I think they could have sunset NMS development like 2 years ago and it still would be considered a damn good open world universe exploration game.

And think of what it means to the devs from beginning to end. It went from something lame and not very substantial, a shallow experience, to something far deeper and far vaster than anyone (even the developers themselves) could’ve imagined.

Obviously there are still a few grating issues with the game (we need an Origins 2 update, seriously, planet and creature variety would help a lot, I’m tired of seeing the same deers and teddy bears and tigers on every planet) but I think that if NMS free update support were to ever end, it would’ve happened a year or so ago.

And of course you can make the argument “Bro wtf are you saying, it’s a company, they make choices based on their wallets not their hearts” and yeah, for most companies I think that’s true but HG is different because of the intense emotional journey most of them have gone through regarding the creation, development, and ongoing support of NMS from its dumpster fire beginning to its current celebrated engoodening.

Another notion to consider: No Man’s Sky doesn’t have super massive content updates. You can just read a patch note one day and see that they implemented a new storyline where you can create and adopt your own little Sentinel buddy and also rework your Minotaur mech. Like sure, from a coding/programming/dev standpoint it IS complex, I’m not denying that, but it’s not nearly as involved as a whole expansion. My point is that Hello Games deliberately keeps their scope low when it comes to expanding on No Man’s Sky, and because of that, in addition to the passion that most of them probably feel for the game, I highly doubt that long-term support for NMS will end any time soon.

But I can be wrong, I’ve certainly been wrong before. However, even if NMS free update support DOES end, it’s going to end on an incredibly high note. They’re not going to just drop it. They’ll drop a banger of a final update that will keep us sated for years. I don’t think they’ll let it go without a “cherry on top”, so to speak.

Well, I finally went and did it. I’m among the 0.7% of NMS players on Steam who journeyed to the center of Euclid in Permadeath mode.

Since I did all of last year’s Expeditions when they came out, I decided to make my own expedition-like experience – earning the “To Live Forever” achievement. The first hour or so was worrying. There were some close calls here and there. But my main impression of the Permadeath mode was annoyance:

• I kept hitting the inventory limitations even after setting up a base and freighter.
• Trying to mine guaranteed a Sentinel spawning nearby and getting big mad at my audacity.
• Pirates showing up and offering to free up inventory slots by taking my stuff every other time I went into space.

My chosen method was to go up the main story/quest line. It’s been a long time and the changes Hello Games made to it since the days of yore were interesting to see. I also took the opportunity to make some different choices this time around. It turns out that everybody is remarkably chill with letting Artemis die.

In the end, I reset the simulation and I found myself on an extreme radioactive planet in another galaxy with a bunch of broken gear. I struggled for a moment, but since I was planning on deleting my Permadeath save anyway, I calmly waited and let it self-wipe.

Going back to my legacy save and seeing the vast expanses of inventory space was like booting up a whole different game.