No Man's Sky

Multiplayer has promise, a tale:

A friend of mine and I joined up, greeted each other, loaded up a mission from the Nexus and set off to a watery world in search of toxic plants to destroy. Upon arrival, we were side-tracked by the exciting plants and animals, and began exploring around our landing site.

Friend noticed a point of interest in the depths, and called back to me that he was going to go check it out. He dove in, I stayed on land scanning and cataloging flora and fauna. Moments later, I heard his screams. I rushed to the waters edge and looked for his marker. Just then, he breached, walked to the shore and explained, "I saw this big clam and went to go get the pearl, and then something started biting me!"

So naturally, I dove in to investigate. As I entered the underwater cave, I saw the source of his temptation - a brilliant neptunian specimen, begging to be taken. As I swam deeper into the cave, finger tips just close enough to grab it, my screen starts flashing red.

180 degrees and I'm faced with a ****ing giant seamonster who fills the entirety of the cave entrance, I can't swim out, I can't get past him, and he's tearing me to shreds. I start screaming, my friend starts screaming; thinking on my feet, I whip out my terrain manipulator and I start tunneling upwards to the surface to escape as the monster continues to chew my legs off. A few feet in, and

I'm out of juice. I left my supplies on my ship, I can't reload, I'm being eaten alive. I can't escape.

"I'M COMIN, HANG ON"

My health is at 50%

"ALMOST THERE"

My health is at 25%

"THERE"

The tunnel in front of my falls away to the light of the sun, and I swim to the surface without a single HP to spare. He'd heard my plight and raced to action, using his own terrain manipulator to tunnel directly into me, the aborted escape hatch, and the hand of fate meeting just a few meters below the surface.

After we caught our breath, and I reloaded all my ****, we melted some dumbass plants and then went and collected our nanites; death averted, death dispensed.

Fin

So I made an attempt to play multiplayer with some friends, one of whom was in VR.

On first guy's planet, everything was mostly fine. There were some trees growing out of his patio that really shouldn't have been there, but all of us could mostly agree on what reality was at this location. VR guy's VR was doing fine and we mostly watched his poor spacedude tie itself in knots. Even a crude attempt at exocraft racing was absolutely fine.

Then we moved to Another World, where a very low-res panther chased me for ages / where things started getting odd.

Attempting to ferry people there, eventually we determined that my freighter not appearing for VR guy was probably because he'd not gotten one yet, which I guess makes a semblance of sense.

On arrival, I found that Player 2 had made quite a nice base, although some of the dirt had managed to pop back in despite her assuring me the base was clear. I cleared it out, turned around and the dirt had spontaneously reappeared as apparently this is Schrodinger's World. (I'd assume that's the original ground level of the planet?)

At this point, consensus reality broke down. Following a couple of restarts, Player 1 called in his freighter and that worked until he got to the cockpit and discovered it was in fact my freighter. Meanwhile on the ground, I was firing bouncy lasers wildly inside a nice new room with a powered portal in that everyone else swore wasn't there, while VR guy and player 2 attempted to build another base that I couldn't see. As Player 1 returned from our(?) freighter, he informed me that on his screen, the whole thing was down as 'Tactical Necromancy's Base' and not 'Player 2's Base' .

At some point I also ended 600,000 ly from the rest of the group, but I think that was a problem at my end.

All in all, a thoroughly surreal experience I can almost recommend. I suspect some of the issues may come from VR guy and Player 2 being right at the start of the game.

I highly suspect they spent so much time ensuring PSVR was as good as possible up until release that they just didn't have time for proper testing for PCVR. PS4 has an 8 Core CPU, ours is a 6 core/12 thread. May take some time for them to get a handle on the differences.

Introduced a number of CPU and rendering optimisations for OpenVR.