Why Was No Man's Sky Bad? (THEORY)

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Bad Jim

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I can't help but notice that the flood was two and a half years ago. So it doesn't excuse any promises made since then, which is nearly all of them.
 

IceForce

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RaikuFA said:
One word: Hype. That's what killed this game. People praised it as the second coming and we got... Minecraft in space.
Let this be a lesson to Valve and Half-Life 3.

If HL3 doesn't give players literal orgasms while playing, then we'll see a thermonuclear and outraged gaming community unlike anything we've ever seen before.
 

MHR

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Speaking objectively, without subjective arguments based on hype an controversy, because we can't forget that the content of the game isn't altered by what people argue about.

No Man's Sky is yet another crafting survival game that is unfinished and does nothing spectacularly. That'd be well enough to not give it a failing grade if it weren't for the fact that it costs 60 dollars.

A flood is extremely unfortunate, but when they get to sell two years worth of development time by ten people for AAA price it becomes everyone else's problem too.
 

Mangod

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Bad Jim said:
I can't help but notice that the flood was two and a half years ago. So it doesn't excuse any promises made since then, which is nearly all of them.
This. Even if the flood screwed them over in terms of lost work, Hello Games are still guilty of lying about what would be in the game. If they'd come out and said that the game would be suffering from the flooding, I would have understood, but they didn't. They instead kept the hype train rolling, promising or, at the very least, not denying what would or wouldn't be in the game, so they're still at fault.
 

Gethsemani_v1legacy

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Czann said:
Losing their stuff in that flood I understand. But if they lost their work because it wasn't backed up elsewhere... That would speak volumes about their preparedness and management competence.
This. I thought it was standard procedure to use cloud services to store a lot of pieces of your game, and to keep off-site back-ups in case something happened to your office (break-in, fire, flood, etc.).

NMS suffered from the fact that it had a great idea, an exhilarating pitch and was made by a developer who had nowhere near the resource to pull it of. 15 employees just isn't enough if you want to provide lots of unique content at the scale of NMS, especially when you consider that it takes several hundred people to make your average Ubisoft open world. NMS biggest failure was the Hubris of its' developers and an incredibly aggressive marketing campaign from its' publisher.
 

Elijin

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RaikuFA said:
One word: Hype. That's what killed this game. People praised it as the second coming and we got... Minecraft in space.
This is a pretty prevalent issue these days. People get so excited and build these games up to be things they can never deliver on. As a result, perfectly decent and functional games get slammed into oblivion because they weren't life changing.

The best part is there's nothing dev studios can do about it. Anything short of outright saying their own game is going to be limited in scope and just simple fun, will let people run rampant with hype. And then because we live in this weird age where anything short of life shattering is a "mediocre waste of time" it will be trashed still.
 

Bad Jim

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Elijin said:
The best part is there's nothing dev studios can do about it. Anything short of outright saying their own game is going to be limited in scope and just simple fun, will let people run rampant with hype.
Then why not outright say that their game will be limited in scope and just simple fun? Why not say "no, Mr Interviewer, there is no multiplayer functionality"? Why not say "no, there is no faction system and no random battles for you to fight in"? Why not say "the ships you can fly are all the same except for cargo slots"?
 

gsilver

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It'd be insane for them to not have offsite backups, so I doubt that had anything to do with it.

What it did do, was push the game towards PS4 (console) exclusivity, since they needed an immediate cash injection to replace the damaged equipment and get going again, which Sony happily provided.


What made No Man's Sky so disappointing was a runaway hype train. That's what you get when you expect the universe (har har) from a tiny ten-man team whose major previous project was a modern version of ExciteBike.
 

Laughing Man

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I think what basically happened was that despite their lost work, they were hellbent on making this game a reality. So... They started over almost completely. Which basically means what should have been a 4-year dev cycle got smashed into a 2-year one. And for the scale and scope of what they were planning, two years is NOT enough, which resulted in having to put out a mediocre game. And as to all the runaway hype, well... I guess they just wanted to see this game succeed so badly, after all the work that they had to put in. So they lied. I don't think this is NEARLY as black and white as a lot of people are making this out to be.
A few things

1). If they are a professional developer than why no back up of the work they had done, why would they have to start from scratch, no off sight storage couldn't get someone at Sony to give them secure server access to store the game on?

2). Even if they did lose everything, it doesn't explain away the fact that they just plain lied about the content and the thing is had they explained after the flood the situation then I would imagine that the general folk waiting to buy it would have been a bit more understanding but no. It wasn't until I watched a few Youtube 'lie based videos' that you see just how bad it was. Flood or not it doesn't explain that the lies were being told right up until the release date.

The stuff I've seen suggests a developer in over their head, they wanted or truly believed these features would be a fact, that they would be in the game or at some point they got blind sided by the fact that the game was their child and couldn't accept that what was actually in the game was no where near as good as they thought it was. What I don't understand is why their pay master Sony wasn't doing at least some checking on what was being said and what was going on within the game, well I know why they wanted this game to be a console seller so better to let Sean Murray spout on about the features of the game rather than restrain him and then when the game doesn't deliver throw him to the wolves and stand back shrug their shoulders and go 'we didn't know'.

The thing is, they could recover this, if they work bloody hard, update and add to the game deliver what they promised then maybe just maybe they could pull their arse out of the fire, in many ways they are really gonna have to work hard now to deliver because if they don't no one is going to buy a game from these guys again, certainly not pre order in the way folk did for No Man's Sky and my god if they are stupid enough to try and release paid for DLC before fixing the game they deserve everything they get.
 

Arnoxthe1

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OK guys,

1. Hindsight is always 20/20. I'm sure they made backups but why would they ever think to make them offsite? I'm pretty sure they weren't expecting a massive flood to destroy everything.

2. The devs DID lie. Many times. You can find numerous instances of them saying a feature is in the game and it simply isn't. That's lying. Sorry.
 

Gethsemani_v1legacy

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Arnoxthe1 said:
1. Hindsight is always 20/20. I'm sure they made backups but why would they ever think to make them offsite? I'm pretty sure they weren't expecting a massive flood to destroy everything.
Because it is a basic safety measure. Your office might not be flooded, but it could burn down in a fire, it can be broken into and robbed, a massive electrical surge in the building could destroy all electrical equipment etc. etc.. If you've got sensitive information in your office, such as the game you are making, it is only prudent to store a back-up off-site. Doesn't matter if it is via a cloud service (I hear several indie devs use stuff like dropbox to store their back-ups), a bank vault, your own apartment or your parents gun cabinet. It is a simple and basic safety measure that will prevent you from seeing two years of your life's work gone just because some junkies broke in and stole all the PCs so they could score meth.
 

Bad Jim

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Johnny Novgorod said:
Arnoxthe1 said:
The devs DID lie. Many times.
Such as? Everybody keeps parroting this, but nobody gives examples.
Well here's a Reddit post documenting what Sean Murray said and what he actually delivered.
http://www.onemanslie.info/the-original-reddit-post/
 

immortalfrieza

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Elijin said:
This is a pretty prevalent issue these days. People get so excited and build these games up to be things they can never deliver on. As a result, perfectly decent and functional games get slammed into oblivion because they weren't life changing.

The best part is there's nothing dev studios can do about it. Anything short of outright saying their own game is going to be limited in scope and just simple fun, will let people run rampant with hype. And then because we live in this weird age where anything short of life shattering is a "mediocre waste of time" it will be trashed still.
Yep. Ultimately what most of the complaints about No Man's Sky comes down to a lot of people not paying any actual attention to what Hello Games said about the game, hyping it into the stratosphere then being disappointed when it wasn't as good as their completely unrealistic expectations made it out to be. In fact, Hello Games delivered a game far far more impressive than their tiny team should've really been expected to.
 

Mangod

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immortalfrieza said:
Elijin said:
This is a pretty prevalent issue these days. People get so excited and build these games up to be things they can never deliver on. As a result, perfectly decent and functional games get slammed into oblivion because they weren't life changing.

The best part is there's nothing dev studios can do about it. Anything short of outright saying their own game is going to be limited in scope and just simple fun, will let people run rampant with hype. And then because we live in this weird age where anything short of life shattering is a "mediocre waste of time" it will be trashed still.
Yep. Ultimately what most of the complaints about No Man's Sky comes down to a lot of people not paying any actual attention to what Hello Games said about the game, hyping it into the stratosphere then being disappointed when it wasn't as good as their completely unrealistic expectations made it out to be. In fact, Hello Games delivered a game far far more impressive than their tiny team should've really been expected to.
Well, whenever an interviewer asked Sean about if something would be in the game, he'd reply "yes". So really, it's just as much his fault: if there's not going to be multiplayer, then don't say there will be multiplayer when asked.
 

immortalfrieza

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Mangod said:
Well, whenever an interviewer asked Sean about if something would be in the game, he'd reply "yes". So really, it's just as much his fault: if there's not going to be multiplayer, then don't say there will be multiplayer when asked.
There's any number of possible explanations for why that failure for two players to meet up happened, especially since it was already a 1 in a ridiculously high number chance any player would ever meet another player in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if Hello Games just decided to drop the feature entirely considering the odds against it myself. Sean Murray DID say there would be no multiplayer. He was asked the equivalent of "can players meet up?" and "is there anything players can do to interact with each other?" his answers were "Yes, but it's really really unlikely" and "No." Ergo, no multiplayer. Multiplayer is not just the capability to SEE another player, but the ability to INTERACT, which Murray made quite clear there was no means ingame of doing so.

Murray also replied no quite often. In fact several things he said wouldn't be in the game were actually added, such as just about everything the Day Zero patch added and things more patches will add in the future.
 

Czann

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Gethsemani said:
Czann said:
Losing their stuff in that flood I understand. But if they lost their work because it wasn't backed up elsewhere... That would speak volumes about their preparedness and management competence.
This. I thought it was standard procedure to use cloud services to store a lot of pieces of your game, and to keep off-site back-ups in case something happened to your office (break-in, fire, flood, etc.).

NMS suffered from the fact that it had a great idea, an exhilarating pitch and was made by a developer who had nowhere near the resource to pull it of. 15 employees just isn't enough if you want to provide lots of unique content at the scale of NMS, especially when you consider that it takes several hundred people to make your average Ubisoft open world. NMS biggest failure was the Hubris of its' developers and an incredibly aggressive marketing campaign from its' publisher.
I couldn't have said this better. This was going to be a $20-$30 indie darling until someone started thinking they could go AAA without the resources to do so.