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:
No Man’s Sky One Year Later
21–30 of 144 posts
Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wha…
>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 ma…
>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.
Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later
#23Ugh 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 o…
> Oh, and the FOV on the PS4 version is horrific
Eh? There's an option for that.
Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later
#24I 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.
Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 g…
Was that around windows 95?
Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later
#26Ugh 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 o…
> Oh, and the FOV on the PS4 version is horrific Eh? There's an option for that.
It was recently added in an update
Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later
#27I 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…
Wut. The company lied about the product. Isn't that fraud? And you say people were too harsh?
Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later
#29I 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…
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.
Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later
#30Open 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…
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.