's safe to say that Sean Murray has kept his word and rebuilt the trust of players which he had lost at launch. No Man's Sky has been getting mostly positive reviews with each new update and the seventeenth update, called Frontiers is another example of this. It introduces, among other things, the ability to create our own settlement and direct the actions of its inhabitants. Players clearly liked the idea of creating settlement as clearly visible after the last reviews.

Analyzing the summary of the game's ratings one can see a perfect correlation of jumps in the number of positive reviews with the appearance of subsequent updates. In the four months after the release of the game it had 20% more negative reviews (34,181) than positive (27,200). The change in perception among the players was caused by the release of the 2018 update NEXT (1.5), which introduced, among other things, the long-awaited multiplayer mode. The breakthrough year was 2020 - the game received as many as six highly-rated, major updates:

Living Ship (2.30) - organic spaceships and technology, a series of new story missions.
Exo Mech (2.40) - walking robots resistant to environmental hazards, new base building features.
Crossplay (2.50) - PC/Xbox One/PlayStation 4 users can play together.
Desolation (2.60) - exploration of procedurally generated spaceships (Dead Space style), new missions.
Origins (3.00) - new planets in existing systems, biome diversity improvements, new photo mode, new buildings, volcanoes, weather changes, giant worms.
Next Generation (3.10) - 32-player multiplayer, cross-play with Xbox Series X/S and PS5, 4K mode for next-gen consoles, VR mode for PlayStation 5.

Few games have been able to generate so much excitement over the years but one has to admit that the developers have risen to the challenge and are constantly working to improve the reception of their creation. Seventeen major updates have been released for No Man's Sky, introducing many fundamental changes. It is worth noting that all new features are free, and not sold as DLCs or separate expansions. The same is to be the case in the future. A rare practice, and this is not the end of the game's development.

Currently, unfavorable reviews of the game are a small percentage, and Sean Murray thanked players for the success of the Frontiers update:

The Frontiers update is available from September 1.