No Man's Sky is a bit of a litmus test for me these days.
If you still hold a grudge against these guys after everything they've done, the numerous free updates, the commitment to high quality output, etc. then I will have a hard time believing you have any perspective. The disastrous launch was 9 years ago and yet here we are still talking about substantial free updates.
It is totally fair to say the game isn't for you. But the team at Hello Games has blown past making up for their rookie mistake and well into the position of a shining example of how any game company should conduct themselves.
If you still harbor some bitter feelings about that launch, maybe it is time to let it go.
- I started playing the campaign (instead of the sandbox mode) and was off to a great start
- I noticed that you slowly gain additional inventory slots for your character, but that you can just buy a large ship with many inventory slots instead, so I did some trading and bought a huge ship
- Inventory management: I put the stuff I don't need on me in the ship's cargo space. Especially the "space traveler's passport" or whatever it was called, since you only need that during quests/campaign progressions
- I had my first run in with pirates and died
- Ah, so when you die, you lose all ship cargo, but keep your player inventory. Good to know. Now, where's my "space traveler's passport", that I need to continue the campaign? I bricked my save?
- I went to the forum where everybody laughed and called me an idiot. OF COURSE you don't put your quest items in the ship!
Note that the game only had auto-save, no manual save states, so I lost everything for the stupid reason that the game removes all quest items from your ship on death and does not tell you that beforehand. This was one of the worst experiences I had in a game/community, ever.
That's super unfortunate, especially the community part.
>Note that the game only had auto-save, no manual save states
Not that it fixes anything, but I am really curious when this was? At least as far back as Nov 2016 there has been manual saves via save points. And I'm pretty sure beacons have been in since pre-release.
This definitely speaks to a UI failure (as well as the quest item stuff). The UI has been completely overhauled since. But, I certainly do not blame you for having your opinion soured and not wanting to try again.
I'm not sure, since this was so long ago. Maybe there were manual saves, but I did not use them and instead trusted the game that I would not need them?
To me, it's either a game design failure (losing the campaign item basically puts you in sandbox mode I think?) or a UI issue (if there was a way to continue playing I could not figure it out).
I might enjoy giving the game another try and considered downloading it again a couple of times, but I couldn't do it so far (it feels like considering petting a dog that bit you). Maybe some day.
I am not bitter, but Sean Murray after launch was sitting in interviews, claiming that the game had multiplayer (and a lot of other stuff), knowing fully well that those were lies.
On top of many, many lies that happened before launch. These are not "rookie mistakes". This is a person that is clearly fine with lying to players in order to hype up the game. He should never be trusted again.
Yes, it's exemplary that they fixed the game, and added all those features, but Sean Murray remains an untrustworthy individual. I would never hire, do business with, or believe him. I will stay away from anything this guy does in the future.
I'm not going to try to gaslight you since your memories are your own. But consider your memory of 9 years ago in the light it occurred. After huge hype, the entire gaming world turned Hello Games and Sean Murray into a meme. Every video was clipped and cut to make him look like a mustache twirling villain that was lying to trick gamers into buying his shit shovel-ware game. We have this vision of a huckster game developer whose entire grift is to hype and then abandon games and Sean became the poster child for this. This was made much worse by Sony strongly pushing No Man's Sky as an indie success story adding even more fuel to the hype.
But lets consider the next 9 years and ask: does the behavior of Sean match that caricature? If he was indeed the lying manipulative hype man that reddit memes made him out to be, how would we expect him to act? Wouldn't he take the money and run? 5 years after the launch, the engoodening video from Internet Archivist was released. Penny Arcade also has that famous cartoon from a few years ago. His reputation is mostly laundered now. Why do they keep releasing free updates? Why is he not shovelings out a bunch more over-hyped crap? Do you think this is the longest 9 year con job in the history of games?
That is the lack of perspective I am talking about. Sean oversold the game and got called out for it. He was put in the public stocks and people threw rotten vegetables at him. Then he and the rest of the team spent 9 years quietly grinding away to prove they believed in the game and believed in their vision.
You remember some videos cut to make him look evil 9 years ago. I'm talking about 9 years of him showing who he and his team really are.
Bottom line is that he knowingly lied about his game before release. I'll assume no motivations but he hasn't really been put in that position again to redeem himself because he's just been releasing updates.
I'll still not trust him when NMS 2 hype starts rolling.
This is a false dichotomy, plus you're implying that anyone who disagrees must bear a grudge, which is not at all the case. Games that promise the things NMS promises are games for me. NMS just doesn't deliver.
Years of free updates have turned a barren tech demo into a fairly middling game, without solving the key problem: there are ten squillion planets, but no sense of discovery. The same three races, who have already populated every planet before you get there, with the same space station, and the same few outpost buildings. No cities. No history. Nothing to explore that you haven't seen in the first 10 minutes. It's a dead galaxy.
Then there's the lack of attention to gameplay systems. The last time I tried it, I quickly figured out that I could turn element X into 10 element Ys, into 3 element Xes. And I could do this with just about any element in the game. And thank God for that, because everything is gated behind collecting far too many of those elements.
NMS is not a good game, and the same gaming community that was hyperbolic about its failure nine years ago is now hyperbolic about its comeback, because 'content creators' need narratives to peddle, and a redemption ark makes for a great narrative. But there is no narrative here. 'Bad game remains fairly bad' isn't going to make any YouTube videos go viral.
Finally, I don't agree with the 9 year point at all. I honestly think that if the studio spent those 9 years making a new game, applying the lessons learnt from NMS, they may have actually made something worth playing. Nine years is a serious chunk of a human lifespan, far too long to spend on a sunk cost fallacy.
I think your confusing my post. You can feel however you want about the game itself, it isn't for everyone. Your suggestion that they work on something else for 9 years is also strange. Why would they listen to someone who doesn't like the games they make instead of listening to the literal thousands of players who play the game each day? [1] It makes a lot more sense for a game company to focus on the lovers and not the haters, IMO.
You don't like the game, and may not like the style of games that Hello Games chooses to make. But 9 years after launch, and before this new update, they were still pulling 5-10k players per day just on Steam, so probably more overall if PlayStation, etc. are included. That seems like evidence enough for me that a decent audience believes it is something worth playing.
My actual comment, however, is addressing people who still hate on the developers. You can dislike the game while still respecting the effort the developers have put into serving their fans.
You're back to the false dichotomy. In effect, you're saying one can either hate the genre or love NMS. But those aren't the only possible positions. One can love the genre while thinking NMS is a bad example of it, and this is where most of the criticisms of NMS actually come from.
Imagine someone watches a football match, and then they say that it was a 'bad game'. They're not saying the very game of football is bad. They're not a football 'hater'. They're saying this particular match was bad. There's an obvious difference.
It isn't required for a game to have literally 0 players or 0 fans in order for it to qualify a bad game - that's a silly standard (and another false dichotomy).
NMS is not a bad game because I'm a 'hater' who doesn't like the genre, NMS is a bad game because it is - for the reasons I allude to in my earlier post - a bad game. This is not a reflection on the worth of the devs, it's just an unfortunate, but factual, state of affairs. I think if the same devs make another game, with the lessons learnt from NMS, it will likely be a better game.
I also think ten years of effort spent improving a game from 'terrible' to 'bad' is not a good use of ten years. Ten years is a very long time. You can count how many of those you will ever see on your fingers.
My first time playing NMS was around 7 years after launch when it was added to Game Pass Ultimate. It's a fine game, but the reliance on procedural generation for planets made everything feel... stale, and same-y. It's ironic, the game has billions of unique worlds, but none of them have anything interesting going on on them because they were made by an algorithm and not a person. Starfield had the same problems (remember Starfield?). This is also how most people feel about AI-generated content.
A counter-point on procedural generation; Elite Dangerous did the same, but it worked. e.g. Watching a ringed planet eclipse a pulsar was awe inspiring. It had countless incredible combinations of procedurally generated stars & planets you could discover.
This would be a stronger point for me if the main developer had already apologized for promising things they couldn't deliver on as main tenants for bringing players to the game, but I can see looking online that this isn't the case even as of 2025. Rather than engage the community continually dismissing intentful lies as 'drama around launch', I'd rather spend my time and energy on supporting platforms that value honesty and transparency.
But, I don't dismiss it as a fun videogame. I don't think cyberpunk 2077 is a bad game still either, but the reframing by these communities of legitimate problems as petty grudges turns me away from wanting to support them entirely. I don't value that type of conduct from a game company.
I've played the game 3 times, which is a lot for a game these days. I want to like it and I still pretty much hate them, and I kinda hate them even more because of how much everyone loves them despite not deserving it.
Part of the problem is the game still isn't good. If they actually pulled off the miracle and created a magnum opus I'd be softer but after the last run (maybe a few years ago) I decided that despite all the love the fans have and all the new "features" foundationally the game is just bad. And never will be good (and that's setting aside all the bugs of which there were many).
though even then I could have forgiven them since it was more of a game than launch but the reason I think I still hate them is the seeming lack of any real repentance over what was, lets not beat around the bush, literal fraud. They weren't really penitent at launch and I see that continued hubris in their pricing. NMS NEVER was a $60 game. NMS never will be a $60 game, if it released brand new tomorrow as is it wouldn't be worth $60. but that's their pride.
Actual AAA games from that era are priced cheaper yet NMS still says "nope I'm worth a AAA now". I think if after release they had said "shit, we're sorry. we're going to re-price the game at $19, refund the difference to everyone and label it 'early access'" then continued to work on it and then maybe 5 years ago peaked at $30 when it hit an actual 1.0 I think i would have forgiven them immediately
And it's not like what they're doing is unique, there's lots of games that get love from their devs and lots of better games in the genre for more reasonable pricing. Redigit and Terraria are a much better poster child of value, they've added so much content over the years, it's such a better game than NMS and I've bought it twice for less than even the sale price of NMS
Their continued overinflated sense of self worth for spending a decade slathering lipstick on a pig combined with a rabid fanbase that never hesitates to gush about them being some sort of saintly figure for doing it rubs me the wrong way.
I found it to be the worst grindfest ever. It's like they went looking for everything they could for you to grin on. I remember trying to fly my ship around the planet instead of walking forever. Suddenly I got a message that I was out of take off fuel. Not fuel, take off fuel. Another resource to grind out. No thanks.
My problem with the NMS debacle was that they lied egregiously when building hype about the game's features and just continued to lie and evade when it all came crashing down. I played the game a year or two ago, overall it wasn't bad, a middling sandbox crafting game, but there are way more games than I have time to play, so I'd prefer to patron those with a more honest approach.
It isn't for everyone, that is for sure. You can find a lot of things to criticize about the game, as you can will all games. Not everyone likes Factorio, Elden Ring, God of War, Stardew Valley, Rimworld etc. even if they are massive successes within their own communities.
I'm not defending the game or trying to make a case for it. I'm suggesting that if you can't look past your 9 year old memory of a botched launch and compare it to the subsequent near-decade of grind this team has put into their dream - you might be lacking perspective.
I'm very grateful to the team after all these hard work and their sincerity, can't forget the surprise when i saw all the changes they made after years, but it's just, hard to go back to play it, makes me feel bad sometimes
A grudge in general is fine enough to me, you don't have to start being fine with everything ever done just because it eventually stopped being that way, but weighing that so high as to not consider anything else about the game/developer at this point is where it's taken into the realm of "really?" for me.
I bought it at launch and I'm satisfied. They fucked it up, then they fixed their fuckup for free. Sure, we can all complain and whine that they released a bad game, and they did, but they apologized and then worked hard to fix the problem. I think humans need to have more understanding for things like this, especially or something as objectively not-important as a video game. If this were the THERAC-25 I would obviously have a much different opinion, but it's entertainment so there's no sense in holding a grudge against them.
I don't hate NMS or HG. And it doesn't upset me that people are enjoying it. However, what bothers me is that people have been talking about it for 5+ years as if it had been fixed up to be at least as good a game as was originally promised. And that's just not true. This gets missed in all the conversations about this game.
Like, originally someone offered to sell you a fully self-sufficient farm on multiple acres of land. You buy it, and what you actually get is a CSA box of vegetables at your doorstep. Vegetables are cool, but that's not what you bought. Over time, the quality and variety of the vegetables went up. You got access to the farm. You saw it didn't actually have any grazing animals or compost management or energy generation, but, you know, they were building a greenhouse. After a few years they started building a composting toilet! Well, ok, just a regular outhouse, not a composting toilet, that was too complicated. You still don't own the farm. It still isn't close to self sufficient. But they're doing some neat things, they have chickens now, and you're entitled to as many vegetables as you can eat. That's all fine, but you were in the market for a built-out farm.
That's what it feels like. Many of the promised features will likely never exist. (And not unreasonably - they'd be massive undertakings.) I've gone back to the game twice to check it out after huge updates and saw:
- They added features like vehicles that I never wanted
- Most of the new features were extremely limited in scope and felt half-baked, like character customization
- The ugliest and most irritating/boring parts of the original game weren't being improved
Now, all that said, this is Worlds 2 and I hadn't even heard about Worlds 1. My information is several years out of date. Since I already own it on PS4, I'm willing to take another look! Some of this stuff sounds really cool! But if they haven't resolved any of the failures in the core gameplay mechanics, I don't know if it's ever going to be a great game.
I saw the "Engoodening" video when it came out and while I get it, there's a lot of praise due to a team that will spend 5 years, let alone 9, making big mechanical improvements to games for free... it's not like it's unprecedented. Paradox Interactive has been doing that for decades, and they've often done it better (although they've had their own huge missteps, they're largely debatable, and the delta between promise::delivery has never been near the scale of NMS) (and admittedly the free updates are usually only about half of the content,the rest being paid DLC). And further, every time I get suckered into checking again, NMS boots up and just feels like a cheap, poorly thought out toy again.
So yeah maybe I'm someone who "holds a grudge for 9 years" in your eyes, but I feel like I'm actually just the only reasonable person in the room. I think being wary of NMS updates is far more rational and honest than telling people it's better than it was ever promised to be, when it's just clearly not. People who enjoy it now should say they enjoy what it is, not that it has surpassed expectations, because expectations were originally set impossibly high.
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An additional point is that the behavior of the (CEO? Lead Dev?) around launch was downright shit, and that was never addressed. Direct lies, even after launch. Silence for months. No mention ever of the missing features.
> However, what bothers me is that people have been talking about it for 5+ years as if it had been fixed up to be at least as good a game as was originally promised. And that's just not true.
> as if it had been fixed up to be at least as good a game as was originally promised
I pre-ordered NMS because I was excited by the concept[0], I wasn't really aware of the "broken promises" until everyone started to make a fuss, and I never felt the game I received didn't provide the experience that I'd expected. Needless to say I played it a lot in those first weeks and enjoyed it a lot.
I've dipped back in since and while the updates are awesome, I've never played it as much as those first weeks. I am hopiong to find the time to give it a proper play through in VR, at some point, though.
[0] and perhaps heavly influenced by 65daysofstatic doing the soundtrack
If you still hold a grudge against these guys after everything they've done, the numerous free updates, the commitment to high quality output, etc. then I will have a hard time believing you have any perspective. The disastrous launch was 9 years ago and yet here we are still talking about substantial free updates.
It is totally fair to say the game isn't for you. But the team at Hello Games has blown past making up for their rookie mistake and well into the position of a shining example of how any game company should conduct themselves.
If you still harbor some bitter feelings about that launch, maybe it is time to let it go.