No Man's Sky is the poster child for turning a shitty launch into a success. You can really feel the passion of the staff at Hello Games in the current version of the game. It reminds me of the quote, which I'm about to butcher, that is along the lines of "People don't remember the problem, they remember how you dealt with the problem".
If you haven't seen it, "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky" is a good review of the story. It's 5 years old now, and the engoodening hasn't stopped.
People keep saying that. I ended up biting the bullet after the latest "game changing" update.
It's barely a game at all. It's still a walking simulator. The environment is great, and there is some variety. But there is no objective or opposition, not even a story (a little robot tells you to do stuff). It's a sandbox, an engine one could build a game in (and they might someday?)
They added some construction stuff, so the game will say "go and build a house" and you do that. Or "go build a blueprint machine" and now you have more blueprints. But what is any of it for? You can just sit in your cockpit.
It all seems so pointless. Like they have seen other survival games and copied some mechanics over without understanding what makes a survival game. It is a really puzzling experience, I can't understand what they were thinking.
I don't know how many different ways to say it. We all enjoy different types of games! You obviously aren't a fan of sandbox games, lots of people aren't either. Or maybe it's just this sandbox game. That's fine too.
But it is pretty objectively a great example of taking an absolutely abysmal launch and turning it into something that a decent amount of people (doesn't mean everyone!) still enjoy and talk favorably about. It still sells copies. It still keeps the lights on at Hello Games.
I cannot think of a single other game that had such an awful launch that has, 10 years later, enjoyed mostly positive reviews. Cyberpunk might be the closest.
I enjoy sandboxes. I like Minecraft, Terraria, etc. "Make a gold axe so you can dig further" is something to work forward. Make an anvil so you can craft new equipment to explore, sure.
Here it's "make a qreblz machine because the voice tells you to". And then you can craft a wewrkz. Why.
There are a few storylines that you can try to immerse yourself in, but they're very heady, ambiguous stories that seem intended to make you wonder if the universe is a simulation running on an unstable computer, without ever committing to any concrete explanation for anything.
The endgame is mining lots of metals and making warp fuel and diving into black holes repeatedly to get to the center of the galaxy, after which you can traverse to the next galaxy, which has different distributions of types of stars and planets, and differently colored galactic nebula. There are 256 galaxies in total.
But I still think you've missed (or are just ignoring) the point of my original comment. I didn't claim it's an objectively good game that everyone enjoys.
It's an objectively good demonstration of taking a shit launch and turning it around into a success story.
In Minecraft/Terraria/Subnautica, I can actually do something with the new equipment. Go to new places, fight new enemies, conquer new bosses.
In No Man' Sky, it's already all there. In fact 10 minutes into the game I was crafting a wooden shed right next to a busy alien base with constant spaceship traffic. Can I interact with them instead? Can there be any storyline involving the sci-fi base right next to me? No, like most of the game it is just for show. You are supposed to look at the pretty scenery and ignore it while do the most boring crafting game ever. Those two aspects are not connected at all.
I think the craziest turnaround story was Final Fantasy XIV, which was so bad at release that the following shitstorms meant that everyone expected it would go the way most MMOs go (soon forgotten). But not with Square-Enix (who had a money maker with their previous MMO Final Fantasy 11) who commited to revamping the whole game which took basically 3 years but in the end it became a really good game with a lot of happy players. (I have not played it myself so would like to listen to what players themselves say!)
All of the other replies to you seem to give examples of other sandbox games that are successful / fun and suggest that maybe you just don't like the genre, but as an avid fan of sandbox games, and many of the other titles given by other posters, I still agree with you.
No Man's Sky feels devoid of any personality or interesting content in a particularly unique way. No amount of updates will ever fix for me what feels like a fundamental gameplay loop issue.
All of the layers of systems they've added with each new update still just feel __bad__. I'm glad so many have found a way to enjoy the game, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when none of them seem to address the issue of "collect arbitrary resources to build gear to collect other arbitrary resources ad nauseum" in a way that I just find fundamentally unsatisfying.
I still understand that reductive description can apply to many of the other games I actually enjoy (i.e. Minecraft, etc.) but that's what's so strange to me about NMS—by all means, I __should__ like the game. But I still think it's a miserable experience devoid of any real meaning. Even if the point is to find your own meaning in the systems it provides, I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just feels so much worse than any of the others.
Maybe someone else can better articulate why it feels so bad, but to me, despite all of the work they've put on the game, it still feels so devoid of meaning.
I think it is both an egregious example of the "farm this to craft this to farm this..." gameplay loop and that other aspects of the gameplay are too shallow to hold it up once you get bored of the crafting and building loop. And I say this as a fan of the game lol
I wouldn't mind it if building didn't seem pointless. You travel with your ship but build on planets that you are meant to quickly abandon.
The exploration and building aspects are in opposition to each other so you can't really hop in between them when you get bored without starting over next time.
This was my impression, too. I've been reading years of hype, so I bought the game a few months ago, and I was unimpressed. But the fact that it's kind of an objective-less sandbox wasn't what got me.
I've played plenty of open world games and enjoyed them. In fact, even in games like Morrowind or Starfield or Grand Theft Auto or the like, which have big worlds and specific objectives, I've always found myself ignoring the quests and preferring to explore on my own terms.
I remember hopping around in Morrowind as a kid, trying to become as powerful as possible, and seeking out baddies to best. Then in Grand Theft Auto I'd go on epic crime sprees to see how long I could elude the authorities. And in Starfield I built an incredible network of trading posts that spanned the galaxy to see how much I could enrich myself.
What made these games fun is that, despite not following any missions or objectives, I was able to do impressive and interesting things and have fun. Perhaps that's possible in No Man's Sky, but in my first couple hours of playing, it didn't seem like it. It seemed liked I'd be going around doing boring and uninteresting things, and that it wouldn't be fun.
So it's not that it was a sandbox that bothered me, but that it was a sandbox devoid of fun.
I've never played it, so I really can't speak to the though, but my obvious comparison is Minecraft.
I really think the deep lore of Minecraft does a lot of work. When you find a new and interesting random place to explore, it usually ties in with your view of the place you are in, and eventually you find your way to an ending of sorts.
Another similar game from my youth that was the same was Wing Commander: Privateer. It was a sandbox, where a game suddenly appears after you've been exploring for months, but it's not much more than some cut scenes within the sandbox.
I have no qualms with a sandbox game, but I'd prefer it were generally tied into a narrative, either in a lore narrative or with a direct story.
I found it to be the grind half of a game, the chores you do to make the fun part more fun. But there is no fun part. The creative part is all prefabricated, and the exploration is very low-dimensional variation on templates that quickly blend together.
> But there is no objective or opposition, not even a story (a little robot tells you to do stuff). It's a sandbox, an engine one could build a game in (and they might someday?)
I've found a very different experience. There seem to be several main story threads to follow, as well as the addition of a few interesting sidequests (I'm in the middle of the one about hacking and reverse engineering one of the sentinels). And that's not even counting the expeditions they come up with from time to time. I particularly enjoyed working through the one that had the Normandy from Mass Effect as the end prize.
It's like describing a bucket of random Lego pieces "not a toy".
It's a game. It just might not be the game for you. Some people buy a Lego set, follow the instructions and make whatever the set is and that's it. That's fine. Other people will build out ideas with whatever pieces they have. Yet other people will buy specific pieces to build out some Lego vision they have, some of which are truly incredible.
It's also like Minecraft. Are you just playing survival mode? Or are you playing creatively to build out some vision of a city or a building or even a computer?
NMS is really self-directed play. The campaign is really just a tutorial. Are you going to go out and find and max out the best ships? Build an interesting base? Find a particular world to build your base on that has an aesthetic you want? That's up to you.
I've put hundreds of hours into NMS although not for a few years. I first got into it after the Next update IIRC, which was a massive improvement at the time.
What I'd like to see with one of these updates is way more attention on base building as I think that area is kinda weak. Flattening ground is awkward. Base components don't snap to wood/stone/metal components for some reason. They could do so much more with this.
That's the same thing I wanted out of it. Give me Minecraft on pretty planets. None of the environmental mods for Minecraft come close to any random NMS planet.
If you think it's bad now, imagine how bad it was for those of us that pre-ordered it. It was a dadgum mess back then.
Most people are warming up to this game because they're delivering on the original game concept and still going the extra mile. No Man's Sky was criticized at launch because the gameplay was nothing like the trailer had suggested, and the updates since launch have really and truly fixed that complaint.
No, there isn't EVA in space or serious FPS combat or even well tuned space dogfights. But none of that was really part of the original promise, and looking at the utterly derelict state of games that try to thread all those needles (cough cough, Star Citizen), I'm glad No Man's Sky went it's own way.
All video games are empty time sinks at the end of the day. It’s a matter of what people want their escape to look and sound like.
Anyone expecting real world prestige for 100 percenting the last Mario? It’s all still literally accomplishing sitting on the couch only barely rising above passive consumption of entertainment.
Asking “what does it all mean” to everything gets exhausting. Human existence is arbitrary; it happened because it could.
This is more a reflection of the state of online gaming discourse and youtube rambling clickbait these days. People believe what the culture tells them cool people believe, and perpetuate it to others. No Man's Sky didn't have multiplayer at launch. Now it does. That's pretty much the only indisputable improvement to the game. They've certainly managed to improve the NARRATIVE about the game, though.
EDIT: I also want to call out one particularly user-hostile thing they have done: pump up the visual quality and complexity so high that the game performs very poorly on the console generation on which it was released: the PS4/Xbox One generation. This is true even on performance mode. So if you bought the game at release, you will now suffer degraded performance if you are still using your original hardware. You don't hear too much about this because when it's mentioned the person usually gets console-shamed, e.g. "get with the times, time to upgrade you cheapskate!" It's not only low framerates and ambient pop-in; it's also extremely bad pop-in of hazardous plants and structures. And you often can't land your ship on the ground until the terrain has fully generated. This can take a minute or two sometimes. Or you could try to go harvest from one of your resource collectors and have to wait something like 10 seconds for it to finally appear in front of you. And once it did, the chances of it bugging out and having no resources inside of it are way too high.
just because you found those mechanics to be not to your liking doesn't make them invalid. A whole lot of shallow gameplay can easily add up to a game that is fun, because it is full of small activities that are each fun for a little while. If that wasn't true, Mario Party would be no fun
"shallow" is also /definitely/ your opinion here. it's okay to not like things, but that doesn't make them objectively bad. it's just not to your taste.
I've played NMS on and off since launch and it's a totally different game now in MY humble opinion
Shallow is the observation of many, many people who usually just get ignored, or worse in today's vote-centered social media platforms, suppressed, for going against the popular narrative.
If it's true that not liking something doesn't make it bad, then liking something also doesn't make it good.
> complexity so high that the game performs very poorly on the console generation on which it was released: the PS4/Xbox One generation. This is true even on performance mode.
The game runs surprisingly well on a Nintendo Switch, I mean each time there is a major update I figure that's the one to do the Switch in (...and this one just may be it!). Then to my utter surprise, the Switch does not spontaneously combust and I can play without crashing (well, except for when they introduce bug that crash it, even then they get it patched pretty quick).
Watching the update video, I'm really not sure what's been added other than new graphic things, and the Switch is not a system for graphic things. At this point though, No Man's Sky seems to be a quasi-staging server for their upcoming game. The update was all about the new graphics and how they made it for the other game and added it to NMS. Some of the updates last year were pretty fun though.
My understanding is that the Switch build had custom attention paid to the quality/performance tradeoff, and I'm guessing that's because they knew they had less margin for error. Does it look good on a TV screen? Keep in mind that even if it looks good and performs well on the Switch, that doesn't excuse degrading the performance for the original customer base on the original release platform. The "Gen 8" console settings give you the illusion of choice, but both modes result in too much focus on quality and not enough on performance. Performance mode = bad performance, and Quality mode = I just want to take a cool screenshot and then will immediately reactivate Performance mode.
> Keep in mind that even if it looks good and performs well on the Switch, that doesn't excuse degrading the performance for the original customer base on the original release platform
Agreed. I think I was more wondering aloud about how they could make the Switch, of all platforms, run well and then also have the older ones degrade. Only that last part forgot to leave my inside voice.
As far as graphics, its one of the better looking Switch games imo--but it's still Switch. I did briefly open the game up on an old Xbox one after hours of updating and the game there looked much better than Switch, but since the save was from 2018 or something, my Freighter had new random walls blocking passage ways and rooms. It was mostly useless. I didn't want to start over so that was the end of that experiment.
Gotcha. I think the PS4/Xbox One performance is partially a result of them not caring about Gen 8 customers anymore. Maybe their procedural generation tech doesn't easily allow configurable quality, or they won't/can't maintain separate asset libraries between the generations. So they favor Gen 9 even when it makes Gen 8 suffer.
If that's really true in a wide scope, yeah, I guess that would have to be an improvement. But I've observed the opposite - didn't used to get too many crashes or glitches back in the launch days, but my recent experiences are full of a few crashes and many, many glitches.
Would treat your experience as unusual. I understand distrusting reported experiences in favor of your own, but the number of patches that list fixed bugs and stability issues, plus rising satisfaction scores, should guide here.
Counterpoint - listing a lot of fixed bugs and stability issues just proves you had a lot of bugs and stability issues. It does not mean you fixed most of them, or that you did not introduce even more. And there are a lot of very old problems in the game to this day. They prioritize adding new stuff like every other game developer. And really, publicly available satisfaction scores are a terrible way to measure actual quality. They're easily manipulated social fora subject to peer pressure and trends, dominated by kids with loud voices, favoring quick overly-simplified impressions, not well-designed measurement and analysis tools.
Okay. I saw in another comment you’ve at least committed to stop playing the game. Seems like a healthy move. Your descriptions of your experience with the game are unreliable.
My apologies. I'll edit out the leading question. It just seems outrageous to me to say "the game hasn't been improved except it added multiplayer" when multiple pieces of the engine have been re-written. New game play loops added, bugs squashed, updated content, and entirely new ways of generating planets, flora, and fauna have been added.
I feel it is akin to saying FPS games haven't improved since DOOM (95), or simulation games haven't improved since Deus Ex. Are both excellent examples of their genre? Yes, absolutely. Are they still some of the most fun you can have in a game? Yes. Holy crap yes. But to ignore improvements made in the last 3 decades of game development and storytelling just because another game hasn't improved on every single aspect aspect of them is a wild perspective.
Denying the improvements Hello Games has made over the last 9 years feels as if it can only come from a perspective of "I don't like it, therefore it is bad". Which to be clear, again, it is fine if you don't like a game. I don't like WoW, haven't since before Cataclysm. I don't like Diablo III in the same way I liked D2 (and as a result haven't even played D4). But those are personal preferences to me, and both games contain numerous improvements over their predecessors. Just not my bag.
They've certainly done a good number of things, and it probably wasn't easy to do, but my observation is just that almost none of those things really contribute to the heart of the game, work together in a meaningful way, or got executed without a lot of rough edges and bugs which never have been/never will be addressed.
I believe it happened this way because when they were in danger of self-destructing after the terrible launch, they knew they could no longer afford to risk continuing to try for the vision they had and sold. They had to pivot to a adding shallow crowd-pleasing fluff, and the more the better. And it was a good business decision! Now people go gaga over the fact that you can summon a multiplayer social hub from your menu and do fortnite emotes with strangers.
Let me try to flip this and compliment NMS for what I think it is. It's a good light-hearted space-themed VR chat with some gamelike elements.
-----------------------
Also, no worries about the earlier question. I wasn't offended or upset, but I think it was just a good opportunity to point out that the culture about discussing this game now has that kind of thing baked into it.
Regarding the question: I appreciate your point. I was less concerned about offense and more about playing into the rule breaking and poor discussion etiquette you brought up. Its too easy to treat everyone like dingbats online and I don't like playing into that type of conversation. So, my apology was intended less as a "sorry for offending you" and more of a "sorry for not trying for a real conversation"
Despite really disliking the game, but also still playing it enough to apparently notice "many, many glitches" in recent updates, it's pretty obvious that they either have some bone to pick with No Man's Sky or just enjoy being a bit contrarian. Or maybe they're having a bad day. In any case, their comments don't seem to be in good faith.
I never understood why people will keep playing games they don't like. It doesn't make any sense to me. If I don't like a game, I play something else.
I should not have spent the time that I did with the game. I regret a lot of it. At this point I think I'm fully done with it, although I might pick it back up on PC at some point in order to work on mods (which I think might address some of the big gaps in the game).
I wouldn't say that it was a good investment, or even too much of an investment at all. A lot of it was procrastination, escapism, self-sabotage, etc. There were times when I could overlay a sort of canon to my character's activities that was pleasurable to think about. I spent a lot of time wanting the game to be good, but some glitch or design decision would always get in the way.
But I'd say one of the best experiences I had in the game was becoming self-reliant at the start of a new save. Struggling not to die evolves into having enough resources to survive indefinitely by manual resource harvesting, which evolves into setting up crude crafting pipelines, which then evolves into advanced harvesting and manufacturing, enabling easy interstellar travel and self-sufficient freighter bases. But that can only happen once per save. And it's only really satisfying on survival or permadeath. The other modes are essentially just a no-risk sandbox.
The poster asked if you played the game, and acknowledged that you don't have to like it - that's not a fallacy, it's a clarifying question.
The game has had clearly observable and measurable improvements, in terms of features, like multi-player, but also in terms of overall content, game and storyline components, and substantial new and revised game mechanics.
It is abundantly clear from player feedback that your opinion is in the minority.
Steam reviews -
Recent Reviews:
Very Positive (1,837)
All Reviews:
Very Positive (256,838)
I think that's an oft repeated over statement of reality.
I've enjoyed a good 60+ hours in it, it's good. But not great. I didn't pay for it, not sure I'd have been as happy would I have paid for it.
It's still very shallow. As a programmer you can see all the really basic algos underlying all the generation.
There are like 10 planet types, with a couple of extra wacky ones. All the stations are virtually identical inside. There are like 8 points of identical interest. And bizarrely they're everywhere. There are 3 alien races. You land on a planet and within seconds spaceships are over flying you. You enter a new system and 10 seconds later a fleet of "random" carriers will turn up within your sightline.
You arrived at a new planet and the creatures are all exactly the same as you've seen before, just more legs, or 4 wings instead of two.
The thing the really bugs me are the sentinels. I get the in game explanation, but it's boring that every planet has them. And the few that don't are weird ones.
Everything is different and yet, apart from a very few minor things, it's all the same.
And the randomness gets grating. Want a cool ship? Have fun trying to grind that out. Want a cool gun? Ditto. You have to resort to going to particular coords supplied by the internet, not in game play.
For me, never before has space felt so small. Elite dangerous suffers from similar shallowness problems, but at least it felt epic.
You don't have to enjoy the game, that's totally fine. But my comment is pretty reality-based.
The game completely bombed on launch and was dragged through the mud (mostly deservedly) in every review. Now has very positive reviews on Steam, people still talk about it, and people still buy it a decade later. It's sold enough copies to support the staff at Hello Games for that time.
If that isn't turning a shitty launch into a success, I have no idea what is.
I've played the game on and off since launch. I think the biggest difference in the game is expectations going in.
A ton has been added to the game but I still play it for the same reason, it's a good ambient exploration game where you get to fly around space but I also still stop for the same reason, it's shallow and repetitive. That was my experience at launch and that was my experience last time I played.
Based on hours played (and I enjoyed them) it was well worth the money but I don't think it's really improved that much over time. There's definitely more to do but it's not much deeper.
I feel same way. Played on Game Pass, not sure I would have valued it if I paid for it. It is very grating that you see same set piece, be it pirates or ruins again and again. I have seen this one before. Oh and to get best output I should just save scum...
And then randomness leads to issues like finding very nice looking end game planet. To make your own base. And even there the option to place it so that certain things refresh.... So game world is not even consistent...
No Man's Sky is a bit of a litmus test for me these days.
If you still hold a grudge against these guys after everything they've done, the numerous free updates, the commitment to high quality output, etc. then I will have a hard time believing you have any perspective. The disastrous launch was 9 years ago and yet here we are still talking about substantial free updates.
It is totally fair to say the game isn't for you. But the team at Hello Games has blown past making up for their rookie mistake and well into the position of a shining example of how any game company should conduct themselves.
If you still harbor some bitter feelings about that launch, maybe it is time to let it go.
- I started playing the campaign (instead of the sandbox mode) and was off to a great start
- I noticed that you slowly gain additional inventory slots for your character, but that you can just buy a large ship with many inventory slots instead, so I did some trading and bought a huge ship
- Inventory management: I put the stuff I don't need on me in the ship's cargo space. Especially the "space traveler's passport" or whatever it was called, since you only need that during quests/campaign progressions
- I had my first run in with pirates and died
- Ah, so when you die, you lose all ship cargo, but keep your player inventory. Good to know. Now, where's my "space traveler's passport", that I need to continue the campaign? I bricked my save?
- I went to the forum where everybody laughed and called me an idiot. OF COURSE you don't put your quest items in the ship!
Note that the game only had auto-save, no manual save states, so I lost everything for the stupid reason that the game removes all quest items from your ship on death and does not tell you that beforehand. This was one of the worst experiences I had in a game/community, ever.
That's super unfortunate, especially the community part.
>Note that the game only had auto-save, no manual save states
Not that it fixes anything, but I am really curious when this was? At least as far back as Nov 2016 there has been manual saves via save points. And I'm pretty sure beacons have been in since pre-release.
This definitely speaks to a UI failure (as well as the quest item stuff). The UI has been completely overhauled since. But, I certainly do not blame you for having your opinion soured and not wanting to try again.
I'm not sure, since this was so long ago. Maybe there were manual saves, but I did not use them and instead trusted the game that I would not need them?
To me, it's either a game design failure (losing the campaign item basically puts you in sandbox mode I think?) or a UI issue (if there was a way to continue playing I could not figure it out).
I might enjoy giving the game another try and considered downloading it again a couple of times, but I couldn't do it so far (it feels like considering petting a dog that bit you). Maybe some day.
I am not bitter, but Sean Murray after launch was sitting in interviews, claiming that the game had multiplayer (and a lot of other stuff), knowing fully well that those were lies.
On top of many, many lies that happened before launch. These are not "rookie mistakes". This is a person that is clearly fine with lying to players in order to hype up the game. He should never be trusted again.
Yes, it's exemplary that they fixed the game, and added all those features, but Sean Murray remains an untrustworthy individual. I would never hire, do business with, or believe him. I will stay away from anything this guy does in the future.
I'm not going to try to gaslight you since your memories are your own. But consider your memory of 9 years ago in the light it occurred. After huge hype, the entire gaming world turned Hello Games and Sean Murray into a meme. Every video was clipped and cut to make him look like a mustache twirling villain that was lying to trick gamers into buying his shit shovel-ware game. We have this vision of a huckster game developer whose entire grift is to hype and then abandon games and Sean became the poster child for this. This was made much worse by Sony strongly pushing No Man's Sky as an indie success story adding even more fuel to the hype.
But lets consider the next 9 years and ask: does the behavior of Sean match that caricature? If he was indeed the lying manipulative hype man that reddit memes made him out to be, how would we expect him to act? Wouldn't he take the money and run? 5 years after the launch, the engoodening video from Internet Archivist was released. Penny Arcade also has that famous cartoon from a few years ago. His reputation is mostly laundered now. Why do they keep releasing free updates? Why is he not shovelings out a bunch more over-hyped crap? Do you think this is the longest 9 year con job in the history of games?
That is the lack of perspective I am talking about. Sean oversold the game and got called out for it. He was put in the public stocks and people threw rotten vegetables at him. Then he and the rest of the team spent 9 years quietly grinding away to prove they believed in the game and believed in their vision.
You remember some videos cut to make him look evil 9 years ago. I'm talking about 9 years of him showing who he and his team really are.
Bottom line is that he knowingly lied about his game before release. I'll assume no motivations but he hasn't really been put in that position again to redeem himself because he's just been releasing updates.
I'll still not trust him when NMS 2 hype starts rolling.
This is a false dichotomy, plus you're implying that anyone who disagrees must bear a grudge, which is not at all the case. Games that promise the things NMS promises are games for me. NMS just doesn't deliver.
Years of free updates have turned a barren tech demo into a fairly middling game, without solving the key problem: there are ten squillion planets, but no sense of discovery. The same three races, who have already populated every planet before you get there, with the same space station, and the same few outpost buildings. No cities. No history. Nothing to explore that you haven't seen in the first 10 minutes. It's a dead galaxy.
Then there's the lack of attention to gameplay systems. The last time I tried it, I quickly figured out that I could turn element X into 10 element Ys, into 3 element Xes. And I could do this with just about any element in the game. And thank God for that, because everything is gated behind collecting far too many of those elements.
NMS is not a good game, and the same gaming community that was hyperbolic about its failure nine years ago is now hyperbolic about its comeback, because 'content creators' need narratives to peddle, and a redemption ark makes for a great narrative. But there is no narrative here. 'Bad game remains fairly bad' isn't going to make any YouTube videos go viral.
Finally, I don't agree with the 9 year point at all. I honestly think that if the studio spent those 9 years making a new game, applying the lessons learnt from NMS, they may have actually made something worth playing. Nine years is a serious chunk of a human lifespan, far too long to spend on a sunk cost fallacy.
I think your confusing my post. You can feel however you want about the game itself, it isn't for everyone. Your suggestion that they work on something else for 9 years is also strange. Why would they listen to someone who doesn't like the games they make instead of listening to the literal thousands of players who play the game each day? [1] It makes a lot more sense for a game company to focus on the lovers and not the haters, IMO.
You don't like the game, and may not like the style of games that Hello Games chooses to make. But 9 years after launch, and before this new update, they were still pulling 5-10k players per day just on Steam, so probably more overall if PlayStation, etc. are included. That seems like evidence enough for me that a decent audience believes it is something worth playing.
My actual comment, however, is addressing people who still hate on the developers. You can dislike the game while still respecting the effort the developers have put into serving their fans.
You're back to the false dichotomy. In effect, you're saying one can either hate the genre or love NMS. But those aren't the only possible positions. One can love the genre while thinking NMS is a bad example of it, and this is where most of the criticisms of NMS actually come from.
Imagine someone watches a football match, and then they say that it was a 'bad game'. They're not saying the very game of football is bad. They're not a football 'hater'. They're saying this particular match was bad. There's an obvious difference.
It isn't required for a game to have literally 0 players or 0 fans in order for it to qualify a bad game - that's a silly standard (and another false dichotomy).
NMS is not a bad game because I'm a 'hater' who doesn't like the genre, NMS is a bad game because it is - for the reasons I allude to in my earlier post - a bad game. This is not a reflection on the worth of the devs, it's just an unfortunate, but factual, state of affairs. I think if the same devs make another game, with the lessons learnt from NMS, it will likely be a better game.
I also think ten years of effort spent improving a game from 'terrible' to 'bad' is not a good use of ten years. Ten years is a very long time. You can count how many of those you will ever see on your fingers.
My first time playing NMS was around 7 years after launch when it was added to Game Pass Ultimate. It's a fine game, but the reliance on procedural generation for planets made everything feel... stale, and same-y. It's ironic, the game has billions of unique worlds, but none of them have anything interesting going on on them because they were made by an algorithm and not a person. Starfield had the same problems (remember Starfield?). This is also how most people feel about AI-generated content.
A counter-point on procedural generation; Elite Dangerous did the same, but it worked. e.g. Watching a ringed planet eclipse a pulsar was awe inspiring. It had countless incredible combinations of procedurally generated stars & planets you could discover.
I've played the game 3 times, which is a lot for a game these days. I want to like it and I still pretty much hate them, and I kinda hate them even more because of how much everyone loves them despite not deserving it.
Part of the problem is the game still isn't good. If they actually pulled off the miracle and created a magnum opus I'd be softer but after the last run (maybe a few years ago) I decided that despite all the love the fans have and all the new "features" foundationally the game is just bad. And never will be good (and that's setting aside all the bugs of which there were many).
though even then I could have forgiven them since it was more of a game than launch but the reason I think I still hate them is the seeming lack of any real repentance over what was, lets not beat around the bush, literal fraud. They weren't really penitent at launch and I see that continued hubris in their pricing. NMS NEVER was a $60 game. NMS never will be a $60 game, if it released brand new tomorrow as is it wouldn't be worth $60. but that's their pride.
Actual AAA games from that era are priced cheaper yet NMS still says "nope I'm worth a AAA now". I think if after release they had said "shit, we're sorry. we're going to re-price the game at $19, refund the difference to everyone and label it 'early access'" then continued to work on it and then maybe 5 years ago peaked at $30 when it hit an actual 1.0 I think i would have forgiven them immediately
And it's not like what they're doing is unique, there's lots of games that get love from their devs and lots of better games in the genre for more reasonable pricing. Redigit and Terraria are a much better poster child of value, they've added so much content over the years, it's such a better game than NMS and I've bought it twice for less than even the sale price of NMS
Their continued overinflated sense of self worth for spending a decade slathering lipstick on a pig combined with a rabid fanbase that never hesitates to gush about them being some sort of saintly figure for doing it rubs me the wrong way.
I found it to be the worst grindfest ever. It's like they went looking for everything they could for you to grin on. I remember trying to fly my ship around the planet instead of walking forever. Suddenly I got a message that I was out of take off fuel. Not fuel, take off fuel. Another resource to grind out. No thanks.
My problem with the NMS debacle was that they lied egregiously when building hype about the game's features and just continued to lie and evade when it all came crashing down. I played the game a year or two ago, overall it wasn't bad, a middling sandbox crafting game, but there are way more games than I have time to play, so I'd prefer to patron those with a more honest approach.
It isn't for everyone, that is for sure. You can find a lot of things to criticize about the game, as you can will all games. Not everyone likes Factorio, Elden Ring, God of War, Stardew Valley, Rimworld etc. even if they are massive successes within their own communities.
I'm not defending the game or trying to make a case for it. I'm suggesting that if you can't look past your 9 year old memory of a botched launch and compare it to the subsequent near-decade of grind this team has put into their dream - you might be lacking perspective.
I'm very grateful to the team after all these hard work and their sincerity, can't forget the surprise when i saw all the changes they made after years, but it's just, hard to go back to play it, makes me feel bad sometimes
A grudge in general is fine enough to me, you don't have to start being fine with everything ever done just because it eventually stopped being that way, but weighing that so high as to not consider anything else about the game/developer at this point is where it's taken into the realm of "really?" for me.
I bought it at launch and I'm satisfied. They fucked it up, then they fixed their fuckup for free. Sure, we can all complain and whine that they released a bad game, and they did, but they apologized and then worked hard to fix the problem. I think humans need to have more understanding for things like this, especially or something as objectively not-important as a video game. If this were the THERAC-25 I would obviously have a much different opinion, but it's entertainment so there's no sense in holding a grudge against them.
This would be a stronger point for me if the main developer had already apologized for promising things they couldn't deliver on as main tenants for bringing players to the game, but I can see looking online that this isn't the case even as of 2025. Rather than engage the community continually dismissing intentful lies as 'drama around launch', I'd rather spend my time and energy on supporting platforms that value honesty and transparency.
But, I don't dismiss it as a fun videogame. I don't think cyberpunk 2077 is a bad game still either, but the reframing by these communities of legitimate problems as petty grudges turns me away from wanting to support them entirely. I don't value that type of conduct from a game company.
I don't hate NMS or HG. And it doesn't upset me that people are enjoying it. However, what bothers me is that people have been talking about it for 5+ years as if it had been fixed up to be at least as good a game as was originally promised. And that's just not true. This gets missed in all the conversations about this game.
Like, originally someone offered to sell you a fully self-sufficient farm on multiple acres of land. You buy it, and what you actually get is a CSA box of vegetables at your doorstep. Vegetables are cool, but that's not what you bought. Over time, the quality and variety of the vegetables went up. You got access to the farm. You saw it didn't actually have any grazing animals or compost management or energy generation, but, you know, they were building a greenhouse. After a few years they started building a composting toilet! Well, ok, just a regular outhouse, not a composting toilet, that was too complicated. You still don't own the farm. It still isn't close to self sufficient. But they're doing some neat things, they have chickens now, and you're entitled to as many vegetables as you can eat. That's all fine, but you were in the market for a built-out farm.
That's what it feels like. Many of the promised features will likely never exist. (And not unreasonably - they'd be massive undertakings.) I've gone back to the game twice to check it out after huge updates and saw:
- They added features like vehicles that I never wanted
- Most of the new features were extremely limited in scope and felt half-baked, like character customization
- The ugliest and most irritating/boring parts of the original game weren't being improved
Now, all that said, this is Worlds 2 and I hadn't even heard about Worlds 1. My information is several years out of date. Since I already own it on PS4, I'm willing to take another look! Some of this stuff sounds really cool! But if they haven't resolved any of the failures in the core gameplay mechanics, I don't know if it's ever going to be a great game.
I saw the "Engoodening" video when it came out and while I get it, there's a lot of praise due to a team that will spend 5 years, let alone 9, making big mechanical improvements to games for free... it's not like it's unprecedented. Paradox Interactive has been doing that for decades, and they've often done it better (although they've had their own huge missteps, they're largely debatable, and the delta between promise::delivery has never been near the scale of NMS) (and admittedly the free updates are usually only about half of the content,the rest being paid DLC). And further, every time I get suckered into checking again, NMS boots up and just feels like a cheap, poorly thought out toy again.
So yeah maybe I'm someone who "holds a grudge for 9 years" in your eyes, but I feel like I'm actually just the only reasonable person in the room. I think being wary of NMS updates is far more rational and honest than telling people it's better than it was ever promised to be, when it's just clearly not. People who enjoy it now should say they enjoy what it is, not that it has surpassed expectations, because expectations were originally set impossibly high.
---
An additional point is that the behavior of the (CEO? Lead Dev?) around launch was downright shit, and that was never addressed. Direct lies, even after launch. Silence for months. No mention ever of the missing features.
> However, what bothers me is that people have been talking about it for 5+ years as if it had been fixed up to be at least as good a game as was originally promised. And that's just not true.
> as if it had been fixed up to be at least as good a game as was originally promised
I pre-ordered NMS because I was excited by the concept[0], I wasn't really aware of the "broken promises" until everyone started to make a fuss, and I never felt the game I received didn't provide the experience that I'd expected. Needless to say I played it a lot in those first weeks and enjoyed it a lot.
I've dipped back in since and while the updates are awesome, I've never played it as much as those first weeks. I am hopiong to find the time to give it a proper play through in VR, at some point, though.
[0] and perhaps heavly influenced by 65daysofstatic doing the soundtrack
NMS is a technical marvel, and at first, the game is quite fun.
But for me, it just falls flat after a while. The planets just feel functionally the same, just with a different "skin" (which is cool, just doesn't add to the fun).
I've gone back to it 3 or 4 times, and may/may not explore it again after this update. But it's always the same: it feels cool/new for a few hours, then I realize it's still very repetitive.
And I hold no ill will about the launch -- I don't really care, and I think the continued efforts and free updates are very admirable.
But it comes down to the gameplay, and at the end of the day, there's not enough depth to keep me playing (e.g. compared to something like Factorio, where I can play this for months and it never gets old).
I would love to see some more detail added and variety of structures and whatnot. The planets are cool but I just end up feeling so bored after awhile with the same random structures every so often.
I think I would rather play on maybe 100 planets that are partially random but have a lot of manual work put into the detail of the surface and structures.
> With Worlds Part II, we added billions of new star systems and trillions of new planets to the universe
I played the game at launch for a few days and coincidentally just last week again. So assume basic knowledge of the gameplay. Can someone explain how trillions of planets in the game (I mean the number specifically) changes the experience in game?
I get improving the level of variety on a planet and between planets can improve the gameplay. But trillions of anything makes me think most of the content will never be touched by any human. Am I missing something?
What they really mean is there is more variety when you land on different planets, they added more variables to the procedural generation. And I gotta say it did improve over time, they have become more varied and interesting, but still with that "procedural" feel.
Unequal distribution, basically. While most planets will never be observed by a human, it turns out players congregate in certain parts of the galaxy, particularly near the galactic center. (The game starts you at a random location near the edge and there's literally a 'reach the galactic center' quest, so most players end up near the center eventually.)
So yes, there are trillions of stars, but there's only so many of them within $RADIUS of the center. In practice every planet 'near' (for some definition of 'near') the center has already been discovered and the 'good' planets are likely to already have bases. There are also spots that get their locations published in the forums or advertised in-game (good drops, cool bases, things like that) that also end up 'locally' crowded.
I found there were basically two experiences in NMS - "the outer rim" which was, frankly, lonely - you almost never encounter any signs that other players even exist and "the core" where it feels like everything has already been done - sure it's new to you, but you're never the first. Finding a middle zone where you can see evidence of other players, but there's still stuff to discover was rare in my experience.
The number of stars and planets has been overplayed from the start. Sure, there's a quintillion planets, but after you've seen a hundred, you pretty much got the gist of the scope of what's possible. Everything starts to look samey.
Much more significantly, it seems the new planets use new biomes and terrain generators. If they gave all undiscovered planets a chance to use these, even if they cut the number of planets by 99%, it would still be a big improvement. The number is just so big, it's irrelevant.
It is wild how much content the team has continued to add years and years after the launch and without even making any of it paid DLC. The commitment is super impressive, and I applaud them for it, but I am curious how the economics of it work. Is there a wave of people that buy the game when these huge updates are released? How is it possible to keep building this long for a game that is a one time purchase?
Man, its too much effort to explore this actual Earth and see as much as possible. I can't even fathom the energy and commitment needed to explore a virtual Earth like planet however awesome it sounds. How do you guys stay committed to something like this?
Seeing as much of a virtual planet as possible costs $60 and it uses the same energy that isn't being used because the other thing costs thousands of dollars.
I tend to play games with high commitment like these in a binge for a few weeks or a month, playing it for maybe hours a day (a night actually because of the kiddos) until I've basically done everything fun the game has to offer, then I stop. Sometimes I play again a few years later in a similar way, then stop again. Recent games I've played like this include Rust, Project Zomboid, and Timberborn.
Depending on how they do it, and how many people they need working on it, it might only need to keep a relatively small trickle of new sales going.
It also now marks it as a "great value" so people are more likely to pick it up even if they don't end up playing.
Depending on pricing, you can even just sell to people upgrading or changing consoles (this is one area that really helps Stardew Valley, albeit with a low cost).
After all, even if you've sold millions of copies, there's way more people who have NOT bought it.
> After the game was added to the Xbox Game Pass service in June 2020, Hello Games reported a month later that No Man's Sky had seen more than one million new players.
This game has the biggest comeback story of any game in gaming history.
I'm really looking forward to their next title and how much of "new" tech they will be showing in it. As far as I understand it will be the same engine as No Man's Sky. But there might be even more content and also this time it seems to be only one big planet?
The game has a 60% discount on Steam right now [1], but not on GoG [2]. Is the Steam version DRM-benign? e.g. Is it similar to Kerbal Space Program where you could just copy the folder out to another location (or a new PC) and play it without Steam having to be installed?
Think the entire premise is flawed though. The average user is going to see maybe 20 or 50 worlds. So 30 hand crafted worlds would be better than a billion bland procedural ones.
With a VR headset: with Alyx, it's one of the best game I enjoyed playing :)
You ARE in space. That feeling when you hop in your spaceship, take off, point to the sky and come up in space...
Sure, after a hundred hours of playing, I came to the conclusion I had enough, I had seen everything that was to see in the game - even without completing it, never reached the center of the galaxy - but it sure was worth its price.
I started playing a week ago having letting it "cellar" for a few years; I was quite enjoying it but today, after downloading 20GB of free update, I reliably crash on boot :(
Edit: deleted C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\No Man's Sky\Binaries\SETTINGS and I can boot again.
Edit 2: crashed again after playing for a bit; back in the cellar it goes -- needs a bit more time to mature I think.
While we're talking space games, did Star Citizen ever get properly released? I crowdfunded it 10 years ago and am still waiting for delivery or access to play. Emailed them a few times in the interim and never got any response.
Thanks for the answer. Was there an email that went out or something? If I recall I didn't back on Kickstarter, but directly with the company. (Also is it ever going to leave Early Access? Are they asking for more money?)
No Mans Sky is a pretty fun game nowadays. If you're less interested in the Eve Online ideals of corporate bureaucracy in space and you just want to explore some neat looking empty planets, it's the premier game of it's kind. I pre-ordered it after watching the infamous IGN trailer[0] and was disappointed like everyone else, but today I'm very happy with where the game is and can easily recommend it at the $30 price point where it goes on sale.
Game is availible natively for Windows and MacOS, supports Linux and supports multiplayer across consoles and PC clients.
No Man's Sky is the poster child for turning a shitty launch into a success. You can really feel the passion of the staff at Hello Games in the current version of the game. It reminds me of the quote, which I'm about to butcher, that is along the lines of "People don't remember the problem, they remember how you dealt with the problem".
If you haven't seen it, "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky" is a good review of the story. It's 5 years old now, and the engoodening hasn't stopped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ
People keep saying that. I ended up biting the bullet after the latest "game changing" update.
It's barely a game at all. It's still a walking simulator. The environment is great, and there is some variety. But there is no objective or opposition, not even a story (a little robot tells you to do stuff). It's a sandbox, an engine one could build a game in (and they might someday?)
They added some construction stuff, so the game will say "go and build a house" and you do that. Or "go build a blueprint machine" and now you have more blueprints. But what is any of it for? You can just sit in your cockpit.
It all seems so pointless. Like they have seen other survival games and copied some mechanics over without understanding what makes a survival game. It is a really puzzling experience, I can't understand what they were thinking.
>It's still a walking simulator.
I don't know how many different ways to say it. We all enjoy different types of games! You obviously aren't a fan of sandbox games, lots of people aren't either. Or maybe it's just this sandbox game. That's fine too.
But it is pretty objectively a great example of taking an absolutely abysmal launch and turning it into something that a decent amount of people (doesn't mean everyone!) still enjoy and talk favorably about. It still sells copies. It still keeps the lights on at Hello Games.
I cannot think of a single other game that had such an awful launch that has, 10 years later, enjoyed mostly positive reviews. Cyberpunk might be the closest.
I enjoy sandboxes. I like Minecraft, Terraria, etc. "Make a gold axe so you can dig further" is something to work forward. Make an anvil so you can craft new equipment to explore, sure.
Here it's "make a qreblz machine because the voice tells you to". And then you can craft a wewrkz. Why.
There are a few storylines that you can try to immerse yourself in, but they're very heady, ambiguous stories that seem intended to make you wonder if the universe is a simulation running on an unstable computer, without ever committing to any concrete explanation for anything.
The endgame is mining lots of metals and making warp fuel and diving into black holes repeatedly to get to the center of the galaxy, after which you can traverse to the next galaxy, which has different distributions of types of stars and planets, and differently colored galactic nebula. There are 256 galaxies in total.
Totally understandable.
But I still think you've missed (or are just ignoring) the point of my original comment. I didn't claim it's an objectively good game that everyone enjoys.
It's an objectively good demonstration of taking a shit launch and turning it around into a success story.
Yes maybe I picked the wrong top comment to reply to. Apologies. I agree with what you said, it is a long way from where it started.
What's the difference between "make an anvil so you can craft new equipment" and "make a qreblz machine so you can craft a wewrkz"?
In Minecraft/Terraria/Subnautica, I can actually do something with the new equipment. Go to new places, fight new enemies, conquer new bosses.
In No Man' Sky, it's already all there. In fact 10 minutes into the game I was crafting a wooden shed right next to a busy alien base with constant spaceship traffic. Can I interact with them instead? Can there be any storyline involving the sci-fi base right next to me? No, like most of the game it is just for show. You are supposed to look at the pretty scenery and ignore it while do the most boring crafting game ever. Those two aspects are not connected at all.
nobody actually crafts golden axes and anvils are not used to created new equipment
I think the craziest turnaround story was Final Fantasy XIV, which was so bad at release that the following shitstorms meant that everyone expected it would go the way most MMOs go (soon forgotten). But not with Square-Enix (who had a money maker with their previous MMO Final Fantasy 11) who commited to revamping the whole game which took basically 3 years but in the end it became a really good game with a lot of happy players. (I have not played it myself so would like to listen to what players themselves say!)
All of the other replies to you seem to give examples of other sandbox games that are successful / fun and suggest that maybe you just don't like the genre, but as an avid fan of sandbox games, and many of the other titles given by other posters, I still agree with you.
No Man's Sky feels devoid of any personality or interesting content in a particularly unique way. No amount of updates will ever fix for me what feels like a fundamental gameplay loop issue.
All of the layers of systems they've added with each new update still just feel __bad__. I'm glad so many have found a way to enjoy the game, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when none of them seem to address the issue of "collect arbitrary resources to build gear to collect other arbitrary resources ad nauseum" in a way that I just find fundamentally unsatisfying.
I still understand that reductive description can apply to many of the other games I actually enjoy (i.e. Minecraft, etc.) but that's what's so strange to me about NMS—by all means, I __should__ like the game. But I still think it's a miserable experience devoid of any real meaning. Even if the point is to find your own meaning in the systems it provides, I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just feels so much worse than any of the others.
Maybe someone else can better articulate why it feels so bad, but to me, despite all of the work they've put on the game, it still feels so devoid of meaning.
I think it is both an egregious example of the "farm this to craft this to farm this..." gameplay loop and that other aspects of the gameplay are too shallow to hold it up once you get bored of the crafting and building loop. And I say this as a fan of the game lol
I wouldn't mind it if building didn't seem pointless. You travel with your ship but build on planets that you are meant to quickly abandon.
The exploration and building aspects are in opposition to each other so you can't really hop in between them when you get bored without starting over next time.
This was my impression, too. I've been reading years of hype, so I bought the game a few months ago, and I was unimpressed. But the fact that it's kind of an objective-less sandbox wasn't what got me.
I've played plenty of open world games and enjoyed them. In fact, even in games like Morrowind or Starfield or Grand Theft Auto or the like, which have big worlds and specific objectives, I've always found myself ignoring the quests and preferring to explore on my own terms.
I remember hopping around in Morrowind as a kid, trying to become as powerful as possible, and seeking out baddies to best. Then in Grand Theft Auto I'd go on epic crime sprees to see how long I could elude the authorities. And in Starfield I built an incredible network of trading posts that spanned the galaxy to see how much I could enrich myself.
What made these games fun is that, despite not following any missions or objectives, I was able to do impressive and interesting things and have fun. Perhaps that's possible in No Man's Sky, but in my first couple hours of playing, it didn't seem like it. It seemed liked I'd be going around doing boring and uninteresting things, and that it wouldn't be fun.
So it's not that it was a sandbox that bothered me, but that it was a sandbox devoid of fun.
I've never played it, so I really can't speak to the though, but my obvious comparison is Minecraft.
I really think the deep lore of Minecraft does a lot of work. When you find a new and interesting random place to explore, it usually ties in with your view of the place you are in, and eventually you find your way to an ending of sorts.
Another similar game from my youth that was the same was Wing Commander: Privateer. It was a sandbox, where a game suddenly appears after you've been exploring for months, but it's not much more than some cut scenes within the sandbox.
I have no qualms with a sandbox game, but I'd prefer it were generally tied into a narrative, either in a lore narrative or with a direct story.
I found it to be the grind half of a game, the chores you do to make the fun part more fun. But there is no fun part. The creative part is all prefabricated, and the exploration is very low-dimensional variation on templates that quickly blend together.
> But there is no objective or opposition, not even a story (a little robot tells you to do stuff). It's a sandbox, an engine one could build a game in (and they might someday?)
I've found a very different experience. There seem to be several main story threads to follow, as well as the addition of a few interesting sidequests (I'm in the middle of the one about hacking and reverse engineering one of the sentinels). And that's not even counting the expeditions they come up with from time to time. I particularly enjoyed working through the one that had the Normandy from Mass Effect as the end prize.
I got it about a month ago. I think it is janky. Everything about the controls, movement, camera is ... well it doesn't seem solid/decent.
Maybe there's some sort of control-remapping or config file tweaks that can make it more tolerable.
The genre is called "sandbox" or "simulation". See Minecraft, Garry's Mod, The Sims, etc. Not all genres are for everyone.
It's like describing a bucket of random Lego pieces "not a toy".
It's a game. It just might not be the game for you. Some people buy a Lego set, follow the instructions and make whatever the set is and that's it. That's fine. Other people will build out ideas with whatever pieces they have. Yet other people will buy specific pieces to build out some Lego vision they have, some of which are truly incredible.
It's also like Minecraft. Are you just playing survival mode? Or are you playing creatively to build out some vision of a city or a building or even a computer?
NMS is really self-directed play. The campaign is really just a tutorial. Are you going to go out and find and max out the best ships? Build an interesting base? Find a particular world to build your base on that has an aesthetic you want? That's up to you.
I've put hundreds of hours into NMS although not for a few years. I first got into it after the Next update IIRC, which was a massive improvement at the time.
What I'd like to see with one of these updates is way more attention on base building as I think that area is kinda weak. Flattening ground is awkward. Base components don't snap to wood/stone/metal components for some reason. They could do so much more with this.
That's the same thing I wanted out of it. Give me Minecraft on pretty planets. None of the environmental mods for Minecraft come close to any random NMS planet.
If you think it's bad now, imagine how bad it was for those of us that pre-ordered it. It was a dadgum mess back then.
Most people are warming up to this game because they're delivering on the original game concept and still going the extra mile. No Man's Sky was criticized at launch because the gameplay was nothing like the trailer had suggested, and the updates since launch have really and truly fixed that complaint.
No, there isn't EVA in space or serious FPS combat or even well tuned space dogfights. But none of that was really part of the original promise, and looking at the utterly derelict state of games that try to thread all those needles (cough cough, Star Citizen), I'm glad No Man's Sky went it's own way.
You can walk out on to the outside of freighters if you install the right module. I forget which one, but I got a nice picture from the outside.
https://bsky.app/profile/kyefox.com/post/3lgvtgt7zas2q
Comments like this make no sense to me either.
All video games are empty time sinks at the end of the day. It’s a matter of what people want their escape to look and sound like.
Anyone expecting real world prestige for 100 percenting the last Mario? It’s all still literally accomplishing sitting on the couch only barely rising above passive consumption of entertainment.
Asking “what does it all mean” to everything gets exhausting. Human existence is arbitrary; it happened because it could.
This is more a reflection of the state of online gaming discourse and youtube rambling clickbait these days. People believe what the culture tells them cool people believe, and perpetuate it to others. No Man's Sky didn't have multiplayer at launch. Now it does. That's pretty much the only indisputable improvement to the game. They've certainly managed to improve the NARRATIVE about the game, though.
EDIT: I also want to call out one particularly user-hostile thing they have done: pump up the visual quality and complexity so high that the game performs very poorly on the console generation on which it was released: the PS4/Xbox One generation. This is true even on performance mode. So if you bought the game at release, you will now suffer degraded performance if you are still using your original hardware. You don't hear too much about this because when it's mentioned the person usually gets console-shamed, e.g. "get with the times, time to upgrade you cheapskate!" It's not only low framerates and ambient pop-in; it's also extremely bad pop-in of hazardous plants and structures. And you often can't land your ship on the ground until the terrain has fully generated. This can take a minute or two sometimes. Or you could try to go harvest from one of your resource collectors and have to wait something like 10 seconds for it to finally appear in front of you. And once it did, the chances of it bugging out and having no resources inside of it are way too high.
>That's pretty much the only indisputable improvement to the game.
I'm not sure how you can possibly say that with a straight face.
Almost everything else is just a half-baked shallow mechanic tacked on to the existing ones. Quantity and popularity != quality.
just because you found those mechanics to be not to your liking doesn't make them invalid. A whole lot of shallow gameplay can easily add up to a game that is fun, because it is full of small activities that are each fun for a little while. If that wasn't true, Mario Party would be no fun
"shallow" is also /definitely/ your opinion here. it's okay to not like things, but that doesn't make them objectively bad. it's just not to your taste.
I've played NMS on and off since launch and it's a totally different game now in MY humble opinion
Shallow is the observation of many, many people who usually just get ignored, or worse in today's vote-centered social media platforms, suppressed, for going against the popular narrative.
If it's true that not liking something doesn't make it bad, then liking something also doesn't make it good.
>If it's true that not liking something doesn't make it bad, then liking something also doesn't make it good.
They didn't say it was good or that they liked it, they said it's a totally different game now from launch.
> complexity so high that the game performs very poorly on the console generation on which it was released: the PS4/Xbox One generation. This is true even on performance mode.
The game runs surprisingly well on a Nintendo Switch, I mean each time there is a major update I figure that's the one to do the Switch in (...and this one just may be it!). Then to my utter surprise, the Switch does not spontaneously combust and I can play without crashing (well, except for when they introduce bug that crash it, even then they get it patched pretty quick).
Watching the update video, I'm really not sure what's been added other than new graphic things, and the Switch is not a system for graphic things. At this point though, No Man's Sky seems to be a quasi-staging server for their upcoming game. The update was all about the new graphics and how they made it for the other game and added it to NMS. Some of the updates last year were pretty fun though.
My understanding is that the Switch build had custom attention paid to the quality/performance tradeoff, and I'm guessing that's because they knew they had less margin for error. Does it look good on a TV screen? Keep in mind that even if it looks good and performs well on the Switch, that doesn't excuse degrading the performance for the original customer base on the original release platform. The "Gen 8" console settings give you the illusion of choice, but both modes result in too much focus on quality and not enough on performance. Performance mode = bad performance, and Quality mode = I just want to take a cool screenshot and then will immediately reactivate Performance mode.
> Keep in mind that even if it looks good and performs well on the Switch, that doesn't excuse degrading the performance for the original customer base on the original release platform
Agreed. I think I was more wondering aloud about how they could make the Switch, of all platforms, run well and then also have the older ones degrade. Only that last part forgot to leave my inside voice.
As far as graphics, its one of the better looking Switch games imo--but it's still Switch. I did briefly open the game up on an old Xbox one after hours of updating and the game there looked much better than Switch, but since the save was from 2018 or something, my Freighter had new random walls blocking passage ways and rooms. It was mostly useless. I didn't want to start over so that was the end of that experiment.
Gotcha. I think the PS4/Xbox One performance is partially a result of them not caring about Gen 8 customers anymore. Maybe their procedural generation tech doesn't easily allow configurable quality, or they won't/can't maintain separate asset libraries between the generations. So they favor Gen 9 even when it makes Gen 8 suffer.
> That's pretty much the only indisputable improvement to the game.
On launch it would crash every ten minutes. Last time I played you could go weeks without a glitch.
Some people think that they warrant forgiveness.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/07/19/succor
"On launch it would crash every ten minutes."
Not me, I got a good 20 hours out of it (not at once). Then I went checking for reviews... Ooof
I tend to start away from preview videos/etc, it does me well.
If that's really true in a wide scope, yeah, I guess that would have to be an improvement. But I've observed the opposite - didn't used to get too many crashes or glitches back in the launch days, but my recent experiences are full of a few crashes and many, many glitches.
Would treat your experience as unusual. I understand distrusting reported experiences in favor of your own, but the number of patches that list fixed bugs and stability issues, plus rising satisfaction scores, should guide here.
Counterpoint - listing a lot of fixed bugs and stability issues just proves you had a lot of bugs and stability issues. It does not mean you fixed most of them, or that you did not introduce even more. And there are a lot of very old problems in the game to this day. They prioritize adding new stuff like every other game developer. And really, publicly available satisfaction scores are a terrible way to measure actual quality. They're easily manipulated social fora subject to peer pressure and trends, dominated by kids with loud voices, favoring quick overly-simplified impressions, not well-designed measurement and analysis tools.
Okay. I saw in another comment you’ve at least committed to stop playing the game. Seems like a healthy move. Your descriptions of your experience with the game are unreliable.
-- Removed leading/condescending question. My apologies to the poster. --
If the game isn't for you that's fine. Not every game is for every person. But the game has absolutely been improved, in numerous ways, since launch.
Yes, I have played a lot of it. And have since 2016.
My apologies. I'll edit out the leading question. It just seems outrageous to me to say "the game hasn't been improved except it added multiplayer" when multiple pieces of the engine have been re-written. New game play loops added, bugs squashed, updated content, and entirely new ways of generating planets, flora, and fauna have been added.
I feel it is akin to saying FPS games haven't improved since DOOM (95), or simulation games haven't improved since Deus Ex. Are both excellent examples of their genre? Yes, absolutely. Are they still some of the most fun you can have in a game? Yes. Holy crap yes. But to ignore improvements made in the last 3 decades of game development and storytelling just because another game hasn't improved on every single aspect aspect of them is a wild perspective.
Denying the improvements Hello Games has made over the last 9 years feels as if it can only come from a perspective of "I don't like it, therefore it is bad". Which to be clear, again, it is fine if you don't like a game. I don't like WoW, haven't since before Cataclysm. I don't like Diablo III in the same way I liked D2 (and as a result haven't even played D4). But those are personal preferences to me, and both games contain numerous improvements over their predecessors. Just not my bag.
They've certainly done a good number of things, and it probably wasn't easy to do, but my observation is just that almost none of those things really contribute to the heart of the game, work together in a meaningful way, or got executed without a lot of rough edges and bugs which never have been/never will be addressed.
I believe it happened this way because when they were in danger of self-destructing after the terrible launch, they knew they could no longer afford to risk continuing to try for the vision they had and sold. They had to pivot to a adding shallow crowd-pleasing fluff, and the more the better. And it was a good business decision! Now people go gaga over the fact that you can summon a multiplayer social hub from your menu and do fortnite emotes with strangers.
Let me try to flip this and compliment NMS for what I think it is. It's a good light-hearted space-themed VR chat with some gamelike elements.
-----------------------
Also, no worries about the earlier question. I wasn't offended or upset, but I think it was just a good opportunity to point out that the culture about discussing this game now has that kind of thing baked into it.
Regarding the question: I appreciate your point. I was less concerned about offense and more about playing into the rule breaking and poor discussion etiquette you brought up. Its too easy to treat everyone like dingbats online and I don't like playing into that type of conversation. So, my apology was intended less as a "sorry for offending you" and more of a "sorry for not trying for a real conversation"
Despite really disliking the game, but also still playing it enough to apparently notice "many, many glitches" in recent updates, it's pretty obvious that they either have some bone to pick with No Man's Sky or just enjoy being a bit contrarian. Or maybe they're having a bad day. In any case, their comments don't seem to be in good faith.
I never understood why people will keep playing games they don't like. It doesn't make any sense to me. If I don't like a game, I play something else.
I should not have spent the time that I did with the game. I regret a lot of it. At this point I think I'm fully done with it, although I might pick it back up on PC at some point in order to work on mods (which I think might address some of the big gaps in the game).
Besides the multiplayer update, what have you found fun about the game to invest all those hours?
Personally think the gameplay loop is shallow, modding helped me find more depth.
I wouldn't say that it was a good investment, or even too much of an investment at all. A lot of it was procrastination, escapism, self-sabotage, etc. There were times when I could overlay a sort of canon to my character's activities that was pleasurable to think about. I spent a lot of time wanting the game to be good, but some glitch or design decision would always get in the way.
But I'd say one of the best experiences I had in the game was becoming self-reliant at the start of a new save. Struggling not to die evolves into having enough resources to survive indefinitely by manual resource harvesting, which evolves into setting up crude crafting pipelines, which then evolves into advanced harvesting and manufacturing, enabling easy interstellar travel and self-sufficient freighter bases. But that can only happen once per save. And it's only really satisfying on survival or permadeath. The other modes are essentially just a no-risk sandbox.
The poster asked if you played the game, and acknowledged that you don't have to like it - that's not a fallacy, it's a clarifying question.
The game has had clearly observable and measurable improvements, in terms of features, like multi-player, but also in terms of overall content, game and storyline components, and substantial new and revised game mechanics.
It is abundantly clear from player feedback that your opinion is in the minority.
Steam reviews - Recent Reviews: Very Positive (1,837) All Reviews: Very Positive (256,838)
The implication is clear even if formulated as a question. Let's not pretend here.
Asking people if they've played the game (or "read the article") is also directly against the HN guidelines.
It's fine to be in the minority; doesn't make you wrong. Steam reviews are far from a good indicator of actual quality.
The game certainly has had changes and additions. Whether those constitute improvements is a matter of opinion.
I think that's an oft repeated over statement of reality.
I've enjoyed a good 60+ hours in it, it's good. But not great. I didn't pay for it, not sure I'd have been as happy would I have paid for it.
It's still very shallow. As a programmer you can see all the really basic algos underlying all the generation.
There are like 10 planet types, with a couple of extra wacky ones. All the stations are virtually identical inside. There are like 8 points of identical interest. And bizarrely they're everywhere. There are 3 alien races. You land on a planet and within seconds spaceships are over flying you. You enter a new system and 10 seconds later a fleet of "random" carriers will turn up within your sightline.
You arrived at a new planet and the creatures are all exactly the same as you've seen before, just more legs, or 4 wings instead of two.
The thing the really bugs me are the sentinels. I get the in game explanation, but it's boring that every planet has them. And the few that don't are weird ones.
Everything is different and yet, apart from a very few minor things, it's all the same.
And the randomness gets grating. Want a cool ship? Have fun trying to grind that out. Want a cool gun? Ditto. You have to resort to going to particular coords supplied by the internet, not in game play.
For me, never before has space felt so small. Elite dangerous suffers from similar shallowness problems, but at least it felt epic.
>over statement of reality.
You don't have to enjoy the game, that's totally fine. But my comment is pretty reality-based.
The game completely bombed on launch and was dragged through the mud (mostly deservedly) in every review. Now has very positive reviews on Steam, people still talk about it, and people still buy it a decade later. It's sold enough copies to support the staff at Hello Games for that time.
If that isn't turning a shitty launch into a success, I have no idea what is.
I've played the game on and off since launch. I think the biggest difference in the game is expectations going in.
A ton has been added to the game but I still play it for the same reason, it's a good ambient exploration game where you get to fly around space but I also still stop for the same reason, it's shallow and repetitive. That was my experience at launch and that was my experience last time I played.
Based on hours played (and I enjoyed them) it was well worth the money but I don't think it's really improved that much over time. There's definitely more to do but it's not much deeper.
I feel same way. Played on Game Pass, not sure I would have valued it if I paid for it. It is very grating that you see same set piece, be it pirates or ruins again and again. I have seen this one before. Oh and to get best output I should just save scum...
And then randomness leads to issues like finding very nice looking end game planet. To make your own base. And even there the option to place it so that certain things refresh.... So game world is not even consistent...
The "sentinels" or whatever is what brought me out of it immediately. There are a billion planets to explore, but someone always got there before you.
No Man's Sky is a bit of a litmus test for me these days.
If you still hold a grudge against these guys after everything they've done, the numerous free updates, the commitment to high quality output, etc. then I will have a hard time believing you have any perspective. The disastrous launch was 9 years ago and yet here we are still talking about substantial free updates.
It is totally fair to say the game isn't for you. But the team at Hello Games has blown past making up for their rookie mistake and well into the position of a shining example of how any game company should conduct themselves.
If you still harbor some bitter feelings about that launch, maybe it is time to let it go.
Okay, I'll bite.
My experience with No Man's Sky was this:
- I started playing the campaign (instead of the sandbox mode) and was off to a great start
- I noticed that you slowly gain additional inventory slots for your character, but that you can just buy a large ship with many inventory slots instead, so I did some trading and bought a huge ship
- Inventory management: I put the stuff I don't need on me in the ship's cargo space. Especially the "space traveler's passport" or whatever it was called, since you only need that during quests/campaign progressions
- I had my first run in with pirates and died
- Ah, so when you die, you lose all ship cargo, but keep your player inventory. Good to know. Now, where's my "space traveler's passport", that I need to continue the campaign? I bricked my save?
- I went to the forum where everybody laughed and called me an idiot. OF COURSE you don't put your quest items in the ship!
Note that the game only had auto-save, no manual save states, so I lost everything for the stupid reason that the game removes all quest items from your ship on death and does not tell you that beforehand. This was one of the worst experiences I had in a game/community, ever.
That's super unfortunate, especially the community part.
>Note that the game only had auto-save, no manual save states
Not that it fixes anything, but I am really curious when this was? At least as far back as Nov 2016 there has been manual saves via save points. And I'm pretty sure beacons have been in since pre-release.
This definitely speaks to a UI failure (as well as the quest item stuff). The UI has been completely overhauled since. But, I certainly do not blame you for having your opinion soured and not wanting to try again.
I'm not sure, since this was so long ago. Maybe there were manual saves, but I did not use them and instead trusted the game that I would not need them?
To me, it's either a game design failure (losing the campaign item basically puts you in sandbox mode I think?) or a UI issue (if there was a way to continue playing I could not figure it out).
I might enjoy giving the game another try and considered downloading it again a couple of times, but I couldn't do it so far (it feels like considering petting a dog that bit you). Maybe some day.
I disagree.
I am not bitter, but Sean Murray after launch was sitting in interviews, claiming that the game had multiplayer (and a lot of other stuff), knowing fully well that those were lies.
On top of many, many lies that happened before launch. These are not "rookie mistakes". This is a person that is clearly fine with lying to players in order to hype up the game. He should never be trusted again.
Yes, it's exemplary that they fixed the game, and added all those features, but Sean Murray remains an untrustworthy individual. I would never hire, do business with, or believe him. I will stay away from anything this guy does in the future.
I'm not going to try to gaslight you since your memories are your own. But consider your memory of 9 years ago in the light it occurred. After huge hype, the entire gaming world turned Hello Games and Sean Murray into a meme. Every video was clipped and cut to make him look like a mustache twirling villain that was lying to trick gamers into buying his shit shovel-ware game. We have this vision of a huckster game developer whose entire grift is to hype and then abandon games and Sean became the poster child for this. This was made much worse by Sony strongly pushing No Man's Sky as an indie success story adding even more fuel to the hype.
But lets consider the next 9 years and ask: does the behavior of Sean match that caricature? If he was indeed the lying manipulative hype man that reddit memes made him out to be, how would we expect him to act? Wouldn't he take the money and run? 5 years after the launch, the engoodening video from Internet Archivist was released. Penny Arcade also has that famous cartoon from a few years ago. His reputation is mostly laundered now. Why do they keep releasing free updates? Why is he not shovelings out a bunch more over-hyped crap? Do you think this is the longest 9 year con job in the history of games?
That is the lack of perspective I am talking about. Sean oversold the game and got called out for it. He was put in the public stocks and people threw rotten vegetables at him. Then he and the rest of the team spent 9 years quietly grinding away to prove they believed in the game and believed in their vision.
You remember some videos cut to make him look evil 9 years ago. I'm talking about 9 years of him showing who he and his team really are.
Bottom line is that he knowingly lied about his game before release. I'll assume no motivations but he hasn't really been put in that position again to redeem himself because he's just been releasing updates.
I'll still not trust him when NMS 2 hype starts rolling.
This is a false dichotomy, plus you're implying that anyone who disagrees must bear a grudge, which is not at all the case. Games that promise the things NMS promises are games for me. NMS just doesn't deliver.
Years of free updates have turned a barren tech demo into a fairly middling game, without solving the key problem: there are ten squillion planets, but no sense of discovery. The same three races, who have already populated every planet before you get there, with the same space station, and the same few outpost buildings. No cities. No history. Nothing to explore that you haven't seen in the first 10 minutes. It's a dead galaxy.
Then there's the lack of attention to gameplay systems. The last time I tried it, I quickly figured out that I could turn element X into 10 element Ys, into 3 element Xes. And I could do this with just about any element in the game. And thank God for that, because everything is gated behind collecting far too many of those elements.
NMS is not a good game, and the same gaming community that was hyperbolic about its failure nine years ago is now hyperbolic about its comeback, because 'content creators' need narratives to peddle, and a redemption ark makes for a great narrative. But there is no narrative here. 'Bad game remains fairly bad' isn't going to make any YouTube videos go viral.
Finally, I don't agree with the 9 year point at all. I honestly think that if the studio spent those 9 years making a new game, applying the lessons learnt from NMS, they may have actually made something worth playing. Nine years is a serious chunk of a human lifespan, far too long to spend on a sunk cost fallacy.
I think your confusing my post. You can feel however you want about the game itself, it isn't for everyone. Your suggestion that they work on something else for 9 years is also strange. Why would they listen to someone who doesn't like the games they make instead of listening to the literal thousands of players who play the game each day? [1] It makes a lot more sense for a game company to focus on the lovers and not the haters, IMO.
You don't like the game, and may not like the style of games that Hello Games chooses to make. But 9 years after launch, and before this new update, they were still pulling 5-10k players per day just on Steam, so probably more overall if PlayStation, etc. are included. That seems like evidence enough for me that a decent audience believes it is something worth playing.
My actual comment, however, is addressing people who still hate on the developers. You can dislike the game while still respecting the effort the developers have put into serving their fans.
1. https://steamcharts.com/app/275850
You're back to the false dichotomy. In effect, you're saying one can either hate the genre or love NMS. But those aren't the only possible positions. One can love the genre while thinking NMS is a bad example of it, and this is where most of the criticisms of NMS actually come from.
Imagine someone watches a football match, and then they say that it was a 'bad game'. They're not saying the very game of football is bad. They're not a football 'hater'. They're saying this particular match was bad. There's an obvious difference.
It isn't required for a game to have literally 0 players or 0 fans in order for it to qualify a bad game - that's a silly standard (and another false dichotomy).
NMS is not a bad game because I'm a 'hater' who doesn't like the genre, NMS is a bad game because it is - for the reasons I allude to in my earlier post - a bad game. This is not a reflection on the worth of the devs, it's just an unfortunate, but factual, state of affairs. I think if the same devs make another game, with the lessons learnt from NMS, it will likely be a better game.
I also think ten years of effort spent improving a game from 'terrible' to 'bad' is not a good use of ten years. Ten years is a very long time. You can count how many of those you will ever see on your fingers.
My first time playing NMS was around 7 years after launch when it was added to Game Pass Ultimate. It's a fine game, but the reliance on procedural generation for planets made everything feel... stale, and same-y. It's ironic, the game has billions of unique worlds, but none of them have anything interesting going on on them because they were made by an algorithm and not a person. Starfield had the same problems (remember Starfield?). This is also how most people feel about AI-generated content.
A counter-point on procedural generation; Elite Dangerous did the same, but it worked. e.g. Watching a ringed planet eclipse a pulsar was awe inspiring. It had countless incredible combinations of procedurally generated stars & planets you could discover.
I've played the game 3 times, which is a lot for a game these days. I want to like it and I still pretty much hate them, and I kinda hate them even more because of how much everyone loves them despite not deserving it.
Part of the problem is the game still isn't good. If they actually pulled off the miracle and created a magnum opus I'd be softer but after the last run (maybe a few years ago) I decided that despite all the love the fans have and all the new "features" foundationally the game is just bad. And never will be good (and that's setting aside all the bugs of which there were many).
though even then I could have forgiven them since it was more of a game than launch but the reason I think I still hate them is the seeming lack of any real repentance over what was, lets not beat around the bush, literal fraud. They weren't really penitent at launch and I see that continued hubris in their pricing. NMS NEVER was a $60 game. NMS never will be a $60 game, if it released brand new tomorrow as is it wouldn't be worth $60. but that's their pride.
Actual AAA games from that era are priced cheaper yet NMS still says "nope I'm worth a AAA now". I think if after release they had said "shit, we're sorry. we're going to re-price the game at $19, refund the difference to everyone and label it 'early access'" then continued to work on it and then maybe 5 years ago peaked at $30 when it hit an actual 1.0 I think i would have forgiven them immediately
And it's not like what they're doing is unique, there's lots of games that get love from their devs and lots of better games in the genre for more reasonable pricing. Redigit and Terraria are a much better poster child of value, they've added so much content over the years, it's such a better game than NMS and I've bought it twice for less than even the sale price of NMS
Their continued overinflated sense of self worth for spending a decade slathering lipstick on a pig combined with a rabid fanbase that never hesitates to gush about them being some sort of saintly figure for doing it rubs me the wrong way.
I found it to be the worst grindfest ever. It's like they went looking for everything they could for you to grin on. I remember trying to fly my ship around the planet instead of walking forever. Suddenly I got a message that I was out of take off fuel. Not fuel, take off fuel. Another resource to grind out. No thanks.
My problem with the NMS debacle was that they lied egregiously when building hype about the game's features and just continued to lie and evade when it all came crashing down. I played the game a year or two ago, overall it wasn't bad, a middling sandbox crafting game, but there are way more games than I have time to play, so I'd prefer to patron those with a more honest approach.
No grudge, but as I understand it the game loop is still too "make your own fun." Has that part changed yet?
It isn't for everyone, that is for sure. You can find a lot of things to criticize about the game, as you can will all games. Not everyone likes Factorio, Elden Ring, God of War, Stardew Valley, Rimworld etc. even if they are massive successes within their own communities.
I'm not defending the game or trying to make a case for it. I'm suggesting that if you can't look past your 9 year old memory of a botched launch and compare it to the subsequent near-decade of grind this team has put into their dream - you might be lacking perspective.
Yes and no. Some new things are quite fun like expeditions or derelict freighters, but there’s no “story” per se beyond the base one.
I'm very grateful to the team after all these hard work and their sincerity, can't forget the surprise when i saw all the changes they made after years, but it's just, hard to go back to play it, makes me feel bad sometimes
A grudge in general is fine enough to me, you don't have to start being fine with everything ever done just because it eventually stopped being that way, but weighing that so high as to not consider anything else about the game/developer at this point is where it's taken into the realm of "really?" for me.
Something tells me you bought the game at a discount years after release.
I bought it at launch and I'm satisfied. They fucked it up, then they fixed their fuckup for free. Sure, we can all complain and whine that they released a bad game, and they did, but they apologized and then worked hard to fix the problem. I think humans need to have more understanding for things like this, especially or something as objectively not-important as a video game. If this were the THERAC-25 I would obviously have a much different opinion, but it's entertainment so there's no sense in holding a grudge against them.
That is an incorrect assumption. In fact, I bought it for full price at launch.
This would be a stronger point for me if the main developer had already apologized for promising things they couldn't deliver on as main tenants for bringing players to the game, but I can see looking online that this isn't the case even as of 2025. Rather than engage the community continually dismissing intentful lies as 'drama around launch', I'd rather spend my time and energy on supporting platforms that value honesty and transparency.
But, I don't dismiss it as a fun videogame. I don't think cyberpunk 2077 is a bad game still either, but the reframing by these communities of legitimate problems as petty grudges turns me away from wanting to support them entirely. I don't value that type of conduct from a game company.
Haha, I'll bite.
I don't hate NMS or HG. And it doesn't upset me that people are enjoying it. However, what bothers me is that people have been talking about it for 5+ years as if it had been fixed up to be at least as good a game as was originally promised. And that's just not true. This gets missed in all the conversations about this game.
Like, originally someone offered to sell you a fully self-sufficient farm on multiple acres of land. You buy it, and what you actually get is a CSA box of vegetables at your doorstep. Vegetables are cool, but that's not what you bought. Over time, the quality and variety of the vegetables went up. You got access to the farm. You saw it didn't actually have any grazing animals or compost management or energy generation, but, you know, they were building a greenhouse. After a few years they started building a composting toilet! Well, ok, just a regular outhouse, not a composting toilet, that was too complicated. You still don't own the farm. It still isn't close to self sufficient. But they're doing some neat things, they have chickens now, and you're entitled to as many vegetables as you can eat. That's all fine, but you were in the market for a built-out farm.
That's what it feels like. Many of the promised features will likely never exist. (And not unreasonably - they'd be massive undertakings.) I've gone back to the game twice to check it out after huge updates and saw:
- They added features like vehicles that I never wanted
- Most of the new features were extremely limited in scope and felt half-baked, like character customization
- The ugliest and most irritating/boring parts of the original game weren't being improved
Now, all that said, this is Worlds 2 and I hadn't even heard about Worlds 1. My information is several years out of date. Since I already own it on PS4, I'm willing to take another look! Some of this stuff sounds really cool! But if they haven't resolved any of the failures in the core gameplay mechanics, I don't know if it's ever going to be a great game.
I saw the "Engoodening" video when it came out and while I get it, there's a lot of praise due to a team that will spend 5 years, let alone 9, making big mechanical improvements to games for free... it's not like it's unprecedented. Paradox Interactive has been doing that for decades, and they've often done it better (although they've had their own huge missteps, they're largely debatable, and the delta between promise::delivery has never been near the scale of NMS) (and admittedly the free updates are usually only about half of the content,the rest being paid DLC). And further, every time I get suckered into checking again, NMS boots up and just feels like a cheap, poorly thought out toy again.
So yeah maybe I'm someone who "holds a grudge for 9 years" in your eyes, but I feel like I'm actually just the only reasonable person in the room. I think being wary of NMS updates is far more rational and honest than telling people it's better than it was ever promised to be, when it's just clearly not. People who enjoy it now should say they enjoy what it is, not that it has surpassed expectations, because expectations were originally set impossibly high.
---
An additional point is that the behavior of the (CEO? Lead Dev?) around launch was downright shit, and that was never addressed. Direct lies, even after launch. Silence for months. No mention ever of the missing features.
> However, what bothers me is that people have been talking about it for 5+ years as if it had been fixed up to be at least as good a game as was originally promised. And that's just not true.
What did they promise that they did not deliver?
> as if it had been fixed up to be at least as good a game as was originally promised
I pre-ordered NMS because I was excited by the concept[0], I wasn't really aware of the "broken promises" until everyone started to make a fuss, and I never felt the game I received didn't provide the experience that I'd expected. Needless to say I played it a lot in those first weeks and enjoyed it a lot.
I've dipped back in since and while the updates are awesome, I've never played it as much as those first weeks. I am hopiong to find the time to give it a proper play through in VR, at some point, though.
[0] and perhaps heavly influenced by 65daysofstatic doing the soundtrack
NMS is a technical marvel, and at first, the game is quite fun.
But for me, it just falls flat after a while. The planets just feel functionally the same, just with a different "skin" (which is cool, just doesn't add to the fun).
I've gone back to it 3 or 4 times, and may/may not explore it again after this update. But it's always the same: it feels cool/new for a few hours, then I realize it's still very repetitive.
And I hold no ill will about the launch -- I don't really care, and I think the continued efforts and free updates are very admirable.
But it comes down to the gameplay, and at the end of the day, there's not enough depth to keep me playing (e.g. compared to something like Factorio, where I can play this for months and it never gets old).
It's not only as shallow and boring as you describe, but also thoroughly unpolished and buggy.
I would love to see some more detail added and variety of structures and whatnot. The planets are cool but I just end up feeling so bored after awhile with the same random structures every so often.
I think I would rather play on maybe 100 planets that are partially random but have a lot of manual work put into the detail of the surface and structures.
> With Worlds Part II, we added billions of new star systems and trillions of new planets to the universe
I played the game at launch for a few days and coincidentally just last week again. So assume basic knowledge of the gameplay. Can someone explain how trillions of planets in the game (I mean the number specifically) changes the experience in game?
I get improving the level of variety on a planet and between planets can improve the gameplay. But trillions of anything makes me think most of the content will never be touched by any human. Am I missing something?
As I understand it, they add a new set of planets with the new features, and keeping the old planets untouched.
The increased variety is not because trillions of planets are added, but because the new planets will have more varierty than the old ones.
What they really mean is there is more variety when you land on different planets, they added more variables to the procedural generation. And I gotta say it did improve over time, they have become more varied and interesting, but still with that "procedural" feel.
Unequal distribution, basically. While most planets will never be observed by a human, it turns out players congregate in certain parts of the galaxy, particularly near the galactic center. (The game starts you at a random location near the edge and there's literally a 'reach the galactic center' quest, so most players end up near the center eventually.)
So yes, there are trillions of stars, but there's only so many of them within $RADIUS of the center. In practice every planet 'near' (for some definition of 'near') the center has already been discovered and the 'good' planets are likely to already have bases. There are also spots that get their locations published in the forums or advertised in-game (good drops, cool bases, things like that) that also end up 'locally' crowded.
I found there were basically two experiences in NMS - "the outer rim" which was, frankly, lonely - you almost never encounter any signs that other players even exist and "the core" where it feels like everything has already been done - sure it's new to you, but you're never the first. Finding a middle zone where you can see evidence of other players, but there's still stuff to discover was rare in my experience.
The number of stars and planets has been overplayed from the start. Sure, there's a quintillion planets, but after you've seen a hundred, you pretty much got the gist of the scope of what's possible. Everything starts to look samey.
Much more significantly, it seems the new planets use new biomes and terrain generators. If they gave all undiscovered planets a chance to use these, even if they cut the number of planets by 99%, it would still be a big improvement. The number is just so big, it's irrelevant.
It is wild how much content the team has continued to add years and years after the launch and without even making any of it paid DLC. The commitment is super impressive, and I applaud them for it, but I am curious how the economics of it work. Is there a wave of people that buy the game when these huge updates are released? How is it possible to keep building this long for a game that is a one time purchase?
Besides all the revenue from things like Game Pass or PS+, I think the long game is building a game engine for procedurally generated games.
They're working on a fantasy title too (https://lightnofire.com/) which uses the same engine to build a whole planet, but Earth scale.
Improvements in the engine for one, translate to the other.
Man, its too much effort to explore this actual Earth and see as much as possible. I can't even fathom the energy and commitment needed to explore a virtual Earth like planet however awesome it sounds. How do you guys stay committed to something like this?
Seeing as much of a virtual planet as possible costs $60 and it uses the same energy that isn't being used because the other thing costs thousands of dollars.
I tend to play games with high commitment like these in a binge for a few weeks or a month, playing it for maybe hours a day (a night actually because of the kiddos) until I've basically done everything fun the game has to offer, then I stop. Sometimes I play again a few years later in a similar way, then stop again. Recent games I've played like this include Rust, Project Zomboid, and Timberborn.
Depending on how they do it, and how many people they need working on it, it might only need to keep a relatively small trickle of new sales going.
It also now marks it as a "great value" so people are more likely to pick it up even if they don't end up playing.
Depending on pricing, you can even just sell to people upgrading or changing consoles (this is one area that really helps Stardew Valley, albeit with a low cost).
After all, even if you've sold millions of copies, there's way more people who have NOT bought it.
New purchasers, subscription products like Game Pass...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky#Sales
> After the game was added to the Xbox Game Pass service in June 2020, Hello Games reported a month later that No Man's Sky had seen more than one million new players.
The game has actually consistently been on Steam’s yearly top seller list for many years.
It’s surprising to see its continued popularity and development. In a good way of course!
This game has the biggest comeback story of any game in gaming history. I'm really looking forward to their next title and how much of "new" tech they will be showing in it. As far as I understand it will be the same engine as No Man's Sky. But there might be even more content and also this time it seems to be only one big planet?
The game has a 60% discount on Steam right now [1], but not on GoG [2]. Is the Steam version DRM-benign? e.g. Is it similar to Kerbal Space Program where you could just copy the folder out to another location (or a new PC) and play it without Steam having to be installed?
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/
[2] https://www.gog.com/en/game/no_mans_sky
Steam games you cannot just copy and play. GoG is like this.
(with steam you can sort of export it, but then need another steam client to install it)
What you said is not the case for all Steam games. KSP is one, several more are listed here:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...
Played it for a bit. Say 20 hrs. It’s okay.
Think the entire premise is flawed though. The average user is going to see maybe 20 or 50 worlds. So 30 hand crafted worlds would be better than a billion bland procedural ones.
More generic volume is not a plus for games
With a VR headset: with Alyx, it's one of the best game I enjoyed playing :)
You ARE in space. That feeling when you hop in your spaceship, take off, point to the sky and come up in space...
Sure, after a hundred hours of playing, I came to the conclusion I had enough, I had seen everything that was to see in the game - even without completing it, never reached the center of the galaxy - but it sure was worth its price.
I started playing a week ago having letting it "cellar" for a few years; I was quite enjoying it but today, after downloading 20GB of free update, I reliably crash on boot :(
Edit: deleted C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\No Man's Sky\Binaries\SETTINGS and I can boot again.
Edit 2: crashed again after playing for a bit; back in the cellar it goes -- needs a bit more time to mature I think.
Personally I prefer content with story and characters. Which is why nobody has beaten Mass effect yet.
While we're talking space games, did Star Citizen ever get properly released? I crowdfunded it 10 years ago and am still waiting for delivery or access to play. Emailed them a few times in the interim and never got any response.
It’s been out in Early Access for a bit… weird that as a backer you wouldn’t have access to it
Thanks for the answer. Was there an email that went out or something? If I recall I didn't back on Kickstarter, but directly with the company. (Also is it ever going to leave Early Access? Are they asking for more money?)
No Mans Sky is a pretty fun game nowadays. If you're less interested in the Eve Online ideals of corporate bureaucracy in space and you just want to explore some neat looking empty planets, it's the premier game of it's kind. I pre-ordered it after watching the infamous IGN trailer[0] and was disappointed like everyone else, but today I'm very happy with where the game is and can easily recommend it at the $30 price point where it goes on sale.
Game is availible natively for Windows and MacOS, supports Linux and supports multiplayer across consoles and PC clients.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtmEjqzg7M
Also supports VR multiplayer
Is there a Switch update yet?
I haven’t checked but it looks like this has rolled out across all platforms, not just PlayStation.
https://www.nomanssky.com/worlds-part-ii-update/
Or PC?
Has the building system improved any since 2023?
I did a playthrough back then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7oYF3lDf4g&list=PLfFb7mAGQz...
But decided I wanted to focus on building, only to discover it was extremely glitchy.