No Man’s Sky was one of the most infamous games of 2016—given it’s incredible scale and failure to live up to the expectations set by its developers and fans.
However, the game largely regained much of it’s lost credibility through sustained large scale updates bringing it much closer to its initial vision. But the game’s infinite universe is now getting compressed to an unlikely platform: the Nintendo Switch!
Announced during the February 9th 2022 Nintendo Direct, No Man’s Sky will find it’s way onto the Nintendo Switch, including the past five years of updates for the game. Hello Games initially expressed interest in bringing No Man’s Sky to the Switch back in 2019, with Sean Murray saying in an interview with Gameinformer, “It’s super interesting. I love the Switch. We’re obviously very focused on what we’re doing right now, but we have done a lot of work for PSVR to optimize the game.” Murray continued, “So I’d be interested to see what’s possible. But at the moment, we’re just very focused on what we’re doing right now.”
While the game itself looks to be visually downgraded from it’s other console counterparts, and will likely run and a reduced framerate, the sheer size and scale of the game make it an incredibly impressive port for the system, especially to be played in handheld. While few details are known at this time—like whether it will implement motion controls, HD Rumble features or whether/how multiplayer may be implemented.
No Man’s Sky initially released on August 7th, 2016 to mostly negative reviews. Despite it’s flaws, I personally enjoyed it’s laid back gameplay and unique concepts. While the Switch isn’t known for being a powerhouse console, it will be incredibly interesting to see how the game runs on it—both docked and in handheld mode. The Switch can run The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt pretty competently, so long if you don’t mind a visual downgrade; so anything is possible.
