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Comment by spandrew | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with this logic.

They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.

I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.

The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.

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>And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't

why scare quotes around for free? they were free.

>haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it.

i went from hating it to really enjoying it. i am not the only one.

>based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.

my comment comes from my opinion and my experience, not social media. i think its a good game, and i would say it's absolutely worth the money.

I suppose because you still bought the game, after all, and on some level it was about catching up to expectations for what you would have paid for out of the box.

That said, I don't agree with their take at all. Hello Games offered a mountain of content that's right in the bullseye center of game's core vibe and identity; and continuing to hold the original critique against them based on the "not procedural enough" argument is increasingly equivocating between two different things. You've been given a game that's more than worth the cost of admission, and you'll see dozens, hundreds, of slop space games come and go with less than one tenth the value proposition of NMS. That should be more than enough to quell 99% of the criticism.

The fact that it's not procedural enough amounts to, say, feeling that The Odyssey was good, not great. For however true that is, it's not a scandal.

You pay for a game——if the game is not good, and patches are provided "for free" that doesn't mean much.

Here, NMS launched with abysmal content and atrocious systems. Now at least it doesn't have abysmal content. A bad game is a bad game (yes, my opinion).

Content updates for a paid game aren't free. They're adding to a package that, more often than not, was incomplete to begin with. And they'll often result in more sales, which is how they pay for themselves.

Not that they're bad, but wording them like they're some huge act of generosity from the studio instead of a reasonable expectation pushes the baseline away from where it should be.

i bought a game that contained X with no expectations of more content.

the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates. i did not pay for those updates. so it seems completely reasonable to consider those updates to be free.

wording it as something i paid for when i didn't pushes the baseline towards dishonesty.

> the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates.

Yeah. Back in the day, those would almost always be paid expansions... if not whole-ass sequels.

There's a subset of video game players these days who expect years and years of substantial changes to a game. Why, back in my day you had to pay for anything more than a game-breaking bug fix... and you counted yourself lucky if you even got those!

This isn't an arguement I'm making.

There's a difference between DLC and providing "the base game content" – which No Man's Sky was doing. It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now. They could have cut their losses but it would've ended the studio.

Now they're being touted as a paragon of scrappy game dev. Which is wrong.

> It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now.

I'd argue that it was barely a game at launch, and it's still barely a game today... it has always been a sandbox with very little game in it, and that's fine. [0] But that's neither here nor there.

They released a "game" ten years ago. They've updated that "game" many times and never charged for updates.

That makes those updates free. You can justifiably be angry about the circumstances of the launch, and justifiably be angry that anyone's saying anything good about the devs. That doesn't change the fact that this [3]

  And the features they've bolted on "for free"...

is an asinine use of scare quotes. The updates were delivered free of charge, and the price of the base game hasn't been increased to account for them. This makes them free updates.

[0] See the fourth paragraph of [1] as well as most of [2] for a little more commentary on this.

[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630148>

[2] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630824>

[3] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629510>

Back in the day, they had to ship complete working games, because the cost to fix it later was too high.

Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time, but the punishment for messing up was severe.

And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves. Those are a lot of value, and there's nothing wrong with them. They even still exist today, though rarer.

Maybe the NMS's updates did amount to one or two expansions throughout the 10 years of updates, but they were done piecemeal. Were it not a game that massively under delivered on release, they could've gone that route.

> Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time...

Sounds like being required to ship a "complete working game" didn't matter much. Weird.

> And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves.

And many were not. Plus, if we ignore shovelware -both past and present- most games these days are way larger than they were back in the day.

Have you ever gone back and played those old games you fuzzily remember through a haze of nostalgia? Many of them [0] would be derided as low-effort asset flips [1] these days. Many of the NMS updates (and tragically many updates to other games) definitely would qualify as "expansion pack"-sized. Some updates are big enough to be whole-ass overhauls. It's _nuts_ how much work some industrious indie game devs put into their games.

It's fine to be angry at how the circumstances of NMS's launch, and be sore that Hello Games is getting any praise after all that. But it's dishonest to refuse to recognize both that a very vocal subset of gamers expects that games will come with months and years of substantial post-release changes provided free-of-charge and that many devs -for better or worse- provide what these folks are demanding.

[0] ...but definitely not all of them...

[1] Granted, all sorts of things get called "asset flips", so the "low-effort" part is the important bit here.

Always having some instance of someone messing up is still substantially different from more instances than not being messed up. So it did actually matter quite a lot.

Now, as someone who is an avid retro gamer, I play plenty of those old games you're talking about. In the very old days, games were definitely shorter, but by the 5th and 6th gen, the gap isn't quite as big. If anything, they're often too large now, but that's neither here nor there. Budgets are bigger, teams are bigger, and most importantly, the consumer base is bigger. So size of games and expansions needs to be looked at relatively.

Regardless, for non-early access (of which NMS is an example of in all but name) and non-live service games, there mostly isn't an expectation that content will be added, only that updates will be made that improve and fix what's there. The exceptions are mostly when there's a pattern of content uodates happening before, or when something is clearly incomplete compared to what's usual for a series. See the Monster Hunter series as an example for both the latter ones.

Overall, it's natural for customers to want things that are at least as good or better than before when technology improves. It's the opposite that should not be happening.

Many people bought it expecting more, because the studio promised a lot more. You can say that's on the people for not checking before buying, but that doesn't invalidate the dishonesty on their part.

Were it an early access game, you would in fact be purchasing expecting updates. Not guaranteed updates, but certainly expecting them. This game was an amazing early access release in all but name.

I'm not saying you should word it as updates you paid for, you just don't word them as if they're an act of generosity. Just call them "updates", not "free updates" like you did right before the reply that put "free updates" in quotes.

they are free updates. i do find them generous.

that sums it up.

Then don't complain because people disagree. If adding unnecessary qualifiers to make it sound better is fair, so is quoting them.

please point out specifically where i complained.

When you objected to quotes around the term you deliberately used to make them sound better than regular updates that any early access game gets.

Bolted on? A lot of the core mechanics were rebuilt or added over the 10 years.

> based on them staggering a few nonsense releases

This has to be a troll. Or you haven’t touched the game in years.

What other game has had 10 years of free updates that has dramatically changed the game?

I think it looks like a variety of game that it's not, and there's a dissonance there... it's not an action/adventure game, it's a sandbox of procedural generated worlds where you gather resources to unlock new builds.

You can build bases, manage settlements, maintain a fleet, build ships and exocraft, build multi-tools, have pets battle each other, cook food, manage the economy... but there's only a thin relationship/lore system and not much of a difficulty ramp at any point.

You're space farming, if you expect anything else you won't like it.

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