The PC launch for Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky was marred by a fairly significant problem: performance. The game launched earlier in the week for the PlayStation 4 but now that it’s out for PC the developers have been pelted with seemingly endless supplies of reviews piling in from people who are having a tough time playing the game.
Over on the Steam page there are more than 14,000 reviews on file at the moment, half of which are negative. No joke, there are 7,170 negative reviews in as of the writing of this article, and you can expect that number to grow significantly within the next 24 hours.
Robo Hobo does a fine job of summarizing what the actual problems are…
“10 FPS on a GTX 980?
No Man’s Lag
DO NOT BUY… Yet. (They’ll fix it eventually.)
Also a game breaking bug with pre-order ship and hyperdrive can get you stuck.”
Robo Hobo’s warning to steer away from No Man’s Sky has been echoed by multiple gamers. However, not all of the warnings are about performance and frame-rate, some people have issues with the game crashing before they even get into the actual game.
Axis explains…
“Amazing game i get as far as hello games logo and it crashes. don’t buy until its fixed.
“UPDATE:
found some confusing details with the help of a friend
on steam it states the min req graphics card as nVidia GTX 480 which cant have OpenGL 4.5 but on sean murrays twitter he clearly states that you require Opengl 4.5 to be able to play the game “please make sure your gfx is above the min spec.” source: https://twitter.com/NoMansSky/status/764166088577851392 (scroll down a bit to see the tweet about it)”
The tweet that Axis is talking about from Sean Murray reads as follows…
Number three please make sure your GFX card is above the min spec. OpenGL 4.5 is required to play No Man’s Sky
— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 12, 2016
So what about the people who do have a GPU that supports OpenGL 4.5? Well, Michael Futter from Game Informer ran into trouble running No Man’s Sky, expressing the concerns on Twitter.
I’ve got a meaty computer, and it’s struggling right now with No Man’s Sky on PC. https://t.co/Z5zUsgqAVJ
— Mike Futter (@Futterish) August 12, 2016
Renown gaming pundit TotalBiscuit also confirmed that No Man’s Sky doesn’t run well on his gaming laptop or his main gaming rig.
The Windows 10 laptop with the i7-6800 and the 970m is running the game at 40fps right now with frequent hitching, latest drivers. Righto
— John Bain (@Totalbiscuit) August 12, 2016
The collection of people basically saying that No Man’s Sky doesn’t work as intended span the spectrum from minimum requirements to high-end gaming rigs, but a lot of people are still having problems running game adequately. The story is exactly the same with the user reviews over on GOG.com, where they’re giving the game one out of five stars for poor performance and optimization.
Now if you’re in the camp where you’re skeptical about all of this hate and that perhaps you’re suspecting some kind of anti-hype machine behind, you might have those impressions misplaced. Just opposite appears to be happening on some user review forums.
Twitter user Honkimus Maximus spotted something fishy on Metacritic… copy and paste 10 out of 10 reviews.
This game is exactly what the developer said it would be#NoMansSkyhttps://t.co/3CZsyfKEeL pic.twitter.com/8ObMikLJf7
— Honkimus Maximus (@Maximus_Honkmus) August 12, 2016
If you head through the archive link it’s true that sprinkled throughout some of the 10 out of 10 reviews are copy and paste comments about the game being “exactly what the developer said it would be.”
At the end of the day it’s your money and you should only spend it where you see fit and when you feel as if the product meets the standards you’re expecting. If the game is having problems running at a decent frame-rate for a large number of gamers then it might be best to wait for several patches to address the problem before diving in.
According to Sean Murray on Twitter, the team at Hello Games are already working on patches to address the performance issues. We’ll see if they can turn around this launch day snafu and create something worthwhile after they roll out some much needed fixes for the PC gaming crowd.
If you’re having troubles with the game, there’s a support page up over on Steam that offers some troubleshooting tips and solutions for No Man’s Sky.
(Main image courtesy of schweet)