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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Every year social media hits me hard with "No Man's Sky is good now!" — and I bit and dove in with a few buddies.
To say everything in this game is half baked is giving it too much credit. It's 10% baked at best. This isn't a game; it's an underwhelming tech demo. The only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.
Everything else is baaaad: the quests have less logic than entry MMO quests, and are mainly fetch missions. The planets are randomly generated slop. The economy of building up your ship/fleet isn't fun (you just sell your ships over and over again). Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that are clearly just trying to trick folks into buying an elaborate space game tech demo. Can we move on from this "game"?
> Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1.
IIRC, back in the v1 days you'd give an NPC a species-specific valuable trinket and they'd teach you a randomly-selected word of their race's language. Learning words was useful for when you'd encounter a historical relic that presented an important scene from history, and when you encountered an NPC that was requesting assistance. In both cases, they'd make their speech or request in their native language, you'd be given a few context clues in the form of dialog describing gestures, NPC attitude, etc, and then you'd have to guess what action you needed to perform or resource of yours they needed. If you get it right, you get something nice.
Like many other systems in the game, this got reworked several times into what it is now: "Find an NPC, ask for language assistance, select a category of word to learn, and Bob's your uncle.". I won't claim that either the v1 or current methods of learning language are fun, but the v1 method did consume a resource that was often difficult to come by... so it made learning the language much more difficult. They could have cooked up three whole-ass conlangs and built in gradual language tutorials for each... but that'd be a surprising choice for a game whose most difficult puzzles are "Can you do basic arithmetic?" and "Can you understand which direction this list of numbers is rotating?".
There's never been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both got what they were being told by the story and weren't enraged by the implications gets why. The game's first story (such as it is) is why I'm always amused by people who don't dislike it, but also take it very seriously and want there to be a ton of stuff to do in it.
Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of stuff [0] over the years. I'm amazed that they're making enough money on the game to still be working on it a decade later, but here we are.
> It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that...
Eh. As someone who pops back in for a few hours when there's a major change, I don't mind at all the detailed patch notes.
> Can we move on from this "game"?
Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it.
[0] ...some of which is clearly playtesting for things planned for Light No Fire...
Amazon also did this for their "Look Inside" feature. To do this they had to spin up massive digital infrastructure——then realized that they could sell that infrastructure and make more money than from the books they were scanning.
This is was what ended up spinning up AWS as a business.
I dislike the idea of destroying rare books--but how rare? A digital copy has a lot more benefit.
Everytime a student says this—it's because they're procrastinating on their work. The hardest part about anything new is starting it. Once you build some momentum, interest and focus tends to build as well.There certainly are some homework assignments that are boring.
A child today can absolutely be successful at doing their homework if they have time to... sit down and write, or draw, or do crafts or things that require them to focus. It's not like Screens exist, therefore no attention span.
What's happening is people are only fixating on screens, and foregoing these slower forms of media. That's akin to saying all children will be obese now that fast food is around. Of course, obesity rates will sky rocket if all you eat is fast food. But if a kid grows up to have homecooked meals, and eat with their parent(s) then they won't. It's as simple as that.
This is too simplistic. There are disciplines, like Anatomy, where you're basically just memorizing bones, glands, and other parts of the human body. For organic chemistry, students need to memorize most of the krebs cycle diagram for their exams (because doing so and drawing it lets them reference it later).
Thinking is infinitely more complex than "critical thinking" vs. rote functions. You want students to get to critical, eventually, but the lower orders on bloom's taxonomy serve important roles, too.
Course design built around multiple choice questions, essays, and a lot of the historical assessments that we're used to are largely not great for learning in the first place—–they're used because they can be auto-graded or score assigned quickly. AI, conversely, is kind of revealing the limitations of these outmoded learning design practices.
Think of the meme going around right now from Milennials to Gen Z: "I wrote a 5 page essay on a book I never read!" <- They're saying this to AI generated essays as if there's any difference in the critical thinking that comes out of an exercise like that (read: absolutely none).
AI is a new tech—so of course people are still figuring out the limits of it. In 10 years a lot of the paradigm will be set. Until then, students are unfortunately kind of in the thick of it.
>Think of the meme going around right now from Milennials to Gen Z: "I wrote a 5 page essay on a book I never read!" <- They're saying this to AI generated essays as if there's any difference in the critical thinking that comes out of an exercise like that (read: absolutely none).
As somebody that read every mandatory reading book, I wish I had had the critical thinking skills to not read them. In retrospect, they were a waste of time and made me absolutely hate reading.
I did not suggest to burn it. They could have bought years ago a ram fab and ensure their supply will not dry up.
Now their sales will go down as a result of the failed planning. But more importantly lost once in a lifetime opportunity to corner the entire personal computer market
They could have, yes. But that's not really in their DNA and mostly an observation with the benefit of hindsight. Apple aren't a hardware manufacturer. Designer, yes. But the making has always been outsourced AFAIK.
Yeah but that's not what the discourse around water and AI is. When people speak about water and AI/dc's, they're indicating that water is being "taken" from other uses. As if a AI usage will oneday cause you to turn on your facet and nothing but an auto-tuned cackle comes out. That the well has gone dry. That water is a scarce resource (which, sometimes it is, esp. if you're drawing from an aquifer in the southwest)
A data centre's construction sentiment clogging pipes is fixable; an acute issue. The discourse is that AI causes chronic strain.
But like... the same people will watch 2-3 hours of HD Netflix or post on TikTok right after lodging their complaints on Reddit. The MW/h of AI isn't that big compared to these services. And the carbon sync of digital goods, including data centres, pales in comparison to the supply chain of Blockbuster. Nobody gave af then.
The reason they're cherry picking AI is because we're all sick of seeing tech billionaires thrive when everyone else is pressed by inflation and stagnant job markets.
I wish people would knock this off. There is zero path to AGI at the moment — and all the Anthropic/pentagon Sam Altman/AI-skynet stuff is scaring people into being fearful (and outright ignorant) to the actual uses of this probabilistic NPL tool.
You can't use AI atm without a human with proper knowledge spot checking and directing it. We should market it that way.
The current theme is that agi may not be definable, and an ai which matches humans on all economically relevant tasks is close enough for business purposes.
Billions spent on RL may be good enough to beat human performance.
This is not correct. People trust their "apps". They know Spotify's algo can feed them novel music. They know Kobo's reader connects to libraries in a way that isn't the DRM-lockin that Amazon shovels.
Most non-tech folks are incredibly skeptical about AI due to the piss-poor brand management of OpenAI and Anthropic—pushing an AGI Skynet post-employment narrative to make the tech feel bigger than it is.
I trust Google (and certainly Apple) to figure some of this stuff out—but nobody wants an LLM, that nobody knows how it operates, to run the show entirely. Heuristically, we may get away with a Human-on-the-loop approach—-not a Human-in-the-loop or Out-of-the-loop approach.
IMO the right next step, which Apple will get to slowly, is better Siri and better app intents. No apps reminds me a bit of the no folders, use search for everything and organize nothing, approach. To me it falls flat because structure - which apps provide - acts as context, memory, mental glue. Heck even changing the layout of apps on my home screen alters what i engage with, and remember to do.
Now generating apps will be game changer. But i dont think it means apps go away. I think we just get better apps, and more open apis (for llms to use).
You're making a hubris-laden assumption coders know the gaps their baking into their software — that any human has a decent enough grip on the multitudes of spinning logic duct taped together to make the internet run. Most vulnerabilities aren't "ignored"; they're in a neverending backlog or unknown.
If you closed all of the AI-discovered security vulnerabilities tomorrow - by the next day there'd be a host of new ones. That's software, baby.
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.
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