Let’s talk about hype for a moment, shall we?
“Hype” is what drives markets to succeed overall. It’s what makes the money, pays for the advertisements, milks the preorders, and draws attention to the product over time.
It puts the game in the center of the millions of games already out there, or at least grants them a place among the top anticipated games of that year. No “hype” equals no consumers, and no consumers equals a failed game. Simply put, we can disparage the idea of “hype” until we’re blue in the face, but it’s a well-known fact that without it, we wouldn’t have a gaming industry.
However, this isn’t to say that “hype” is necessarily something that should be milked until it’s dry, and nowhere this year is that more apparent than in No Man’s Sky.
What began as a promising concept from indie studio Hello Games turned into an explosion of developer previews and compelling footage backed by Sony, who liked the concept and decided to back the game. As you might expect, this tripled the game’s popularity.
Failing to Deliver on Promises
Despite what was promised, things started to look a bit too familiar on the day of release – and after having paid a hefty $60, many, if not most players ended their journey through space extremely disappointed. So….what happened?
Recently, Reddit user Undust4able posted an extensive and constantly growing list of everything that was promised, yet left out of No Man’s Sky upon release. It’s not exactly news that a video game left some things out of the promised final release, but for such an overhyped, highly anticipated game, you’d think that list would be a little bit shorter.
Give Us Something to Do?
In a lot of ways, No Man’s Sky’s gameplay doesn’t justify the cost. You walk around, mine nodes, look at and study wildlife, and explore planets, which all start looking the same after awhile. There’s no true survival – you have to defend yourself, but there’s no way you can really play survival the same way you could in the Elder Scrolls or Fallout games.
And let’s face it – not everything needs to be Skyrim (and it really shouldn’t), but there are a lot of concepts that, if added to No Man’s Sky, could have made for an amazing space based RPG. Instead, we get a breathtakingly beautiful world that simply gets old far too quickly due to the lack of…well, things to do.
That said, NMS is by no means the worst game ever made, and the devs aren’t just a bunch of lazy twenty-somethings in it for the quick cash. The backlash is understandable, but there are still plenty of people playing. There’s definitely some fun to be had in the game as a whole for the right people, despite it having suffered from big-name company hype and quite possibly some corporate meddling behind the scenes.
Honesty Goes a Long Way
The lesson we can take from this is not to avoid hyping up a game, but to encourage a more honest, upfront gaming development culture that focuses on polishing the final version rather than pushing it out long before it’s ready, along with slapping on a completely unjustified $60 price tag. Given that Sony was backing the game, it didn’t come off as much of a surprise that the price ended up being so high.
We’re just not too happy about the fact that half of what we were promised did not make it into the final product.
For now, we’re not too sure what kind of content we might be getting in the future, or if the game will even manage to generate enough revenue to promote new content. No Man’s Sky wasn’t a complete letdown, but it’s yet another game in the rapidly growing line of titles that promised an atom bomb and delivered a shell.