No Man’s Sky Is Having Trouble Lifting Off On PC

You know something’s wrong when one hour after a highly anticipated game launches its Steam reviews peg it in the “mostly negative” category. Hello Games’ challenging week continues, with the No Man’s Sky PC launch having some serious issues right off the bat.

The Steam user reviews cite framerate problems on powerful GPUs, including Nvidia GTX 980. For many (including us for the first few tries), the program doesn’t open. For others, it crashes after mere minutes. As of publication, only 29 percent of the 3,279 reviews are positive.

Still other users reporting stuttering, audio problems, and general optimization issues. A user going by the name “Dr. Dangledick” says, “You’re severely wrong about the minimum system requirements, replace them with this: Minimum - A computer made by Jesus Christ himself, but it’ll still struggle to hit 20 fps.”

We can confirm a number of problems on a computer sporting an i7-6700, GTX 980Ti, and 16GB RAM. Stuttering occurs regularly, key binds do not work for flight controls, and framerate is unreliable, even with recommended specifications. 

We’ve reached out to Hello Games for comment. Right now, the only guidance we have is from founder Sean Murray’s Twitter account:

Bracing for impact on PC. We'll do our best to keep servers online. Be aware there is a lot of you

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 12, 2016

99% appear to be up and running on our servers. We'll begin trying to resolve asap for those who are having issues

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 12, 2016

Number two issue so far is players who have out of date GFX drivers, or none installed. Please install latest drivers from AMD and nVidia.

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 12, 2016

Number three please make sure your GFX card is above the min spec. OpenGL 4.5 is required to play No Man's Sky

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 12, 2016

Even after updating our graphics drivers, things weren't ideal. Stuttering still occurs (though a bit less frequently), with framerates dropping to as low as 10-15. The keybinding issue makes the game exceedingly hard to play with a control pad once you get off the first planet.

We'll continue to monitor and update.

[Source: Steam]

Our Take
The PlayStation 4 launch was relatively smooth, even with complaints about framerate and field of view. The PC launch is hard to play right now. You could tough it out, but the optimization and performance issues are severe. Hopefully this gets fixed fast.