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Update, Friday, August 11: No Man's Sky version 1.3 is now live for players on PC and PlayStation 4. "30 hours" of campaign plot have been added, Hello Games says, and other updates to the game support that increased plot content, including new types of missions and an interstellar "politics" map that looks at economies and warring alien factions.

Arguably the most intriguing update is the new "joint exploration" mode. However, be warned that this is not necessarily full-blown multiplayer. Instead, this adds visual and voice indicators whenever more than one person is traversing the same planet in the game while connected online. Any other players who happen to be on the same planet as you will appear as floating, glowing orbs. At the very least, players can now hop, skip, and jump across the universe as a group and chat about what they each see and discover, but they will not share missions, terrain deformation, or other system-specific actions in the game.

Original report:

No Man's Sky has seemingly survived one of the most uneven video game launches in recent history, and its reputation has slowly recovered thanks to a series of content-loaded patches. But none of those patches has been preceded by as much hype as the "Atlas Rises" update, which finally has a release window: this week.

Hello Games founder Sean Murray announced the patch's launch in an e-mail to fans on Tuesday, and it confirms what the game's "Waking Titan" alternate-reality game (ARG) hinted at: a new "quick-travel portal" system and an expanded, updated story. (These two changes may combine to make the game's enormous, procedurally generated universe feel a little more interconnected.) This "version 1.3" update will be free for all No Man's Sky game owners on both PC and PlayStation 4. Murray did not confirm whether the patch will land on the same day for both platforms.

This patch follows a base-building "foundation" update in November of last year and a car-loaded "path finder" update from this March. As with the other patches, we expect version 1.3 to add additional smaller-scale updates and tweaks beyond the major, headline-grabbing updates. We'll update this report with more information on the patch as soon as its release notes are published, which Murray says will accompany the patch.

With these three patches combined, the game slowly approaches the hope and promise that No Man's Sky ultimately suffered from during its rocky launch, thanks to underdelivering. Still, it remains to be seen if more patches, particularly a multiplayer-focused one, could ever arrive.

The Waking Titan ARG began with a series of audio cassettes mailed to active No Man's Sky community members in early June, and these included clues that pointed users to a series of websites. A giant series of interconnected puzzles followed, and these ultimately led to a real-life puzzle-room challenge in New York City at the end of July.

"What we do is so much more than what we say, but since launch we have sometimes focused too much on that," Murray wrote in the e-mail. "We wanted to reach out and celebrate the devoted community that means so much to us. We launched Waking Titan to try to do that."

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