Does it bother anyone else that No Man's Sky (as well as other PC games) force you to sit through an opening level/cutscene before letting you set up video and graphics options? My first experience of the game was everything being set to low with triple buffering v-sync all because my GPU wasn't recognised. To add insult to injury I was forced to watch my character burn to death because I spawned on planet with a base temperature of 60*c. Not a good start to say the least.

It is difficult to remember when experiencing the crazy ambition and scale of NMS that this was made by just a handfull of guys that pretty much had only made Joe Danger (as Hello Games) previously.

They are young (still!) and the sheer scale of NMS has led to many little over-sights in the design process (not being able to use a torch in a dark cave at daytime for years after release, no auto-walk (k key) until recently, terrible navigation tools in game etc etc).

Not having a front facing 'options' screen is just another example of all this. Welcome to NMS, awesome and incredible and full of little 'wtf?' confusions over why things work (or do not work) as expected ;)

My bad guys, I didn't realise it was something to do with engine having to preload the massive world space. I wasn't trying to dunk on Hello Games either. The reason I decided to check NMS out was after learning that these guys have been pouring everything into not only fixing the game, but adding features (including ones that weren't advertised at launch) since the initial backlash. It's an incredible feat, especially nowadays when certain devs aren't even willing to fix their buggy PC ports.

Thank you for the welcome, haha, looking forward to giving it another shot later tonight.

Heh, sorry for not welcoming you properly; hadn't noticed you were a newcomer. So if it's not too late - welcome to our community :D .

Thank you as well for marking my answer as the solution, though i must say it was not really intended as such, neither was it well-informed. I honestly have no clue as to how the game engine works like or what its limitations might be.

And while there might be merit in my arguement, that tweaking the gfx options can be impractical without any rendering being done to reflect those changes, it could also be suggested that many options such as the resolution, but also those unrelated to any rendering, such as sound or network options, should be possible to change without having to wait for the game to first fully load up.

But thanks anyway, and welcome one again; i hope you will enjoy the game as much as most of us do, despite its flaws.