PSA: The No Man’s Sky PC port is having widespread issues

18 quintillion bugs and refunds

Another day, another No Man’s Sky controversy. The PC port is apparently in a rather abysmal state as there are widespread reports of crashes, frame rate issues, and other bugs.

Popular YouTuber and Destructoid ‘super fan’ John Bain aka Total Biscuit had this to say about the PC release:

NMS on PC appears to run like absolute crap at the moment. Massive hitching and fps drops. #stoppreorderingvideogames

— John Bain (@Totalbiscuit) August 12, 2016

This is Arkham Knight levels of bad.

— John Bain (@Totalbiscuit) August 12, 2016

A thread on the No Man’s Sky subreddit is compiling details of people having issues, most of which are some kind of crash, or the game refusing to open across all types of hardware and software.

Currently on Steam, it sits at mostly negative reviews with 5,520 reviews and counting. One such review by a Dr. Dangledick reads:

You’re severely wrong about the minimum system requirements, replace them with this-

Minimum-
A computer made by Jesus Christ himself but it’ll still struggle to hit 20 fps

The Steam discussions for the game are riddled with complaints about issues players are having, people bragging about refunds, as well as a bunch of trolls telling others to buy better computers and the typical defense squad you see around any hyped game.

This isn’t to say that everyone is having problems, as former Destructoid alumnus Joe Parlock reports:

On my PC (GTX 980, 16GB RAM, installed on an NVMe SSD), I don’t have any performance problems at all. Port’s bad in other ways though.

— Joe Parlock (@joeparlock) August 12, 2016

Sean Murray, the creator of No Man’s Sky, is aware of the issues and the team has already pushed out one patch, along with some advice to players having issues:

Biggest issue reported so far is players without the Visual C++ Redist 2010. First PC patch released already! Update and restart if needed

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 12, 2016

Number two issue so far is players who have out of date GFX drivers, or none installed. Please install latest drivers from AMD and nVidia.

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 12, 2016

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

I can’t imagine that many people who game on PC have never installed basic drivers and software for their video cards, but maybe I’m wrong.

If you can manage to get the game working on PC, then you’ll have the benefit of advanced graphical settings, 4K resolution, and a field-of-view slider which I’ve heard is needed as many find the PS4 release’s FoV to be too small.

With multiple delays and another delay for the PC launch by a few days for those in the US, this certainly paints a picture that looks like the game was knowingly or carelessly rushed out, especially when you consider the promise of multiplayer that doesn’t seem to exist at the time of writing. 

What a rocky, disastrous launch for one of the most hyped games in years. People accuse me of hating, but honestly, I’m just very disappointed and I’m certainly not the only one.