Comment by john_strinlai
21 hours ago
at the time of posting, i think every top-level comment except one is negative. so, i'd like to balance it by saying that i have never seen a better executed turnaround than what the no man's sky team did. they cratered their reputation on launch, worked hard and long to restore it, and then continued to offer free updates long after they needed to. lots of respect there. (i will reward the effort by purchasing their next game on day 1, sight unseen.)
i also happen to enjoy the game itself.
no matter what, that always happens with this game. Any news about it causes the people who played for 10 minutes at launch however long ago come back to tell you how much they didn't like it.
I have 65 hours logged on Steam, am I allowed to say that I have also bounced off of several updates and find the game empty and lacking meaningful goals?
It's simultaneously an amazing achievement, worth the money I paid, a redemption story for Hello Games, and yet disappointing in a way that e.g. BOTW is not.
One of these years I plan to dive back in again, hoping to find that the sum of all the updates has provided some new story progression I will find meaningful and give me a reason to exercise all the new game mechanics. I'm hopeful!
I have over 3500 hours logged on Steam for NMS, and at 65 hours you have barely scratched the surface. Like many open world sandbox games, you have to make yourself goals. If you want a nice guided "start here" to "finish there" type game NMS is not for you.
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It appears that the go-to response from certain fans is to accuse anyone critical of having only played it at launch. I assure you that's not the case. I find the game just as shallow today every time I try a new content update. What do you want me to do? Convince myself I don't feel that way about it? I can't make myself like something.
My perspective on this is that it’s fine to not like things and bounce off them. I also bounced off NMS, no big deal. It just isn’t for me and that’s fine.
All I know is that they worked hard on this game and found plenty of people who enjoy playing it a lot and that’s that. Doesn’t mean they are wrong, doesn’t mean I’m wrong in bouncing off. I do think it is interesting to explore why I bounced off and others might not – I can identify with many of the negative comments here, especially the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal one regarding the procedural generation which probably was the one thing I was most fascinated by when I decided to install the game – but there are so many other systems and elements in this game that if you more into those I can easily see why the game works much better for you.
I am grateful that the devs and their commitment to continuously improving the game have long left those people behind.
The gameplay is completely engaging and this update looks like it fills in even more spaces than were hoped for.
Many of the day 1 game breaking bugs still exist and every time I play it every couple years, they’re still there.
That is a predictable consequence of their decision to launch before the game was ready. The game as it is now may not deserve that kind of contempt, but it's the price they chose to pay forever at launch.
There's a fair bit out there about their launch circumstances. From memory they weren't entirely in control of the timing.
I don't really enjoy the game for more than 10-20 hours after picking it up (gets boring fast for me), and have problems with it, but kudos to the dev team. I agree, huge turnaround
For sure. Even as someone who bounced off the game several times, the scope of their post-launch additions are truly impressive, even matching up against a lot of the subscription games (whose whole deal is regular content drops)
There is no such thing as a turnaround. People wait for a game to be released. When you give a release date, you must give one that shows the almost complete state of your game. Not something that is half done, not something that will feel completely different 1 year later. When you buy a thing you get an experience. If your game is a different experience 1 year later, well, I couldn't care less about it. I'm not gonna sink another 10+ hours into it, just to see what you have done in one year's time. Imagine you go to the matrix and you get a half movie, bad coloring and the like. Just ridiculous.
Early access, early release, beta, whatever is just an euphemism of becoming a backer. You thought you buy something final, and in the end you become a financier. You lend your money upfront. All this because a group of pampered kids can't keep a deadline. And think that the world is a playground and they can keep their game 5 years in early access. Get a grip.
Sorry. You release your shit, it gets evaluated, end of story. Nobody cares the rest. Gaming space is already half dead because people think that sitting at a game company means you get to have knitting lessons during workhours, and you can daydream and chitchat all day long. Ridiculous.
>There is no such thing as a turnaround.
this is very obviously untrue, as evidenced by no man's sky.
Doesn't matter, people move on. Those who stay, who funneled money into the endeavour want it to succeed. That's all.
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I agree with you in principle, but "nobody cares" clearly isn't true given the steam review history.
Yeah, imagine the reviews if it would've been what was promised from the get go.
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I disagree with this logic.
They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.
I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.
>And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't
why scare quotes around for free? they were free.
>haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it.
i went from hating it to really enjoying it. i am not the only one.
>based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
my comment comes from my opinion and my experience, not social media. i think its a good game, and i would say it's absolutely worth the money.
I suppose because you still bought the game, after all, and on some level it was about catching up to expectations for what you would have paid for out of the box.
That said, I don't agree with their take at all. Hello Games offered a mountain of content that's right in the bullseye center of game's core vibe and identity; and continuing to hold the original critique against them based on the "not procedural enough" argument is increasingly equivocating between two different things. You've been given a game that's more than worth the cost of admission, and you'll see dozens, hundreds, of slop space games come and go with less than one tenth the value proposition of NMS. That should be more than enough to quell 99% of the criticism.
The fact that it's not procedural enough amounts to, say, feeling that The Odyssey was good, not great. For however true that is, it's not a scandal.
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Content updates for a paid game aren't free. They're adding to a package that, more often than not, was incomplete to begin with. And they'll often result in more sales, which is how they pay for themselves.
Not that they're bad, but wording them like they're some huge act of generosity from the studio instead of a reasonable expectation pushes the baseline away from where it should be.
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Bolted on? A lot of the core mechanics were rebuilt or added over the 10 years.
> based on them staggering a few nonsense releases
This has to be a troll. Or you haven’t touched the game in years.
What other game has had 10 years of free updates that has dramatically changed the game?
I think it looks like a variety of game that it's not, and there's a dissonance there... it's not an action/adventure game, it's a sandbox of procedural generated worlds where you gather resources to unlock new builds.
You can build bases, manage settlements, maintain a fleet, build ships and exocraft, build multi-tools, have pets battle each other, cook food, manage the economy... but there's only a thin relationship/lore system and not much of a difficulty ramp at any point.
You're space farming, if you expect anything else you won't like it.