No Man’s Sky’s New Port Is a Wake-Up Call for Bloated Open-World Games

The games industry is undergoing a kind of renaissance in terms of innovation and development, with AI fundamentally changing how the landscape has evolved, and more developers striving to deliver the next big thing before the competition. But one of the most unexpected reveals this week came from No Man’s Sky, a game that has risen from the ashes and received over a decade of updates and patches, and will be playable on IOS on the 28th of October thanks to some optimization wizardry by the team over at Hello Games.

It might sound like just a lite version of the game with some toned-down graphics and only a handful of features, something that is common with mobile ports for bigger games. However, this phone version of No Man’s Sky will include the full universe to explore, alongside over 40 major updates, including the more recent ones like COSMOS and Voyagers, but with a few limitations for older devices and no multiplayer as of yet. All of that for under 4GB, which makes the triple-digits that most players are accustomed to with open-world games nowadays seem like a joke, and is a real achievement for the developers, one that other large games should look to and question whether there is room for improvement in their optimization department.

No Man’s Sky on Mobile Feels Like Magic

No Man’s Sky has been impressing players for over 10 years at this point, and it doesn’t matter if you come for the infinite procedural universe or the lush planetary exploration; you have to marvel at how impressive the game is. And, with each passing year, that universe only becomes more crowded with content, ranging from settlement building to Pokémon-style battles, but the concept of taking all of that and putting it on an iPhone seems bonkers, yet in a couple of weeks, it will become a reality.

For people who own an iPhone 11 or a third-generation iPad Air and above, you will be able to load into the wonderful world of No Man’s Sky and take off into the sunset as if you were playing on a full desktop PC. Aside from some slight content limitations related to the Planetary Settlements, which will be limited to iPhones 15 Pro and above, and a lack of multiplayer support, you will be getting the full No Man’s Sky package, in a file size no bigger than an HD movie. How they have made this happen, I don’t know, but what I am curious about are the implications it will have on future mobile ports of other big open-world games.

Right now, your average big-budget open-world game is easily going to eat up 100GB of your storage space, with games such as Crimson Desert going even further. So for games like Death Stranding, which was ported to mobile back in 2024, trying to cram a huge game onto a small device was never going to be easy, which is why the installation on IOS is around the same size depending on how much of the story you have downloaded at once. But, as great as that game looks, you have to admit it feels pretty bad to have to sit and wait for that giant file to download, especially if your internet speeds are poor or your device has limited capacity.

We have grown accustomed to these enormous file sizes, and I think that what No Man’s Sky IOS is showing is that there is still a lot of work to be done on the optimization side of things. The whole point of these phone ports is to allow players to experience the game in the palm of their hands, and with that comes the expectation that what they are playing is as close to the PC or console version as physically possible. Previously, it seemed as though developers basically just slapped the game’s file onto the app store and called it a day, but Hello Games is explicitly showing off the potential for far smaller file sizes, which may very well result in a major reduction in other open-world file sizes, without a loss of quality.

Maybe Open-World Games Aren’t So Big After All

Whenever a new open-world game drops, the first few things people bring up are how the world looks and the scale of the environment. There has been a trend towards bigger and grander landscapes to explore, and a gradual improvement of graphical fidelity, which when put together, results in an exponentially larger file size than in the past. Back in the day, you could download a copy of Skyrim, and it would only take up around 10GB, but 12 years later, Bethesda’s own Starfield requires at least 120GB of free storage, which may include a larger explorable area, but is far from a major leap in terms of gameplay quality.

Turning back to No Man’s Sky, there is a grain of salt worth mentioning that sets it apart from other open-world games, being the procedural nature of the universe. The reality is that you only need around 15GB to download the game, and the mathematical procedural magic does all the work, but condensing that by over 70% onto a far weaker device is still absurd considering how much of the gameplay and visuals remain intact. It also makes the competition look borderline silly, as you might be technically getting some higher fidelity visuals in Starfield, but there are far fewer places to go, and you have to juggle a huge file that can easily consume a large chunk of your SSD.

The fact is that big file sizes are a real and constant issue that players have to deal with, and with rising parts prices and no sign of slowing down, it’s no accident that more people are on the lookout for alternatives like Cloud Gaming or these more compact mobile options. If we keep seeing an expansion of worlds and a linear growth in download sizes, then I imagine mobile gaming may become the next big thing for mainstream gaming, with small download sizes of blockbuster hits, or no installs at all thanks to streaming technology. Hopefully, though, optimization milestones like this lead to a shift in attitudes, bringing with them more sensible file sizes, rather than forcing you to install 30 GB worth of different grass textures.

No Man’s Sky

7/10

Released

August 9, 2016

ESRB

T for Teen: Fantasy Violence, Animated Blood