No Man’s Sky. The big boy in the PS4 library and the talk of the town for the past year or so. And the official result? Mediocrity and controversy. Maybe not the verdict Hello Games were looking for. But in the end, who’s to blame for the Molyneux effect?
What’s the Molyneux effect? To put it simply, it’s a move where a game is built up on so much promise, so much expectations that at the end, it will not succeed. Never. (See the Fable series for reference.) But this time it’s different. The blame isn’t just on the developer. Who else?
Vague Communication from Developers
Well, first, obviously the developers themselves, with just how vague they were leading up to this. Ever since day one, there were.. Off promises. Multiplayer, variety the likes you which you can only dream of and in the end?
The multiplayer was a lie and the variety was only on the surface level. With more issues coming up, it seems like the game will need to be put on life support with an abundance of patches. And with that, the fire spreads.
Overzealous Fans
Second, the fanbase, who seem to have taken extreme measures in order to silence any criticism. Coming in guns blazing whenever negativity is shared, they’ll do anything to silence censorship, from petty insults about game tastes, to death threats whenever critique or news is shown, to DDOSing an entire website to “eradicate” said criticism. It’s amazing just how toxic a fanbase can be in such a small amount of time.
Planets. And More Planets?
A third culprit could be the advertising itself, which didn’t really attempt to sell the game on anything but the gimmick itself. Whenever I saw a trailer or an advert, it was always the 18 quintillion planets coming in first, frothing at the mouth and they jump around, with everything else just shoved in the back.
That’s it? What about the gameplay itself? Focus on that, I mean yeah, 18’000’000’000’000’000’000 planets, but what’s there to do in them? Where’s the context? If this is an a play in order to be better than it’s peer, Minecraft, is there a leap in that particular game’s mechanics and how it works?
Main Culprit: Hype Culture
And the biggest suspect of them all is the entity which has killed many a game before it’s latest victim. Hype culture itself. People consistently pulling the rope until eventually, it leaves the subject hanging there on its own, with nothing to stand on, and the end result is the fans trying to put the blame on anything and everything but themselves. Because it “wasn’t their fault”. They WERE the ones pushing the game forward to be the best thing since super sliced bread.
But the thing is, why does this happen? If the fans are so eager to play it and defend it to the point where they threaten to slit a mans throat for reporting on a delay, then forget defending it and play it. Have fun and leave the keyboards, put your gametime of 30-60 hours in and claim it’s GOTY material, that’s perfectly fine! But please don’t attempt to destroy any naysayers as then the cracks begin to show. You don’t seem like a fan of the game, you seem like a disgruntled employee, mad because people might be calling out the game for the broken, boring product it may very well be.
You are you, you have your opinions, and that’s fine. Nobody wants you to change, just stop rushing to the developers defense in an immature manner. They’re big boys, they can speak for themselves. But in the end? It doesn’t really matter if they do or don’t. That’s the neverending cycle of hype culture itself. Hello Games have the cash now. They don’t really need to do anything. And it’ll happen with the next big release sold on empty promises, lies and shady going ons in the background.
Manage Your Expectations!
This is just one of the various titles bought up on hype alone, and then comes up empty to a cry of disappointment. The Division. Destiny. Fallout 4. Arkham Knight. Games built on promises. And that stuff is easy to break. True, these games DO function but came out with nothing, just a boring slog through the same old tripe, with the only exception at this point being Destiny, whose DLC (groan.) and plans to sell the base game along with all the DLC announced for RRP has saved some hope.
Keep your expectations low, people, that’s all I’m saying.