spatialcomputing.info

Redemption arcs rarely last this long, but No Man’s Sky (2016) hasn’t given up on going above and beyond with its latest update, which finally fixes the visuals on PSVR 2.

The game’s initial release on PSVR earlier this year 2 wasn’t great, with users noting that visual quality simply wasn’t up to snuff. Players and reviewers alike decried the much beloved game’s blurriness on PSVR 2, which became an unfortunate fixture since the February 2023 update.

Now Hello Games has released its Echoes 4.4 patch which has completely overhauled visuals on PSVR 2 thanks to the inclusion of foveated rendering, an eye-tracking-driven rendering technique that only displays the area in the center of your eye’s gaze at max quality. Your peripheral vision isn’t that great at seeing detail anyway, so why waste precious resources to render where it matters the least? That’s foveated rendering in a nutshell; learn more about how eye-tracking goes way beyond foveated rendering here.

Echoes also brings a new race to the game, the Autophage, a long-hidden civilization of robotic beings. You’ll also encounter Pirate Dreadnoughts, which cruise between the stars and terrorise merchant fleets, and some more detailed ship controls that let you divert power to boost shields, move faster, or increase your firepower. Hell, there’s even a trench run in Dreadnoughts, which—terrible ship design flaw notwithstanding—sounds like a blast.

Checkout the Echoes update trailer below to see it all, or also read the game’s release log for the full rundown of recent updates.