ASA Investigating No Man’s Sky’s Steam Advertising | Hacker News Reader

ASA Investigating No Man’s Sky’s Steam Advertising

rockpapershotgun.com

51 pointsMattBearman40 comments

An interesting side note is that the most popular recent thread on /r/NoMansSkyTheGame/ has been about people who have stopped playing but check in daily for news.

A common theme in that sub is that the news about Hello Games is far more entertaining than the game itself.

Fundamentally, the game failed to deliver any emergent gameplay between the various procedural components. An infinite universe that's completely lifeless, waiting for for you to interact with it.

They've released 9 updates so far, mostly bug fixing, there's talk of new features in the future but I have a hard time seeing how they truly fix the game.

I don't understand why it's only No Man's Sky that's being investigated. What about other known games that came out below expectations and with misleading advertisements? Watch dogs being a prime example.

ASA are reactive not proactive, it takes complaints for an investigation to be triggered.

Their standard punishment is "don't show the advert again in this form", this isn't a scary prospect for Hello Games.

> this isn't a scary prospect for Hello Games.

You're right, they have far bigger problems, I wonder if HG has a future given how tarnished their name is?

I feel sorry for Sean Murray, in hindsight he seems like a Walter Mitty character; big on dreams and when anything was suggested in an interview he let his imagination answer.

The new Peter Molyneux?

I didn't follow that debacle too closely, from what I understand Spore was too ambitious but at some level it delivered.

NMS on the other hand is just a badly designed game. Sure, there was hype and over commitment. However, the core game loop is so shallow it's borderline fraudulent.

You're thinking of Will Wright; Peter Molyneux's classic fame was Populous and Black and White, and recent controversy Godus.

Fable is the one that sticks out most in my mind. He's a very talented director and developer but I think by his own admission he hypes his own work beyond what is reasonable. I'm sure he was never doing so to deceive, but you can't talk about amazing features and then completely fail to deliver and not expect blowback.

thanks for the catch, I need to do a little reading.

The big take away for me, and while Sean Murray / NMS might be an extreme example... We view our babies very differently to our users / customers.

Maintaining an objective perspective through out a product's development is a challenge.

What I find funny about this comment is that Hello Games' office is about 2 miles away from the former office of Lionhead Studios.

Anyone can complain to ASA.

Here's the page with information for consumers: https://www.asa.org.uk/Consumers.aspx

Here's the page that talks about what ASA covers: https://www.asa.org.uk/Consumers/What-we-cover.aspx

The complaint, our reader tells us, was made not out of malice against this particular game, but rather a desire to make a larger point about the nature of the way he alleges customers are misled by gaming advertising

The trailers clearly say "captured in real-time" which leads the viewer to believe that is indeed the current state of the game (and games usually improve from their initial releases).

They aren't investating the game for not meeting expectations at release. They are investigating whether the advertising being used today matches the product being sole today. So this isn't about hype. It's about ongoing false advertizing.

I have to believe that investigators have seen this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik

I think Watch dogs was a brilliant game. The story was also decent, but the brilliant part was that you could go into other peoples games, melt in to the city and stalk them, but they restricted it to only two minutes or so, and put up a radar and a warning message so players always knew when someone entered their game, witch totally destroyed the immersion. They could have spun off more into that game-play, like having to check the rear mirror to make sure you weren't followed by the police or secret agent.

That's great to see happening, but any word on the situation with Steam refunds since you pretty much had to play more than an hour or whatever their refund cutoff is to determine that the game oversold itself?

A lot of people claim they got a refund after more than 2 hours but it's a case by case thing so I think as the stream of people asking for refunds hit a critical point they stopped and even put a reminder on the store page saying they will not refund beyond the normal 2 hours.

I think that's fair. The game has an overwhelmingly negative rating and people keep buying it. Marketing genius.

The automated and entirely machine-driven refunds will reject you for too much playtime, but after that rejection you go further and get it to a human and they'll refund you.

It's worth noting that Elite: Dangerous is constantly improving and is definitely worth another look if you found the gameplay a bit thin when it was released. Planetary landing, multi-crew ships, fighter launch from larger ships have all been introduced.

Still no landing on earth-like planets thought :-(

When did multicrew happen? The game is on life support as the company is working on other projects. They keep missing all the deadlines.

It's only in beta as of now, but will probably be released in a couple of weeks or so.

Is the game really on life support though? I only play sporadically and don't really keep up to date with the news, other than the ones you get in the launcher and it seems to be a healthy game as far as I can tell.

You are lying. Multi crew is not in beta and will not be shipping any time soon, not in the next update and certainly not this year. New Horizons was meant to be released in parts, first of which was meant to be released in Q1, was released in May with smaller scope (and New Horizons was originally slated for 2015!). There are people working on it, yes, but just enough to keep it ticking along.

Life support? They posted their numbers and they are doing great. New content is being added quite often.

Elite Dangerous isn't remotely on life support. They are still releasing major new features constantly. You can now launch fighters from your starship and fly them, or hire others to fly escort missions with you.

> company is working on other projects.

This is how game development works.

You only need the senior engine engineers when you are tackling hard problems (e.g. they would have been roped in for planetary landing). You only need artists when art is being added to the game. Multicrew? Probably needs a senior network coder or two. You can't pay people to sit around and do nothing, and you can't sack people with in-depth knowledge about your IP - so you put them on another project. It's almost like consulting, but for a single entity who so happens to be yourself.

Bleh. It is the same brouhaha that surrounds every overhyped game. This has been going on for ages.

I guess the new twist is that gamers pay up front, sometimes years ahead, and that only adds to the disappointment when the game actually comes out and is not the best thing since sliced bread.

> “My hope,” he tells us, “is this could give Valve a reminder/prod that they themselves have a responsibility, they can’t just blame individual publishers, and this might help them keep future games being listed, more honest.”

Why is it Valve's responsibility? And how did Valve act inappropriately at all? AFAIK they were the first publisher/store to offer refunds for NMS after the story broke that it was largely unfinished, and aside from some wasted time on the part of the players everyone walked away relatively unscathed.

The alternative would be that Valve would have to have a review process for every game that passes through Steam, which means they would have to charge a lot more for the Steam Greenlight service. The vast, vast majority of indie developers do not do this sort of thing, and benefit greatly from the audience and ease of distribution that Steam provides. I just don't see what offloading that responsibility to Valve would accomplish, aside from setting Valve up to be a deep-pocketed lawsuit target.

> AFAIK they were the first to offer refunds

Not out of any manual action on their part. All refunds steam offered were 100% in line with their policies from before the game was released.

Manual action isn't needed when the policies are already good.

Wow. I really wanted this game to be amazing. Hell, I've played it over 100 hours, but that's mainly because I waited so long for it to come out.

I have an 8x AMD with 32GB RAM and a Radeon 7970. Not a bad system. At 1080p it drops frames all the time. It freaks out at weird moments in game play. There is this weird tick where every alien that shows up at a space station will be the same alien. As I play it I really think about how if they hadn't hyped it, it would be fun...maybe not worth 60$...but it would be fun. I;m old. I guess I was hoping it would turn into the greatest Trade Wars 2002 ever. It's really not even close. As you move around the galaxy you really wonder sometimes...why the fsck am I doing this again? I've upgrade my person and ship to the point that they are almost indestructible to anything that I've met to this point. At first I did this alternate path through the game where you "follow the atlas"...you go through multiple solar systems chasing this thing and it gives you a shiny red orb every time that you catch up to it. Ok. Then at the last one it says..."hey, I'm the last one. Do you want to give me those stones and create a new star?"...Sure why not. You give it the stones and then it says...in text..."somewhere...out there...a new star was created. thanks for the stones dawg". That's it. I thought there would at least be a pre-rendered star-being-created animation. Nope. AND you don't have those shiny orbs anymore which were the most valuable things in the in-game economy.

At this point, I keep thinking that HG will release a patch that makes it not terrible. Seriously. I would settle for just bad at this point. I'm not like a lot of the Reddit crowd that wants to see Sean Murray hanged. I just think this was a huge wasted opportunity. If this had been a PC only game or an Xbox indie release it would have been amazing. Having to go the big time console release route made the hype really crazy. It showed, though, how intense the followers of an immersive universe sized space game would be if you could build something like a high quality 3D Trade Wars 2002.

But yeah...they should make it not suck at this point. I really try to not be critical of other people's creative work, but seriously. Make it not suck. (Some new music would be great too. I like it, but the sushi bar techno gets old after a while.)

EDIT: I hadn't watched those trailers again since the game came out. OH MY GOD. I forgot how amazing they were. There was more diversity in the first 3 minutes of that trailer than there was in 100 hours of gameplay. Jesus. Sean said in an interview that they were doing all of this generation on the client side and relying on the fact that planet creation was somehow idempotent for everyone to have the same experience. What I don't get is why, in 2016, would you even remotely try to do everything client side? As soon as someone jumps into a solar system that would be a trigger for a distributed job on a cluster to assist in generating the details. Those details would need to then be cached somewhere, but you wouldn't need to generate them again. After that some direction and story mechanics could steer people towards some pre-engineered experiences that would bring them together and drive the plot. Jesus Christ, this isn't rocket science anymore. There are text books with this stuff in it. They said "no loading screens"...I WISH THERE WERE. The stutter that the game has when transitioning between environments is worse than a loading screen.

I would have bought a new computer to play the game in those trailers. Man. What a waste.

If I recall correctly, I think some people had an issue with the game having nSync enabled by default, and that editing a config file to disable it helped them

Ahhh...I will try that when I get home. Cause, let's face it...I waited for two years to play the effing thing. I'm going to play it for a while more.

You've ploughed over 100 hours into even though it "sucks" and you want it to be patched so it's "not terrible" anymore?

Seems like a lot of time to dedicated to something that you don't really like. Do you feel like you got value for money, given the amount of time you've spent playing it?

Don't get me wrong, for what it is, if you don't think about the price...it's kind of cool.

Since a good glass of scotch can cost more than a game...sure why not.

EDIT: Also, at the length of a comment grows the probability of hyperbole being cranked up approaches 1.

I think it is sort of hard to asses the "true value" of a game, but I do agree with you that No Man's Sky is No Where Close of being worth $60 in comparison to other games.

yep, 100 hours ?! ...and for perspective, it has been less than 2 months since release date in early August. That is a HUGE investment of time. I like the game (although I certainly haven't put 100 hours into it), it has some true innovation but its a friggin' game. How much can one expect from a computer game? You play it for a while until you get bored and then quit. 100+ hours of gameplay for $60 seems like a smashing success to me. I mean, how much time would a "great" game use up? Are we in South Park Territory (... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Love,_Not_Warcraft)??

I get the feeling HG was forced to release it too early-- probably by pushy "project management professionals." Someday we may hear the juicy details of what happened.

That is still under 2 hours per day. Not that much in my books, especially if you do not watch TV or play other games...

Tradewars 2002... you are old. You and me both :) I definitely relate to the feeling of sinking thousands of hours into games to try and find something that was like TW2002 in its heyday on the BBS. WoW and EVE came pretty close... maybe there's something about the sound of your 2400bd modem finally getting the connection to the door on the BBS that you just can't recreate:)

Honestly I've never encountered any bugs in the game. Different alien species in stations (given the three or however many species), no frame loss on a gtx 970 and i5 processor, 8GB ram. Iv'e found all the diversity I expected... Little rat sized creatures whose body is 90% a goat head, T-rex creatures with fingers stupidly long doing constant jazz-hands.

Exploring planets is still fun, although I've only played ~25 hours. I still keep finding new things like a planet full of murrine or some other exotic element I've never heard of before.

Quests are about as entertaining as WoW's quests were. They get repetitive, but at least you can constantly move on and discover new areas and quest givers instead of going back to the same dude 50 times.

Warping isnt terribly exciting. If you just skim a planet and warp hoping for new exciting content it will be boring. Most fun is had flying along the surface of a planet and exporing new things, or following a land bridge to a little hut across a lake on a hostile moon, or diving to the bottom of a lake to find upgrades and items in a building you can barely hold your breath enough to reach and surface from.

I think this game was everything I hoped for, and I know im in the minority in that respect. This game's biggest flaw was being picked up by Sony and releasing at a full game price as opposed to remaining true to the indie game it actually is. I would honestly say hive-mind killed this game. I kept myself out of r/nomansskythegame and other online media related to the game from when the PS version came out till after I played my first 8 hours. I was honestly shocked to see it get such terrible ratings.

I agree with you entirely. I think it's a fine game; it's not particularly deep, and the procedural generation has issues (no large scale planetary structures, like continents or oceans, mean that every place on a planet is like every other place; flying long distances doesn't do much).

But I still find it thoroughly enjoyable. I like the process of just drifting round the landscape, looking at the scenery; it helps that I hooked up a joystick, which makes the ship way more fun to fly. Even 30-odd hours in I still find new bits and pieces of game mechanic, and scenery that makes me go 'wow' and take a screenshot.

I do have a laundry list of stuff I'd like changed, of course. The top one on the list is to be able to mark waypoints on a planet's surface, so I can find my way back to places I've found before...

> * What I don't get is why, in 2016, would you even remotely try to do everything client side? As soon as someone jumps into a solar system that would be a trigger for a distributed job on a cluster to assist in generating the details. Those details would need to then be cached somewhere, but you wouldn't need to generate them again.*

I don't think this is the missing piece that would have improved the game; the client has a tremendous amount of processing power available and the benefit of procedural generation is exactly that it can pop-up as much universe as you liked from a tiny seed. Moving this to the server would give a different debacle, like SimCity: always online requirement, affected by data caps and server outages, cluster overload on launch day, etc.

Procedural generation worked for Elite on the BBC and it continues to work, if people have realistic expectations for it. I've just been reading a history of its development and saw the interesting claim that while it too could have claimed 2^48 possible planets, the marketers advised them to restrict it to 8 galaxies of 256 rather than a giant meaningless number.

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