SimCity, ugh. What a disaster, especially with the legacy of popular games it had.
But yeah, the level of NMS disappointment is clearly comparable, at least in terms of a percentage of lost players in a short time, never mind refund demands (which are a new thing), to the launch of failed titles like SimCity and Spore. Not WoW. I also don’t think Diablo 3 dropped so far so fast by a long shot.
Games are shittier than they could be because publishers are willing to put out an incomplete product hoping to be able to make enough sales through preorders and day one sales before people realize they’ve been duped.
Imagine if every game didn’t preorder, didn’t buy a game day one, and only bought games after video/reviews/etc were out. Do you think that would change the game industry? Do you think they’d put more emphasis on having a quality game on release?
It’s just like movies - when they know they’ve got a stinker on their hands, they don’t fix it, they just make a big marketing push for day one ticket sales, and throw on a review embargo, and hope they can cash in however much they can before people realize their product is shit and the sales dry up.
I wanted NMS to be good, because hey, it’d be a cool game. But it’s bad. It’s really bad. It’s the worst case of hype to delivery ratio since Spore at the very least.
So I want to it to serve as a lesson. I want it to make people remember the last time they got so hyped for a game they preordered it and it turned into a big pile of stinking shit, so that the next time this comes around, they might wait a day and actually find out if the game is good or not before commiting their money. After a few years of this, game publishers will actually become interested again in delivering a good product, and games will improve because of it.
So if this thing is going to be a disappointment, which it is, I want it to be an epic scale crash and burn dumpster fire of a disappointment so maximize the chances that it changes the industry for the better.
Orrrr…you could just live and let live and let people who are enjoying the game (Like me) do so without reading “EVE Online monocle-level” hate.
Have you played it? It’s certainly not “really bad”. To me, it’s a bit like Minecraft, a pretty game that I enjoy playing but is not deep enough to hold my attention for any length of time.
If no one bought games day one and always waited for reviews they would soon discover that just because something reviews well doesn’t mean they will enjoy playing it. They will then go back to buying games that look like they might interest them without relying on reviews. I mean really, why base your spending on whether another person likes something or not? Isn’t the important point whether YOU like it?
Example, I like realistic motorcycle racing games such as MotoGP, if I relied on reviews I would never buy one because they never review well. Reviewers are looking for something entirely different to what I’m looking for in a motorcycle racing game.
I don’t get your fascination with this either. You come across as very bitter. It is not a good look.
There is a strange phenomena where a game, movie, or TV show is either awesome! or shit! In reality there are many many games, TV shows, and movies that are just fine. They are not great, and they’re not terrible, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There is nothing inherently wrong with dumping $60 on a game and getting 10-20 hours of mindless entertainment out of it and then never giving it another thought, or paying $10 to see a forgettable movie at the cinema.
All of the really good games and movies stand on the shoulders of a bunch of mediocrity that is just good enough to be profitable.
I haven’t played No Man’s Sky, but the buzz I’m hearing sounds very similar to Spore. Spore promised to be the “ultimate game of everything”, combining aspects of SimCity, Civilization, and whatever 4X space strategy game was popular before then. Basically it sucked at all of them.
SimCity was just bad. Honestly, I can’t figure out why all the SimCity games sucked after SC4 (SimCity 2013 and SimCity Societies). The people who made Cities Skyline and Cities XL get it. People just want to create massive urban environments in an open sandbox with lots of modding support, not micromanage a 1 mile square the size of Hoboken, NJ.
This is an excellent observation and I agree with every word of it.
I really don’t get the quasi-tribal nature of gaming, sometimes - it’s not a zero-sum game; the existence of No Man’s Sky doesn’t mean that some other insanely awesome and worthy game doesn’t get to exist instead.
As anyone who follows the gaming industry fairly closely will know, people will mostly have stopped raging about NMS in a few weeks and will be on to something else - my money is on vocal game-ragers hating on Battlefield 1 because it’s from EA and won’t be a hyper-realistic trench warfare simulator.
Well there is quite a lot to do in the most recent releases of MineCraft and it’s certainly very deep, if you get into constructing redstone circuits, mine tracks and resource farming contraptions, not to mention multiplayer servers. I estimate that NMS is roughly at the stage where Minecraft 1.2 beta was, except that because of the graphical requirements and complexity NMS needs 15 people on it while Minecraft could be developed with just one person for a long period of time.
Sure, I’m not saying it is literally like Minecraft, I mean I get the same out of it.
I’m having a hard time thinking of any game with more depth than Minecraft, which makes me wonder what it was you were actually trying to say, there. Perhaps it’s that the depth of Minecraft isn’t very easily accessible?
Dwarf Fortress, Nethack, Crusader Kings 2… I’m sure there’s more but it’s a shortish list…
This just in: Steam is apparently being much more generous than their official policy with NMS refunds.
I think that’s part of it. Not so much that Minecraft isn’t easily accessible but that it doesn’t engage me enough to make me want to access it. It wasn’t meant to be a deep comparison, I just see parallels in how I play the two games and how they engage me.
There seems like there is this whole genre of “build and explore the universe” sandbox games - Space Engineers, Star Made, Empyrion, No Man’s Sky.
There’s nothing to build in No Man’s Sky.
The No Man’s Sky controversy reminds me a lot of the release of Outpost back in the early 1990s. It was a game where a colony ship made it to another planet, lost contact with Earth, and split into two colonies. You controlled a colony and had to manage resources, build up your colony, and compete with the other colony (though not militarily). It was an amazing, engaging concept that a lot of people fell in love with. But the actual game lacked most of the functionality it was supposed to have - numerous things you were supposed to be able to just weren’t there, a lot of parts of the game just didn’t seem to work, and what did work was so simple it wasn’t engaging. The developers left a snarky note in the release notes about how ‘sometimes you have to let your baby fly’ as the only explanation for the incompleteness, and people got seriously pissed. Sierra actually offered rebates for years after the flopped release, but it hurt their reputation for a while.
No Man’s Sky’s Steam page has this over the price:
[QUOTE=Steam]
The standard Steam refund policy applies to No Man’s Sky. There are no special exemptions available. Click here for more detail on the Steam refund policy.
[/QUOTE]
That’s a first. 
I like the game.
For some reason this seems to bother you. I expect you simply don’t believe me.
It is DICE. We all know there are going to be server issues at the beginning.
My best friend got a refund.
It’s an anecdote, but I cannot think of a more alarming canary. I love my best friend but he lives a lifestyle that can best be described as… consumptive. He and his wife buy stuff basically nonstop; they get a shipment from Amazon or some other online retailers basically every day and he buys so many PC games I honestly cannot fathom how he finds time to play them. They do very well, you understand, but they spend it on whatever things their hearts desire.
I cannot - not in 25 years of knowing him - think of one single occasion, ever, when he returned a product because he was dissatisfied with it. Not ANY sort of product.
People always bitch about new games but there’s no point denying No Man’s Sky is one of the most egregious examples in video game history.
Is the game worth buying for $20, or is it better priced at $10-15?