No Man's Sky is the poster child for turning a shitty launch into a success. You can really feel the passion of the staff at Hello Games in the current version of the game. It reminds me of the quote, which I'm about to butcher, that is along the lines of "People don't remember the problem, they remember how you dealt with the problem".
If you haven't seen it, "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky" is a good review of the story. It's 5 years old now, and the engoodening hasn't stopped.
People keep saying that. I ended up biting the bullet after the latest "game changing" update.
It's barely a game at all. It's still a walking simulator. The environment is great, and there is some variety. But there is no objective or opposition, not even a story (a little robot tells you to do stuff). It's a sandbox, an engine one could build a game in (and they might someday?)
They added some construction stuff, so the game will say "go and build a house" and you do that. Or "go build a blueprint machine" and now you have more blueprints. But what is any of it for? You can just sit in your cockpit.
It all seems so pointless. Like they have seen other survival games and copied some mechanics over without understanding what makes a survival game. It is a really puzzling experience, I can't understand what they were thinking.
I don't know how many different ways to say it. We all enjoy different types of games! You obviously aren't a fan of sandbox games, lots of people aren't either. Or maybe it's just this sandbox game. That's fine too.
But it is pretty objectively a great example of taking an absolutely abysmal launch and turning it into something that a decent amount of people (doesn't mean everyone!) still enjoy and talk favorably about. It still sells copies. It still keeps the lights on at Hello Games.
I cannot think of a single other game that had such an awful launch that has, 10 years later, enjoyed mostly positive reviews. Cyberpunk might be the closest.
I enjoy sandboxes. I like Minecraft, Terraria, etc. "Make a gold axe so you can dig further" is something to work forward. Make an anvil so you can craft new equipment to explore, sure.
Here it's "make a qreblz machine because the voice tells you to". And then you can craft a wewrkz. Why.
There are a few storylines that you can try to immerse yourself in, but they're very heady, ambiguous stories that seem intended to make you wonder if the universe is a simulation running on an unstable computer, without ever committing to any concrete explanation for anything.
The endgame is mining lots of metals and making warp fuel and diving into black holes repeatedly to get to the center of the galaxy, after which you can traverse to the next galaxy, which has different distributions of types of stars and planets, and differently colored galactic nebula. There are 256 galaxies in total.
But I still think you've missed (or are just ignoring) the point of my original comment. I didn't claim it's an objectively good game that everyone enjoys.
It's an objectively good demonstration of taking a shit launch and turning it around into a success story.
In Minecraft/Terraria/Subnautica, I can actually do something with the new equipment. Go to new places, fight new enemies, conquer new bosses.
In No Man' Sky, it's already all there. In fact 10 minutes into the game I was crafting a wooden shed right next to a busy alien base with constant spaceship traffic. Can I interact with them instead? Can there be any storyline involving the sci-fi base right next to me? No, like most of the game it is just for show. You are supposed to look at the pretty scenery and ignore it while do the most boring crafting game ever. Those two aspects are not connected at all.
I think the craziest turnaround story was Final Fantasy XIV, which was so bad at release that the following shitstorms meant that everyone expected it would go the way most MMOs go (soon forgotten). But not with Square-Enix (who had a money maker with their previous MMO Final Fantasy 11) who commited to revamping the whole game which took basically 3 years but in the end it became a really good game with a lot of happy players. (I have not played it myself so would like to listen to what players themselves say!)
FFXIV is an excellent game, with multiple exceptional expansions (Heavensward and Shadowbringers being particularly great) and a generous free trial mode that doesn't limit hours (!) and includes the first three games/expansions and a decent endgame. It also includes keyboard/mouse and controller support and cross-play across PC/Mac/PS5/PS4/Xbox.
It's worthy of the Final Fantasy name, and Hironobu Sakaguchi (creator of Final Fantasy) actually plays it as well.
Current state of STALKER 2 is pathetic. Might be better in few months after many patches. I hope they'll fix all bugs, because otherwise is solid game as predecessors.
I also don't enjoy simulators. Same as for films or book, I look for interesting story, that has a point. To be honest, quite hard to find it those days, but luckily we have plenty older games that I can still enjoy.
All of the other replies to you seem to give examples of other sandbox games that are successful / fun and suggest that maybe you just don't like the genre, but as an avid fan of sandbox games, and many of the other titles given by other posters, I still agree with you.
No Man's Sky feels devoid of any personality or interesting content in a particularly unique way. No amount of updates will ever fix for me what feels like a fundamental gameplay loop issue.
All of the layers of systems they've added with each new update still just feel __bad__. I'm glad so many have found a way to enjoy the game, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when none of them seem to address the issue of "collect arbitrary resources to build gear to collect other arbitrary resources ad nauseum" in a way that I just find fundamentally unsatisfying.
I still understand that reductive description can apply to many of the other games I actually enjoy (i.e. Minecraft, etc.) but that's what's so strange to me about NMS—by all means, I __should__ like the game. But I still think it's a miserable experience devoid of any real meaning. Even if the point is to find your own meaning in the systems it provides, I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just feels so much worse than any of the others.
Maybe someone else can better articulate why it feels so bad, but to me, despite all of the work they've put on the game, it still feels so devoid of meaning.
I think it is both an egregious example of the "farm this to craft this to farm this..." gameplay loop and that other aspects of the gameplay are too shallow to hold it up once you get bored of the crafting and building loop. And I say this as a fan of the game lol
I wouldn't mind it if building didn't seem pointless. You travel with your ship but build on planets that you are meant to quickly abandon.
The exploration and building aspects are in opposition to each other so you can't really hop in between them when you get bored without starting over next time.
This was my impression, too. I've been reading years of hype, so I bought the game a few months ago, and I was unimpressed. But the fact that it's kind of an objective-less sandbox wasn't what got me.
I've played plenty of open world games and enjoyed them. In fact, even in games like Morrowind or Starfield or Grand Theft Auto or the like, which have big worlds and specific objectives, I've always found myself ignoring the quests and preferring to explore on my own terms.
I remember hopping around in Morrowind as a kid, trying to become as powerful as possible, and seeking out baddies to best. Then in Grand Theft Auto I'd go on epic crime sprees to see how long I could elude the authorities. And in Starfield I built an incredible network of trading posts that spanned the galaxy to see how much I could enrich myself.
What made these games fun is that, despite not following any missions or objectives, I was able to do impressive and interesting things and have fun. Perhaps that's possible in No Man's Sky, but in my first couple hours of playing, it didn't seem like it. It seemed liked I'd be going around doing boring and uninteresting things, and that it wouldn't be fun.
So it's not that it was a sandbox that bothered me, but that it was a sandbox devoid of fun.
It's like describing a bucket of random Lego pieces "not a toy".
It's a game. It just might not be the game for you. Some people buy a Lego set, follow the instructions and make whatever the set is and that's it. That's fine. Other people will build out ideas with whatever pieces they have. Yet other people will buy specific pieces to build out some Lego vision they have, some of which are truly incredible.
It's also like Minecraft. Are you just playing survival mode? Or are you playing creatively to build out some vision of a city or a building or even a computer?
NMS is really self-directed play. The campaign is really just a tutorial. Are you going to go out and find and max out the best ships? Build an interesting base? Find a particular world to build your base on that has an aesthetic you want? That's up to you.
I've put hundreds of hours into NMS although not for a few years. I first got into it after the Next update IIRC, which was a massive improvement at the time.
What I'd like to see with one of these updates is way more attention on base building as I think that area is kinda weak. Flattening ground is awkward. Base components don't snap to wood/stone/metal components for some reason. They could do so much more with this.
That's the same thing I wanted out of it. Give me Minecraft on pretty planets. None of the environmental mods for Minecraft come close to any random NMS planet.
I've never played it, so I really can't speak to the though, but my obvious comparison is Minecraft.
I really think the deep lore of Minecraft does a lot of work. When you find a new and interesting random place to explore, it usually ties in with your view of the place you are in, and eventually you find your way to an ending of sorts.
Another similar game from my youth that was the same was Wing Commander: Privateer. It was a sandbox, where a game suddenly appears after you've been exploring for months, but it's not much more than some cut scenes within the sandbox.
I have no qualms with a sandbox game, but I'd prefer it were generally tied into a narrative, either in a lore narrative or with a direct story.
All video games are empty time sinks at the end of the day. It’s a matter of what people want their escape to look and sound like.
Anyone expecting real world prestige for 100 percenting the last Mario? It’s all still literally accomplishing sitting on the couch only barely rising above passive consumption of entertainment.
Asking “what does it all mean” to everything gets exhausting. Human existence is arbitrary; it happened because it could.
If you think it's bad now, imagine how bad it was for those of us that pre-ordered it. It was a dadgum mess back then.
Most people are warming up to this game because they're delivering on the original game concept and still going the extra mile. No Man's Sky was criticized at launch because the gameplay was nothing like the trailer had suggested, and the updates since launch have really and truly fixed that complaint.
No, there isn't EVA in space or serious FPS combat or even well tuned space dogfights. But none of that was really part of the original promise, and looking at the utterly derelict state of games that try to thread all those needles (cough cough, Star Citizen), I'm glad No Man's Sky went it's own way.
I found it to be the grind half of a game, the chores you do to make the fun part more fun. But there is no fun part. The creative part is all prefabricated, and the exploration is very low-dimensional variation on templates that quickly blend together.
> But there is no objective or opposition, not even a story (a little robot tells you to do stuff). It's a sandbox, an engine one could build a game in (and they might someday?)
I've found a very different experience. There seem to be several main story threads to follow, as well as the addition of a few interesting sidequests (I'm in the middle of the one about hacking and reverse engineering one of the sentinels). And that's not even counting the expeditions they come up with from time to time. I particularly enjoyed working through the one that had the Normandy from Mass Effect as the end prize.
Essentially you get a task list and set path to complete the event, mechanically just for some shiny cosmetic stuff and a really basic lore dump for the event. But the reality is that it feels like an MMO-lite due to the fact that everyone else is on the same handful of planets.
I think that's an oft repeated over statement of reality.
I've enjoyed a good 60+ hours in it, it's good. But not great. I didn't pay for it, not sure I'd have been as happy would I have paid for it.
It's still very shallow. As a programmer you can see all the really basic algos underlying all the generation.
There are like 10 planet types, with a couple of extra wacky ones. All the stations are virtually identical inside. There are like 8 points of identical interest. And bizarrely they're everywhere. There are 3 alien races. You land on a planet and within seconds spaceships are over flying you. You enter a new system and 10 seconds later a fleet of "random" carriers will turn up within your sightline.
You arrived at a new planet and the creatures are all exactly the same as you've seen before, just more legs, or 4 wings instead of two.
The thing the really bugs me are the sentinels. I get the in game explanation, but it's boring that every planet has them. And the few that don't are weird ones.
Everything is different and yet, apart from a very few minor things, it's all the same.
And the randomness gets grating. Want a cool ship? Have fun trying to grind that out. Want a cool gun? Ditto. You have to resort to going to particular coords supplied by the internet, not in game play.
For me, never before has space felt so small. Elite dangerous suffers from similar shallowness problems, but at least it felt epic.
You don't have to enjoy the game, that's totally fine. But my comment is pretty reality-based.
The game completely bombed on launch and was dragged through the mud (mostly deservedly) in every review. Now has very positive reviews on Steam, people still talk about it, and people still buy it a decade later. It's sold enough copies to support the staff at Hello Games for that time.
If that isn't turning a shitty launch into a success, I have no idea what is.
I've played the game on and off since launch. I think the biggest difference in the game is expectations going in.
A ton has been added to the game but I still play it for the same reason, it's a good ambient exploration game where you get to fly around space but I also still stop for the same reason, it's shallow and repetitive. That was my experience at launch and that was my experience last time I played.
Based on hours played (and I enjoyed them) it was well worth the money but I don't think it's really improved that much over time. There's definitely more to do but it's not much deeper.
I feel same way. Played on Game Pass, not sure I would have valued it if I paid for it. It is very grating that you see same set piece, be it pirates or ruins again and again. I have seen this one before. Oh and to get best output I should just save scum...
And then randomness leads to issues like finding very nice looking end game planet. To make your own base. And even there the option to place it so that certain things refresh.... So game world is not even consistent...
This is more a reflection of the state of online gaming discourse and youtube rambling clickbait these days. People believe what the culture tells them cool people believe, and perpetuate it to others. No Man's Sky didn't have multiplayer at launch. Now it does. That's pretty much the only indisputable improvement to the game. They've certainly managed to improve the NARRATIVE about the game, though.
EDIT: I also want to call out one particularly user-hostile thing they have done: pump up the visual quality and complexity so high that the game performs very poorly on the console generation on which it was released: the PS4/Xbox One generation. This is true even on performance mode. So if you bought the game at release, you will now suffer degraded performance if you are still using your original hardware. You don't hear too much about this because when it's mentioned the person usually gets console-shamed, e.g. "get with the times, time to upgrade you cheapskate!" It's not only low framerates and ambient pop-in; it's also extremely bad pop-in of hazardous plants and structures. And you often can't land your ship on the ground until the terrain has fully generated. This can take a minute or two sometimes. Or you could try to go harvest from one of your resource collectors and have to wait something like 10 seconds for it to finally appear in front of you. And once it did, the chances of it bugging out and having no resources inside of it are way too high.
just because you found those mechanics to be not to your liking doesn't make them invalid. A whole lot of shallow gameplay can easily add up to a game that is fun, because it is full of small activities that are each fun for a little while. If that wasn't true, Mario Party would be no fun
"shallow" is also /definitely/ your opinion here. it's okay to not like things, but that doesn't make them objectively bad. it's just not to your taste.
I've played NMS on and off since launch and it's a totally different game now in MY humble opinion
Shallow is the observation of many, many people who usually just get ignored, or worse in today's vote-centered social media platforms, suppressed, for going against the popular narrative.
If it's true that not liking something doesn't make it bad, then liking something also doesn't make it good.
If that's really true in a wide scope, yeah, I guess that would have to be an improvement. But I've observed the opposite - didn't used to get too many crashes or glitches back in the launch days, but my recent experiences are full of a few crashes and many, many glitches.
Would treat your experience as unusual. I understand distrusting reported experiences in favor of your own, but the number of patches that list fixed bugs and stability issues, plus rising satisfaction scores, should guide here.
Counterpoint - listing a lot of fixed bugs and stability issues just proves you had a lot of bugs and stability issues. It does not mean you fixed most of them, or that you did not introduce even more. And there are a lot of very old problems in the game to this day. They prioritize adding new stuff like every other game developer. And really, publicly available satisfaction scores are a terrible way to measure actual quality. They're easily manipulated social fora subject to peer pressure and trends, dominated by kids with loud voices, favoring quick overly-simplified impressions, not well-designed measurement and analysis tools.
Okay. I saw in another comment you’ve at least committed to stop playing the game. Seems like a healthy move. Your descriptions of your experience with the game are unreliable.
> complexity so high that the game performs very poorly on the console generation on which it was released: the PS4/Xbox One generation. This is true even on performance mode.
The game runs surprisingly well on a Nintendo Switch, I mean each time there is a major update I figure that's the one to do the Switch in (...and this one just may be it!). Then to my utter surprise, the Switch does not spontaneously combust and I can play without crashing (well, except for when they introduce bug that crash it, even then they get it patched pretty quick).
Watching the update video, I'm really not sure what's been added other than new graphic things, and the Switch is not a system for graphic things. At this point though, No Man's Sky seems to be a quasi-staging server for their upcoming game. The update was all about the new graphics and how they made it for the other game and added it to NMS. Some of the updates last year were pretty fun though.
My understanding is that the Switch build had custom attention paid to the quality/performance tradeoff, and I'm guessing that's because they knew they had less margin for error. Does it look good on a TV screen? Keep in mind that even if it looks good and performs well on the Switch, that doesn't excuse degrading the performance for the original customer base on the original release platform. The "Gen 8" console settings give you the illusion of choice, but both modes result in too much focus on quality and not enough on performance. Performance mode = bad performance, and Quality mode = I just want to take a cool screenshot and then will immediately reactivate Performance mode.
> Keep in mind that even if it looks good and performs well on the Switch, that doesn't excuse degrading the performance for the original customer base on the original release platform
Agreed. I think I was more wondering aloud about how they could make the Switch, of all platforms, run well and then also have the older ones degrade. Only that last part forgot to leave my inside voice.
As far as graphics, its one of the better looking Switch games imo--but it's still Switch. I did briefly open the game up on an old Xbox one after hours of updating and the game there looked much better than Switch, but since the save was from 2018 or something, my Freighter had new random walls blocking passage ways and rooms. It was mostly useless. I didn't want to start over so that was the end of that experiment.
Gotcha. I think the PS4/Xbox One performance is partially a result of them not caring about Gen 8 customers anymore. Maybe their procedural generation tech doesn't easily allow configurable quality, or they won't/can't maintain separate asset libraries between the generations. So they favor Gen 9 even when it makes Gen 8 suffer.
My apologies. I'll edit out the leading question. It just seems outrageous to me to say "the game hasn't been improved except it added multiplayer" when multiple pieces of the engine have been re-written. New game play loops added, bugs squashed, updated content, and entirely new ways of generating planets, flora, and fauna have been added.
I feel it is akin to saying FPS games haven't improved since DOOM (95), or simulation games haven't improved since Deus Ex. Are both excellent examples of their genre? Yes, absolutely. Are they still some of the most fun you can have in a game? Yes. Holy crap yes. But to ignore improvements made in the last 3 decades of game development and storytelling just because another game hasn't improved on every single aspect aspect of them is a wild perspective.
Denying the improvements Hello Games has made over the last 9 years feels as if it can only come from a perspective of "I don't like it, therefore it is bad". Which to be clear, again, it is fine if you don't like a game. I don't like WoW, haven't since before Cataclysm. I don't like Diablo III in the same way I liked D2 (and as a result haven't even played D4). But those are personal preferences to me, and both games contain numerous improvements over their predecessors. Just not my bag.
They've certainly done a good number of things, and it probably wasn't easy to do, but my observation is just that almost none of those things really contribute to the heart of the game, work together in a meaningful way, or got executed without a lot of rough edges and bugs which never have been/never will be addressed.
I believe it happened this way because when they were in danger of self-destructing after the terrible launch, they knew they could no longer afford to risk continuing to try for the vision they had and sold. They had to pivot to a adding shallow crowd-pleasing fluff, and the more the better. And it was a good business decision! Now people go gaga over the fact that you can summon a multiplayer social hub from your menu and do fortnite emotes with strangers.
Let me try to flip this and compliment NMS for what I think it is. It's a good light-hearted space-themed VR chat with some gamelike elements.
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Also, no worries about the earlier question. I wasn't offended or upset, but I think it was just a good opportunity to point out that the culture about discussing this game now has that kind of thing baked into it.
Regarding the question: I appreciate your point. I was less concerned about offense and more about playing into the rule breaking and poor discussion etiquette you brought up. Its too easy to treat everyone like dingbats online and I don't like playing into that type of conversation. So, my apology was intended less as a "sorry for offending you" and more of a "sorry for not trying for a real conversation"
Despite really disliking the game, but also still playing it enough to apparently notice "many, many glitches" in recent updates, it's pretty obvious that they either have some bone to pick with No Man's Sky or just enjoy being a bit contrarian. Or maybe they're having a bad day. In any case, their comments don't seem to be in good faith.
I never understood why people will keep playing games they don't like. It doesn't make any sense to me. If I don't like a game, I play something else.
I should not have spent the time that I did with the game. I regret a lot of it. At this point I think I'm fully done with it, although I might pick it back up on PC at some point in order to work on mods (which I think might address some of the big gaps in the game).
I wouldn't say that it was a good investment, or even too much of an investment at all. A lot of it was procrastination, escapism, self-sabotage, etc. There were times when I could overlay a sort of canon to my character's activities that was pleasurable to think about. I spent a lot of time wanting the game to be good, but some glitch or design decision would always get in the way.
But I'd say one of the best experiences I had in the game was becoming self-reliant at the start of a new save. Struggling not to die evolves into having enough resources to survive indefinitely by manual resource harvesting, which evolves into setting up crude crafting pipelines, which then evolves into advanced harvesting and manufacturing, enabling easy interstellar travel and self-sufficient freighter bases. But that can only happen once per save. And it's only really satisfying on survival or permadeath. The other modes are essentially just a no-risk sandbox.
The poster asked if you played the game, and acknowledged that you don't have to like it - that's not a fallacy, it's a clarifying question.
The game has had clearly observable and measurable improvements, in terms of features, like multi-player, but also in terms of overall content, game and storyline components, and substantial new and revised game mechanics.
It is abundantly clear from player feedback that your opinion is in the minority.
Steam reviews -
Recent Reviews:
Very Positive (1,837)
All Reviews:
Very Positive (256,838)
If you haven't seen it, "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky" is a good review of the story. It's 5 years old now, and the engoodening hasn't stopped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ