Playing Early Copies of 'No Man's Sky' Is a Waste of Time

All across the internet, players are managing to get their hands on early copies of the ridiculously hyped space exploration game No Man's Sky and posting videos of what they've seen. For many, as should only be natural for a game that's been burdened with so many expectations, the final product hasn't lived up to the dream. But in that regard, the damage has been done (and the fact that Sony is forcing news sites to remove footage via DMCA requests isn't exactly helping). But if one of those early copies manages to make its way to your door, you might be better off just waiting to play it with everyone else on the proper release date of August 9.

If you're of a sentimental bent, consider the plea of poor Hello Games chief Sean Murray, who sent out a tragic tweet on July 29 after Reddit user Daymeeuhn posted over 30 minutes of footage on DailyMotion. He really, really doesn't want you to play it (or watch footage), you guys.

"We've spent years filling No Man's Sky with surprises," Murray said then. "You've spent years waiting. Please don't spoil it for yourself :("

Yet there's a reason beyond pure spoilers. As Murray said in another tweet just last night: "If you are reviewing/playing our game without our update, on a leaked copy, then please don't. It's not what players will experience."

Murray appears to be referring a Day One patch that could change much about the footage we've seen so far. Much of the uproar over Daymeeuhn's footage focused on the embarrassing number of bugs and glitches he showed or reported, such as sea creatures spawning vertically in the ground, missing or glitched upgrades, or the simple fact that Daymeeuhn was able to reach the center of the universe in only a couple days' time. Murray earlier told GameSpot it would take players "hundreds of hours" to reach that point if they did nothing else.

Murray tweeted last Tuesday that he and his team were still at the office working on the patch at 5:00 a.m. after a month of preparing a patch that will bring "Lots of new features, balancing and content." What that means isn't exactly clear, but it'll almost certainly contain a decent amount of bug fixes.

But here's the biggie: No Man's Sky is chiefly about exploration, about finding one in a "quintillion" planets and naming it all your own for other players to see while investigating their sometimes unique flora and fauna. Any planets you name so far are going away on Sunday, as Hello Games' Harry Denholm tweeted yesterday after Kotaku informed its readers that there was a planet named for it out there among the procedurally generated nebulae.

It's a good thing, too, as for a few hours No Man's Sky's launch should live up to that Star Trek-inspired dream of going where no one has gone before. "Where no one has gone before except for some unscrupulous YouTubers" just doesn't have the same bang.