I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development - the game of the last few years is absolutely nothing like the early one and I agree, there is a surprising amount of stuff to do.

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djeastm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>stuff to do

This is the whole problem in a nutshell. I want a Game™ and they're providing "stuff to do".

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consumer451 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have never played, but I watched all the drama unfold on reddit. It makes me wonder, is this what happens when you have an underwhelming launch? "You only make a first impression once" - and there is a huge price to pay for that?

In SaaS and YC, it's ship early and ship often, right? Is that absolutely not the case in games? Also, how true is it in SaaS? Genuinely curious here.

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JohnMakin 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, I believe this is a thing. I'm not sure why, but I think for game releases, especially hyped AAA games, your highest player counts are almost definitely going to be the highest in the first weeks of release, so that's the strongest impression. Almost all games see a steep drop off of concurrent players later on, then it stabilizes. Improvements later are thus much less visible, and all the players that got the bad first impression have little reason to go back. I think NMS particularly made a bad mistake compounding this by hyping up the game beyond what it could actually do when it was released - that's an unforgiveable sin to a gamer.

Stuff like this, it's why I often avoid big releases for the first year or two then go play it when it's on sale.

For another perfect game example - Star Wars Outlaws. Terrible, buggy release with obnoxious gameplay loops. They fixed it, now it's one of the better games I've played recently. You can go look up gameplay reviews from the last year to see people shocked at its reputation, it's a very good game now and arguably would have been a candidate for GOTY if it had released in its current form.

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teamonkey 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In general that’s correct and you can generally estimate sales over the life of the game before the the end of release day. But there are also early access games, which are completely the opposite. Not very much in between those two extremes though.

NMS really is an exception, that they sold well enough at launch that they can keep providing free major updates for 10 years.

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throwaway314155 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 are actually proof you can have an awful launch and still pivot into a large player base and continued sales via updates.

Reception for both games is largely positive despite their poor initial response.

	▲	bigyabai 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Cyberpunk 2077 is in a worse state, though. CDPR axed multiplayer from the roadmap after launch, and the updates it got (eg. working police cars, outfit transmog) should have been there at release. NMS is no crown jewel, but Hello Games did add multiplayer and held pretty close to the original vision that was offered. It's much more "fixed" than current Cyberpunk 2077 is, at least IMO.

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jader201 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

FWIW, I was there from the beginning, and stopped fairly quickly (maybe 20 or so hours in).

I hopped back in a couple years later after a few updates, and agree that the quantity of content was pretty big. But the quality was not -- it still felt "empty", and never held my interest long.

Last year, the same thing happened. I hopped back on after a few big updates, probably spent another 10 or so hours on it (I think I started over), and felt like I had explored all there was.

I feel like all the criticisms it gets are valid. I agree that the effort of maintaining a game after 10 years is incredibly admirable, especially since ever update has been free. That's amazing. And the devs should be acknowledged for that.

But the game itself still feels largely empty. The progression feels mostly repetitive without feeling like you're really moving forward in a meaningful way. And, as others have said, the proc gen still feels "vanilla".

I probably won't hop back in after this update. I've learned, by now, that while many praise the new content, it'll probably just feel like more of the same to me.

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seplox 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As someone who played it for the very first time just last year, those 10 year old takes ring absolutely true to my experience in the game. It was fun for a little while, but it became repetitive and shallow quickly.

Different strokes, I guess.

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rc5150 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think maybe you're discounting that people have agency and can decide that a game they are playing actively doesn't tick their boxes. I reinstalled it last week and put in about two hours before uninstalling again. Mile wide and inch deep is exactly the way to describe it.

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JohnMakin 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> I think maybe you're discounting that people have agency and can decide that a game they are playing actively doesn't tick their boxes.

> Mile wide and inch deep is exactly the way to describe it.

Aren't you doing the same thing you're saying? Plenty of comments in this thread disagree with your assessment. If the game isn't for you, that's one thing, but it's a factually untrue thing to say "there's nothing to do, game is sparse after a few hours and novelty wears off" like many comments say. This suggests the person did not actually see a lot of the game, which is fine, but it's still not a trustworthy evaluation to me.

	▲	seplox 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"There's nothing to do" is a straw man. There are about 6 things to do over and over and over and over.

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simoncion 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development...

Some are, sure. But -I say as someone who enjoys the game for what it is and still pops in every now and again to mess around with it- there's not much game in the game. Like BoBaitlyn said, it's a sandbox game. It has always been a sandbox game, and there are some folks who spend a few minutes fucking around with the sand in the box, go "WTF, this is boring as shit. I'm out!" and are boggled at the folks who enjoy playing with all the sand.

There's nothing wrong with being boggled or talking about how much you hated the sandbox. Specific sandboxes tend to appeal to specific sorts of people... each one often has its own gimmick that will pull in different sorts of folks. Suggesting that most complainers are complaining from a position of ignorance when they're complaining about a lack of things to do in a game that doesn't have much game in it kinda sucks. I've been playing off and on since v1, and have played for about half of the major patches. Hello Games has added a lot of stuff, but they haven't really added in much game to the game, if you see what I'm saying?