Since No Man's Sky was released, people have been tirelessly chronicling falsehoods, half-truths, and lies-by-omission that occurred during the game's PR cycle. There's massive annotated Reddit posts noting every feature that never came to fruition. While I think this is important, and that every publisher or developer should have their feet held to the fire for over-promising or faking demos or under-delivering.....a lot of that stuff has just been petty quibbles masking and ignoring one central problem:
No Man's Sky just isn't really any fun to play for any extended period of time. The core gameplay loop is mostly just a chore. Resource collection is dull, space flight is competent but dogfighting sucks, character movement is plodding, and inventory management is atrocious. Survival/resource management elements are a constant nag that limits your desire to explore. None of these problems would have been helped even if the undelivered features had manifested themselves.
You can't "meet" other players? Even if you could, there's about a 1 in a trillion chance that it might happen. If you were lucky enough to be able to orchestrate meeting another player like those two Redditors did, there's nothing interesting or engaging that you could do together. If me and a friend could go shoot a gun at rocks together, I'd still rather be playing a different game with my friend.
There's no faction alignment system? Okay, but if there was how would it have made the game any better? Most faction-systems in games amount to little more than a progress bar that rewards you with faction-related items, quests, and perks. It makes some faction-controlled areas easier or harder to travel through depending on your faction alignment. Within the shallow framework of No Man's Sky, I don't see how this would have really made much of a difference. Maybe your faction gives you a quest to collect 500 Plutonium and they reward you with nice new engine or a special space ship. You still wouldn't be having any fun.
The scientific simulation isn't as in depth or detailed as described? Biodiversity and geographical diversity are lacking, and there's no accurate orbits or day/night cycles. Procedurally generated lifeforms have janky animations and are just a bunch of cobbled-together body parts? Sure, yes, that's a failure....but one that also would not have impacted gameplay that much. If the game had been able to create more convincing worlds I suppose people might have spent a little more time exploring, but I don't think that is enough to overcome the tedium at the game's core.
People feel cheated and deceived by the game, and in that hurt they've blamed Hello Games' false promises. But that's all a red herring, IMO. The problem is that people simply imagined the game to be way better than it was. The premise of No Man's Sky is something that sounds incredibly compelling on paper. But when that premise is designed and actually implemented into a game, it's incredibly tiresome and shallow. I'm not trying to say that "If you feel disappointed, it's because you got yourself overhyped". But at the same time, I think people willfully ignored big questions about what was going to fuel your sense of progression and exploration and simply assumed that Hello Games was competent enough to fill those questionable gaps with compelling gameplay and content. There was a hopeful faith that an RNG/procedural universe could be as immersive and surprising as a handcrafted one. Was it fair or wise to give Hello Games the benefit of the doubt? I suppose that's up to you.
EDIT: I tend to feel like this game was able to tap into a weird sort of nostalgia, and feed off of it. Again and again on podcasts I heard people say something to the extent of "This is the game I've dreamed about ever since I was a little kid. And someone's finally made it!" Being able to explore a mysterious unknown planet and then just hop on a space ship, get into a massive space battle, and then go explore another planet is something we've all wanted. I think people just got a bit caught up in seeing some childhood dream fulfilled, rather than questioning whether their 12-year-old self really had great game design sensibilities.
TLDR: Blaming your disappointment on the admittedly sheisty No Man's Sky PR is the wrong way to go. Hello Games was ill-advised to promote the game the way they did, but I don't think their false statements are what really brought the game down. People were pretty much blinded by the game's incredible promise, so much so that they stopped asking questions about core issues. In the future, I hope more people can be healthy skeptics even in the face of a game that is incredibly ambitious.
No Man's Sky just isn't really any fun to play for any extended period of time. The core gameplay loop is mostly just a chore. Resource collection is dull, space flight is competent but dogfighting sucks, character movement is plodding, and inventory management is atrocious. Survival/resource management elements are a constant nag that limits your desire to explore. None of these problems would have been helped even if the undelivered features had manifested themselves.
You can't "meet" other players? Even if you could, there's about a 1 in a trillion chance that it might happen. If you were lucky enough to be able to orchestrate meeting another player like those two Redditors did, there's nothing interesting or engaging that you could do together. If me and a friend could go shoot a gun at rocks together, I'd still rather be playing a different game with my friend.
There's no faction alignment system? Okay, but if there was how would it have made the game any better? Most faction-systems in games amount to little more than a progress bar that rewards you with faction-related items, quests, and perks. It makes some faction-controlled areas easier or harder to travel through depending on your faction alignment. Within the shallow framework of No Man's Sky, I don't see how this would have really made much of a difference. Maybe your faction gives you a quest to collect 500 Plutonium and they reward you with nice new engine or a special space ship. You still wouldn't be having any fun.
The scientific simulation isn't as in depth or detailed as described? Biodiversity and geographical diversity are lacking, and there's no accurate orbits or day/night cycles. Procedurally generated lifeforms have janky animations and are just a bunch of cobbled-together body parts? Sure, yes, that's a failure....but one that also would not have impacted gameplay that much. If the game had been able to create more convincing worlds I suppose people might have spent a little more time exploring, but I don't think that is enough to overcome the tedium at the game's core.
People feel cheated and deceived by the game, and in that hurt they've blamed Hello Games' false promises. But that's all a red herring, IMO. The problem is that people simply imagined the game to be way better than it was. The premise of No Man's Sky is something that sounds incredibly compelling on paper. But when that premise is designed and actually implemented into a game, it's incredibly tiresome and shallow. I'm not trying to say that "If you feel disappointed, it's because you got yourself overhyped". But at the same time, I think people willfully ignored big questions about what was going to fuel your sense of progression and exploration and simply assumed that Hello Games was competent enough to fill those questionable gaps with compelling gameplay and content. There was a hopeful faith that an RNG/procedural universe could be as immersive and surprising as a handcrafted one. Was it fair or wise to give Hello Games the benefit of the doubt? I suppose that's up to you.
EDIT: I tend to feel like this game was able to tap into a weird sort of nostalgia, and feed off of it. Again and again on podcasts I heard people say something to the extent of "This is the game I've dreamed about ever since I was a little kid. And someone's finally made it!" Being able to explore a mysterious unknown planet and then just hop on a space ship, get into a massive space battle, and then go explore another planet is something we've all wanted. I think people just got a bit caught up in seeing some childhood dream fulfilled, rather than questioning whether their 12-year-old self really had great game design sensibilities.
TLDR: Blaming your disappointment on the admittedly sheisty No Man's Sky PR is the wrong way to go. Hello Games was ill-advised to promote the game the way they did, but I don't think their false statements are what really brought the game down. People were pretty much blinded by the game's incredible promise, so much so that they stopped asking questions about core issues. In the future, I hope more people can be healthy skeptics even in the face of a game that is incredibly ambitious.
