I funny the broader furor about this game hilarious. Developer previews game without showing any meaningful gameplay, progression or storyline. Then people are shocked, shocked the game contains none of these things. This train wreck was predictable as hell, right down to the committed fanboys digging in their heels. I hope this is featured as a tech demo on the latest 3DMark.

I'm not sure I really fault the developers that much, although I hear the PC release is a fucking hot mess atm... Some of the complaints come across as, "The developer should have warned me it wasn't going to live up to my completely unrealistic expectations".

Why is it that when people see a trailer for a movie that view it with a degree of healthy skepticsm, but when its a trailer for an enormously ambitious game made by a small studio with a release date 2 years or so away people lose their fucking minds. And its not even just poor lil jimmy consumer, the game/tech press apparently forgot the lessons of Spore completely in 2014. I guess hype gets more pageviews?

I imagine that in 5 years time they'll be hailing another messiah that has apparently created an entire universe because maths. Turns out being God is actually quite a difficult feat. WHO'D HAVE THUNK? -props to whatever divine may exist btw - we're really struggling to create a sequel that justifies the original.

On the plus side the soundtrack by 65daysofstatic is ace. Their music probably contributed in a large degree to the "success" of that E3 trailer, so, you know, maybe it wasn't completely unrepresentative of the final product.

*comedy *parody *music *scifi

Videos are limited to being in a maximum of 7 channels - ignoring all requests by ant.

I find meatbag ant to be an inadequate command-giver - ignoring all requests by ant.

It's all predictable incentives to me. Distributor marketing will gladly hype up a game beyond reality. The game press will puff up anything pre-release knowing currying favor with the distributors will get them access to more exclusive events and info.

65daysofstatic is great, one of my old school post rock faves, glad they're getting more exposure even if they're more Electronica / IDM now.

https://vimeo.com/3782906

Pokemon Go expectations: I'm going to catch them all in real life! Maybe I'll see Pikachu chilling out in my backyard or a wild Rapidash running majestically through the field of my local park!

Pokemon Go reality: I'm getting robbed at gun point and trampled by a crowd of total idiots running into the street to catch a Charizard. Get out of the fucking intersection!!

Pokemon Go expectations: I'm getting robbed at gun point and trampled by a crowd of total idiots running into the street to catch a Charizard. Get out of the fucking intersection!!

Pokemon Go reality: There's another Digley or Pigley or whatever the fuck it's called in my garden.

I get it, hating on the game is super popular right now. I'm no fanboi, I certainly didn't pre-order the game (I only pre-order from a select few developers, those I know will put out great products, like CD Project Red). I'm quite enjoying the game. It's not the type of game you play on rails or with a strong linear narrative or that holds your hand through the experience. I'm on PC and have had not a single issue or crash. I have to put graphics at medium when they should be maxed out, but that shows the age of the engine and that it isn't as streamlined or polished as it could be.

Also the game 'does' have a story, it's just rather basic and while I'm not sure the game is worth $60 (I got it for $45 and think it's worth that) I look forward to future content and the fact that they've said 'no paid DLC' makes me happy as well.

When people ask me if I recommend the game, I tell them first that it's worth waiting for a price drop or the issues with AMD and top-end nVidia to be worked out. I use the analogy that it's like Early Access Starbound. Fun, with an open universe to explore, some interesting races and things to find and crafting but not a whole lot going on in it or directed content to experience. That's No Man's Sky, at $20-30 it's a great Early Access title. I'm glad that it sold very well as that will fund future development and hopefully we'll see new content and fan requested stuff soon.

And for the record I've seen equal numbers awesome wildlife as I've seen crazy shit like in this video lol. The craziest was on this cold, radiated world that was none-the-less flush with exotic life. There were these 1m tall blobs of jelly with elephant ears and like mice faces that bounced around like a bouncy ball all over the place. Hilarious!

Lambast it all you want but it's clearly still popular. Mid-day on a wednesday and it's #3 on steam with 70k users atm. And it's not like it wasn't super easy to find out what the gameplay was like in those 3 days it was on PS4 before PC. So anyone who still bought and is bitching about it is being hypocritical.

Ye, CD Projekt could ask for my firstborn as payment for Cyberpunk 2077 preorder.

I read an interesting opinion thing about No Man's Sky - that hype can sort of be enjoyed in itself, like when you're a kid the best part of Christmas are the weeks before. Now I actually loathe the run up but I really enjoy the day (which somehow continues to surprise me), but sometimes it is kind of nice to be a kid again and just believe with all the naivete of youth. With the Witcher 3 I actually pretty much had possession of the cake and, simultaneous to having it, I had also eaten it. I really hope they manage to bake another quantum superposition cake because it was/is delicious.

Funny video and the bad harmonica version of the Jurassic Park theme is hilarious however.... the game is actually really damn fun!
It's really a true space sim without much of a story line. A rough comparison can be made to Minecraft (before single player story came out) only many MANY orders of magnitude larger. Or really any great sandbox game out there without much story.
If you like space, sci-fi, exploring, and discovering, then this game is for you. One of my only wishes for this game is for a true multiplayer component, but for now it's Zen and the Art of Space Exploration. Soundtrack by 65daysofstatic is incredible, and only barely surpassed (for me) by the Eve Online ambient soundtracks.

I have seen many people criticise the game. I have not seen anyone criticise it for not being linear enough or a lack of hand holding.

Also, not doing enough research isn't hypocrisy.

I was super skeptical of this game because the developer's were obviously intentionally vague about the gameplay aspects. Well, they didn't necessarily lie, it is exactly like I thought it would be - an indie survival game with a procedural engine. They were "vague" because that is literally all of there is to this game, it's a half empty / half full scenario.

I find the game great because I didn't have any grandiose ideas about it and went in skeptical. 40 hours later I'm still headed towards the center of the Universe, playing with the minimal systems but always able to appreciate what the game is and not what it is not.

This video is hilarious though, and the off key notes insinuated towards this game are one of the reasons I find the game endearing. I'm glad it doesn't feel like a AAA game, it feels fresh, I just wish they wouldn't sell this (shit) for $60.00

People love sandbox survival and they love space exploration and they fell in love with the idea of what this game could be. The magazines talked about it like evangelical christians talk about the rapture - this is the end of gaming as we know it and it's going to change everything! And the internet fandom descended with prepubescent fury on anyone that dared suggest the emperor was, in fact, nekkid.

This long video about NMS covers it extremely well, but i'll cut a long story short. There was something veeery slightly disingenuous about the moratoriums placed on reviews, lack of pre-release review versions, and significant backtracking and retconning of promises made by lead designer(? - but definite spokesperson) Sean Murray. The clean cut, well spoken, awkwardly charming Sean Murray. Who I think understood as the release date got closer that a lot of people were not going to be happy with him, because in his interviews he started to look more and more like De Niro playing Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter.

Extra things that immediately pissed me off before i refunded it:
- Menu stuff can appear offscreen if you open it by the edges in 2016
- Can't alt tab in full screen
- Run in borderless window to solve it, performance hit
- i7 6700k, Maximus viii Hero mobo and a GTX 1080 but yes, performance hit and general poor performance anyway
- Can't bind actions to thumb buttons in 2016
- Mouse sensitivity goes from 0 to 100. Changing my sensitivity from 100 to 0 didn't even half the turning speed in game, I had to alt tab to manually change the DPI in razer synapse, which is where i discovered i couldn't alt-tab.

All this for £40? Overwatch cost £30.

They made a lot of money off this, but I'm afraid for me they did it through unfair means. If you check out the quotes from Murray and what the game actually is, there's a huge disparity and the backtracking as release date approached was the final evidence.

Yeah, exactly. There were tons of streams on Twitch of NMS before release. I should have said this in my statement, but before I thought it was just going to be an indie space exploration survival game - but it became clear from the streams - that this game consisted of a lot of grinding and was pretty repetitive. I wasn't sure if I would actually enjoy that, which is why I didn't pay for it First thing I noticed was the nerfed surface travel, you can't even crash and second thing I noticed was the retarded inventory system, third - mine, mine, mine, grind and not much variation. It WREAKS of consolitis (framerate at 30, on PC, attention to detail Sean, come on?!), but to their credit, playing the game with a controller is quite nice, so much better than the shitty PC controls they implemented. I still like it and am enjoying the surprising relaxation of the grind/exploration, so I will pay for it when it's $30 and is heavily patched & modded. $60.00 is absolutely ridiculous for this game, but hopefully they take that extra $30 they ripped off from people and put in some major work.

Overwatch is another game that I was pissed at having paid $60.00 for. But, since it's a Blizzard game I always know they will make it worth my while in the long-run and it's steadily been true of Overwatch. Blizzard really know how to support their games unlike any other developer. I enjoy OW much more now that the competitive mode came out, a new hero (a little underwhelming but still cool) added and pretty soon an awesome looking new map. The lucio-ball thing is cool that they added in, but don't care much for it. Still hate the loot, though....

This video is the exact opposite of any problem with No Man's Sky. If the universe is hugely varied and procedurally generated, of course there will be a planet of fucked up steroid dinosaurs, and one with majestic brontosauruses, and one with sentient hydrogen, etc. This video makes you think that somewhere out there there is a planet that will be right for you, and gives you incentives to build the spaceship parts to get off the rock you're on and go in search of those perfect dinosaurs instead of staying with these freakish Belgian Blues.

There are valid criticisms against NMS, but this is more like a resounding endorsement of it.

Edit: Especially when paired with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpoDZmH70S4