Infamous space exploration game No Man’s Sky appears to finally be making a comeback on Steam. With the announcement and subsequent release of the extensive Atlas Rises update, No Man’s Sky has seen a massive upswing in popularity, seeing a 2000% boost in active players.  According to Steam tracking, the latest number of current players is 11,402, down from its peak number of 14,780 earlier today.

Despite the drastic downturn of active players in the game shortly after its launch, developer Hello Games doubled down and set to work on turning No Man’s Sky into the game it was expected to be due to its faulty pre-launch marketing.  Hello Games has released several content-filled patches since the game launched a year ago, none of which come close to the sheer enormity of its Atlas Rises update.  The update – available now on PC and PlayStation 4 – adds 30 hours of new story content, a graphical overhaul, and a basic multiplayer system known as “joint explorations”.

Multiplayer has been a sore subject for players that purchased No Man’s Sky, especially those that were looking forward to interacting with friends and strangers in such an enormous game universe.  Discovering that there was no multiplayer to speak of after being advertised as such is arguably what led to such a large decline of active players.  Though multiplayer is now officially part of the game, it has a long way to go.  Introduced in the Atlas Rises update, the “joint exploration” feature lets players interact and communicate with up to 16 other players, though these other players are depicted as glowing orbs of light.  Hopefully Hello Games will implement more multiplayer features in the future, though there is currently no news suggesting that this will be the case.

So, thoughts on No Man’s Sky’s Atlas Rises update?  Plan on giving the game another try?  Let us know in the comments section below, and as always, stay tuned to DFTG for all the latest gaming and entertainment news!  Don’t forget to follow Don’t Feed the Gamers on Twitter for our 24/7 news feed!