"Space exploration" games have strange tendency for hyper-hype and scams, for example recently released No Man's Sky.
Don't buy into the "mass rage" that spreads from some small number of people crying out loud.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/#app_re...
Steam as a platform is great, but as a community it's a bigger dumpster fire than 4chan.
Quite frankly I find Steam reviews to be one of the worst possible metrics and would trust the octopus that picked world cup winners more than Steam reviews.
How so? Whether or not I trust someone has no obvious bearing on whether their opinion closely matches the general consensus.
For example, I know someone who likes the 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead better than the original. I absolutely believe her on this point. But it would be ludicrous for me to say, based on her preferences, that the 1990 version is widely considered the definitive Night of the Living Dead.
It's another thing entirely to call a game a scam.
Looking at the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/ it looks like there is a healthy community playing a lot and game updates are released regularly.
My initial point was to give a different view and to try to stop the negative feedback loop this game always gets.
Anyway, it sounded to me like your initial point was that the game is generally well liked and the people who are disappointed should be dismissed as "a small number of people crying," which is both rude to those people and seems to be the opposite of reality. That's why I was like, "Whoa there."
Games are consistently dog piled on by various communities and enraged fans who are upset by a game update.
It's a shame because the review system has a lot of near features, but the community is completely untrustworthy.
- dynamic economy based by station/planetary production of goods, demand and supply (influenced by distances and space piracy)
- known actors lending their voices to characters
- hundreds of items and ships
- massive universe filled with mysteries and lore
What happened instead was Microsoft stepping into the project and forcing changes to make ship plausible within a year due to continuous delays. Chris left the project. Universe was cut to 50 systems, bulk of characters gets killed off quickly after appearing in the plot, or have few spoken lines. There are omissions in items, like only only single top-class shield, whereas in every lower class there were three types of shields. Some commodities are sold on planet or few, but not bought anywhere in the universe, being useless for trade. Engine supports ship animations and plenty of ship models implement those, but they were eventually disabled. Etc. ect.
But game shipped, and besides cut content, it actually delivered quality experience, and even if it lacked replaybility, content or sandbox features of X-Universe games, it contained stateful multiplayer that resulted in game having long live in multiplayer thanks to Role-Playing mods and communities build around those.
There's a litany of bugs and brokenness that have been around for months, even years, but in the meantime, development effort is expended on Shiny Stuff to sell in the cash shop, and half-baked Shiny Stuff to release in expansions. Game-breaking bugs are fixed in weeks and months, rather than the traditional hours and days of any other MMO.
Communication with the devs is spotty and increasingly infrequent.
Sadly, it has no real competition either. And Frontier Developments knows this. E:D is a phenomenal and unique game, but it could be so much more if the devs would actually act like they gave a toss.
In the case of Star Citizen we're deep into gold-plating territory, wouldn't be surprised if it became a Duke Nukem Forever. But even then, Chris Roberts is genuinely trying to deliver a game, even if his ambitions may have gotten too large to deliver.
The evidence largely points to a developer who is good at his core job, but inexperienced at managing hype. And who was overly optimistic about what he and his team can accomplish in X amount of time. Based on how Hello Games is acting & communicating now, I think they've learned their lesson.
And I sympathise a little with them because I was once the overly optimistic team lead in my younger days, and had to get burnt a few times before I learned my lesson.
In video game development, studios are frequently forced to cut significant content or features from a game for a number of reasons. That's why the smart studios are pretty cagey about promises until they're VERY sure they can deliver them. Sean Murray was reckless with his promises and that's what got him into trouble.
It's possible he outright never intended to deliver those features but I don't think that's the case. It's clear they tried very hard to deliver as much as they could.
To be fair, the devs demo'd some supposedly in-game footage which was much better and more compelling than what shipped in the end.
Peoples expectations were set high, because the devs actually promised a lot of cool stuff on record.
I call this the "Segway effect".
It is when the hype far exceeds any possible realistic product.
They went big. They could have stopped at the few million they raised on Kickstarter, but they knew they'd need more to accomplish their vision.