I followed this game for a while during development. Preordered it for PS4. Did not cancel preorder when all ghe reviews of it started leaking out. Have put some time in the game..I will tell anyone who has not purchased it to wait to see if it becomes worthwhile...or for the inevitable price drop.

I preordered it based on all those selling points. Procedure generated sandlot with infinite possibilities...but the bottom line is that the game just isn't fun to play.

The spaceship...this should have been your main home. It just isn't fun to fly. Not fun to control. No flying around the planet doing cool stuff. Not fun flying in space. No fun space battles.

Planet exploration...same boring thing over and over. Shoot a rock to with laser to mine iron. Shoot some plants to mine carbon. Shoot some rare metals for bigger amount of coin. Rinse and reat in another planet that looks the same...with maybe a different color.

You see the same stupid animals recycled. Oh hey its a lion with a hyena head...oh there is a turtle with an eagle head...some random animal part combined with another part. Some will attack if they are aggresive. Some you can feed and they follow you around.

Everything is getting more inventory space....get more inventory space so you can mine more stuff...so you can buy a ship with more storage space to mine more stuff...so you can buy more inventory space. You never move up to something more fun...just something to store more useless junk to sell after you shoot at things with your laser mining tool.

Its like the game designers got so vested in their procedure / formula of the universe creation that they forgot to ask the question whether the gamem is ANY fun to play? If you are supposed to keep wanting to play because you discover new planets (which just look like the previous 100 planets)...then they severely miscalculated. Granted...i did like ability to name stuff...you shoukd have seen Nipple Valley i discovered....it gets old damn fast...maybe 1 or 2 days fast...

Once Deus Ex and Madden come out Tuesday..i doubt i will even play this game again

Ouch!

It matters not,I'm still enjoying it. What does annoy me,after spending some considerable time in the toxic environment of the Steam forums is that people will bash it and they don't even own it.They just jump on the bandwagon of 'hate' and do their best to make sure that those of us that do own and enjoy it know about it.

It's a pity that Sean Murray wasn't upfront at the very beginning about what NMS would and wouldn't have at release.Maybe it was going to be MP,maybe for technical or other reasons it had to be removed,why else did the game box have labels stuck over the MP part? I'm not defending him,he did himself no favours in all those interviews and what with the botched release he's reaping the negativity from those things..

Hopefully they will add more content and now some mods are available who knows.

Steam forums are just as bad as YouTube video comment threads. I stay away from both.

I too often make the mistake that Steam reviews can be a reliable source. I guess for the more obscure genres it can, but I agree. NMS is getting a lot of unearned hate.

It failed to meet expectations, regardless of whether they were deserved or not. It must now suffer The Wrath of Internet.




The Jedi Master

I would say that it failed to meet the expectations of some players. Unfortunately those players,the haters,just like feminists and BLM have the loudest voices.

In this case, the game proably deserve the bashing.

Forums are akso filled with people posting how they love this game and calling anyone with any criticism of the game a hater...while not being able to explain what is enjoyable about the game.

For me, its Deus Ex time. If they made this game more enjoyable in the future i will give it a try again.

I blame Sony's lack of control in the marketing. This was probably meant to be a very enjoyable and chill exploration and survival indie niche game, that wanted to make itself stand out by adding "procedurally generated" elements to the game.

Sony turned it around and probably put undue stress on the small development team to add features that would justify AAA game pricing. Probably Sony encouraged an earlier release and convinced the team on getting better revenue by adding all these extra features as DLC.

A small studio developing their second game (they had developed 2 previous releases, but were based on the same gameplay), offered millions of dollars by a major publisher/distributor... they probably became too ambitious. I became interested and hyped in the game, not by nothing I was expecting on my own, but by the developers own words over many videos and presentations. That record is still there to see, so if they missed on the promises, they have only themselves to blame. Even now, they tend to communicate very vaguely about any feedback on the current state of the game.

I saw a video with a great example of a similar thing happening with a different result.

Bioshock Infinite's E3 footage showed a lot of features that never made it into the final game. Did anyone thought they were scammed by 2K and Irrational Games? No. Why? Because even without those things, B:I was a very good game.

I'm sure if NMS had been released as originally planned, and priced accordingly, there would be no controversy regarding promised features.

So it sounds to me like the big mistake was taking Sony's shilling.

Yup.


If you want to retain full creative control over your own project then you don't take any money from a big third party. It's that simple.

...but of course it's easier said than done.

I'm hesitant to always put the blame on the big corporations. I haven't been following this game, but my impression is that the devs were unprepared for the attention that the PR machine would generate. It's easy to get carried away, particularly if you get invited to talk shows etc.; Sony's failing would be to not train the guys how to deal with that level of attention.

I don't know about that, Sony got them major exposure and they sold a shedload more copies than they would have otherwise. Where's the mistake there?

I suppose it depends whether your goal is: profit, quality, or reputation

Despite the huge backlash,plus the current score on Steam (last time I looked it was near 50%) it doesn't seem to have dropped out of the top sellers list since day 1.

Figures show close to 800,000 owners on Steam,plus you have the other outlets,GoG,GMG etc and then you have PS4 sales. Those seem good figures to me for an Indie game with a AAA price tag.

Ssnake,you are more than likely right,Sony should have given SM some lessons on interviewing 101,he did not look at ease,almost like someone from Sony had a rifle trained on him from backstage.

I doubt Sony was the sole reasoning for this flop of a title. It's an average buggy procedural generation mining game in a market with a million of them.

Was Sony undoubtedly a part of blowing this game out of proportion? Sure. But the devs are quoted multiple times as saying things that were flat out lies, and they were intentionally ridiculously vague about anything whatsoever content wise to keep the hype train rolling. Combine that with the typical morons on the internet and you get a perfect storm of derp where a truckload of people buy into a mess of a game.

Frankly I wish I were working at Sony during all this, it's clear people are easily manipulated and foolish enough to preorder damn near anything they know nothing about.

I think we all learned that when Microsoft swayed Bungie with the original Halo. Series was tainted thereafter.

What? Was the Mac alpha supposed to be any better?

It was significantly better in the previews before Microsoft grabbed it, and slated to be a PC release first and foremost.

I'm kinda quite glad they took it over and made it an Xbox game.