The enhancements they're making to NMS appear to be backports from the Light No Fire engine, so my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort while the actual technical work is predominantly on the next game.
reply> ...my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort...
replyGiven that they don't (often? ever?) advertise Light No Fire alongside the NMS updates, I'd say that the updates into NMS are large-scale playtests of LNF engine updates, game systems, or both, rather than marketing.
Yeah, I meant the marketing effort for No Man's Sky since that's where the money is. They need to continually attract new players.
reply> They need to continually attract new players.
replyI'm not so sure about that, but otherwise agree with your comment.
I'll gently point back to my hunch that many (most?) of the NMS updates are large-scale tests for things they're thinking about having in LNF. Given that it seems likely that both games are using the same engine, it'd make a lot of sense to use a preexisting playerbase for large-scale, no-cost testing of new changes.
Yes, I think we agree... I think they're using it for both marketing and to test the viability of it and get player feedback, but I do expect LNF to have at least some substantially similar mechanics to NMS for this reason.
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