No Man's Sky and its defenders have collectively cast acid on games discourse and left it in a state of permanent disrepair.
Whenever a new game comes out, and it inevitably launches broken, and feature-incomplete, and abjectly unfun, the same argument gets trotted out by those eager to defend their newest, shiniest toy: "Well, No Man's Sky had a bad launch too, and now it's great!" It's become something of a thought-terminating cliche; sure, the game in question is bad now, but this other game was also bad once, so don't worry too much about it. It's a defeatist attitude that's only ever put forward by people who have been conditioned to be complacent. It's the rallying cry of those who take pride in mediocrity. Don't complain about this new game being a buggy, unfinished piece of shit, because that's what No Man's Sky once was, and you're gonna look real foolish when the developers of the new game make it acceptable.
While this applies less often to those on Backloggd (and you will thus think I'm talking out of my ass if you've been incubated on and subsequently limited yourself exclusively to this site), using No Man's Sky as a shield against criticism is the common consumer-brained man's way of ensuring that nobody ever has a critical thought about something that sucks. It's astonishing how many people treat having quality standards as some sort of sin. You'll see it everywhere on Reddit, in the YouTube comments, on the Steam forums; waves and waves of people who will come to the absolute defense of whatever product they've recently gotten fixated on, always bringing up No Man's Sky as abject proof that one ought not complain about something coming out and being bad. After all, if it's good later, you don't want to be the dumbass naysayer who gets proven wrong by the scrappy little company who rode the wave of a supportive fanbase to a comeback, do you? Everyone loves an underdog. Who cares if the underdog in question is pulling millions in advertising funding from a publisher like Sony? It's purely vibes-based. Public opinion turning against a company makes the company seem like the one to root for, provided you've got zero fucking class consciousness (as is true for most Americans, who will make up the overwhelming majority of discussion on any given English-speaking website).
You'd assume then, naturally, that No Man's Sky has been made very good in the intervening seven years since its release. For anything to have such a positive reputation and such fanatical word-of-mouth proselytizing in wholly-unrelated conversations, to be anything less than stellar would be shocking. After all, No Man's Sky is held up as the poster boy for games being saved by the creators refusing to give up on them. So it's great, right? Good, at least?
No, it's one of the worst pieces of shit I've ever played.
No Man's Sky feels like a minimum viable product, emphasis on product. It's bordering on not being a game. People like to joke a lot about visual novels not really being games, and that's kind of true in the sense that your interactivity with them are going to be limited relative to other genres; especially in the case of kinetic novels, the actual "gameplay" is about as involved as turning pages in a book. Where visual novels distinguish themselves, however, is in the holistic experience: the visuals, the music, the sound design, the narratives. No Man's Sky does not have the decency to provide anything in these categories that is even remotely up to par. The gameplay loop itself consists of moving from Point A to Point B, shooting procgen plants and animals with a laser along the way, opening up your crafting menu, crafting something that will allow you to either craft more things or move to Point C, and then repeating for what How Long to Beat claims is thirty straight hours. There is barely anything beyond this. The game came out in 2016 but looks like a middle-era PS3 title, the music is literally randomly generated, the sounds may as well be Unity store assets, and whatever narrative is present is thin to the point of not being worth discussing. It really is kind of remarkable that after this many additions and changes over the course of over half a decade, what’s here still feels like it’s about eighteen months out from being ready to ship.
A friend of mine made the comment that if someone hooked me up to an EEG while I was playing, the machine reading my brain waves would report that I was comatose. I don't think I've ever been less engaged with a game than I've been in No Man's Sky; conversely, though, I don't believe that it's possible for anyone to be more engaged with it than I was. I'm loath to imagine the kind of person who sits down with No Man's Sky, plays it, and walks away at the end of the session feeling like they've done anything other than waste their time. I genuinely struggle to place myself in the shoes of anyone who can find this to be an enjoyable experience. There is nothing here. This game is void. I can only guess that the act of running around a barren, procedurally-generated planet with procedurally-generated fauna and procedurally-generated music and procedurally-generated sound effects is somehow what’s drawing people in, though I can’t for the life of me figure out why. People like to trot out that line about media being “soulless”, and I can’t think of a better word to describe this. It’s soulless. It’s endless capital-C Content being put together and delivered by a computer and then given to a player who has fucking nothing to do in all of this infinity. Much in the way that the bowls of gray slop that Neo ate in The Matrix were food, No Man’s Sky is a video game.
What I resent the most about No Man’s Sky, however, is the fact that it didn’t have the good sense to just quietly die after release and be eventually forgotten as another failure born from over-promises. I can accept that. I understand it. Shit happens. What bothers me is that Hello Games were either compelled to or felt it necessary to keep No Man’s Sky alive, always just on the periphery, dancing on the border between life and death — Victor Frankenstein throwing the switch to shock new and unnatural life into his monster’s decomposing parts. Knowingly or not, there’s poison in the well now, and so many dogshit, unfinished games now get to roll straight through production and onto the market in the wake that No Man’s Sky left behind. It was the first through the door in a paradigm shift that may well have been inevitable, but it’s still patient zero all the same. The sickest joke so far might be that Hunt Down the Freeman is now getting a remake, and people seem to be genuinely excited for it.
When I reviewed Hi-Fi Rush earlier this year, there was something I left unspoken that I think I should have said: Hi-Fi Rush reignited my faith in video games as a medium. Not that I believed it to be a dying format before — on the contrary, some of my favorite games have come out pretty recently — but it stood as a complete refutation of all of the marketing and middle manager meddling bullshit that financiers have been pushing ever since they realized how much money was in this shit. It shadowdropped, it didn’t have microtransactions, it provided an interesting spin on a niche gameplay loop, it was made by people with a clear vision and passion for what they were doing. It was a great game that proved you didn't need any of this superfluous marketing nonsense to succeed.
No Man’s Sky is the anti-Hi-Fi Rush. I have less faith in the medium after playing it and seeing the positive reception it’s gotten. If something is allowed to release broken, remain that way for years, and then still get celebrated and paraded as an example of how one ought never give up on a game when it’s still shit, then there really is no hope. People will defend fucking anything. It’s happening everywhere: PAYDAY 3 was nothing more than a start screen for nearly a week, and people still defended it, because it’ll be good eventually. Star Citizen has been pulling tens of thousands of dollars from clueless whales for years now, but it’s okay, because it’ll be good eventually. How about Diablo 4? We still waiting for that one to be good eventually? After all, No Man’s Sky had a bad launch too, and it became good eventually, right?
Fuck all of that. What’s so wrong about expecting a game to be good now?
Whenever a new game comes out, and it inevitably launches broken, and feature-incomplete, and abjectly unfun, the same argument gets trotted out by those eager to defend their newest, shiniest toy: "Well, No Man's Sky had a bad launch too, and now it's great!" It's become something of a thought-terminating cliche; sure, the game in question is bad now, but this other game was also bad once, so don't worry too much about it. It's a defeatist attitude that's only ever put forward by people who have been conditioned to be complacent. It's the rallying cry of those who take pride in mediocrity. Don't complain about this new game being a buggy, unfinished piece of shit, because that's what No Man's Sky once was, and you're gonna look real foolish when the developers of the new game make it acceptable.
While this applies less often to those on Backloggd (and you will thus think I'm talking out of my ass if you've been incubated on and subsequently limited yourself exclusively to this site), using No Man's Sky as a shield against criticism is the common consumer-brained man's way of ensuring that nobody ever has a critical thought about something that sucks. It's astonishing how many people treat having quality standards as some sort of sin. You'll see it everywhere on Reddit, in the YouTube comments, on the Steam forums; waves and waves of people who will come to the absolute defense of whatever product they've recently gotten fixated on, always bringing up No Man's Sky as abject proof that one ought not complain about something coming out and being bad. After all, if it's good later, you don't want to be the dumbass naysayer who gets proven wrong by the scrappy little company who rode the wave of a supportive fanbase to a comeback, do you? Everyone loves an underdog. Who cares if the underdog in question is pulling millions in advertising funding from a publisher like Sony? It's purely vibes-based. Public opinion turning against a company makes the company seem like the one to root for, provided you've got zero fucking class consciousness (as is true for most Americans, who will make up the overwhelming majority of discussion on any given English-speaking website).
You'd assume then, naturally, that No Man's Sky has been made very good in the intervening seven years since its release. For anything to have such a positive reputation and such fanatical word-of-mouth proselytizing in wholly-unrelated conversations, to be anything less than stellar would be shocking. After all, No Man's Sky is held up as the poster boy for games being saved by the creators refusing to give up on them. So it's great, right? Good, at least?
No, it's one of the worst pieces of shit I've ever played.
No Man's Sky feels like a minimum viable product, emphasis on product. It's bordering on not being a game. People like to joke a lot about visual novels not really being games, and that's kind of true in the sense that your interactivity with them are going to be limited relative to other genres; especially in the case of kinetic novels, the actual "gameplay" is about as involved as turning pages in a book. Where visual novels distinguish themselves, however, is in the holistic experience: the visuals, the music, the sound design, the narratives. No Man's Sky does not have the decency to provide anything in these categories that is even remotely up to par. The gameplay loop itself consists of moving from Point A to Point B, shooting procgen plants and animals with a laser along the way, opening up your crafting menu, crafting something that will allow you to either craft more things or move to Point C, and then repeating for what How Long to Beat claims is thirty straight hours. There is barely anything beyond this. The game came out in 2016 but looks like a middle-era PS3 title, the music is literally randomly generated, the sounds may as well be Unity store assets, and whatever narrative is present is thin to the point of not being worth discussing. It really is kind of remarkable that after this many additions and changes over the course of over half a decade, what’s here still feels like it’s about eighteen months out from being ready to ship.
A friend of mine made the comment that if someone hooked me up to an EEG while I was playing, the machine reading my brain waves would report that I was comatose. I don't think I've ever been less engaged with a game than I've been in No Man's Sky; conversely, though, I don't believe that it's possible for anyone to be more engaged with it than I was. I'm loath to imagine the kind of person who sits down with No Man's Sky, plays it, and walks away at the end of the session feeling like they've done anything other than waste their time. I genuinely struggle to place myself in the shoes of anyone who can find this to be an enjoyable experience. There is nothing here. This game is void. I can only guess that the act of running around a barren, procedurally-generated planet with procedurally-generated fauna and procedurally-generated music and procedurally-generated sound effects is somehow what’s drawing people in, though I can’t for the life of me figure out why. People like to trot out that line about media being “soulless”, and I can’t think of a better word to describe this. It’s soulless. It’s endless capital-C Content being put together and delivered by a computer and then given to a player who has fucking nothing to do in all of this infinity. Much in the way that the bowls of gray slop that Neo ate in The Matrix were food, No Man’s Sky is a video game.
What I resent the most about No Man’s Sky, however, is the fact that it didn’t have the good sense to just quietly die after release and be eventually forgotten as another failure born from over-promises. I can accept that. I understand it. Shit happens. What bothers me is that Hello Games were either compelled to or felt it necessary to keep No Man’s Sky alive, always just on the periphery, dancing on the border between life and death — Victor Frankenstein throwing the switch to shock new and unnatural life into his monster’s decomposing parts. Knowingly or not, there’s poison in the well now, and so many dogshit, unfinished games now get to roll straight through production and onto the market in the wake that No Man’s Sky left behind. It was the first through the door in a paradigm shift that may well have been inevitable, but it’s still patient zero all the same. The sickest joke so far might be that Hunt Down the Freeman is now getting a remake, and people seem to be genuinely excited for it.
When I reviewed Hi-Fi Rush earlier this year, there was something I left unspoken that I think I should have said: Hi-Fi Rush reignited my faith in video games as a medium. Not that I believed it to be a dying format before — on the contrary, some of my favorite games have come out pretty recently — but it stood as a complete refutation of all of the marketing and middle manager meddling bullshit that financiers have been pushing ever since they realized how much money was in this shit. It shadowdropped, it didn’t have microtransactions, it provided an interesting spin on a niche gameplay loop, it was made by people with a clear vision and passion for what they were doing. It was a great game that proved you didn't need any of this superfluous marketing nonsense to succeed.
No Man’s Sky is the anti-Hi-Fi Rush. I have less faith in the medium after playing it and seeing the positive reception it’s gotten. If something is allowed to release broken, remain that way for years, and then still get celebrated and paraded as an example of how one ought never give up on a game when it’s still shit, then there really is no hope. People will defend fucking anything. It’s happening everywhere: PAYDAY 3 was nothing more than a start screen for nearly a week, and people still defended it, because it’ll be good eventually. Star Citizen has been pulling tens of thousands of dollars from clueless whales for years now, but it’s okay, because it’ll be good eventually. How about Diablo 4? We still waiting for that one to be good eventually? After all, No Man’s Sky had a bad launch too, and it became good eventually, right?
Fuck all of that. What’s so wrong about expecting a game to be good now?
4 Comments
Oh, and I forgot to mention... Hunt Down the Freeman is getting a WHAT?????
I recoil in the same way from all the positive buzz Cyberpunk is getting. Fans of that game had to wait 3 years AND pay another forty bucks to get their game fixed. And everyone's treating it like some kind of redemption arc.
Thank you for saying this, and in such an entertaining manner too. More and more I feel that 'gamers' - those who base their entire life and emotional stability on following video game companies - are the most blindly devout of any hobbyists and place corporate worship above even their own rights and expectations. They act as if they owe it to developers or publishers to champion their games no matter how bad or broken they are. Gamers are the only group whom you could charge $70 to slap them in the face, and they'll come back for more.
I recall when Cyberpunk 2077 came out, and people were saying, "I won't play it now while it's broken, I'll wait a year or two while they fix it." I have to question why. That game should have caused CDPR to go bankrupt from giving out refunds. Instead it remained a smashing success because consumerists were willing to surrender a large sum of their hard-earned money to CDPR for jack shit in return.
Another extremely frustrating aspect of the post-No Man's Sky discourse, as you put it, is that you're now expected to keep up with the fucking behind-the-scenes development process of a game and sheep-brained audiences will actually defend a bad game, that they ACKNOWLEDGE is bad, by saying, "Well the developer had a tight deadline/they had to release it because of investors/they were under a lot of pressure," etc. I don't give a shit if the developers had to build the game in a cave with a box of scraps. Their job is to make a good game. It better be worth the money I pay for it, and it's not my business or problem to know why it sucks - it doesn't excuse them for making a shitty game. I fully feel your frustration on this. When people say, "You don't know how hard game development is! Think of the devs! The poor devs!" They're not mining blood diamonds in Sierra Leone, they're sitting in front of a fucking computer. Here is a list of other jobs that are difficult: Doctor. Lawyer. Air traffic controller. Taxi driver. And so on. We don't make excuses for those guys when they fuck up, do we?
Lastly, cuz you discussed how boring the game itself was... yeah. Another one of the many sins of No Man's Sky is making procedural generation famous. Procedural generation is a cancer, and 10 times out of 10, manually designed levels beat the shit out of this lazy-crap tactic. The only thing Hello Games did was make No Man's Sky playable. Doesn't mean they made it good.
I recall when Cyberpunk 2077 came out, and people were saying, "I won't play it now while it's broken, I'll wait a year or two while they fix it." I have to question why. That game should have caused CDPR to go bankrupt from giving out refunds. Instead it remained a smashing success because consumerists were willing to surrender a large sum of their hard-earned money to CDPR for jack shit in return.
Another extremely frustrating aspect of the post-No Man's Sky discourse, as you put it, is that you're now expected to keep up with the fucking behind-the-scenes development process of a game and sheep-brained audiences will actually defend a bad game, that they ACKNOWLEDGE is bad, by saying, "Well the developer had a tight deadline/they had to release it because of investors/they were under a lot of pressure," etc. I don't give a shit if the developers had to build the game in a cave with a box of scraps. Their job is to make a good game. It better be worth the money I pay for it, and it's not my business or problem to know why it sucks - it doesn't excuse them for making a shitty game. I fully feel your frustration on this. When people say, "You don't know how hard game development is! Think of the devs! The poor devs!" They're not mining blood diamonds in Sierra Leone, they're sitting in front of a fucking computer. Here is a list of other jobs that are difficult: Doctor. Lawyer. Air traffic controller. Taxi driver. And so on. We don't make excuses for those guys when they fuck up, do we?
Lastly, cuz you discussed how boring the game itself was... yeah. Another one of the many sins of No Man's Sky is making procedural generation famous. Procedural generation is a cancer, and 10 times out of 10, manually designed levels beat the shit out of this lazy-crap tactic. The only thing Hello Games did was make No Man's Sky playable. Doesn't mean they made it good.
DeemonAndGames
6 months ago
Fantastic review!