No Man’s Sky’s next update will let you explore infinite space in VR
techcrunch.com
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The devs did the right thing by their customers which is sadly quite rare these days.
I, and most people I knew who bought the game at launch, were disappointed but also REALLY enjoyed the game. I still play casually to this day and the updates since launch have more than made up for any disappointment I originally felt, and it's currently one of my favourite games of the last few years.
It's a stunningly beautiful, peaceful, and endlessly enjoyable creative explorer. On par with Minecraft and Astroneer.
1. Massive hype suspended the critical faculties of many gamers (maybe fueled by Murray's geeky and somewhat confused countenance) and the game saw substantial pre-orders.
2. Sandbox, infinite exploration nature of the game meant massive numbers were playing after launch despite disappointment and frustration in the game. It does offer a unique experience.
3. After a period of keeping their heads down as an organization -- probably partially to try to avoid a lawsuit -- they started rolling out free updates that pushed the game forward enough to maintain interest.
The game was hugely successful, even by AAA standards. Combined with a tiny team means they could likely put out free updates for another decade.
I have a feeling they're playing the long game. Once they've unequivocally won people over with updates they'll likely use their war chest and momentum to roll out another insanely ambitious title, though they might stick to a PC release so they can manage expectations better.
HN in general has weird standards around game quality considering many of the users work on software as service start-ups that launch as almost broken MVPs. I understand NMS asked players to pay $60 up front but they've put their money where there mouth is and continually supported and updated the game.
It had everything to do with what promised / implied vs what was actually delivered.
If the creator had slapped a Open Beta tag on the box and charged $20 (and simply upped that number as they got closer to release), everyone would probably still be talking about it.
But instead they delivered on 25%-50% of what they claimed was in the game.
Thank you so much for saying this. This community is very toxic in a few ways, and this is one of them.
Was overhyped, but it probably 50% is press fault.
You don’t go in debt by making a ton of copies that don’t sel and you don’t lose money when you lower your sale price to clear inventory because there isn’t none.
If you continue to develop and support the game you can create a continguous stream of revenue even if it’s a small one, for a small studio without investors it’s a very viable business model.
I don’t know how to explain, but I can highly recommend it!
Isn’t that something we can all admire?
However, we as humanity really need to give people the opportunity to make things right. And Hello Games surely did that by implementing just about everything they said they would including multiplayer over the next few years.
I think it was less on purpose and more symptomatic of having a breathless dreamer as a lead who thinks the world is possible. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but might be a good idea to keep that guy’s interactions with the press pretty rehearsed so you don’t accidentally put your foot in your mouth. The guy who did the Fable franchise (Peter Molyneux) was also notoriously bad about this.
> they outright said something was going to be in the game and it didn’t happen
Haven't most if not all of those NMS promises been fulfilled?
As someone who played a fair amount NMS and Godus, even at launch NMS was a much better and more interesting game than Godus and it has only improved.
So yeah, they promised stuff that they knew they wouldn't deliver.
There are others like this, it was just the first result on Google.
I think comments like yours really just short-change Hello Games for the sheer amount of progress they've made and the difficulty of the challenge they faced in doing something as hard as winning back the gaming community.
For example, literally the first thing in the list you link:
"Yeah, at the moment you can land on asteroids."
That's a "promise" apparently not kept.
So is this:
"Maybe you take out a space station, or a fleet, or you know, something like that..."
I'm not going to list everything here, but everything everyone complains about is what they were shown, what they hyped themselves, and general game development that will get changed.
I never found anyone that could point to these explicit promises. There was lots of discussion about things they'd like to add, or just talking about game development in general, but I don't remember them saying "At launch, you will get X feature" and then at launch, not having that.
Edit: You edited your comment after I replied. It was originally just a link with no commentary.
> There are others like this, it was just the first result on Google.
You would do well to not just assume it's 100% accurate.
> I think comments like yours really just short-change Hello Games for the sheer amount of progress they've made and the difficulty of the challenge they faced in doing something as hard as winning back the gaming community.
First, I'm not saying that they game was perfect. Only that the issue was the hype built up by the community and the inference of "promises" where there were none. The game needed work, and they did a great job in improving it.
Secondly, the gaming community is fickle and uncaring. They love things they claim to hate, and hate things they claim to love. Sure, Hello Games has done a lot, and they get a lot of credit for this especially in the face of the death threats from that gaming community. Sorry, but the gaming community does not have my sympathy.
We can definitely agree that the gaming community does tend to overreact. Especially the modern gaming community with its hyper-fixation and echo chambers and far-reaching mainstream audiences. You don't just get lynched by a few nerds across a few phpbb forums anymore.
Hello Games struck hype gold at the expense of the deep dive scrutiny that gamers love, and I would largely credit the veil of mystery that they continued to sew right up to August 2016.
But it certainly wasn't far-fetched for someone to buy the game at launch expecting some of these features: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no...
I think Hello Games' misstep was that they seemed to avoid clearing the pre-launch air with precise answers.
They said you could grief other players. They said you could customize the look of your player. They said you could land on comets. They said the animals eat each other. They said you wouldn't have to ever gather resources if you wanted (which I guess is technically true if you're alright with also doing absolutely nothing else the game has to offer beside walking around on your starting planet).
I guess you could argue that these were all some sort of vision of a "future state" and not representative of day 1, but there certainly weren't any qualifications added to the statement in any of his interviews, and there's plenty of evidence that they actually intended this stuff to be in on day 1 but simply didn't have the time. Which is fine! And I think we should praise them for committing to turning it into a game that is actually amazing. But they definitely did betray a lot of players at launch.
The context of that quote was that Sean was explaining why the game had multiplayer elements like naming rights for discoveries in a shared universe but the gameplay was primary about solo exploration. It was clear that he wanted to push the benefits of "shared universe" as a form of multiplayer but as for literally seeing your friends, he was trying to say "we could code it into the game but we think it's too unlikely so we won't".
It's obvious that Murray has problems directly saying no. He repeatedly said "rare", meaning "never". That was his crime.
Even after the game came out he kept up the charade. When two players on the same planet couldn't see each other he made evasive comments about server load[2].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqeN6hj4dZU&t=5m41s
[2]: https://twitter.com/nomanssky/status/763271005003538432
As the release cycle went on and Sean did more interviews, it became subtly clear that he was trying to control expectations, by saying things like "we want it to be an experience like Dark Souls or Journey", which implies a sort of "humans are here but you never see them" atmosphere (moreso Dark Souls than Journey). But that didn't stop other comments from him, like clearly saying that other players would be able to see your character, nor did it stop the box from being printed with an Online Play ESRB rating before being redacted with a rating that didn't have that.
In the best case, I'm fine with believing the best of everyone involved; that this was Hello Games' first game, that Sean firmly believed they could get everything done by release, and then, as it always does, the reality of software development hits. I think that's very likely what happened. So calling their actions "lies" is very strong language; moreso simply broken promises. But, at the same time: we can't simply allow game developers to promise the universe and then not hold them accountable when they can't deliver, because that line between "assume the best, they're new at this" and "trying to drive pre-order sales despite knowing the game is shit" is very gray, and very hard to identify when all the information we often have to go on is their word.
Now considering that, I do think that they seem to have made the best out of the situation they were in. Hello Games seems to be a lot more open, not promising things they can't deliver, and they've been quietly bringing the game up to where they said it would be. It really seems like they're trying to make restitution and do things the right way, this time around. That says a lot to me about where they want to be in the future and what they've learned from what they did.
I don’t respect them for the launch, but I do for what came after.
I agree with you that free add-ons to games are great but they shouldn't just be the originally promised functionality
I'm as guilty of the same youthful exuberance in my first software products. Mine were just far less public.