No Man’s Sky One Year Later | Hacker News Reader

No Man’s Sky One Year Later

shamusyoung.com

128 pointssmacktoward140 comments

> No Man’s Sky inhabits this frustrating space alongside games like the nu Deus Ex games, the original X-Com, or the Mass Effect series. It offers something you just can’t get anywhere else, but it does so in a deeply flawed and annoying way.

This really resonated with me. I have a whole pile of Steam games which have fascinating, unique traits, but are 'objectively' bad in that they failed to deliver a solid story, or interface, or mechanics, or all of the above.

- Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator comes to mind; it's a great exploration of cooperative multiplayer design and the possibilities opened up by incomplete information. But it's also clunky and acutely underdeveloped in terms of game modes, balance, and AI. If you want a good game, you'd better dive deep into modding.

- Tharsis also counts; deeply strategic play in a constrained setting, undermined by strategy-destroying levels of randomness.

- Even AAA stuff like Civilization does this to me. Why is Civ great? Because nothing else is Civ. Why is Civ terrible? Because the balance is underwhelming and the AI is catastrophically bad.

- Hell, for years Minecraft was like this. The opening comment about "imagine if Minecraft had been clunky and unintuitive at release" made me laugh, because it was. Deep Survival play has been almost dependent on mods for much of the games history, but the underlying insight was too good to pass up.

So... it's an interesting insight, and it also prompts a question. Why don't more of these intriguing flops prompt more polished attempts?

> - Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator comes to mind; it's a great exploration of cooperative multiplayer design and the possibilities opened up by incomplete information. But it's also clunky and acutely underdeveloped in terms of game modes, balance, and AI. If you want a good game, you'd better dive deep into modding.

Could you elaborate on the sorts of things you'd like to see in terms of game modes, and AI? I ask because I've been working for the past 5 years on an open source linux game that has the same basic premise as Artemis called Space Nerds In Space, so I'm always on the lookout for good ideas for this type of game.

It offers something you just can’t get anywhere else, but it does so in a deeply flawed and annoying way.

This just described Elite Dangerous for me. Multiplayer MMO Descent:Freespace scratches a deeply satisfying itch that I've had since I was a kid, but that game's flaws are absolutely maddening.

Is there a word to describe the maddening annoyance at something being so close, yet so far away, for objectively silly reasons?

Heartbreaking, in the same sense as Fantasy Heartbreaker tabletop RPGs?

> Is there a word to describe the maddening annoyance at something being so close, yet so far away, for objectively silly reasons?

They call that the uncanny valley

This may be off-point, but are there more polished attempts at new ideas out there that are worth checking out? I can't keep up with what's worth playing anymore, and don't have time to play every game hoping that it hits the mark. Anytime I check out the top ranking games, it's new Call of Duty's, Battlefields, Assassin's Creeds, or sports (blegh) and a whole host of games that disappear as fast as they show up. I'd kill for a new game that engages as much Civilization or C&C did.

Yes.

Modded Minecraft (try All the Mods 3 on the twitch client, or (formerly my modpack) Resonant Rise)

Challenge Pack Modded Minecraft (Currently Popular: Age of Engineering, Forever Stranded, Sky Factory 3)

Factorio

Dwarf Fortress

Modded Dwarf Fortress Masterwork

Poschengband & Tome4 represent the pinnacle (to me) of classic Roguelike design.

Risk of Rain

Endless Legend

Endless Space 2 (Amplitude releases a consistent and growing world of fantastic games with amazing and long-lived content releases).

(Just give Zachtronics all your money and take all their games, but in a particular order:)

Shenzen I/O

TIS-100

Spacechem

Infinifactory

Cities: Skylines (Paradox Interactive publishes does this and the next few, they're very good)

Europa Universalis 4

Stellaris

Great, thoughtful, engaging games are out there if you want them. Sadly, most people are filthy casuals now.

Zachtronics games in particular stand out as turning real world thinking and skills into fun games.

I've never really understood some of the zachtronics games.

Things like TIS-100 and Shenzen I/O confuse me. Why would I spend time learning some esoteric assembler that exists no where else, when you could take that same time and learn an actual assembler?

I really, REALLY wish they had done something really clever, like targetted AVR opcodes or something for their vCPU. That'd make it so not only do you get to have fun, but you learn a marketable skill in the process!

That's one of my major complaints about most of the "programming" games I've seen, in that most of the time, if I'm going to spend time writing code, I'd rather just hack on one of my projects then play a game with no real end-product. At least with personal projects, you wind up with an actual app at the end.

I did enjoy Spacechem and Infinifactory, though I didn't finish each before becoming bored.

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> Things like TIS-100 and Shenzen I/O confuse me. Why would I spend time learning some esoteric assembler that exists no where else, when you could take that same time and learn an actual assembler?

TIS-100 and Shenzen I/O are theme park training grounds where a solution is guaranteed to exist. For education or for people lacking confidence, that has appeal. Also, I _wish_ I had hardware like the TIS-100.

TIS and Shenzen superficially look like assembly programming, but in reality they're very sophisticated puzzle games. You basically create these networks of routines, each of which is limited to something like 9 lines of code (and labels cost a line!). All the tasks are structured so that when you try to code them the straightforward way you're always short a line or two, and then you have to sit there racking your brain to figure out the 'trick'. Then you incorporate that new knowledge in your solution for the next level, and so on.

So it's really nothing like real coding. Highly recommended though! Especially Shenzen.

Labels and code can share a line, like this:

  ST: MOV X1 ACC
  TEQ ACC 1
  + JMP ST
  MOV X1 X2
  SLP 1

Now go back and optimize your solutions! :)

My fav part of Zachtronics games is that they show an alternative vision of massively multiplayer PVP where the metric of success is not, "Who is the best murderer?"

> Why would I spend time learning some esoteric assembler that exists no where else, when you could take that same time and learn an actual assembler?

Fully agreed. I own TIS-100 but never saw the appeal. I can write actual programs in real-world programming languages that accomplish something, thank you!

This is why I found Factorio infinitely more engaging: theme matters! The game is still an assembler/automaton, but disguised as a sci-fi RTS game. By the time you realize you're actually programming, it's too late and you're having lots of fun conquering an alien planet.

The games aren't really about the language--which have maybe 12 instructions at most--they're about the challenge of working with an extremely limited instruction set. They're puzzle games disguised as games about assembly languages. A game using a real instruction set might be fun for some people, but it would feel a lot different, and probably have to be a lot more challenging to make up for all of the convenient instructions. At that point you're basically just programming.

I am a university CS student and my microprocessor course has us learning assembly. The concepts I learned in TIS-100 are definitely making it easier to grasp how things work at the most fundamental level. It might not have taught me x86 assembly, but it taught the basics like moving data between registers and working with only the most basic instructions. Still found it very useful.

>Things like TIS-100 and Shenzen I/O confuse me. Why would I spend time learning some esoteric assembler that exists no where else, when you could take that same time and learn an actual assembler?

I think it's really more for people who don't realize they're learning an assembler. Also, it's less daunting than a real assembler because it's so much simpler.

Haven't played TIS-100, but Shenzen I/O is just a really good puzzle game. Nothing more to it than that.

I'd also add that a large segment of their player base likely has programming experience, yet no experience in assembly.

Not to mention the huge loss of a learning opportunity to have players learn programming language basics for specific real world code

Let me prove your axiom wrong with a counterexample.

I love these games, and I can program (and have shipped to prod) in over a dozen languages including Erlang, Haskell, C++, C, Common Lisp, Java, Clojure, Scala.

What you're saying is nonsense. Practice in programming is practice in programming. If we wanted to, we could make the TIS-100 system real for embedded computing and I bet it'd be popular with some instruction extensions.

I did an annex course at a local middle school with TIS-100 to teach kids that programming is fun. It went over well.

This smells of when industry shows up at a college and complains they aren't teaching them "what we use in the real world". After enough practice learning multiple fictional languages, learning the n+1th one should be a walk in the park! The important part is the game is fun and encourages learning. That the developer didn't choose to use an "actual" language to do so shouldn't ultimately matter if the concepts are sound, right?

Whoa, thank you for the interesting list. I'm excited to check this stuff out.

If you google my name and youtube you'll find an depressingly large cache of content. My recent stuff is not really for random consumption, but my older stuff was when I was considering becoming a fulltime gamer.

I have a still-relevant tutorial on Dwarf Fortress, SpaceChem, and over a hundred hours of very technical modded minecraft play.

Try Europa Universalis 4 by Paradox Interactive. It's a strategy game.

I think I will be checking this one out

It's not really new, just under the radar - but maybe Paradox Interactive's grand strategy games would be up your alley. Look at Crusader Kings 2, or Europa Universalis 4.

I make this recommendation reluctantly as I despise their DLC practices, but those games are pretty great and fulfill an underserved niche. If you do decide to play them - I'd try out the base game before considering DLC, there's just way too much.

Just on Civ, if you like it I'd highly recommend checking out any of Paradox's grand strategy games like Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis.

The AI is generally pretty good, although you might see some questionable behaviour from time to time. Balance is another matter though, for the most part the games try to at least start with some historic accuracy so you'll find some nations are just straight up hard to play. For example, if you start WW2 as Poland in HoI, you're gonna have a bad time.

Thanks - Hearts of Iron is definitely on my list. Europa Universalis appeals a bit less, though that's mostly because of my perceptions of the interface and cognitive burden. I could be totally wrong about those.

I definitely don't mind bad balance if the game isn't trying for it; Rome: Total War did something very similar with certain nations starting in terrible positions.

HoI4 is a good starting point I'd say, it's prettier and the UI is much more manageable which makes the whole game feel a lot easier to learn even though it's not hugely less complicated than HoI3.

EU is a different beast though, and I know exactly what you mean about the UI. EU4 has made some improvements but once you add in even just a few of the bigger expansions/DLC then it can really get a bit overwhelming.

I followed the game for years before buying it on launch and being completely and utterly disappointed. Every single time they spoke about the game and showed videos, they promised a fleshed out universe with real consequences for your actions. They promised factions that had goals and would act independent of you. They promised a deep system of crafting. They promised multiplayer. What they didn't mention was that they had scrapped all those ideas a long time before and had turned the game into a grind-fest while they tried to hack things in there. The play-throughs they showed were hand-made areas with automated entities, but they never mentioned that. There was a promise of multiplayer, but it never happened. And probably worst of all, they never mentioned that it wasn't truly open-world, it was all essentially "levels" with little freedom to fly around and explore. They never mentioned that it turned into an almost on-rails flying game when you got close to the surface. You couldn't crash, you couldn't maneuver, you couldn't land on your own. Flying around was made even worse because you run out of fuel every few minutes because of the forced autopilot landings/takeoffs. That's not open world, that's a half-assed game with training wheels permanently glued on.

The whole "Not Evil, Just Bungling" that the author says simply isn't the case. But I'm not saying they're evil. They definitely wanted to make the game they were promising. They had a passion for it. But they knew well ahead of time that it wasn't happening and they kept up the charade.

I'm not disappointed about losing out on my money, I'm disappointed that I lost out on the game they promised.

As a former amateur Twitch.tv streamer, I've always been fascinated by the rise and fall of internet personalities, and some of the biggest personalities seem to be game developers that found themselves in the spotlight.

Someone made this very in-depth video about the fall from grace of Phil Fish, the creator of Fez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w It seems to me that the combo of high pressure and a guy with a combative personality combined with internet anonymity to create a really messy situation that drove him out of the business.

I've also followed Narscissa (formerly Cosmo) Wright's fallout in the speedrun community after coming out as transgender. Once one of the most popular streamers on Twitch, I'd imagine transitioning is hard enough, but transitioning in front of a studio audience of anonymous gamers would be next level.

And so the same seems to be with Sean Murray and No Man's Sky. Inexperience plus overpromising and really high expectations created the current situation.

I don't think any of these people are malicious and I don't really know how I would have advised them to do things differently. Edmund McMillen, the creator of Super Meat Boy and other indie games once said in a podcast interview that he hates showing people what he's making before it is done for this very reason.

Edit: I know the circumstances of these people are not identical, I'm just calling for more understanding and empathy instead of assuming the worst in everyone.

Wait, let’s not conflate the cases you describe, where the trolling may have been and probably was malicious, with the case of No Man’s Land, where lead director flat out lied about the content of the game, and people who couldn’t control their hype fell for it and late raged. In the latter case, any professional shaming—which is the only shaming of Murray I’ve seen—is justified.

>In the latter case, any professional shaming—which is the only shaming of Murray I’ve seen—is justified.

Why? The guy obviously wasn't trying to make a bad game. He was just inexperienced, got in over his head, and failed to deliver the product he wanted to build on the timeline he promised. I would have assumed if any community understands that failure isn't an unusual result in the face of ambitious goals it would be the HN crowd. Meanwhile since the game's release he has continued to work on that product to get it closer to everyone's initial expectations. I understand being disappointed by the whole thing, but the vitriol directed his way was somewhat disturbing.

Please. He was lying up until the last weeks to release, where no practical development on the game was taking place. I’d see your point if promises were made years before release and the company was unable to deliver. But there was clear malice here.

Like the original article suggests, if he was truly malicious in intent then why would he continue to work on this game after release? Hanlon's razor suggests he just failed on the biggest stage he was ever on and he didn't know how to handle that.

To quote the article:

>When people ask you, “Will we be able to do X?” it’s easy to say “yes” because you already wanted to have X and you’ve already thought about how you’d go about making it happen. People love you, your work is valuable, and you don’t want to say no. People smile with delight when you say “yes” and when you say “no” they look disappointed and ask annoying technical questions that would – if you took the time to answer them accurately – being incredibly boring and hard to follow. In the short term, saying “yes” is always the path of least resistance.

>I know exactly how that feels and I know I’ve trapped myself in situations where I needed to crunch in order to meet my promises. Not because I wanted to work overtime, but because saying yes just feels so much better than saying no. I’m really thankful I made those mistakes in private meetings as part of a small company on not in front of international media. If Stephen Colbert had me on his show in March of 2016 and asked with delight if Good Robot was going to have different character classes, it would have been very tempting to say yes. After all, it was something I’d wanted to put in the game and maybe I’d be able to find time to squeeze it in before release. And if that interview happened to me when I was a young man and more easily dazzled by the limelight? Shit. I’m sure I’d make the exact same mistake.

I really can't imagine a developer who has lead a project of any size not relating to that on some level.

Why wouldn't he work on the game? It's not like after ONE over-promise he's never going to ever in the game dev business. His life a repeated game theory interaction.

Whether he intended to deceive or not, it makes sense to do some damage control for the future.

> But there was clear malice here.

Do not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

I don't believe this was the case here. Maybe the stupidity was underestimating the reaction of people who would be disappointed, but that's different.

Professionalism entails keeping promises. If he didn't do that, people saying he isn't good at his job isn't totally absurd.

To be fair, did he have a previous track record? I honestly don't know, but if he didn't have prior experience working on projects at this level then it's not hard to give him some benefit of the doubt.

Maybe he should've been more open and honest about the development process, but otherwise I just don't know how much blame he deserves. Professionalism is much easier when you have the perspective, time, and experience.

There should have been huge amounts of skepticism related to his claims. Every report I remember seeing reflected a great deal of skepticism.

I'm sorry, but if anyone fell for this, they need to take a look at their relationship with media.

I should also add that the reviews for games come out rather quickly. If you're not buying within the first day or two, the amount of detail available is quite high.

No Man's Land? I'd assume that's a typo, but you speak of it as a separate case.

Gaming personalities are particularly susceptible because of their audience: gamers.

It's one of the most politically polarizing cultures, where witch hunts and public opinion spread extremely quickly, and since nobody really has anything tangible to lose– except participation, are quick to choose sides. This is not a community where 50/50 splits of opinion happen often; unless you want to be a challenger, joining the majority and me-too-ing is a lot more rewarding.

Spend any amount of time on Twitch and it's obvious this community has serious problems with presenting maturity, too. Racism, sexism and homophobia are rampant for the same reasons.

Don't get too caught up in taking it personally; there's really no substance there. Thoughts are perpetuated through chat, YouTube and memes, and disappear as soon as everyone gets bored enough to invest in the next loudest thing.

Speaking of coming out as transgender, lead programmer on No Mans Sky, Innes Mckendrick has been there done that. He's done some great talks about programming in the game including a GDC talk that's on youtube, and earlier a talk on procedural world tech.

This is what most impresses me about No Mans Sky, the engine. I've only played it a bit on friend's playstation. They're onto something really cool with the new way of generating noise and using voxels to create detailed realistic landscapes.

Sean Murray did a talk on the noise generation, but it was a strange talk I must say. He spends too long on how many people played No Mans Sky, and how it 'really was actually' successful. He shouldn't worry so much and just get on with making games with this awesome engine. The story-telling and game elements will sort itself out in this game or the next.

Game devs can be amusingly self-conscious and troubled... just today I watched a talk by Davey Wreden the writer of The Stanley Parable. Wow, talk about 'in therapy'. Honest guy, nice guy, insists his life is okay now and he's no longer deeply depressed and addicted to self-validation. Brave talk... but dude it's a gaming conference, not a mental health conference!

Someone made this very in-depth video about the fall from grace of Phil Fish, the creator of Fez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w

This video bugs me. I don't disagree with it. In fact, the first time I watched it, I found it quite similar to my own take on Fish. Maybe just a few degrees off of how I feel.

Watching it for the first time in ~three years made me realize why it bugged me. The differences between the video and my opinions are the set of changes I'd make if I wanted to publish the strong argument for my perspective on the topic and be taken seriously. Fish is an interesting case study of internet-rando-turned-celebrity that doesn't adapt well to the fact people now care what he's saying.

The rough edges sanded and convenient omissions made by this video are the exact same tweaks I'd make to my perspective to hold onto my own credibility in the games echo chamber.

> Inexperience plus overpromising and really high expectations created the current situation.

And yet I'm surprised how, again and again, gamers fall for it. You should always reserve your top-shelf skepticism for not-yet-shipped-games.

Cosmo was shunned because he went looney tunes in a very short timespan.

For those who don't really watch speedruns, what happened to him was really fucked up.

- Lost in very important tournament.

- Got depressed because of it.

- Girlfriend left him.

- More depressed.

- Suddenly, "I'm actually a girl".

I feel really really sorry for Cosmo, so much went wrong in his life in a very short timespan and he snapped.

This account has been violating the guidelines a lot in its short life. Please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Can you give me examples where I'm breaking the guidelines? I've been extra careful to leave comments that contribute to the discussion and share a unique point of view.

While that is a possible sequence of events, it may have been a different cause/effect relationship. From what I saw losing the Nintendo World Championship wasn't something she was unhappy about and was glad to just be a part of it. Maybe girlfriend left because she couldn't handle the flack they were both receiving. Maybe transitioning is something Narcissa has been trying to suppress for a long time and finally couldn't anymore, and everything together happened.

I guess my point is, you really don't know all of that and you seem to be painting her in the worst possible light, which sort of is what I was talking about in my above comment. I can't say any of us would have been able to handle the same situation any better, same with No Man's Sky.

It's not "He's actually a girl." She's a woman. Use the right pronouns.

I found the gameplay at release enjoyable as a chill-out experience, much more my speed than first-person twitch-fests. I didn't mind that it was hyped far beyond what they delivered, its a game after-all. Maybe millennial gamers have more expectations than people who grew up on atari game cartridges?

Haven't played it for months, but my expectations for any game is merely few dozen sessions of play maybe ~100 hours of play total. What more do you want out of a $50 game? People are too harsh.

Well the issue was that the developers lied. They explicitly stated that certain features and functionality would absolutely be in the game at launch... and they weren't. And then when people tried to ask questions about it, the developers disappeared. They were totally MIA for a while (a couple months?).

So it wasn't just hype, and it certainly wasn't about "millennial gamers". It was about people paying for a game and not getting the game they believed they had paid for.

I can definitely see why the community was enraged at release, and the game definitely doesn't fit the magazine cover descriptions I remember reading about it. That said, I bought it a few weeks ago for $20 and it's exceeded my expectations. If I had bought this game on release expecting what was promised, I don't know if I could even enjoy it now. But having gone in with pretty low expectations and for the price of a movie theater outing, it's definitely been a great experience. I agree with the author, that NMS occupies a space that doesn't really have a standout title that accomplishes what everyone really wants in this genre. For now I'm enjoying the exploration and base building quests - it's a great pick up/put down game that I can play after work a few times a week to unwind.

Wut. The company lied about the product. Isn't that fraud? And you say people were too harsh?

Damn millennials are too harsh, expecting developers to be honest! It’s just a game after all! /s

It’s because of such ridiculous attitude and low expectation that the gaming industry is at the state that it is—terrible.

Well, it is "just a game"... an innovative, highly creative game with some really interesting features.

I suspect the real creative talent behind the game got used and pressured by product-manager types to ship far before it was ready because of all the money and promises involved.

Throwing a fit because of "honesty" in game pre-marketing is sort of like asking for your money back because a movie didn't fulfill the expectations set by the trailer. Yeah, good luck with that at the multiplex, but also keep in mind that many people got their money back for the game.

And anyways, cautious folks who expect absolute honesty from their game vendors, would do better to wait for the 3rd party reviews before jumping in headfirst with their 50 bucks.

> Throwing a fit because of "honesty" in game pre-marketing is sort of like asking for your money back because a movie didn't fulfill the expectations set by the trailer. Yeah, good luck with that at the multiplex, but also keep in mind that many people got their money back for the game.

These aren't the same though. Trailers can be used to evoke a certain sense about a movie that is disingenuous such as masking a drama as a comedy by splicing together the funny parts. You'll still get those funny parts, but they just weren't what you expected. A director can say that they'll guarantee you'll laugh until you cry, but that's all subjective. What happened with No Man's Sky was just outright lying.

This would be akin to someone saying that some actor gave the performance of a lifetime in the movie, but the actor never had anything to do with the movie. Does that mean I can't enjoy the movie? Nope. I might still love it, but that person still lied to get me to see the movie. That's what they did with No Man's Sky - gave false information about a game's features that was still good for what it was.

For what it's worth, I heard that people who didn't follow the hype-train liked the game. Those accounts of the gameplay all praised it.

> For what it's worth, I heard that people who didn't follow the hype-train liked the game. Those accounts of the gameplay all praised it.

It's unfortunate (but understandable) that critique of No Man's Sky often mix what was promised with what was actually delivered. So much of the commentary focus on Sean Murray's broken promises.

There are a few reviews that cut through all the hype and focus on the gameplay and it's not a pretty picture. It's an AAA-priced game that (at the time of the launch) is at the level of an early access game. I recommend checking out Joseph Anderson's analysis on Youtube.

The people who have had the best time with this game seem to treat it as an overly complicated fidget cube. Something to keep their fingers busy while their mind is focused on something like listening to a podcast.

This is not really a game—more like a tech demo. This was the problem outlined in the article and many, many gamers.

> And anyways, cautious folks who expect absolute honesty from their game vendors, would do better to wait for the 3rd party reviews before jumping in headfirst with their 50 bucks.

100% agree, but the two are not really related. People should be cautious, but developers and publishers should not lie.

>>Well, it is "just a game"... an innovative, highly creative game with some really interesting features.

My understanding is that the developer either outright lied about the features pre-release, or they strongly hinted at them and misled people, or a mix of two.

I don't envy software developers under immense pressure to deliver a AAA title on time. Having to predict whether or not you can get that feature working flawlessly in 30 days isn't easy in a vacuum. Much less with your Marketing dept being overly optimistic with your prediction.

In this case of a small company, most of the marketing was done by lead director who was very close to the development team and obviously knew what the team was able and unable to deliver.

Yeah, but like in the case of online multiplayer, I believe they had every intention of making that a release day feature, but it just wasn't ready. I just think calling the guy a liar is a bit harsh. All marketing is lying in some form or fashion. :P

How is purposefully implying that there is multiplayer a month before release not a lie? Had it been “uhm, yeah, we are working on that but have nothing to announce at this point” would have been a lot more honest. But none of the marketing campaign was honest—it was full of half-truths, inaccuracies and insinuations of something much grander.

Also, I think the end result being as bad as it was in many’s eyes create feedback loop on the negativity. This is not the first time a game has disappointed its audience due to an overreaching marketing campaign, but this was not much of anything at the time of release.

> obviously knew what the team was able and unable to deliver.

You speak like someone that has never been a part of a software project.

Beyond the lies, I could have forgiven the game for what it is if it didn't have a AAA price tag. But of course, they did lie, so... yeah.

I haven't played it, but my brother was someone who pre-ordered long before it was released and had a ton of fun with it the past year. I know that's anecdotal, but I think this may be a situation where some majority, or even minority, is just overshadowing the opposite that did/does enjoy the game as-is.

Open world games are notoriously disappointing. "What is this game supposed to be?" is a great question. Are you trying to explore? collect resources and upgrade grind? build things? combat (ground or space)? By being all these things, they became nothing. All encompassing space games (for example EVE) take years to build, usually in the form of updates after release.

As for the UI. It looks like its designed so the PC and consoles have similar UIs. Also they are inspired by context menus, which sacrifice UX for flexibility. (Pretend the inventory is a file system).

If you want strong direction, then open world is the wrong end of the spectrum. Give me a large world with lots of complexity and I'll entertain myself for hundreds of hours. Give me a directed plot and I'll probably stop caring in about 4 hours.

It seems to me there are two very different views of story telling in games. One camp wants games to be strongly directed minimal choice stories with a very specific narrative and it's entirely ok to curtail player agency to tell that story.

Another camp thinks the opposite: player agency always comes first and there is no set narrative but the one that players create for themselves. This comes with the potential that said narrative can be dumb.

I don't think either camp is wrong, just different ways to tell a story. I really favor the later, and I really hate when my agency is abridged as a player because some writer wants to tell a story I don't care about. At the same time, I'm sure plenty of folks have the opposite viewpoint.

This is a false dichotomy.

Skyrim, for example, is absolutely both of these things, offering a strongly directed central narrative and lots of open world exploration opportunities.

Skyrim is definitely a gem of a game. I wouldn't however call it "directed" or "central". I've had several playthroughs of it as just a hunter or a spelunker and totally ignored the main story of dragonborn/background war (which is a strength of the game, not a fault).

I would consider Fallout 4 to be much more directed. You have to be the survivor, you have to save the patriots, you have to ultimately destroy one of the three powers. Sure you can ignore the plot for a bit, but you can't advance any storyline. You can't play PI or explore vaults unless you've advanced the story.

"Give me a large world with lots of complexity and I'll entertain myself for hundreds of hours."

Personally I'd say one of the problems is that No Man's Sky never had "lots of complexity" (not that you are necessarily claiming it did or tried to). Maybe I just know too much, but I can see through the algorithms generating all the pretty pictures pretty easily, and from there it's not hard to notice that the preconditions those algorithms have is going to make it so that pretty much nothing of any other complexity is possible. So you have all of these very beautiful worlds, where all you can do is point at things and shoot them with one of a couple of different types of beams. That was pretty much written in stone as soon as the data structures that make up the world were written down; there's not much more you can do with those data structures other than what the game offers you.

Contrast with Minecraft, which is built for interaction from the get go. It's a very different data structure.

Come to think of it, you could do worse than take an early Minecraft as your base and build No Man's Sky on top of it. (Modern Minecraft would be more like what particular worlds would look like; it's now a bit too detailed to build something like this on.) Another thing you'd get out of that is that you can build things that actually interact with the environment, the way villagers (who may not actually build their villages, but they do farm) and creepers ("boom") do in minecraft. Worlds could not just look superficially different, but actually have different behaviors in them, this world filled with creatures that aren't violent, that world filled with things that destroy everything you do as soon as you look at them, etc. If one was clever and could make those world rich in resources, perhaps even resources the peaceful worlds entirely lack, you might even be able to get some "game" going like having to land with a party to defend you while you put up an obsidian shelter or something.

Man. Suddenly I wish I had a few million dollars spare lying around because this sounds like with some care it could be hella fun. Make it an MMORPG somehow (biggest challenge: What game mechanism can you use to prevent too many people from being in the same chunks at the same time? Solve that and you're a great deal of the way there, since Minecraft itself pretty much proves out the rest) and you could have an Eve killer.

Oh man come join me in modded minecraft. I need someone to help me build my new elevator system and work up a mining system to amass and process ores for the fusion reactor I want to build.

Open world games are great for me. I can't stand it when a game locks me into a pattern.

Sure, but every open world game includes a gameplay loop of some kind.

Virtually every open world game has the same basic loop: collect, craft/buy/sell, build.

After that, it's just a question of how you motivate players to go through the loop: quests (Elder Scrolls), randomly generated threats (Minecraft, Terraria), multiplayer PC threats (WoW, EVE), etc.

Sounds like this author feels NMS fails to justify itself in this way.

> randomly generated threats (Minecraft, Terraria)

Maybe that's just me, but Minecraft is totally not about randomly generated threats. Sure, you have a certain set of milestones related to combat (e.g. loot a nether fortress, defeat the Ender dragon), but 99% of what motivates me about Minecraft is building stuff.

Yeah, that's fair, I left that out and only noticed it later.

Of course, AFAIK, NMS only added "building stuff" (e.g. bases) to the list of things you could do after the initial release.

> Virtually every open world game has the same basic loop: collect, craft/buy/sell, build.

That is a massive loop though, huge, world size, not confined to a specific path. I choose my path through the world.

> After that, it's just a question of how you motivate players to go through the loop

Open World is about ... openness. The player gets to decide, specific motivation not required; the journey is the motivation.

The player gets to decide, specific motivation not required; the journey is the motivation.

But you still need gameplay mechanics to support the user's activities.

If the user is motivated by quests, you need good quests.

If the user is motivated by conflict, then you need good fighting mechanics, etc.

If the user is motivated by building/construction, you need strong mechanics to support that.

Unfortunately, I suspect you'll find very few user's who are motivated over the long term by just wandering around seeing cool stuff.

"just wandering around seeing cool stuff."

I think of journey as see, do, explore. Perhaps there's a better word than journey I could use. I'm not defending NMS, I'm defending Open World.

"Myst" was basically all about wandering around seeing cool stuff, and it was so wildly popular that it held the "best-selling PC game" title for nine years.

So you're just going to ignore the highly regarded puzzle solving component of Myst that formed the core gameplay element that drove people to it?

Heck, if you're gonna argue this way, I'm surprised you didn't pick Super Mario Bros. After all, Mario Bros. is just wandering around and seeing cool stuff. You just to have to jump over things every now and then...

Totally agree. Elder Scrolls and Fallout and Ultima are some of the best games ever.

> Open world games are notoriously disappointing.

Its true that many are. Especially many Ubisoft ones. They follow a rather particular formula of lots-of-very-shallow-content and they get repetitive and boring rather quickly.

Not all open world games are like this! The Witcher 3 is a huge open world game which is full or interesting environments and content and many of the easily-missable side quests are actually just as interesting and compelling as the main quest.

Then there's Horizon: Zero Dawn, which, when I started playing, I had to double check that it wasn't a Ubisoft game. It had all of the Ubisoft open-world feel: towers to uncover map regions, the skill tree, inventory and menu's looked directly ripped from Far Cry. Resource collection.. so much of the game screamed Far Cry or Ubisoft and I was afraid that it would soon get dull, repetitive and boring. Yet it never happened! I put about 60 hours into the game and loved every moment of it. I would have played longer too, but was starting to run low on content (I didn't do all of the side stuff, but most of it) and am eagerly awaiting the DLC. This shows that even the oh-so-shallow Ubisoft formula can be compelling and work really well!

Games like Elder Scrolls are similar in that they have enough stuff to do before you have to settle for the repetitive/randomly-generated stuff, plus the world building and lore is interesting enough to make you want to explore and discover.

Compare and contrast No Man's Sky with Elite: Dangerous. Elite has a lot more defined and fleshed out "roles" to play that have tradeoffs, but they aren't working against each other. The author indicates that this very thing is lacking in No Man's Sky.

Yeah - the author said "no other game is offering this!", and my first thought was "but Elite: Dangerous offers large swaths of this stuff and has for some time."

Granted, it doesn't do everything No Man's Sky does, and it has its own gameplay issues (mainly a lack of depth to the universe resulting in boredom). But No Man's Sky doesn't exist in a vaccuum. There are lots of other games at least trying to do what it does, and in some cases, succeeding.

Star Citizen, if it is not vaporware, may become another good example.

>>Open world games are notoriously disappointing.

You should play Witcher 3. It's an open-world game that gives you tremendous freedom in a very large, detailed world while also driving you forward with a long, well-written story.

It definitely became the gold standard for open-world games for me. Easily the best game I've played in over a decade.

It's not just an openworld, it's "randomly" generated (from what I understand, the idea was to fix random generator's seed based on space coordinates, so that the same coordinates always produce the same planets). I can get that adding a story of even simple missions could be a challenge when doing so.

Breath of the Wild wasn't, at least IMO. That and Witcher 3 pulled off open world quite well.

I found with NMS that I couldn't really see a game in it.

The planets were lovely, the creatures fascinating, but other than grind fuel and occasionally get eaten by something, there wasn't much gameplay.

With the later addition of base-building I was able to ... build a base. W00t.

Lovely tech, pretty planets and stuff... not much compelling to actually do.

> Lovely x, y and z... not much compelling to actually do.

This is pokemon go in a nutshell yet it seemed to work for niantic.

I think the compelling part of pokemon go is not the game its self, but the social interactions it created.

The deception aside, people have different expectations of mobile games..

Much like Zombocom, the only limit is yourself.

I tried No Mans Sky a year ago and it was so utterly shallow and boring. Lots of breadth and zero depth. I tried the "foundations" update at some point, built a little base and... it felt empty and pointless and still utterly shallow. The game might have been "ok", or at least, I'd have been less harsh, if it didn't have a AAA price tag (and if Hello Games had been honest).

I did not try the next update, and while its added a lot of the originally promised features, from what I've heard and seen on youtube, it still looked shallow and lacking depth and substance. So I've given up hope that these 19 quintillion planets will ever be interesting enough for me to bother playing it again.

Also, regardless of whether they eventually pull of what was promised, it doesn't change the fact that Sean Murray mislead or even outright lied to everybody and that leaves an extremely bitter taste. I for one will never buy anything that Sean Murray touches or has anything to do with. So in many ways, the damage is done.

Counter opinion: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/18/16164520/no-mans-sky-one-...

Honestly - I loved the first iteration and have jumped in to play it again this time round. I love it still (again).

It's changed a lot. It's upgraded again there is a tonne of stuff to do, lots to see and explore and plenty of "hooks" to give you the excuse to see them.

NMS gets a lot of hate and I don't think it's deserved but hey if the author doesn't want to play it, then it's no skin off my nose.

They can do what they want.

>NMS gets a lot of hate and I don't think it's deserved

Should we just ignore all of the hype and promises made by the developer/publisher which were never delivered on? That's where the hate comes from. They promised something much more than what they delivered.

Yes, they've made improvements, and that's great, but it still doesn't contain some of the biggest features promised while the game was still in dev. The marketing of this game was very deceptive, and they deserve what they got for that.

Besides... most find the game pretty boring.

>Should we just ignore all of the hype and promises made by the developer/publisher which were never delivered on? That's where the hate comes from. They promised something much more than what they delivered.

The people who pre-ordered should've waited till the reviews came out and then bought?

I have rarely seen a level of delusion from a fan base than the one around NMS, they collectively hyped themselves to a level of frenzy before the game came out that could only lead to disappointment.

> The people who pre-ordered should’ve waited till the reviews came out and then bought?

This is obviously true—no one should ever preorder digital games.

But that does not absolve the developer from flat out lying in interviews and promises, sorry.

>I have rarely seen a level of delusion from a fan base than the one around NMS

Just wait until star citizen crashes down hard

You assume it will ever be released. :-)

Wait... it's the customer's fault for believing what they were being told by the developer? I don't pre-order anything for this very reason, but c'mon; th fault still lies with the liar.

Please see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ-tgaE37UE

Even if you ignore the blatant lies, the game just turned out to be boring. An empty universe which lacked the awe inspiring sense of adventure that was promised.

Yes... that is the point of reviews, that's why they exist, to establish what a game is not what it was meant to be. If marketing materials were accurate there wouldn't need to be any reviews in the first place, if you pre-order you are pre-ordering aspirations not guarantee's, all anyone had to do to avoid disappointment was not buy the game until it was released.

As I said, that fanbase hyped themselves up to a degree which is ridiculous, they took every word out of the devs mouth from years of interviews as gospel, it really was an unholy shitstorm where everyone from the developer, the publisher and the customers made things worse than it needed to be.

Regarding preordering - If you're talking monetary value it's of course accurate but I'm sure tons of people were insanely excited for the game. When it turns out to be different, it doesn't matter as much that they lost money but that they had their hopes up for nothing.

They did what most "lean startups" did. They made an MVP, and iterated from there. The only difference is that their target audience were gamers who hivemind way more than most other markets.

A lean startup, done right, plans the MVP and promises only that, as a first iteration. Then, if necessary, they can pivot in a new direction with another MVP v2, or use the credibility from the execution of their first, viable, release, to raise support for a major expansion or three.

Clearly they did not create a “minimum viable” product if their customers were so unhappy with the end result. As a startup, they failed completely at determining what that “minimum viable” was.

So what's your personal take on the posted article?

The post article would suggest NMS is being pulled in a lot of different directions... it has a single player quest, but it's not a great quest-based game. It has sandbox elements, but no obvious gameplay loop to make the sandbox compelling. It doesn't speak to the multiplayer elements, and I don't have personal experience with them, so I don't know how well they fit.

The Verge seems a fair bit more charitable regarding the changes, while acknowledging that the game is still flawed. They seem to like the additional quest components, and feel the overall engine improvements have been well done. But it still doesn't seem to address the core issue this article is focused on, which is that they feel NMS is a jack of all trades but a master of none.

So what's your take?

I was a fan of what was released initially, and thought the uproar was completely ludicrous. But I also didn't pay insanely close attention to the hype machine.

When my more "invested" friends pointed out all the things the developer said would be there, that weren't, I thought, "Well, it'll probably come later." And behold, now some are. Maybe more will come.

As a game, I probably lost 40-60 hours playing the initial release of the game. I treated it as a weird independent/art house game which was more about an experiment than about a crystalized game loop experience.

It was fun, and interesting, and what systems were present were pleasant enough.

Having played with the update, all of the updates are great and worth revisiting. It definitely changes the feel of the game.

It's not a "great" game, but what it is is great. You can fly around a universe and see things literally no one has ever seen before, including the developers. There are some mechanics to make exploring easier, some things which make you more powerful, and a loose, cryptic plot.

It's easily worth the 60 bucks, which is all you can ask of it.

As someone who actually followed the development from the day it was announced at the VGAs, I also found the uproar to be ludicrous and the claims of the developer lying to be overblown.

I think it also might be that I am pretty aware that games/most projects in any field are never going to be what is said when first announced. I used to feverishly follow game developments when I was a kid and became intimately aware that features promised at announcement don't always make it to the end and that I also impose a lot of my own desires onto the project that never had any reality of coming true.

Finally I will say I found NMS to be a pretty boring game, but one that is incredibly beautiful. The sense of planetary scale in the game is unmatched IMO and I think that Hello Games or a developer with similar tech can make something truly special with that.

X-Com flawed and annoying? Them's fighting words! The game is a masterpiece. It didn't feel frustrating back then; it felt like it belonged in my top 5 most engaging and enjoyable games, and I know this is a widely shared opinion in gamers my age.

edit: well, one of the commenters from TFA agrees with me:

> The original x-com was “deeply flawed and annoying”? I mean if that’s your opinion, cool, but surely you realize that most people consider it a classic and using it as an example of a failed game is only going to confuse us.

X-Com shipped with a broken difficulty selector, so that all games were played on "Easy" regardless of your setting. The gameplay could be slow and ponderous at the best of times, and at the worst of times (chasing down the one last alien) could be quite maddeningly slow, literally at times 10-30 minutes of nothing. (Then the last alien gets the drop on you and your dude dies.) Some of the mechanics are pretty opaque in the era before "I'll just read a complete disassembly of the game engine on GameFAQs." Some of that is probably a part of the love for the game, but by most modern standards that's a flaw in a game. (Having to discover mechanics is not intrinsically a flaw, but making them somewhat undiscoverable kinda is.)

I'm not sure I'd defend the "deeply" part of "deeply flawed", because IMHO it still belongs in a different category than some of those other games; it came much closer to doing what it set out to do deliberately, it did not just accidentally back into being a good game despite itself. However, I will defend that X-Com was somewhat flawed. The very fact that they could ship the difficulty selector broken, because nobody noticed, because the difference was not big enough to be noticeable, is a pretty decently sized problem on its own; that affects everything from top to bottom right there.

Because X-Com was widely considered a masterpiece by the standards of its day (unfair to compare it to today's games, and anyway that wasn't the point of TFA) it's extremely confusing to list it as an example of a flawed or frustrating game.

You already mentioned the pace: that was one of its strong points, not a weakness. I -- and most of its fans, I'd guess -- liked the game because of its deliberately slow pace, not in spite of it. Why, I remember about 15-20 years ago I debated with someone about real-time vs turn-based games, and why I preferred the latter, and used X-Com as an example!.

Like you also mentioned, I don't think most people realized about the "Easy" setting bug back then (I certainly didn't!). "Easy" was difficult enough anyway, so I think this criticism doesn't apply. We're not talking about bugs here (which happen in every game), but about "flawed" gameplay, and how you experienced the game back when you played it. Nobody complained about the broken difficulty setting, so this couldn't cause a frustrating experience.

To me, picking X-Com as an example of a flawed game is like picking a movie everyone considers a classic masterpiece and declaring it flawed because there is a scene which is somewhat out of focus: it's an act of snobbery.

Not a particularly well-researched post. Sony did not publish the game, they provided marketing budget. This means that they were not in creative control.

Furthermore, they could be forgiven for making statements saying e.g multiplayer was included a year out since it was an aspirational goal, but they were lying to the bitter end right up to release, either explicitly or by omission.

Ugh NMS. Didn't get superhyped but bought it at launch, listened to that soundtrack by 65daysofstatic for a few weeks, played the game for about 30 minutes. It was just so boring. They had the tech to make universes but made the core gameplay so boring you didn't care. How is that possible?

The game is now what it could have been, but it makes me uncomfortable even enjoying the game because I remember the dev lying on the day of release about multiplayer. That breaks some kind of contract between producer and consumer. Oh, and the FOV on the PS4 version is horrific, interesting way of extending a consoles lifespan.

I think NMS is a glimpse of the future, but hopefully someone else will take their formula mainstream.

> Oh, and the FOV on the PS4 version is horrific

Eh? There's an option for that.

It was recently added in an update

"The game is now what it could have been"

The commentator was talking about one of the latest NMS releases. I was simply stating that their idea of "latest" is not what it is right now.

>> The game is now what it could have been

Do you mean that like "it's got as far as they can reasonably take it, it could never have been more than that" or "it has fulfilled everything that it was ever supposed to be"?

Because the former is a little tautological but likely correct, and I'd be surprised if it's really the latter.

I think all games should focus on one platform, the PC platform. Consoles drain developer's time and attention from making the actual game. And don't get me started on knuckle-dragging VR.

The consoles are much easier to develop for -- debugging GPU problems across hundreds of GPUs by three manufacturers is so much harder than doing so on a single (or two, if you count the two major consoles) GPU type. They also make a larger share of the revenue than PC games do. They don't drain attention, they put attention where the most revenue for the least work is.

And from a user point of view, PC gaming just got exhausting for me. Driver updates, keeping up with GPU upgrades... or I can plunk down some money on a box that Mostly Just Works. Yes, there's parts of console gaming that annoy me. I dislike having to have a PS4 and an Xbox One, which are like 80-90% of the same damn hardware, to play all the games I want. This goes doubly because the PS4 has marginally better hardware (minus the controller, which is improved from previous generations but not as comfortable as the Xbox controller) and the Xbox has outrageously better software, so I'm missing out on something no matter which console I'm using and I can't crossplay with friends on a different console. But those annoyances are small potatoes given how much time I've sunk into getting PC games to run optimally.

I have a PC that's nearly 5 years old, that wasn't top of the line (budget about £800 without screens) when I bought it and took me half a day to put together. It runs every game I've tried on it at least at medium and usually on high. I've spent zero time optimising it, not put a single h/w upgrade in and driver updates get run about every 6 months for a few minutes. PC gaming is way beyond "mostly just works" and has been for some time from my point of view.

Was that around windows 95?

Consoles are lock-in death to me.

It looks like PS4 [1] sales almost doubled Steam Sales [2]. There were probably a large amount of non Steam PC sales, but Steam being one of the largest distribution platforms, I imagine its a large portion of total PC sales.

[1] http://www.vgchartz.com/game/84663/no-mans-sky/ [2] http://steamspy.com/app/275850

This product was really always about trying to push the limits of procedural generation technology. It failed as a game if you ask the gamers, but exceeded expectations if you ask the developers (lucky devils are now millionaires). This 30 second clip pretty much sums up how great their marketing was:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KxRp8jeliQ

In the lead up, when they were touting 6.84 * 10^23 planets or whatever, my thought was, how is that fun? If it will take all of humanity 10,000 years to see your entire game, what good does that do players now?

As a game designer this resonated with me: " it’s easy to say “yes” because you already wanted to have X and you’ve already thought about how you’d go about making it happen. People love you, your work is valuable, and you don’t want to say no. "

Along the way in my career I heard something that I remind myself to help me with this problem: "Promises are like babies, fun to make but hard to keep. "

I love the soundtrack. Many lines of code were written to it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRI-o9JDfCI

Having read this article the only remaining real flaw in this game is - Sony. I'm sorry that I didn't know that it was actually Sony behind the publishing which backfired into the face of Jean Murray, and not Sony. Damn.

The UI is clunky and impossible to efficiently use.

Compare the galaxy map to the one in Elite Dangerous in which it is far easier to control the camera.

They meant well but they might be better restarting

Update 1.35 is improving that, you might want to check it out.

Looking at this from a totally different angle, I find the fact that we collectively have such a high standard for games to be such a positive signal that life today is moving along swimmingly. The fact that this is what bothers us (rather than a depression or a big war) is wonderful. (Or maybe I've just been reading too many history books recently.)

A lot of NMS problems go away if you mod and cheat your way to game balance...

Play it your way.

I was just on vacation and played a bunch.

They should have done an early access thing, because it's actually a quite fun game now and it was somewhat oversold at launch.

Because they've focused on a different set of priorities from the ones he wants, thus they're incompetent and sadistic?

Ok.

Actually, his most basic, underlying thesis is that it's impossible to determine what their priorities are. To the author, the game is incoherent. If you cleave to that view, then it's impossible to understand why the developers changed what they changed.

His example of Dark Souls is a perfect one. He acknowledges that, while the game isn't his thing, he can at least intellectually grok why Dark Souls is a good game, and how it has been optimized and refined for the specific play style they aimed at.

The author claims the same can't be said for No Man's Sky.

So, no, it's not that it's a different set of priorities. It's that it appears to be an incomprehensible set of priorities. And that's a real problem, if you believe in the thesis (which, I assume, will be explored in subsequent installments).

"Actually, his most basic, underlying thesis is that it's impossible to determine what their priorities are" - zzalpha (someone who read the article)

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