Easily my favorite go-to for no-nonsense, highly-technical game analysis is Digital Foundry. DF brings news and deep-dive looks at modern (and retro) games using custom capture and analysis tools to deliver unique insight into the titles gamers know and love. As a tech-minded gamer and developer, I feel they are without peer.

In response to Hello Games’ recent release of the No Man’s Sky Worlds Part I update (v5.0), Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter, John Linneman, and Alex Battaglia discussed in a recent video just how monumental and untraditional the release of this massive update — eight years after the game’s launch — really is.

Here, I wanted simply to share the video and some of what was said about just what Hello Games has done, here.

Ok, so this kind of came out of nowhere and, what can I say, I think it’s pretty terrific. No Man’s Sky received a massive update this week and it looks like — the argument seems to be from Hello Games — that, it’s like, “Ok we’ve developed this fantastic new rendering technology for our brand new game that’s coming up [Light No Fire] but what we’ve actually done is to kind-of inject it into our old game, and it’s been transformed in the process.”

…and I think what’s fantastic about this particular update is that they didn’t really need to do it. All eyes are on the next game, right? But, they’ve turned what they’ve invested time-wise into this new game into an update for No Man’s Sky — and it’s just phenomenal. I just can’t quite get my head around it. Is this unprecedented?

Richard Leadbetter, Technology Editor at Digital Foundry

For myself and many others it seems, the Worlds Part I update has truly been transformative as far as the look and feel of wandering through the No Man’s Sky universe.