No Man’s Sky just landed on macOS with crossplay and cross-save support

These guys by no means stop: One of the hardest-working builders on the market, Hello Games, has continued plugging away at its flagship ardour challenge, No Man’s Sky, for almost seven years. It’s exceptional for any developer to proceed enhancing a sport for that period of time with out involving microtransactions.

So far, the studio has subsisted on its preliminary gross sales on PlayStation 4, with the occasional bump from ports to Nintendo Switch, Xbox consoles, PlayStation 5, and PC. These boosts have helped the group ship over 20 main updates, together with two within the first a part of this yr – Fractal and Interceptor.

On Thursday, Hello Games shocked the group and everybody else by releasing No Man’s Sky on Mac! The studio introduced the plans a few yr in the past at WWDC 2022 with out a launch window. So the turnaround time was fairly fast. The sport is already out there on Steam, however Sean Murray mentioned he’s working with Apple to get it into the native Apple Mac Store as quickly as doable.

As one may anticipate, the Mac model will include all seven years of content material – one thing the group struggled with on the Switch. It wasn’t a half-assed effort to rapidly (and cheaply) port it to Mac {hardware}, both.

The group rebuilt the sport from the bottom as much as reap the benefits of Apple silicon and the Metal 3 platform. However, to stem the FOMO Intel-based Mac customers may really feel concerning the information, the group went the additional mile to make the sport suitable with older Apple {hardware}. So you will not must improve your 2015 iMac to take pleasure in NMS. It does not even must be a top-of-the-line Intel Mac, however there are some limitations we’ll level out in a second.

“Expect fast loading times using the Mac internal SSD,” mentioned Murray. “Consistent performance across the full range of Macs is possible through MetalFX Upscaling. Metal 3 support allows No Man’s Sky to achieve console quality graphics whilst maintaining battery life on laptops and lower end devices.”

Additionally, those that already bought No Man’s Sky for PC by means of Steam can seize the Mac model without spending a dime. Players do not even have to fret about dropping their progress when switching from one platform to a different because the save system is platform-agnostic between Windows and macOS.

“No Man’s Sky for Mac is free to millions of players who already own the game on Steam. And for users who use both PC and Mac, cross save is supported between both systems, allowing players to jump from a PC to a Mac laptop, or from a Mac mini to Mac Studio.”

While console variations do not share this cross-save performance, the macOS port is crossplay enabled, just like all different variations. So whether or not taking part in on a console or a pc, hooking up with buddies on any system remains to be a cinch.

No Man’s Sky will run effortlessly on any Mac with Apple silicon, whether or not essentially the most highly effective desktop or essentially the most modest M1 laptop computer, together with the low-horsepower MacGuide Airs. Intel Macs are a bit extra choosy. Users will want at the very least an Intel i5, 8GB RAM, 20GB storage, and a Radeon Pro 570X 4GB Graphics Card. That final spec disqualifies all Intel laptops since they use Intel Iris Plus iGPUs. It additionally requires macOS Monterey 12.3, however that should not be an issue for something however a number of the older Macs (pre-2017).

Murray closed out by teasing that one other main content material dump is coming quickly. So the HG group actually has been busy churning it out this yr.