No Man’s Sky’s Latest Threat Seems Like A Star Wars Homage

This week marks the 49th anniversary of the original Star Wars movie, and Hello Games appears to be paying homage to the seminal flick with its “mysterious Death Star-like construct” that will debut in No Man’s Sky’s latest update, The Swarm. Per the patch notes, The Swarm is set to begin soon and it will run for around eight weeks. This expedition will introduce a new threat to every living being in the galaxy, as the Swarm targets any travelers that get in its way. To end the Swarm and its massive weapon, travelers will be split into three teams–the royal, the sage, and the weaver–all of whom will have to work together to unlock a final confrontation. At the end of the campaign, the team that contributed the most to the war effort will be given their due in the Space Anomaly. Hello Games’ Sean Murray promised that The Swarm will have the “biggest and most epic space battles to date,” before adding that “The Hive of Glass protects itself by releasing swarms of robotic drones, creating an awesome spectacle of battles with hundreds of ships. The Hive itself is a weapon too, with the iris opening to release the largest weapon we’ve ever seen in No Man’s Sky. A laser capable of destroying freighter fleets and perhaps even something as large as a space station.” While Murray stopped short of calling the Hive a planet killer, the worlds of No Man’s Sky can be contaminated by the Swarm. Players can go through the effort of healing these broken worlds while investigating the wreckage of Swarm ships for clues about their past and potential ways to defeat them. However, salvage missions of this type pose new dangers to travelers as the Swarm can defend itself even when its ships are destroyed.  The most recent No Man’s Sky update added Pokemon-like battles to the game. Players also gained Gravity Guns earlier this year, and that’s a weapon that may come in handy as The Swarm campaign unfolds. The complete patch notes for The Swarm are included below. No Man's Sky The Swarm Update Update 6.4 patch notes: The Swarm Expedition Expedition Twenty-Two, The Swarm, will begin shortly and run for approximately eight weeks. Players on the expedition will be assigned into one of three teams of Travellers, and allocated a ship and uniform in their team colours. All teams must work together to unlock the final battle. Progress is represented by the construction of the Prismatic Core in the Space Anomaly, as well as displayed in the Mission Log and on the Galactic Atlas website. Construction of the Prismatic Core is driven by completing three categories of missions to counteract the Swarm – Purge, Restoration, and Sabotage. Each category has a different impact on the rate and balance of construction. The most valuable team will be glorified in the Space Anomaly for all time. Rewards include new posters, decals and titles; flags representing your assigned soul fragment; the Direwasp rifle Multi-Tool; the Direwasp Flightpack; and the six-piece Direwasp customisation set. Swarmer Enemies During the expedition, players will encounter two new enemy types: small, agile swarmer ships, and the huge, formidable Hive of Glass boss. In all game modes, crashed swarmer ships can now be found on dissonant planets. Crash sites are defended by small but deadly planetary swarmers. Buried debris from crashed swarmer ships can now be found on worlds which are both dissonant and contain salvageable scrap. Stability and Optimization Fixed a rare softlock where the Connecting banner could display indefinitely when viewing the initial frontend screens. Fixed a crash related to rendering thumbnails for multiple complex corvette-class starships. Implemented a number of memory and performance optimisations related to ship trails and speedlines. Improved performance when piloting wheeled Exocraft on Switch, Xbox One, and PS4. Implemented a significant optimisation in freighter battles. Improved performance of certain lighting calculations on CPU. Significantly improved performance when handling object visibility in complex scenes. Optimised memory usage when rendering UI in sub-4K resolutions on PS4 Pro. Fixed an issue that could cause a crash when playing in 4K on PS4 Pro. Fixed a number of rare crashes. Space Combat Improved the visibility of targeted enemy ships in third person space combat. Improved weapon aiming of the starship in third person space combat. Improved the navigation of the starship when using auto-follow in space combat, and allowed auto-follow to boost the ship. Improved the navigation and flight patterns of enemy ships in space combat. In space combat, when battling enemies with weak points, hitting the weak point will now always crit, and hitting other areas of the enemy will never crit. Improved the appearance of speedlines in the starship. Fixed an issue that caused mission notifications counting the number of nearby enemy ships to delay updating until a destroyed enemy ship completed its death

This week marks the 49th anniversary of the original Star Wars movie, and Hello Games appears to be paying homage to the seminal flick with its “mysterious Death Star-like construct” that will debut in No Man’s Sky’s latest update, The Swarm. Per the patch notes, The Swarm is set to begin soon and it will…

This week marks the 49th anniversary of the original Star Wars movie, and Hello Games appears to be paying homage to the seminal flick with its “mysterious Death Star-like construct” that will debut in No Man’s Sky’s latest update, The Swarm. Per the patch notes, The Swarm is set to begin soon and it will run for around eight weeks. This expedition will introduce a new threat to every living being in the galaxy, as the Swarm targets any travelers that get in its way.…