Daily Briefing: Tuesday 10th August

No Man Sky announces another massive update to celebrate fifth anniversary

As hard as it may be to believe, No Man's Sky turns five years old this week and to celebrate developers Hello Games have released a neat highlight real detailing all the updates the procedural space game has received over the years. As an additional surprise, the trailer also announced a new upcoming expansion called Frontiers. No detail was provided on this new injection of content beyond confirmation that it's "coming soon" but, looking at the game's track record, it'll definitely be worth a look.

• Provided nothing sneaky happens between now and its eventual release, Frontiers will be the 17th major update No Man's Sky has received during its five years wandering the universe. The game's original 2016 release went down in history as one of the greatest disappointments in gaming, but Hello Games have spent the intervening years refining and improving No Man's Sky to the point where it has met, and even exceeded, those lofty ambitions. It's a true success story, and Hello Games aren't done yet.

Nintendo to hold indie showcase later this week

It's been a while since we got an official Nintendo show but a new Indie World stream is set to air tomorrow, Wednesday 11th August, at 9am PT/12pm ET/5pm BST and promises "roughly 20 minutes of information on upcoming indie games heading to Nintendo Switch."

• Nintendo's last Indie World showcase aired back in April and managed to squeeze 21 games into a similar 20 minute runtime, so it'll be interesting to see what they have in store, especially given this will be the first official Nintendo broadcast since E3. As ever, everyone's fingers will likely be crossed for word on Hollow Knight: Silksong but, as ever, we're likely to be slightly disappointed again. It sure is fun to dream though, isn't it?

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice gets a next-gen upgrade

The game has been fully optimised in a new update for Xbox Series X|S, which is available for free to all existing owners of the game - including Xbox Game Pass subscribers. The newly beefed-up version of the game offers players three visual settings - performance, resolution, and enriched. Enriched mode offers ray tracing on Xbox Series X|S and supports 4K resolutions on Series X - with both consoles running at 30fps. Performance mode offers 1080p/120fps on Series X and full HD/60fps on Series S, while Resolution mode offers 4K/60fps on Series X and 1440p/30fps.

• It's a pretty solid wee update, but the catch is that it's currently only available on Xbox Series X|S. A PC version of the update is "currently in development" but there are no plans to bring the update to any other platform - which is bad news for anyone playing on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. QLOC, the studio responsible for the Switch version of Senua's Sacrifice, actually handled this upgrade - freeing up the rest of Ninja Theory to continue work on the upcoming sequel.

Hideo Kojima is worried about the future of digital and physical media

The, shall we say, eccentric creator's Twitter feed is always worth paying attention to and recently he's been getting rather saturnine about media ownership. Kojima says he still buys CDs even though they'll "be gone soon", and it seems that his main motivation is fear of a future where "even digital data [is] no longer [owned] by individuals on their own initiative." He feels that a sudden change may "cut off" access to digital media.

• Kojima expressed concern on Twitter that, eventually, "we will not be able to freely access the movies, books, and music that we have loved." Oddly for a game creator, he makes no mention of the increasingly digital trajectory games have been on these past few years. The transition has been aided by the pandemic, of course, but digital gaming's share of the pie was growing even before then. Poor Kojima, he must own so many CDs.