at the time of posting, i think every top-level comment except one is negative. so, i'd like to balance it by saying that i have never seen a better executed turnaround than what the no man's sky team did. they cratered their reputation on launch, worked hard and long to restore it, and then continued to offer free updates long after they needed to. lots of respect there. (i will reward the effort by purchasing their next game on day 1, sight unseen.)

i also happen to enjoy the game itself.

▲ zf00002 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

no matter what, that always happens with this game. Any news about it causes the people who played for 10 minutes at launch however long ago come back to tell you how much they didn't like it.

	▲	modeless 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I have 65 hours logged on Steam, am I allowed to say that I have also bounced off of several updates and find the game empty and lacking meaningful goals? It's simultaneously an amazing achievement, worth the money I paid, a redemption story for Hello Games, and yet disappointing in a way that e.g. BOTW is not. One of these years I plan to dive back in again, hoping to find that the sum of all the updates has provided some new story progression I will find meaningful and give me a reason to exercise all the new game mechanics. I'm hopeful!
	▲	arrrg 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		My perspective on this is that it’s fine to not like things and bounce off them. I also bounced off NMS, no big deal. It just isn’t for me and that’s fine. All I know is that they worked hard on this game and found plenty of people who enjoy playing it a lot and that’s that. Doesn’t mean they are wrong, doesn’t mean I’m wrong in bouncing off. I do think it is interesting to explore why I bounced off and others might not – I can identify with many of the negative comments here, especially the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal one regarding the procedural generation which probably was the one thing I was most fascinated by when I decided to install the game – but there are so many other systems and elements in this game that if you more into those I can easily see why the game works much better for you.
	▲	herpdyderp an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Many of the day 1 game breaking bugs still exist and every time I play it every couple years, they’re still there.
	▲	xbar 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I am grateful that the devs and their commitment to continuously improving the game have long left those people behind. The gameplay is completely engaging and this update looks like it fills in even more spaces than were hoped for.
	▲	throwawayk7h 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That is a predictable consequence of their decision to launch before the game was ready. The game as it is now may not deserve that kind of contempt, but it's the price they chose to pay forever at launch.

▲ goatking 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't really enjoy the game for more than 10-20 hours after picking it up (gets boring fast for me), and have problems with it, but kudos to the dev team. I agree, huge turnaround

▲ swiftcoder 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For sure. Even as someone who bounced off the game several times, the scope of their post-launch additions are truly impressive, even matching up against a lot of the subscription games (whose whole deal is regular content drops)

▲ lofaszvanitt 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is no such thing as a turnaround. People wait for a game to be released. When you give a release date, you must give one that shows the almost complete state of your game. Not something that is half done, not something that will feel completely different 1 year later. When you buy a thing you get an experience. If your game is a different experience 1 year later, well, I couldn't care less about it. I'm not gonna sink another 10+ hours into it, just to see what you have done in one year's time. Imagine you go to the matrix and you get a half movie, bad coloring and the like. Just ridiculous.

Early access, early release, beta, whatever is just an euphemism of becoming a backer. You thought you buy something final, and in the end you become a financier. You lend your money upfront. All this because a group of pampered kids can't keep a deadline. And think that the world is a playground and they can keep their game 5 years in early access. Get a grip.

Sorry. You release your shit, it gets evaluated, end of story. Nobody cares the rest. Gaming space is already half dead because people think that sitting at a game company means you get to have knitting lessons during workhours, and you can daydream and chitchat all day long. Ridiculous.

▲

john_strinlai 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>There is no such thing as a turnaround.

this is very obviously untrue, as evidenced by no man's sky.

▲

lofaszvanitt 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Doesn't matter, people move on. Those who stay, who funneled money into the endeavour want it to succeed. That's all.

	▲	ch4s3 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It keeps selling well by all accounts. New people are buying it and playing it.

▲

Antipode 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree with you in principle, but "nobody cares" clearly isn't true given the steam review history.

▲

lofaszvanitt 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, imagine the reviews if it would've been what was promised from the get go.

▲

t-writescode 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It has a Steam Review Score of 84%. What are you talking about?

▲

lofaszvanitt 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah and Star Citizen has half a billion funding, and then WHAT?

Also what was it when the game released? It was waaay negative.

	▲	john_strinlai 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Also what was it when the game released? It was waaay negative. yeah, it was. and now it isn't. this is known as a "turnaround".

▲ spandrew 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I disagree with this logic.

They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.

I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.

The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.

▲ john_strinlai 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't

why scare quotes around for free? they were free.

>haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it.

i went from hating it to really enjoying it. i am not the only one.

>based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.

my comment comes from my opinion and my experience, not social media. i think its a good game, and i would say it's absolutely worth the money.

▲ glenstein 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I suppose because you still bought the game, after all, and on some level it was about catching up to expectations for what you would have paid for out of the box.

That said, I don't agree with their take at all. Hello Games offered a mountain of content that's right in the bullseye center of game's core vibe and identity; and continuing to hold the original critique against them based on the "not procedural enough" argument is increasingly equivocating between two different things. You've been given a game that's more than worth the cost of admission, and you'll see dozens, hundreds, of slop space games come and go with less than one tenth the value proposition of NMS. That should be more than enough to quell 99% of the criticism.

The fact that it's not procedural enough amounts to, say, feeling that The Odyssey was good, not great. For however true that is, it's not a scandal.

	▲	spandrew 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You pay for a game——if the game is not good, and patches are provided "for free" that doesn't mean much. Here, NMS launched with abysmal content and atrocious systems. Now at least it doesn't have abysmal content. A bad game is a bad game (yes, my opinion).

▲ flavionm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Content updates for a paid game aren't free. They're adding to a package that, more often than not, was incomplete to begin with. And they'll often result in more sales, which is how they pay for themselves.

Not that they're bad, but wording them like they're some huge act of generosity from the studio instead of a reasonable expectation pushes the baseline away from where it should be.

▲ john_strinlai 5 hours ago | parent [-]

i bought a game that contained X with no expectations of more content.

the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates. i did not pay for those updates. so it seems completely reasonable to consider those updates to be free.

wording it as something i paid for when i didn't pushes the baseline towards dishonesty.

▲ flavionm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Many people bought it expecting more, because the studio promised a lot more. You can say that's on the people for not checking before buying, but that doesn't invalidate the dishonesty on their part.

Were it an early access game, you would in fact be purchasing expecting updates. Not guaranteed updates, but certainly expecting them. This game was an amazing early access release in all but name.

I'm not saying you should word it as updates you paid for, you just don't word them as if they're an act of generosity. Just call them "updates", not "free updates" like you did right before the reply that put "free updates" in quotes.

	▲	john_strinlai 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		they are free updates. i do find them generous. that sums it up.

▲ simoncion 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates.

Yeah. Back in the day, those would almost always be paid expansions... if not whole-ass sequels.

There's a subset of video game players these days who expect years and years of substantial changes to a game. Why, back in my day you had to pay for anything more than a game-breaking bug fix... and you counted yourself lucky if you even got those!

▲ flavionm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Back in the day, they had to ship complete working games, because the cost to fix it later was too high.

Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time, but the punishment for messing up was severe.

And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves. Those are a lot of value, and there's nothing wrong with them. They even still exist today, though rarer.

Maybe the NMS's updates did amount to one or two expansions throughout the 10 years of updates, but they were done piecemeal. Were it not a game that massively under delivered on release, they could've gone that route.

▲

simoncion 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time...

Sounds like being required to ship a "complete working game" didn't matter much. Weird.

> And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves.

And many were not. Plus, if we ignore shovelware -both past and present- most games these days are way larger than they were back in the day.

Have you ever gone back and played those old games you fuzzily remember through a haze of nostalgia? Many of them [0] would be derided as low-effort asset flips [1] these days. Many of the NMS updates (and tragically many updates to other games) definitely would qualify as "expansion pack"-sized. Some updates are big enough to be whole-ass overhauls. It's _nuts_ how much work some industrious indie game devs put into their games.

It's fine to be angry at how the circumstances of NMS's launch, and be sore that Hello Games is getting any praise after all that. But it's dishonest to refuse to recognize both that a very vocal subset of gamers expects that games will come with months and years of substantial post-release changes provided free-of-charge and that many devs -for better or worse- provide what these folks are demanding.

[0] ...but definitely not all of them...

[1] Granted, all sorts of things get called "asset flips", so the "low-effort" part is the important bit here.

	▲	flavionm 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Always having some instance of someone messing up is still substantially different from more instances than not being messed up. So it did actually matter quite a lot. Now, as someone who is an avid retro gamer, I play plenty of those old games you're talking about. In the very old days, games were definitely shorter, but by the 5th and 6th gen, the gap isn't quite as big. If anything, they're often too large now, but that's neither here nor there. Budgets are bigger, teams are bigger, and most importantly, the consumer base is bigger. So size of games and expansions needs to be looked at relatively. Regardless, for non-early access (of which NMS is an example of in all but name) and non-live service games, there mostly isn't an expectation that content will be added, only that updates will be made that improve and fix what's there. The exceptions are mostly when there's a pattern of content uodates happening before, or when something is clearly incomplete compared to what's usual for a series. See the Monster Hunter series as an example for both the latter ones. Overall, it's natural for customers to want things that are at least as good or better than before when technology improves. It's the opposite that should not be happening.

▲ spandrew 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This isn't an arguement I'm making.

There's a difference between DLC and providing "the base game content" – which No Man's Sky was doing. It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now. They could have cut their losses but it would've ended the studio.

Now they're being touted as a paragon of scrappy game dev. Which is wrong.

	▲	simoncion 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now. I'd argue that it was barely a game at launch, and it's still barely a game today... it has always been a sandbox with very little game in it, and that's fine. [0] But that's neither here nor there. They released a "game" ten years ago. They've updated that "game" many times and never charged for updates. That makes those updates free. You can justifiably be angry about the circumstances of the launch, and justifiably be angry that anyone's saying anything good about the devs. That doesn't change the fact that this [3] `And the features they've bolted on "for free"...` is an asinine use of scare quotes. The updates were delivered free of charge, and the price of the base game hasn't been increased to account for them. This makes them free updates. [0] See the fourth paragraph of [1] as well as most of [2] for a little more commentary on this. [1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630148> [2] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630824> [3] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629510>

▲ EagnaIonat 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bolted on? A lot of the core mechanics were rebuilt or added over the 10 years.

> based on them staggering a few nonsense releases

This has to be a troll. Or you haven’t touched the game in years.

What other game has had 10 years of free updates that has dramatically changed the game?

▲ micromacrofoot 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it looks like a variety of game that it's not, and there's a dissonance there... it's not an action/adventure game, it's a sandbox of procedural generated worlds where you gather resources to unlock new builds.

You can build bases, manage settlements, maintain a fleet, build ships and exocraft, build multi-tools, have pets battle each other, cook food, manage the economy... but there's only a thin relationship/lore system and not much of a difficulty ramp at any point.

You're space farming, if you expect anything else you won't like it.