The contradiction is that you have repeatedly railed against developers for duping consumers into paying money for games in advance (because they are getting free money to deliver products that may or may not ever delivered), and have railed against consumers for paying money for games in advance (because they are encouraging a broken system).
Look at your very first post in this thread:
But with Star Citizen, you’ve pretty consistently defended it as nobly ambitious. Here’s your first post in the Star Citizen thread:
So why the disconnect? There’s no way in hell anybody could have accused NMS of being unambitious, iterative, or of rehashing tired tropes. Why does Star Citizen get a pass for ambition but NMS didn’t?
Are you trying to use that quote to demonstrate that I’m a true believer in Star Citizen or something? My purpose to post that wasn’t even to praise Star Citizen, it was to show that an incidental bit of detail created in that game ended up doing a better job of it than NMS, in which such a feature was far more important core to the development, did. It’s cute, though, that you want to attack Star Citizen to try to get me back for attacking NMS. But as I explained in post 447, I’m not the sort of person who makes what I’m interested in or what I want to like my identity, so I would never take it personally if someone insulted a game I want to see succeed.
As for that poster’s criticism, obviously that’s not the entirety of solar body placement. That tool would be used for checking out how various states of sun positioning would affect the appearance of the landscape, since the developer could freely set the ecliptic and the rotation of the planet relative to the sun in a way they found pleasing. The sun would be placed in real 3d space (or the planet’s rotation and ecliptic set to match an already-placed sun) after using this tool to get the desired positioning. I just posted it because it shows off that the sun is an actual physical object with extensive lighting and atmospheric effects as viewed by the planet, the sort of thing NMS promised but never delivered, and not just a skybox.
No Man’s Sky is a conventionally funded game. They were given investment money by investors/publisher, dictated a release schedule, etc. The game was coming out whether or not people preordered it. Preordering did nothing to make the game come to fruition. It would’ve been released on the same day regardless of preorders. As such, preorders merely indicate a blind faith and impatience to have it on day one, to make the purchasing decision ahead of time. You aren’t making a risk/reward decision. You are taking all of the risk with none of the reward.
Crowdfunding is entirely different. Crowdfunding is an alternative method to funding games than the traditional investor/publisher model that gives developers, rather than investors, control over the direction of the game. If no one put their money into a crowdfunded game, it would never exist, or would have to exist in a form that compromised the developer’s dream to suit the investor model So while you’re also taking risk - there’s a potential reward there - a game you’re really interested has no chance to come into fruition unless you, and people like you, invest in it.
First of all, you know that NMS sky has released and has basically been demonstrated to be a scam, right? Up until release day, they were still lying about fundamental features in the game. It wasn’t that they were overly ambitious, couldn’t pull it off, and reduced their scale and told people about it. They were lying even up to the very last day about what the game was.
My criticism of NMS happened after it was released, and after we found out it was a scam. So you’re asking me why I’m treating a game, which had been released and became a known quantity, and turned out to be a scam, differently from a game that’s in the middle of development.
If Star Citizen turns out to have been a scam - that they were lying about everything and taking the money and running and all the developers go silent and run off to Tahiti laughing it up while counting our millions, I will be just as critical towards it.
My praise towards Star Citizen has been pretty mild. I’ve basically just said “wait and see what comes of it” to people who are declaring that it must be a big vaporware scam because it didn’t come out in 2 years like the annual Call of Duty reskins. And I was still rooting for NMS to be good until it was clear that it was not. The difference is that I waited to see if it was actually good or not before purchasing it.
That appears to just be a rehash of the previous story by another site.
I honestly think it’s too late to turn the tide of gamer public opinion, to be honest. Regardless of what I personally feel (I haven’t bought it, and now won’t), I think it’s going to take something major - full multiplayer, perhaps - to get people back into it.
Currently, 356 people playing it on steam. It’s a long way back from there.
There’s no chance they recover this one. They’re just going to disband the company and reform as something else. The launch was too disastrous to recover from, there’s not really a whole lot there to work with (revamping the game significantly would require a lot of development), they’ve already made 95%+ of the money the game will ever make even if they decide to sell DLC down the road. The game doesn’t just need minor tweaks, it needs a lot of reworking and new content.
Offhand, the only time I can think of where there are huge reclamation projects where a company puts a huge amount of work in a bad loss is when it’s a big name franchise where the existance of such a terrible game drags the franchise down. With NMS, their company and the game have no attachment to anything (other than maybe the blunder of Sony promoting it), so there’s not a brand name to save.
I still think they’re laughing it up on some beach somewhere.
Of course, at this point silence is the only option.
If they say anything at all about what they’re working on (if anything), and even one syllable of that turns out to be wrong, the entire shitstorm will start all over again. They literally can’t risk promising anything, since if they fail to deliver it along with a keystroke that makes the feature happen instantly (since all content available must be visible the first eight minutes of gameplay, or the critics will declare it nonexistent), the internet will just start the bonfires again.
I disagree - I think they’ve managed to incur maximum backlash already. People are assuming they took the money and run. Going “radio silent” on this only reinforces everyone’s perception that they were scammed. I think people would want the hope that the communication would give them, and the lack of communication is… well, I was going to say the final nail in the coffin, but at this point it’s more like welding it shut.
The technical issue are irrelvant. Really, it doesn’t matter if the game can be fixed. The BRAND is irreparably damaged. You could make it a really good game; no one will trust a game called “No Man’s Sky,” which is a shame inasmuch as it’s a great title.
Someday someone will create the game this game was supposed to be.
GOG isn’t just bargain bin games, for what it’s worth. I bought Witcher III there at release, and they have other A-list titles, frequently at launch. They’ve been trying to become a competitor to Steam for years, although their terrible UI and tools are holding them back.
In particular, NMS’s GOG listing is at the full $59.99 price, although it’s on sale at the moment for 40% off ($35 or so).