No Man's Sky Looked Better Before 45 Updates Changed It

45 major updates in ten years. By any measure, No Man's Sky's transformation from a bare-bones exploration sim into a sprawling multiplayer sandbox is one of gaming's great redemption arcs. But as the game hits its tenth anniversary this week, revisiting the original 2016 version raises an uncomfortable question: did all that evolution come at the cost of what made it visually special in the first place?

Eurogamer's Matt Wales went back) to the original disc version this week, running it on a dusty PS4 pulled from an attic, and his findings line up with something I've felt for a while. The 2016 No Man's Sky, stripped of a decade's worth of graphical overhauls and feature bloat, still looks striking. More than that, its psychedelic colour palettes and alien geometry arguably capture the spirit of its sci-fi art inspirations, Chris Foss and John Harris, better than the modern version does. Wales described the original landscapes as "maybe even more exotic, even more alien" than what the game generates today.

I think he's right, and it gets at something broader about how live-service evolution can quietly sand down a game's identity. Every lighting pass, every terrain overhaul, every new biome type pushed No Man's Sky closer to photorealism and further from the retro-futuristic fever dream it launched as. The 2016 version had floating islands rendered in saturated, almost painted hues. The 2026 version has volumetric clouds and realistic water physics. Both are impressive. Only one of them felt like stepping into a 1970s paperback cover.

Where Next vs. What Now

The visual shift mirrors a deeper design change. Wales makes a sharp distinction between the original game's driving question, "Where next?", and the modern version's "What now?" Base building, freighters, farming, multiplayer, settlements, expeditions: each update gave players more reasons to stay in one place. The original had almost none of that. It was built around transience, around landing on a planet, taking a screenshot of something weird, and moving on. The art direction served that philosophy perfectly. Every horizon looked like a painting you'd never see again.

None of this is to say Hello Games made the wrong call. The studio's post-launch support is still the gold standard for how to turn a disastrous launch into a thriving game, and the updates brought millions of players back. But there's a version of No Man's Sky that existed for about three months in 2016 that was doing something no other game has replicated since: pure, lonely, psychedelic exploration with no endgame and no reason to stop walking.

This anniversary's timing is interesting, too. Hello Games is deep into development on Light No Fire, its next project, and indie developers are already picking up the torch of strange space exploration. Space News Network, a new game with a work-in-progress build on Itch.io, takes the No Man's Sky formula and casts you as a roving space journalist chasing scoops across procedurally generated worlds. It's a wildly different premise, but it shares that same DNA of lonely discovery across alien landscapes.

I'd love to see Hello Games offer a "classic mode" that restores the original generation algorithms and art style. Not as a replacement, just as an option. Ten years of updates built a better game by almost every metric. But sometimes the rougher version is the one with more soul, and No Man's Sky in 2016 had soul to spare.