Ad watchdog looking at No Man's Sky (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, September 28, 2016, 14:46 (2987 days ago) @ Kermit

I think No Man's Sky is unique, and I honestly have a little sympathy for Hello Games. I don't think they realized how their initial reveal would capture so many people's imaginations, and after that the pressure to feed the hype train was too great, and I honestly don't believe that pressure came from within Hello Games. I don't think features were hawked with the intent to deceive, but they weren't able to execute on every "feature" they mentioned by ship date.

Had No Man's Sky stayed under the radar (and perhaps been a slightly cheaper digital-only release), I think people would be blown away by it. Did they set out to make a AAA game with Collector's editions, bonuses, talk show appearances and all that jazz? I don't think so. Size is the complicating factor when it comes to categorizing it, though, and was always going to be bullet point for the game. No Man's Sky is an infinitely large small game.

I mostly agree. The vast majority of the hype was just fanboys making things up and telling other people it would be in the game. "OMG I can't wait to be a space pirate and rule star systems!" Yeah dude, that's not a thing in this game. It's not even close to a thing. "I'm gonna get all my friends and we're gonna travel together everywhere!" Well, no, you're not.

BUT they did lie about some pretty major things. Saying you could see other players if you met them, showing us plants that moved when large creatures charged past, showing us functional portals in the game... All lies. Pretty blatant ones, too. I'll buy that maybe the portals were in the game originally, but were later removed, but HG knew their E3 footage was a pre-render and they presented it as live gameplay, and they knew you couldn't see other people because there was no character model in the game, but they perpetuated that lie.

Unfortunately, the scope of the game and sheer mind-blowing size of the tech got lost beneath these few but significant actual lies and then the heaps of make-believe people put on top of it.

I think this game presents a watershed moment for video games and I think we'll see far more refined games in similarly generated worlds in the near future (2-3 years for fully realized games, I think).