Comment by john_strinlai
21 hours ago
>And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't
why scare quotes around for free? they were free.
>haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it.
i went from hating it to really enjoying it. i am not the only one.
>based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
my comment comes from my opinion and my experience, not social media. i think its a good game, and i would say it's absolutely worth the money.
I suppose because you still bought the game, after all, and on some level it was about catching up to expectations for what you would have paid for out of the box.
That said, I don't agree with their take at all. Hello Games offered a mountain of content that's right in the bullseye center of game's core vibe and identity; and continuing to hold the original critique against them based on the "not procedural enough" argument is increasingly equivocating between two different things. You've been given a game that's more than worth the cost of admission, and you'll see dozens, hundreds, of slop space games come and go with less than one tenth the value proposition of NMS. That should be more than enough to quell 99% of the criticism.
The fact that it's not procedural enough amounts to, say, feeling that The Odyssey was good, not great. For however true that is, it's not a scandal.
You pay for a game——if the game is not good, and patches are provided "for free" that doesn't mean much.
Here, NMS launched with abysmal content and atrocious systems. Now at least it doesn't have abysmal content. A bad game is a bad game (yes, my opinion).
Content updates for a paid game aren't free. They're adding to a package that, more often than not, was incomplete to begin with. And they'll often result in more sales, which is how they pay for themselves.
Not that they're bad, but wording them like they're some huge act of generosity from the studio instead of a reasonable expectation pushes the baseline away from where it should be.
i bought a game that contained X with no expectations of more content.
the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates. i did not pay for those updates. so it seems completely reasonable to consider those updates to be free.
wording it as something i paid for when i didn't pushes the baseline towards dishonesty.
Many people bought it expecting more, because the studio promised a lot more. You can say that's on the people for not checking before buying, but that doesn't invalidate the dishonesty on their part.
Were it an early access game, you would in fact be purchasing expecting updates. Not guaranteed updates, but certainly expecting them. This game was an amazing early access release in all but name.
I'm not saying you should word it as updates you paid for, you just don't word them as if they're an act of generosity. Just call them "updates", not "free updates" like you did right before the reply that put "free updates" in quotes.
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> the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates.
Yeah. Back in the day, those would almost always be paid expansions... if not whole-ass sequels.
There's a subset of video game players these days who expect years and years of substantial changes to a game. Why, back in my day you had to pay for anything more than a game-breaking bug fix... and you counted yourself lucky if you even got those!
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