Back in the mists of 2021, No Man’s Sky revealed its very own Normandy SR1 space frigate. “The Normandy in No Man’s Sky?” you cry. “Why, that’s a Mass Effect vessel. Some mistake here surely?” 1) My name’s not Shirley, and 2) Indeed it is a Mass Effect ship, but HelloGames struck a time-limited deal with BioWare to create a version for their own space sim.
“Blast, if only I’d noticed this at the time and acquired one,” you mourn. “Ah, so many years I have wasted.” Be of good cheer, my friend, for No Man’s Sky has a Normandy once again, just in time for the latest N7 Day of assorted Mass Effect celebrations. For the next two weeks, you’ll be able to get a-hold of it by way of a revised version of 2021’s Beachhead Expedition. Tray-tray, away!
That’s not all they’re adding in the latest updates. No Man’s Sky now supports cross-save, albeit in limited beta form to begin with. At last, you will be able to transfer all of your console saves to PC, where they belong. Here’s some blurb – it sounds like implementing the feature has been atypically tricky.
Adding the ability to transfer saves between platforms via a server is especially difficult for No Man’s Sky, as the work involved increases with each platform supported and how long folks have already been playing for. Both those numbers are large for our tiny team.
It’s very common for players to rack up thousands of hours of saves exploring across space, building elaborate bases and cataloging their discoveries, with incredibly detailed saves. Adding Cross-Save for us is a little bit like moving house, the longer people have lived there the more complicated it is to move them! We also have players who played once at launch, eight years ago, suddenly loading up that save on a platform that didn’t even exist back then!
For these reasons we have secretly been introducing the technology for this update for over 6 months. We are now ready to start rolling Cross-Save out to a small number of players. From today, all No Man’s Sky players can connect their different platform accounts together at https://cloud.nomanssky.com/cross-save. A subset of players will then be admitted to the beta. Participants in the beta will be able to upload and download saves from any connected platform, via the in-game save screen. In the coming weeks, all players will be invited to do so.
Find the full bulletin about the Normandy/cross-save update here. Of course, all this invites the question of when we’ll hear more about Mass Effect 5. Bioware released an “Epsilon” teaser trailer on N7 Day last year, but the word is they’re having a quieter one this year, presumably to avoid stealing any thunder from the recently launched Dragon Age: The Veilguard.