Hacker News Reader

Comment by rgoulter | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of pre-release hype for over-promised scope,

Internet Historian's "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky" is surprisingly a well told, heart-warming (albeit quite long) video telling the story of No Man's Sky, how it got so hyped, and the good-faith steps the developers took to do their best to make good on their promises. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ

View on HN

For those that dismissed NMS due to the launch fiasco and never looked at it again, it’s now an incredible game. If they’d launched it then in the state it’s in now, it would probably have been a colossal hit and gone down as one of the best space survival/exploration games ever made. For me personally it’s easily top 5, and space survival is the primary genre I play almost every day.

Also, playing it on PSVR is incredible. No cut-down “VR Experience”, it’s the full game in VR. Doing VR dog fights in an asteroid belt against waves of fighters, then transitioning through the atmosphere as the fight follows you down to ground level is an awesome experience.

There's no doubt that the devs turned No Man's Sky into a good game, well-worth the asking price. There's little doubt that Sony and unexpected hype were the driving forces behind the over-promising and under-delivering. God help me though, I just can't let it go. I cannot let go that Murray apologizes for literally everything except what he actually did wrong. He's sorry for getting ahead of himself, he's sorry for believing his own hype, he's sorry for letting Sony push the studio too hard. What he hasn't said, in the hours upon hours of interviews he's done since release, is apologize for looking us in the eye and telling us things he knew weren't true. Not once has he apologized for the moral failure of making the conscious choice to lie to us. And I looked, boy did I look, because I wanted to believe that he was sorry for that. But he isn't.

So I encourage people to play No Man's Sky. It's a good game. But I will never, ever give Sean Murray my money again.

You have put words into his mouth I think, though it sounds as though you have looked harder than me. I can imagine a version where he truly believed the features he said would be in the game would make it in time for launch if only he tried hard enough. Instead of lieing, what he did was fail to deliver. The difference is intention and I personally think it matters more than how things unfold in most circumstances.

He said the game had multiplayer when it not only had no netcode of any kind but none was being worked on. That is a lie.

Their advertising materials including their post-launch Steam page featured large-scale space battles, rivers, formation flying with wingmen, etc were so egregiously false they triggered an investigation by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority.

> it’s now an incredible game.

No, the core gameplay is the same, it's incredibly shallow, even by survival standards. I understand some people love busy work, but let's not pretend they did something incredible. They barely fulfilled their original promises (multi-player). Murray still needs to apologize publicly for his lies on TV though.

Completely agree. I have played NMS on launch day. Played everything it had to offer. Even went through the grind and flew to the middle of the galaxy.

Biggest disappointment in gaming I ever had.

Recently played it again. Has it more content? Sure. Has it multiplayer? Well.. I guess you can see each other, but it's a terrible experience in so many ways. Has it most of the features promised to be in the game even before it launched? Not.. even.. close. It might be an "okay" or for some people even "good" game, but compared to what has been promised, it would still deserve the steam rating of "mostly negative"

Aye this was my experience too. Played it a bunch when I was pet-sitting for friends and my amigo was cool w/ me using his gaming PC & Steam account.

It was pretty cool for the first 4 hours, but got repetitive fairly quickly.

Caveat: I'm not really into the big open survival games anyway; Subnautica was alright, but Fallout 4 and Rust (the game) put me to sleep.

I'm still waiting for something on par with Freespace or the old Playstation classic Colony Wars (1 & 2).

What other space survival games do you play? Have you ever tried subnautica?

I've been playing it since it came on Game Pass. It's very enjoyable if you want some unstructured noodling around in space.

I certainly saw the hype for no man's sky and perhaps they released the game a little earlier than they should've, given the scope that they claimed.

But hey, at least the rubber hit the road when the game was released.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com