No Man's Sky - First star to the right, and straight on till morning

The Game Room
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To this day I cannot figure out what people were expecting or what they wanted, that they feel they didn’t get. I know there are lists but every time I read one I’m like “well okay but I mean, that little detail wasn’t that big a deal to you, was it? Was it really? …ww…wwh…wwhyyy?”

I play the game and I feel like I’m playing exactly the game from all the trailers. There are details that are different. But the look-and-feel, the basic thrust of the game, is exactly as advertised.

I see things not in the final product and I think “aw too bad they couldn’t get everything in that they wanted to, but I hope they get to patch it in later!”

But a bunch of people, and I genuinely am seriously actually puzzled by this reaction, but for whatever reason, a bunch of people instead react as follows: “Sean Murray is a fucking liar!”

I like this article, a bit long but I read every word and I almost never do that: Promising the Earth: No Man’s Sky | by Paul Kilduff-Taylor | Mode 7

It’s by one of the developers of Frozen Synapse. (BTW I have not noticed, yet, any negative comments from any actual game developer about this whole affair. Did I miss it?)

Couple of choice quotes:

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I see the trailers and I think “Wow these guys are aiming for something really cool! I hope they get there, or close!”

I see gameplay videos and I think “They got reasonably close!”

I play the actual game and I think “This is just too cool, I cannot wait to see what comes down the pipe five years from now along these lines!”

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Well, at the most basic level from early reviews I thought the game would be focused on exploration, discovery, and categorizing things, not a dull repetitive exercise in grinding resources and managing crappy inventory space. There were supposed to be interesting animals interacting on different worlds, instead you get color-shifted creatures whose physiques don’t make sense sparsely distributed on their color-shifted planets. Players were supposed to be able to run into each other occasionally.

I’m really glad for the negative reviews, because I would have been pissed if I foolishly believed the demos and developer statements and bought this game (And I would have banged away at it for more than two hours before realizing it was a waste of time, so wouldn’t be able to get a Steam refund).

They’re a for-profit business asking for full AAA price on the game. The attitude of ‘well, most of it doesn’t work, but gosh I feel sorry for those people getting paid out of my pocket who couldn’t finish the product I bought’ is one that encourages bad games.

Lying drives additional sales, it’s a tactic that’s been well established in the three decades of history in the home video game market. You have to really be drinking the cool-aid to think that video game companies and developers don’t lie about features or that there’s no benefit to video game companies for advertising features that don’t exist.

And yes, I count ‘really believing’ that you’re going to finish a feature that takes a lot of work and isn’t working now to be lying. This is not the 1980s when games were undiscovered, or the 1990s when multiplayer and CD-sized games were new and unexplored and maybe someone could be excused for not knowing how this stuff worked. Self-deception is still deception.

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For starters, they said that it would be multiplayer, and it isn’t. That right there is a huge one.

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They hesistantly said there will be some weakly multiplayer features, and as time went on, became more and more hedge-y about that, culiminating in a straight, clear statement from Murray towards the end that it’s not a multiplayer game.

What happened here should be obvious. No lies occurred on this front.

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Not sure exactly what you’re referring to by “categorizing things” but aside from that, the above seems like exactly the kind of game I have installed on my system righ now.

The grinding and inventory stuff was apparent in the trailers, it’s exactly as I expected. What did you expect? What game with an inventory/grinding system would you not describe as having a “crappy” such system? What are good inventory management and grinding games? Were you expecting something like that? Or were you not expecting inventory and grinding at all because if it’s the latter I just don’t know man, I just don’t know.

From trailers and interviews, what actual operational definition of “interesting” do you have in mind here?

That’s in the game…

Why would you have expected, from anything you saw, heard, or know from common sense, that creatures would “make sense”? What does “makes sense” even mean here? The game is not, and was never advertised as, an evolution simulator for example.

The idea that planets are merely color shifted versions of the same thing is easily disproven by fifteen minutes of gameplay. As for sparse distribution, again, the sparsity (which varies by planet btw) is exactly as advertised as far as I can tell. People keep pointing to this one trailer with tons of lush life all over the place, but ignore all the other footage that was out there in other trailers. I don’ tunderstand this.

See linked article, other comments in this thread.

Demonstrably friggin’ false by a cursory glance at the indie games industry. Patronage is risky and also enables and encourages great developments when the risk pays off.

Ah, then you’re not using the standard English language I guess…

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I think the fact that they are asking a full AAA price is a big part of why I’m not buying it now. If it was half the price - as many indie titles are - I’d be much more interested in what’s there.

The big lie, to me, is that this is a full, polished, AAA game deserving of the price tag.

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I’m not sure what you hoped to gain by asking the question then. As someone who was glad that reviews slammed the game because it kept me from wasting money on a piece of junk, I answered your question based on my experience since I presumed it was an honest question. You responded with extreme nitpicking (breaking a simple sentence into four pieces, for example), simple denial of basic facts and personal preference, and ended with a false accusation that I’m not even using standard English. I’m nowhere near enough invested in the game to go back and forth nitpicking English usage or tracking down what trailers I saw when I formed my pre-release impression of the game. And while I’m generally fine with discussing gaming preferences, I’m not going to try to discuss a vague and subjective topic with someone who’s being angry, pedantic, and isn’t even listening.

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I defend the game but do think it should have been more like thirty or maybe forty dollars.

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I did not break a simple sentence into four pieces. The sentence was (literally, in the technical sense even) complex.

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To further expand:

My point in my first reply to you was that it is fairly clear that your post contained inaccuracies about the game. I’m not talking about personal preferences, I’m talking about whether people even actually understand what the game was supposed to be like according to official marketing and what it’s actually like. The two are not nearly so different as many (such as yourself) seem to think. And where they do differ, judgments that people “lied” etc are not supported. NOthing at all about personal preferences is relevant to any of this–I didn’t bring that up.

I read each word, and what you interpreted as “pedantry” was in fact the very evidence that I was listening–I went through each point you made (and your sentences, being complex, made more than one point each, hence the breaking-up–it’s a standard mode of discussion on the internet and at the SDMB specifically) and responded to it substantively.

As to anger, maybe some frustration shows forth from my general experience of what seem to me to be broadly, clearly unsupported ideas they have about this game and its marketing. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of encountering ideas that seem reasonably well-developed yet completely disconnected from what seems clear to you to be the actual truth of the matter. (Again, not personal preference–actual, observable facts and logical inferences are the kinds of things under discussion here.)

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Of course they lied, for fucks sake. They said you could play the game as a space trader, if you wanted to. Or a pirate. Like it was fucking freespace. That you could spend the whole game in space if you wanted to, because there are multiple ways to play. They knew what they were catering to by saying that. What they were promising And none of that is in the game.

They said there would be a universe that was alive with alien factions that would war with each other, and you could make big decisions about who to help or who to hurt and it would be meaningful and there’s none of that. That there’d be alien creatures off doing their own thing - flying by on trade routes, giant battles between factions. There’s none of that in the game.

None of the unvierse feels alive at all. The planets don’t move. Freighters don’t move. Alien outposts on planets look the same, are more or less randomly placed - never in little cities in logical places - and they all just have an unmoving, uninteresting NPC in them. There are no meaningful faction interactions. There’s no one else going about their business in the universe. It feels static and stale.

They said you could buy different ships and specialize different ships for these different roles you could take on. But all the ships are the exact same except for inventory space. There are no speed ships or big trade freighters or fighter craft.

They should you actually being able to fly around planets and dart through canyons and stuff (and showed it in the videos). No, it’s a simplistic flight model that prevents you from actually going near the surface of the planet and only allows one button land/dock/etc sequences.

They said the center of the universe would be this big deal and you’d be amazed when you got there and the ending was really unique and… welp.

The universe is extremely samey. You pretty much get all resources easily on all planets. It’s not as though you have to make a risky trip to a volcanic planet near a sun in order to acquire some hard to find material - you just walk around and take your random unobtanium nodes from any planet at any time. The creatures are just randomly scrapped together from a parts/color list - there’s no function towards making them make sense to their environment or interact with other species. Every planet has the same gravity. There’s so little creativity in the planet diversity it’s actually kind of remarkable. They could’ve made all sorts of wondrous things. Ringed planets. Neutron stars. Planets with acid rain that you needed to make special preparations for. Hundreds of unique possibilities. But no, everything is basically the same thing with a recolor. There aren’t even mountains or interesting geology.

They said there would be crafting - combining things in unexpected ways to create a deep crafting system with undiscovered possibility - and there’s no crafting system at all.

These aren’t minor criticisms, these are fundamental ways you can play the game that are totally missing. And they know it. They still use the E3 2014 footage with all the promised features as their main video on the steam sale page.

If people say “yeah, it doesn’t have everything, but I’m still enjoying it”, so be it. But saying “oh they never lied, every criticism is just nitpicking” is, well, voluntary shill territory.

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I don’t know what to say about this, it really is something that flummoxes me. Like, I read/heard exactly the same words you did. You’re accurately paraphrasing their literal content. But it is beyond me how anyone could have taken these as promises as to what will definitely be in the game.

Like, it just wasn’t that kind of speech act. It has been clear to me throughout that this was a kind of wish list, a high-hopes list, and not a promised list of definite features. I have never taken these words as anything other than that, from the very beginning when I first heard about the game.

Like, for whatever reason, I know to put an “if all goes well, it will be awesome if we can” before any developer’s claims about a game especially at long intervals prior to release–and to understand that the developer understands themselves to mean exactly that and expects the audience understands this as well. But others, clearly, don’t understand things that way.

But also: Trading is in the game. Piracy is in the game. It’s rudimentary, but nothing particularly complex was promised! It’s poorly designed, but I don’t know, just, how could someone have expected a well designed game out of this? Like seriously how? How did anyone not go into this not knowing full well that from a game-mechanical standpoint this was going to be a trifle at best? That seemed obvious to me. Why not to you guys?

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So your defense is essentially “Yeah, sure, they said they’d have these features. The features aren’t there. They didn’t lie, though, you’re just an idiot for thinking that the person who was making the game could make claims about what was in the game!”

And “How could it possibly have been good and had all this stuff? It couldn’t! You were an idiot for thinking it would be good!”

“In conclusion, game is fine, no one lied”

You said

Yesterday the game peaked at 11,213 players. It’s currently the #38 most played game on steam. We’re not even 3 weeks into the launch. The game started with a 212k peak, and it can no longer hit just the 12k part of that. It might be the most refunded game in history.

Clearly the vast, vast majority of the players who paid full price for this game do not think “they got reasonably close” - and having you essentially blame the customers by saying “of course it isn’t going to be any good, how could it! you were dumb for believing what they said”, rather than blaming the developers for overhyping and lying about a product they knew would be a huge disappointment is pretty bizarre to me.

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Monday peak was at 11213. If the trend keeps up Empyrion(still in alpha) will have more concurrent players in a week or two. I’m not really into minecraft or space sims, but watching this train wreck has been a most fulfilling experience.

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No, no my defense is manifestly not that.

My defense is that the claim “this will for sure be in the game” for almost everything people have gotten mad about, has never actually been made. Rather, statements that any reasonable person should have understood as describing a provisional plan, was taken instead as a hard specification on the final product.

Not exactly. Just watching the trailers indicated to me that the gameplay was going to be dirt simple. Listening to Murray talk about how the point was more about exploring and it was a “chill game” let me know the gameplay was going to be dirt simple. Understanding how incredibly ambitious it would be to actually have all the features you mentioned as fullblown game mechanics well integrated with each other let me know the gameplay was going to be dirt simple.

I don’t exactly blame the customers–I think the developers made some serious communication mistakes, none of which involved deception.

Having said that, long experience does show me that people–and most people are customers–are, yeah, pretty much incorrigibly dumb.

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Do you think that having the E3 2014 trailer, which includes many things that are clearly not in the game, as the main video on the steam store page is deceptive?

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Probably so, tbh.

I have been wondering if that was HG’s call or Sony’s.

If Sony’s it is absolutely almost certainly deceptive. (By “deceptive” I mean “intentionally lying.”)

If HG’s it might be deceptive, though I think there’s a realistic possibility it is still marketing-clueless indie-like developers advertising a game based on what they hope it will become rather than what it is.

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If this were a $10-20 game, or even better: a $10-20 early access game, 96% of the displeasure wouldn’t exist.

To understand why some of us are pissed, look at another AAA $60 game, Fallout 4. It too is an open-world sandbox, albeit terrestrial. It has hundreds of stories, quests, missions, stumble-upons, plus scores of NPCs with unique personalities and desires. Your actions permanently affect parts of, or in some cases, the entire “universe”. There is a fairly deep crafting system, allowing you to fine-tune individual parts of your weapons and armor, plus make food and other items, and share or sell them to NPCs. You are free to role-play, or not, as you choose; but your character is a “real” entity, with stats and a look and a reputation.

I have played Fallout 4 for 100 hours and I’ve probably experienced less than half of what is out there. And when I have, there is incredible mod support for all kinds of new experiences.

NMS has none - absolutely none - of the depth of FO4, but they’re the same price, and probably came with similar hype. I’ve paid $60 for a game that has perhaps 20 hours of gameplay life, if that.

It’s not a “fail” - it does some things right, or at least headed in the right (and/or new) direction. But when you charge a AAA-price, people expect a AAA experience.

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I looked at the so-called list of things promised and not included*…fwiw there is in-atmosphere fighting.
*And if 1/1000th of the outrage and scrutiny were applied to the current crop of politicians, there would be literal million man marches every damn day.