Saturday Morning Gaming: No Man’s Sky’s Evolution
When No Man’s Sky came out (three years ago!) it was, shall we say, Peter Molyneuxy.
The developers said it was going to have a lot of bells and whistles that it didn’t end up having. More than that, the bells and whistles it did have (and it had a lot) were obviously procedurally generated rather than something that felt organic.
So there was a bloodbath even after developers said stuff like “That means this maybe isn’t the game you imagined from those trailers“, players yelled stuff like “WHAT THE HECK!” and, my goodness, there was drama.
Well, it’s now three years later (holy cow!) and the game actually got good. The reviews on Steam have migrated from “overwhelmingly negative” to “mixed” and the recent reviews have achieved “mostly positive” which is a pretty amazing turnaround.
Well, come Wednesday, it gets the VR update. Which means that you can travel to procedurally-generated planets and wander around and contribute to the database and fly around in VR and inch ever closer to the game you imagined from those trailers.
We’ve all heard the complaints about how game devs have made players the beta testers and now we’re pretty much in a place where game devs have made us the alpha testers and that is NOT the direction I wanted us to move in… but No Man’s Sky seems to be the very rare game that actually clawed its way out of the awful state it was in at launch into a good, solid, playable state.
(I’ll still wait for the reviews to settle down before dropping some money for this, though. I’ve been Molyneuxed too many times.)
So… what are you playing?
(Featured images are “South Bend Fish-Oreno #953” by Wapster and “Light Switch” by Artform Canada. Both used under a creative commons license.)
I always liked Molyneux, but if anyone showed up the weakness of gaming journalism, it was him. (And decades before “gamergate”.) Everybody rolled over for “Black & White”, even me. But as a player I can be as generous as I want to be. B&W got the reviews similar to Microsoft’s: “Yeah, it’s buggy and will cause you pain, but you pretty much have to use it.”
Still love “Dungeon Keeper” though.Report
I so loved B&W as a concept. Dungeon Keeper (and especially DKII) was pure gold and its only imperfection was simply that there wasn’t much much more of it.Report
So many of Molyneux’s games made me feel like they could be perfect if only they weren’t broken.
DK and DKII didn’t, though. They actually got what they were shooting for.Report
I finally caved and started a Darkest Dungeon run on “Radiant” difficulty (that’s easy mode). It’s another case where I wish there was a difficulty between “Radiant” and “Darkest” (normal mode).But this run has at least taught me a few things, chief among them that I play far too cautiously!Report
I need to return to No Man’s Sky. I bought it when it came out for the xbox one (that version was touted to be “improved” over the original release). It’s impressive in some ways, but the grindy aspect turned me off a bit. The scanning of each planet’s flora and fauna is satisfying, as is the mining. But the resource costs of stuff start to skyrocket; I probably didn’t play enough to really master the systems.Report
I was happy to play Azul and Catacombs last week with my family.Report
The thing is that it wasn’t just trailers, it was actual statements by the guy himself about features that didn’t appear in the game at launch, and the first anyone learned they weren’t in the game was when they started the game they’d paid for and the features weren’t there, and the response to complaints about this was “WELL WE NEVER ACTUALLY PROMISED THAT WOULD BE IN THE GAME, STOP ACTING SO ENTITLED, YOU GAMERS ARE SO SPOILED”.Report
and, y’know, from the sound of things, they’ve basically taken the game engine and shoved a whole new game into it, and on the one hand that’s great, but on the other hand it does kinda show that everyone was right to complain about the launched product not actually being complete…Report
Welp. It’s broke.Report