An interesting side note is that the most popular recent thread on /r/NoMansSkyTheGame/ has been about people who have stopped playing but check in daily for news.<p>A common theme in that sub is that the news about Hello Games is far more entertaining than the game itself.<p>Fundamentally, the game failed to deliver any emergent gameplay between the various procedural components. An infinite universe that's completely lifeless, waiting for for you to interact with it.<p>They've released 9 updates so far, mostly bug fixing, there's talk of new features in the future but I have a hard time seeing how they truly fix the game.
I don't understand why it's only No Man's Sky that's being investigated. What about other known games that came out below expectations and with misleading advertisements? Watch dogs being a prime example.
That's great to see happening, but any word on the situation with Steam refunds since you pretty much had to play more than an hour or whatever their refund cutoff is to determine that the game oversold itself?
It's worth noting that Elite: Dangerous is constantly improving and is definitely worth another look if you found the gameplay a bit thin when it was released. Planetary landing, multi-crew ships, fighter launch from larger ships have all been introduced.<p>Still no landing on earth-like planets thought :-(
Bleh. It is the same brouhaha that surrounds every overhyped game. This has been going on for ages.<p>I guess the new twist is that gamers pay up front, sometimes years ahead, and that only adds to the disappointment when the game actually comes out and is not the best thing since sliced bread.
> “My hope,” he tells us, “is this could give Valve a reminder/prod that they themselves have a responsibility, they can’t just blame individual publishers, and this might help them keep future games being listed, more honest.”<p>Why is it Valve's responsibility? And how did Valve act inappropriately at all? AFAIK they were the first publisher/store to offer refunds for NMS after the story broke that it was largely unfinished, and aside from some wasted time on the part of the players everyone walked away relatively unscathed.<p>The alternative would be that Valve would have to have a review process for every game that passes through Steam, which means they would have to charge a lot more for the Steam Greenlight service. The vast, vast majority of indie developers do not do this sort of thing, and benefit greatly from the audience and ease of distribution that Steam provides. I just don't see what offloading that responsibility to Valve would accomplish, aside from setting Valve up to be a deep-pocketed lawsuit target.
Wow. I really wanted this game to be amazing. Hell, I've played it over 100 hours, but that's mainly because I waited so long for it to come out.<p>I have an 8x AMD with 32GB RAM and a Radeon 7970. Not a bad system. At 1080p it drops frames all the time. It freaks out at weird moments in game play. There is this weird tick where every alien that shows up at a space station will be the same alien. As I play it I really think about how if they hadn't hyped it, it would be fun...maybe not worth 60$...but it would be fun. I;m old. I guess I was hoping it would turn into the greatest Trade Wars 2002 ever. It's really not even close. As you move around the galaxy you really wonder sometimes...why the fsck am I doing this again? I've upgrade my person and ship to the point that they are almost indestructible to anything that I've met to this point. At first I did this alternate path through the game where you "follow the atlas"...you go through multiple solar systems chasing this thing and it gives you a shiny red orb every time that you catch up to it. Ok. Then at the last one it says..."hey, I'm the last one. Do you want to give me those stones and create a new star?"...Sure why not. You give it the stones and then it says...in text..."somewhere...out there...a new star was created. thanks for the stones dawg". That's it. I thought there would at least be a pre-rendered star-being-created animation. Nope. AND you don't have those shiny orbs anymore which were the most valuable things in the in-game economy.<p>At this point, I keep thinking that HG will release a patch that makes it not terrible. Seriously. I would settle for just bad at this point. I'm not like a lot of the Reddit crowd that wants to see Sean Murray hanged. I just think this was a huge wasted opportunity. If this had been a PC only game or an Xbox indie release it would have been amazing. Having to go the big time console release route made the hype really crazy. It showed, though, how intense the followers of an immersive universe sized space game would be if you could build something like a high quality 3D Trade Wars 2002.<p>But yeah...they should make it not suck at this point. I really try to not be critical of other people's creative work, but seriously. Make it not suck. (Some new music would be great too. I like it, but the sushi bar techno gets old after a while.)<p>EDIT: I hadn't watched those trailers again since the game came out. OH MY GOD. I forgot how amazing they were. There was more diversity in the first 3 minutes of that trailer than there was in 100 hours of gameplay. Jesus. Sean said in an interview that they were doing all of this generation on the client side and relying on the fact that planet creation was somehow idempotent for everyone to have the same experience. What I don't get is why, in 2016, would you even remotely try to do everything client side? As soon as someone jumps into a solar system that would be a trigger for a distributed job on a cluster to assist in generating the details. Those details would need to then be cached somewhere, but you wouldn't need to generate them again. After that some direction and story mechanics could steer people towards some pre-engineered experiences that would bring them together and drive the plot. Jesus Christ, this isn't rocket science anymore. There are text books with this stuff in it. They said "no loading screens"...I WISH THERE WERE. The stutter that the game has when transitioning between environments is worse than a loading screen.<p>I would have bought a new computer to play the game in those trailers. Man. What a waste.