I’ve worked on a big big project where we had a team of five developers working for over a year on a feature. One month before release they decided to cut that feature because the publishers (read investors) weren’t confident that feature could be delivered at all. Everyone on the team was devastated, but they were all reassigned to QC and finishing other features that could be delivered. Thats what happens. It doesn’t matter if you are the game creator when the people paying the salaries say to you “no we’re not paying any salaries after this date, give us a product or we sue you for breach of contract” then thats what you do.
Actions speak louder than words, so like I’ve said we will see if Hello Games follows up or not but it’s too early to say if they were lying to get sales or they were just unrealistic and over enthustiastic about what they could deliver.
Yes, absolutely this was a case of them being unrealistic, and almost certainly under a ton of pressure from Sony and press and gamers. This was a poorly managed project coupled with misleading marketing and unfiltered commentary by devs with way too much enthusiasm and not enough grounding.
Going by what Hello Games and the marketing said we would be getting a game that featured a much larger variety of animals, fauna, and worlds than what shipped. A huge array of varied stations on planets and off, which do not exist. A gigantic library of ships with different handling mechanics and even with specialized to different roles like science, resource gathering, combat, trade, etc. A nuanced economic system. Other varied ships that had a purpose in the world and did not just involve simple patrol routes, nor were all just copy paste trading ships so that you’d enter a hanger bay and there would be 4 ships with the same name and the same trader, for pity’s sake! Not to mention the copy paste stations, some of which feature the same locked box with the same password to get into! That you’d be abel to interact and see other players, remote as that chance might be. That there would be secrets and a narrative that tuged you along the galaxy.
There was talk of factions who would war one another, and that you’d have the ability to join the fray and take sides. And an ending that did NOT, HAHAHA that would be so funny! Would Never be just a black screen and then nothing (but is absolutely that).
No, this stopped being over enthusiasm and then outright lies when they KNEW that none of this would happen, and they didn’t tell ANYONE.
I can’t imagine your clients were very happy about the decision in your own little anecdote (though I’m not seeing the similarity between it and No Man’s Sky).
But I bet you the moment the feature was cut your higher ups fucking told the client, they didn’t just wait until 1.5 came out and they’d be looking through the menus for the features wondering where they were.
And if they didn’t, I’m guessing they are no longer your company’s clients.
I still haven’t played NMS, but from reading this thread a couple of things sparked a thought.
There’s a fun little mobile game called Out There: Omega Edition. It’s a 2D space-themed rogue-like. Ostensibly, it has nothing to do with NMS, but it has a couple of striking (to my mind) similarities:
Much of the strategy centers on inventory management. The only difference between the ships is in the inventory slots, so there’s a balance between collection and loading out your ship. Progress mostly consists of getting more inventory slots. Sometimes you have to take calculated risks between carrying fuel, repair material, modules, or trading goods.
Collecting alien words. Traveling around, you occasionally receive a “you have leaned the X word for Y”. And then when you meet with X, you can use that information to trade or get other benefits.
Beyond that, it’s a randomly-generated space-themed game with combat and exploration elements, and where you travel from star to star looking for the next thing, though that’s not exactly unique to either.
Seems I’m not the only one that’s made the connection–that it’s basically Out There 3D. 'Course, one’s $60 and the other is $10…
Then you don’t get it. The “clients” ARE the publishers / investors, they’re the ones that make decisions to drop features because they control paying the bills. I would guarantee you 100 percent that there is 40%-90% complete code for dozens of features for NMS that already exists. It’s pretty normal that at different milestone stages you and the clients (eg publishers) go through and decide what can’t be shipped and needs to be cut in first release.
Yes there should have been better communication but we don’t know exactly what happened between Hello Games and Sony so we don’t know who to blame. Ideally NMS would have been in early access on steam for 1-2 years at $30, so it could grow organically like Minecraft did. But they needed the money to expand their team so they did a deal with Sony and so they are forced to compromise.
If Hello Games don’t deliver any free significant content patches then I’ll join you in crucifying them, until then I’m going to be patient.
I’m still not quite clear on just what NMS was supposed to be doing that was new. Minecraft (and many, many other games) already has the kazillions of different procedurally-generated worlds (each of which is big enough that you’d never even finish exploring one of them). Spore already had the wacky creatures. Plenty of games have actual multiplayer, where you really can meet other players. Plenty of games have pretty graphics. And almost all games have actual gameplay beyond just the exploring and ooh-look-at-that.
Perhaps the appeal/promise was in combining several elements together to get exploration of massive amounts of pretty procedurally-generated worlds with wacky creatures?
Part of the shallowness seems to stem from the fact that communicating “lots of possibilities” is simple and straightforward enough when you can (honestly enough) quote 18 quintillion possibilities and communicating “pretty graphics” is simple and straightforward enough with screenshots. Communicating good gameplay, on the other hand, seems difficult to do in a simple, straightforward way. One can always say “Innovative gameplay and complex systemic interaction with the environment” but that doesn’t really assure players of anything. So developers seem to skew towards what can be communicated easily. It would be interesting to find ways to communicate info about gameplay in a simple, quick, non-bullet point-y way.
…ever watch Star Trek and think to yourself “I wanna be Captain Kirk?”
I want to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life, and civilization, and to boldly go where no one has gone before. That was the dream I had when I was a kid and it hasn’t diminished now I’m 42 years old. Its not something most of us will be able to do in real life. I’d go be an astronaut: but only a handful of people in the world will every get the opportunity to be able to fly in space.
So I’ll settle for a game. A game where I get to role-play as an explorer of worlds.
I love role-playing: and I think that the people that are role-players are probably the ones who are enjoying No Mans Sky the best. They can set aside obvious flaws in the game play and just get immersed in the universe. When I play Skyrim I play by my own personal rules: for example I never strike the first blow and only fight when attacked. I role-play my character (Palador, Holy Paladin) the same way I role-played him back when I used him the first time on a computer when I played Eye of the Beholder. And when I eventually get NMS I’ll play to my own set of internal rules.
I could see myself really enjoying this game. (But finances at the moment rule out buying it just now.) The flaws have been pointed out by many people. But I’ve watched a few hours of gameplay on youtube. And I could imagine spending days exploring a single system of planets, just doing my own thing.
Minecraft doesn’t have procedurally generated creatures and plants. Spore was just lacking in so many ways, so for a lot of people this seemed to be fulfilling the potential that Spore promised.
I firmly believe that procedurally generated content is the future for games, but specifically hybrid systems where you have a huge or infinite procedural world and then you embed developer created plotlines and specific locations within the procedural universe. Imagine GTA VII where there is a huge procedurally generated city where you can go inside every building, and then the specific locations that are parts of missions are developer created overlaying the procedural city.
NMS will (probably) be remembered in future as a flawed game but a hugely influential one that raises the bar for procedurally generated content.
Except that Spore already fulfilled the potential that Spore promised. It delivered exactly what it promised. It just turned out that what it promised wasn’t actually very interesting, once you got down to playing it.
And I was already seeing articles about full-sized fully-detailed procedurally-generated planets a full two decades ago. The graphics wouldn’t have been nearly as good, of course, but the algorithms behind the graphics already existed. The only reason it never went anywhere was because there was no game attached to the worlds. Just like NMS.
Peaked at under 23000 today for a a loss of over 89% of the peak daily player base. In what, 10 days? Since this is an open ended game - it’s not as if people are beating the 6 hour campaign and quitting having completed the game - that is extremely dire. I’ve never seen a game fall off half that fast before.
Um, isn’t that how a refund works? Or do you mean that their names are going to be put into some sort of database and if your name is on that list you won’t be able to buy it again once they finish it?
Sony is apparently claiming that a digital refund involves revoking the license for your PS4, thus rendering the game unplayable in the future.
I haven’t seen it confirmed by Sony. It sounds like the kind of thing somebody in a call center might pull out of their ass to keep up with quotas, but it also sounds like the kind of shitheel move a big corp would pull.
Wait, that does actually mean they won’t be allowed to buy it again? How does that make any sense at all? Why would any company want to prohibit customers from buying from them?
OK that is completely inexcusable, and also stupid, both because of the negative word of mouth it will create and because it’s pretty easy to get around it by creating a new PSN account linked to a different bank account. I can’t imagine they are actually blocking the PS4 hardware, since that would effect people with second hand PS4’s who just happen to end up with a system thats had a previous refund done on it.
They’re trying to stave off the logistical nightmare of handling a huge amount of refunds. The threat will reduce the refunds by some amount, and not having a mass panic/hassle among the retailers might be worth the cost to them in future sales.
Especially if you don’t actually expect the game to ever become good, so people wouldn’t want to buy it down the road nayway.