With its new game, Hello Games is literally promising the world. Is the developer of No Man's Sky about to make the same disastrous mistakes all over again?
I mean, everything they showed in the trailer is in NMS right now, and it's pretty clearly in the same engine.
With No Man's Sky, it was a [relatively] unknown studio making some pretty massive claims and then showing what turned out to be pretty exaggerated footage to sell it. There's no getting around the fact that they over promised and under delivered, to say the least.
But this is different. They have done everything they're saying and showing is in this new game now, it's in NMS right now, you can go play it and do all the same things but with a scifi flavour instead of fantasy. I'm not sure where people's doubts are coming from.
Whether or not it will be good is subjective, there are still people who don't like NMS' gameplay loop and that's fine it's not for everyone. But the features are there.
I get that it's really easy to be negative and jaded about it but cmon, I just want more (good) MMOs to play. Hello Games has both the budget and the experience to make it a good game, and the fact that they are trying to do it in a pretty struggling and stale genre is commending IMHO.
Of course I'm not preordering or believing anything they say until I see it for myself, that goes without saying - but we shouldn't actively root for them to fail like many of the comments here are seemingly doing. Let's not be "those" always-negative online people just looking for a reason to hate, I'm sure this game will finds its audience the same way NMS did eventually and I personally hope I'm one of them.
Yeah, I'm not personally interested in an MMO, but nobody wins if they fail. I want more great games, even if they're in genres that I'm uninterested in, because they can spark ideas for other devs to make great games in genres I do care about.
Don't worry, when it fails to live up to the expectations they'll spend the next decade slowly adding some features. People will love them for continuing to do their best.
At this point under-delivering is a marketing strategy. Just promise the world to lure in pre-orders, then release it too early in a broken state and spent the rest of the time that you had planned to develop it anyway to fix up the title and reap the press articles about your comeback and how much work you do for the fans. Gullible idiots will praise and defend you with their lives on social media. Worked for NMS, CP2077 and many other titles.
I think that the reviewer is missing the point that this is still just no man's sky with a few tweaks and a different set of inputs. I look at this and the bones of no man's sky are plain to me, the flesh there to see, just... tweaked.
It's fair to expect that all the lessons learned from no man's sky will probably be applied here.
Well they get the experience from building No Man Sky from the disastrous state to what it is right now. From the trailer, they didn't seems to promise as much as No Man Sky, which is billions of world, instead they now focus on a single proc-gen world. Not like it never done before(Valheim, Minecraft, No Man Sky, etc etc).
At this point everyone should know they just lie to see what they cam get away with and then see what actually needs to be delivered in the next years only to still have a boring game
That's the problem I have with their flavor of procedural generation: While there was some thematic difference between some planets, exploring them always felt like being on the same place.
Oddly enough I never felt this way with Minecraft and I can't say why...
I expect the great leap forward in LLMs and AI art to dramatically change this at some point. They can already write pretty interesting plot with OK prompting, surely only a matter of time before someone is able to wrap that in a game.
I agree with you 100%. The difference could be in the "uncanny valley" of proc gen... Minecraft is blocky, so you suspend judgement and just find the attention to detail a wonder, while perhaps realistic-looking proc gen games are not quite realistic enough.
Funnily enough I was talking to my teenagers on this exact subject last night. At a basic level, nms appears to have what Minecraft does, plus spaceships. Why doesn't it work the same?
For us, we decided that nothing in Minecraft is difficult to get at the level you need it. Wood is easy, always there. When you learn that you need coal for torches, it's just in that rocky outcrop. Start digging, here's some iron for you.
In Minecraft you don't need to understand anything complex, until you're ready to understand something complex. And if you want to spend a week running around on the surface and collecting chickens, you can do that too.
I restarted a nms game the other day and remembered that constant "warning, warning" as the planet inevitably tries to kill me. It was disheartening.