It's perhaps the last remaining hangover from No Man's Sky's rocky launch; the poster child for what many saw to be promises unfulfilled and the one major pre-release tease that's continued to remain elusive, despite four years of tireless post-launch support. But now, six years after its initial 2014 unveiling, Hello Games' exploratory space sim finally has its sandworm.
Sandworms are just one of the many, many new additions in No Man's Sky's latest update, one the developer is calling Origins for reasons that will become clear; despite 2020 having been an unusually busy year for No Man's Sky in terms of release frequency, Origins, which launches today on Xbox One, PS4, and PC, is another mammoth undertaking, rivalling the size and scope of No Man's Sky's previous Next and Beyond updates.
Yet while both of those took a rather scattershot approach to expansion - delivering everything from multiplayer to VR support between them - Origins is unusually laser-focussed in its inception; it's also arguably the update that fans of No Man's Sky's early exploratory promise have waited for the longest, finally giving the four-year-old game a massive injection of variety.