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

Any of you have more than 57 posts in this thread? :slight_smile:

Different people are reporting different things for their own reasons. In fact, the only person posting the same opinion over and over again that I can see is you.

Yeah, I think Skywatcher’s the lone voice here. Beef is right - the Rise and Fall of No Man’s Sky hype has been a big story in video game hobby this year and it’d be nice if it was taken as a warning example of what overhyping does and not as a shining example of how marketing can polish a turd so it sells way more copies at way higher price than it should.

I haven’t been posting because I don’t really care that much. I’ve concluded that for me the game isn’t worth getting unless it comes down in price by a lot. I’ll pick it up for $20 someday assuming it is still operating. I didn’t see any reason to make the kinds of posts SenorBeef was making. And to be honest, and I don’t mean this as a personal attack, but they did come across a little bit as “Neener neener I was right” and I can understand how that my rankle people who were enjoying the game. Honestly, I think the right think to do would have been open a new thread called “The No Man’s Sky Disaster Analysis” or whatever. Anyway that’s my view on it.

SenorBeef and Skywatcher, take your fight to the Pit if you want to continue it. It’s getting a bit too heated for this forum.

Mate, I’m not diginifying any of your post with a detailed response. I’ve said my piece. Personally, I enjoyed No Man’s Sky. I am baffled at your continued “interest” in it and IMHO thinly-veiled disdain towards the game and, by extension, anyone who bought it.

There’s a lot happening in gaming this month - I count something like five AAA titles due out. We should all be looking forward to that; I certainly am.

As with other posters, your attacks are far more personal in nature than mine. You called me an entitled whiner, the epitome of what’s wrong with gaming today. Now you’re saying my post - which only contained arguments and no personal attack - is below you, and so you can’t respond to it.

What’s actually true is that you can’t respond to it. I told you why I was in this thread, and you told me that nothing I’d said in the thread conveys that, and then I quoted a post of mine which basically restated word for word what I had claimed my intent was. And so now you’re dodging that.

You then fell onto the standard “but you can’t criticize it if you haven’t played it!” logic, and I asked what would change if I did, and why is what I’m describing uncongruent with the opinion of the majority of people who have played and reviewed it. You’re refusing to answer that question.

I haven’t been personal in this thread. I haven’t called anyone an idiot for liking the game, nor begrudged anyone for liking it. And in fact I tried to defuse people taking criticism of the game personally:

In summary, I haven’t been personally insulting people in this thread. I have been personally insulted by people in this thread, including you. You attempt to silence me by suggesting I have no standing unless I buy it. I challenged you to tell me how my assessment of the game, which includes factual references to people who have played the game and their opinion on it, reviews, and video, would be dramatically changed by having actually played it, and rather than respond to those challenges (which you initiated by attempting to discredit my standing), you decide that my post is not to be “dignified with a detailed response”, which clearly suggests to me that you don’t have one.

It’s strange to me that the few hardcore defenders in this thread are labelling me as somehow cancerous and insulting, but that behavior has only been displayed against me, not by me. My suspicion is that I identified the root cause in my quote above - people identify too closely with a game they, by their own claims, moderately enjoyed, and take criticism of the game as personal insult.

In case it wasn’t clear, that was a reply to Martini Enfield’s post 506, not Skywatcher, who I am disengaging with as per mod instructions. I’ll probably still end up in trouble for some reason, though my post had no personal attacks of any sort.

It’s great you enjoyed No Man’s Sky but do you feel it is justified in being a $60 AAA title? If it had been released as a $30 digital only indie title everyone would be (rightly) raving about it, and probably they’d have made more money as well from increased volume.

I’ll wait until it is $30 then I’m sure I’ll enjoy it as well, but yeah I’d be pissed if I had pre-ordered at $60.

Let’s all just get back to talking about the game. Understand, everyone, that others might have different opinions than you…and if you really want to get into a heated debate over difference of opinion or any other issues with another poster in this thread, and/or what this means for the person having it… then again, let’s move the discussion to the Pit, please.

This note is for any and everyone involved in the hijack in here causing heated exchange of opinions.

TL;DR version: This topic is about the discussion of the game, let’s everyone quit the sniping at each other. Right now.

Beyond this post, people will start getting warnings if they keep up the heated bickering.

Short version: Yes.

Longer version: AUD$80 was probably a tad higher than it should have been, but I don’t think it’s outrageous either. I’ve played dozens of hours of the game; on cost-per-hour-of-entertainment basis it’s down at the “negligible” level for me.

I honestly doubt it; the sale figures were massive and even taking refunds into account, there’s no way they would have sold twice as many units at half the price.

My honest view: It’s not a bad game, it’s just not the game the internet wanted to get, hence the widely reported outrage and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

:dubious: A lot of people (like me) held off on purchase because we were skeptical. At $30 I would have purchased it by now. Video games have a high price elasticity of demand, valve has studied this and generally found cheaper prices bring big increases in revenue.

Was it the game they were promised, either through press releases, advertisements or (possibly misleading) examples of gameplay?

The game was available on PlayStation 4 too and in Australia was being heavily marketed as a PS4 game; there was absolutely no local support or promotion for the PC version and I had to do a lot of asking around before it was eventually confirmed that yes, it was coming to PC, but as a digital-only product.

Don’t get me wrong, I love cheap PC games and like most other gamers, I have an unplayed games list that gets longer everytime one of the major digital distribution platforms has a sale on; but at the same time, it costs a fuckload of money to develop a game on the scale beyond “a few mates from uni working in someone’s garage”. And that’s not including the promotional and distribution costs.

I saw most of the same promo stuff as the other folks on the internet and I more or less got the game I was expecting.

However - I’ve been following the games industry for a really long time now so I think I tend to have a pretty well-developed hype compensator.

Developers promising ambitious things and not following through on them isn’t new. It’s been a thing in games since before some of the posters here were born. It’d be nice if it didn’t happen but unfortunately it does and I suspect it pretty much always will.

Just throwing a little fuel on the fire here: No Man’s Sky is being investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority.

I both agree and disagree with this. It is clearly correct that the Internet wanted although I would say though, to be fair, that it wasn’t the game they were expecting either due to marketing. However, I honestly think that if the game were legitimately good then after the initial gnashing of teeth people would have just got down to playing it. Since that didn’t happen, I don’t think the game could be called good (again in the general sense, I’m not saying that for you it isn’t good). I’ll pick it up when it is cheap and find out for myself.

It didn’t seem any worse to me than what Peter Molyneux has done promoting the Fable games. Perhaps what saved those games was that, even when stripped of the ridiculous promises, they were relatively deep with a story etc, while NMS was never going to be a deep game. I think that even if NMS had delivered on every little promise, implied and explicit, many gamers would have been disappointed as the reality of the promised gameplay would not have been as engaging as they’d imagined.

I suspect that may be partly what’s happening here. Gamers were expecting to be deeply immersed and many weren’t. Because the game suffered from some hyperbolic marketing it has been easy to blame that for their disappointment, but I think they would have been disappointed anyway.

Bit late there. :slight_smile:

The thing to keep in mind is the denizens of today’s Internet, many of whom are reluctant to admit even the possibility of being wrong. About anything.

Sorry, wasn’t thinking.