
No Man’s Sky One Year Later - smacktoward
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=40413
======
Bartweiss
> _No Man’s Sky inhabits this frustrating space alongside games like the nu
> Deus Ex games, the original X-Com, or the Mass Effect series. It offers
> something you just can’t get anywhere else, but it does so in a deeply
> flawed and annoying way._

This really resonated with me. I have a whole pile of Steam games which have
fascinating, unique traits, but are 'objectively' bad in that they failed to
deliver a solid story, or interface, or mechanics, or all of the above.

\- Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator comes to mind; it's a great exploration
of cooperative multiplayer design and the possibilities opened up by
incomplete information. But it's also clunky and acutely underdeveloped in
terms of game modes, balance, and AI. If you want a good game, you'd better
dive deep into modding.

\- Tharsis also counts; deeply strategic play in a constrained setting,
undermined by strategy-destroying levels of randomness.

\- Even AAA stuff like _Civilization_ does this to me. Why is Civ great?
Because nothing else is Civ. Why is Civ terrible? Because the balance is
underwhelming and the AI is catastrophically bad.

\- Hell, for years Minecraft was like this. The opening comment about "imagine
if Minecraft had been clunky and unintuitive at release" made me laugh,
because it _was_. Deep Survival play has been almost dependent on mods for
much of the games history, but the underlying insight was too good to pass up.

So... it's an interesting insight, and it also prompts a question. Why don't
more of these intriguing flops prompt more polished attempts?

~~~
Pigo
This may be off-point, but are there more polished attempts at new ideas out
there that are worth checking out? I can't keep up with what's worth playing
anymore, and don't have time to play every game hoping that it hits the mark.
Anytime I check out the top ranking games, it's new Call of Duty's,
Battlefields, Assassin's Creeds, or sports (blegh) and a whole host of games
that disappear as fast as they show up. I'd kill for a new game that engages
as much Civilization or C&C did.

~~~
KirinDave
Yes.

Modded Minecraft (try All the Mods 3 on the twitch client, or (formerly my
modpack) Resonant Rise)

Challenge Pack Modded Minecraft (Currently Popular: Age of Engineering,
Forever Stranded, Sky Factory 3)

Factorio

Dwarf Fortress

Modded Dwarf Fortress Masterwork

Poschengband & Tome4 represent the pinnacle (to me) of classic Roguelike
design.

Risk of Rain

Endless Legend

Endless Space 2 (Amplitude releases a consistent and growing world of
fantastic games with amazing and long-lived content releases).

(Just give Zachtronics all your money and take all their games, but in a
particular order:)

Shenzen I/O

TIS-100

Spacechem

Infinifactory

Cities: Skylines (Paradox Interactive publishes does this and the next few,
they're very good)

Europa Universalis 4

Stellaris

Great, thoughtful, engaging games are out there if you want them. Sadly, most
people are filthy casuals now.

Zachtronics games in particular stand out as turning real world thinking and
skills into fun games.

~~~
fake-name
I've never really understood some of the zachtronics games.

Things like TIS-100 and Shenzen I/O confuse me. Why would I spend time
learning some esoteric assembler that exists no where else, when you could
take that same time and learn an _actual_ assembler?

I really, REALLY wish they had done something _really_ clever, like targetted
AVR opcodes or something for their vCPU. That'd make it so not only do you get
to have fun, but you learn a marketable skill in the process!

That's one of my major complaints about most of the "programming" games I've
seen, in that most of the time, if I'm going to spend time writing code, I'd
rather just hack on one of my projects then play a game with no real end-
product. At least with personal projects, you wind up with an actual app at
the end.

I did enjoy Spacechem and Infinifactory, though I didn't finish each before
becoming bored.

\------

~~~
ngold
Not to mention the huge loss of a learning opportunity to have players learn
programming language basics for specific real world code

~~~
KirinDave
Let me prove your axiom wrong with a counterexample.

I love these games, and I can program (and have shipped to prod) in over a
dozen languages including Erlang, Haskell, C++, C, Common Lisp, Java, Clojure,
Scala.

What you're saying is nonsense. Practice in programming is practice in
programming. If we wanted to, we could make the TIS-100 system real for
embedded computing and I bet it'd be popular with some instruction extensions.

I did an annex course at a local middle school with TIS-100 to teach kids that
programming is fun. It went over well.

------
shepardrtc
I followed the game for years before buying it on launch and being completely
and utterly disappointed. Every single time they spoke about the game and
showed videos, they promised a fleshed out universe with real consequences for
your actions. They promised factions that had goals and would act independent
of you. They promised a deep system of crafting. They promised multiplayer.
What they didn't mention was that they had scrapped all those ideas a long
time before and had turned the game into a grind-fest while they tried to hack
things in there. The play-throughs they showed were hand-made areas with
automated entities, but they never mentioned that. There was a promise of
multiplayer, but it never happened. And probably worst of all, they never
mentioned that it wasn't truly open-world, it was all essentially "levels"
with little freedom to fly around and explore. They never mentioned that it
turned into an almost on-rails flying game when you got close to the surface.
You couldn't crash, you couldn't maneuver, you couldn't land on your own.
Flying around was made even worse because you run out of fuel every few
minutes because of the forced autopilot landings/takeoffs. That's not open
world, that's a half-assed game with training wheels permanently glued on.

The whole "Not Evil, Just Bungling" that the author says simply isn't the
case. But I'm not saying they're evil. They definitely wanted to make the game
they were promising. They had a passion for it. But they knew well ahead of
time that it wasn't happening and they kept up the charade.

I'm not disappointed about losing out on my money, I'm disappointed that I
lost out on the game they promised.

------
dcolgan
As a former amateur Twitch.tv streamer, I've always been fascinated by the
rise and fall of internet personalities, and some of the biggest personalities
seem to be game developers that found themselves in the spotlight.

Someone made this very in-depth video about the fall from grace of Phil Fish,
the creator of Fez: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-
owa2w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w) It seems to me that the
combo of high pressure and a guy with a combative personality combined with
internet anonymity to create a really messy situation that drove him out of
the business.

I've also followed Narscissa (formerly Cosmo) Wright's fallout in the speedrun
community after coming out as transgender. Once one of the most popular
streamers on Twitch, I'd imagine transitioning is hard enough, but
transitioning in front of a studio audience of anonymous gamers would be next
level.

And so the same seems to be with Sean Murray and No Man's Sky. Inexperience
plus overpromising and really high expectations created the current situation.

I don't think any of these people are malicious and I don't really know how I
would have advised them to do things differently. Edmund McMillen, the creator
of Super Meat Boy and other indie games once said in a podcast interview that
he hates showing people what he's making before it is done for this very
reason.

Edit: I know the circumstances of these people are not identical, I'm just
calling for more understanding and empathy instead of assuming the worst in
everyone.

~~~
LeoNatan25
Wait, let’s not conflate the cases you describe, where the trolling may have
been and probably was malicious, with the case of No Man’s Land, where lead
director flat out lied about the content of the game, and people who couldn’t
control their hype fell for it and late raged. In the latter case, any
professional shaming—which is the only shaming of Murray I’ve seen—is
justified.

~~~
slg
>In the latter case, any professional shaming—which is the only shaming of
Murray I’ve seen—is justified.

Why? The guy obviously wasn't trying to make a bad game. He was just
inexperienced, got in over his head, and failed to deliver the product he
wanted to build on the timeline he promised. I would have assumed if any
community understands that failure isn't an unusual result in the face of
ambitious goals it would be the HN crowd. Meanwhile since the game's release
he has continued to work on that product to get it closer to everyone's
initial expectations. I understand being disappointed by the whole thing, but
the vitriol directed his way was somewhat disturbing.

~~~
LeoNatan25
Please. He was lying up until the last weeks to release, where no practical
development on the game was taking place. I’d see your point if promises were
made years before release and the company was unable to deliver. But there was
clear malice here.

~~~
slg
Like the original article suggests, if he was truly malicious in intent then
why would he continue to work on this game after release? Hanlon's razor
suggests he just failed on the biggest stage he was ever on and he didn't know
how to handle that.

To quote the article:

>When people ask you, “Will we be able to do X?” it’s easy to say “yes”
because you already wanted to have X and you’ve already thought about how
you’d go about making it happen. People love you, your work is valuable, and
you don’t want to say no. People smile with delight when you say “yes” and
when you say “no” they look disappointed and ask annoying technical questions
that would – if you took the time to answer them accurately – being incredibly
boring and hard to follow. In the short term, saying “yes” is always the path
of least resistance.

>I know exactly how that feels and I know I’ve trapped myself in situations
where I needed to crunch in order to meet my promises. Not because I wanted to
work overtime, but because saying yes just feels so much better than saying
no. I’m really thankful I made those mistakes in private meetings as part of a
small company on not in front of international media. If Stephen Colbert had
me on his show in March of 2016 and asked with delight if Good Robot was going
to have different character classes, it would have been very tempting to say
yes. After all, it was something I’d wanted to put in the game and maybe I’d
be able to find time to squeeze it in before release. And if that interview
happened to me when I was a young man and more easily dazzled by the
limelight? Shit. I’m sure I’d make the exact same mistake.

I really can't imagine a developer who has lead a project of any size not
relating to that on some level.

~~~
sushid
Why wouldn't he work on the game? It's not like after ONE over-promise he's
never going to ever in the game dev business. His life a repeated game theory
interaction.

Whether he intended to deceive or not, it makes sense to do some damage
control for the future.

------
crispyambulance
I found the gameplay at release enjoyable as a chill-out experience, much more
my speed than first-person twitch-fests. I didn't mind that it was hyped far
beyond what they delivered, its a game after-all. Maybe millennial gamers have
more expectations than people who grew up on atari game cartridges?

Haven't played it for months, but my expectations for any game is merely few
dozen sessions of play maybe ~100 hours of play total. What more do you want
out of a $50 game? People are too harsh.

~~~
wutwutwutwut
Wut. The company lied about the product. Isn't that fraud? And you say people
were too harsh?

~~~
LeoNatan25
Damn millennials are too harsh, expecting developers to be honest! It’s just a
game after all! /s

It’s because of such ridiculous attitude and low expectation that the gaming
industry is at the state that it is—terrible.

~~~
crispyambulance
Well, it is "just a game"... an innovative, highly creative game with some
really interesting features.

I suspect the real creative talent behind the game got used and pressured by
product-manager types to ship far before it was ready because of all the money
and promises involved.

Throwing a fit because of "honesty" in game pre-marketing is sort of like
asking for your money back because a movie didn't fulfill the expectations set
by the trailer. Yeah, good luck with that at the multiplex, but also keep in
mind that many people got their money back for the game.

And anyways, cautious folks who expect absolute honesty from their game
vendors, would do better to wait for the 3rd party reviews before jumping in
headfirst with their 50 bucks.

~~~
noxToken
> _Throwing a fit because of "honesty" in game pre-marketing is sort of like
> asking for your money back because a movie didn't fulfill the expectations
> set by the trailer. Yeah, good luck with that at the multiplex, but also
> keep in mind that many people got their money back for the game._

These aren't the same though. Trailers can be used to evoke a certain sense
about a movie that is disingenuous such as masking a drama as a comedy by
splicing together the funny parts. You'll still get those funny parts, but
they just weren't what you expected. A director can say that they'll guarantee
you'll laugh until you cry, but that's all subjective. What happened with No
Man's Sky was just outright lying.

This would be akin to someone saying that some actor gave the performance of a
lifetime in the movie, but the actor never had anything to do with the movie.
Does that mean I can't enjoy the movie? Nope. I might still love it, but that
person still lied to get me to see the movie. That's what they did with No
Man's Sky - gave false information about a game's features that was still good
for what it was.

For what it's worth, I heard that people who didn't follow the hype-train
liked the game. Those accounts of the gameplay all praised it.

~~~
vinkelhake
> For what it's worth, I heard that people who didn't follow the hype-train
> liked the game. Those accounts of the gameplay all praised it.

It's unfortunate (but understandable) that critique of No Man's Sky often mix
what was promised with what was actually delivered. So much of the commentary
focus on Sean Murray's broken promises.

There are a few reviews that cut through all the hype and focus on the
gameplay and it's not a pretty picture. It's an AAA-priced game that (at the
time of the launch) is at the level of an early access game. I recommend
checking out Joseph Anderson's analysis on Youtube.

The people who have had the best time with this game seem to treat it as an
overly complicated fidget cube. Something to keep their fingers busy while
their mind is focused on something like listening to a podcast.

------
dexwiz
Open world games are notoriously disappointing. "What is this game supposed to
be?" is a great question. Are you trying to explore? collect resources and
upgrade grind? build things? combat (ground or space)? By being all these
things, they became nothing. All encompassing space games (for example EVE)
take years to build, usually in the form of updates after release.

As for the UI. It looks like its designed so the PC and consoles have similar
UIs. Also they are inspired by context menus, which sacrifice UX for
flexibility. (Pretend the inventory is a file system).

~~~
vorpalhex
If you want strong direction, then open world is the wrong end of the
spectrum. Give me a large world with lots of complexity and I'll entertain
myself for hundreds of hours. Give me a directed plot and I'll probably stop
caring in about 4 hours.

It seems to me there are two very different views of story telling in games.
One camp wants games to be strongly directed minimal choice stories with a
very specific narrative and it's entirely ok to curtail player agency to tell
that story.

Another camp thinks the opposite: player agency always comes first and there
is no set narrative but the one that players create for themselves. This comes
with the potential that said narrative can be dumb.

I don't think either camp is wrong, just different ways to tell a story. I
really favor the later, and I really hate when my agency is abridged as a
player because some writer wants to tell a story I don't care about. At the
same time, I'm sure plenty of folks have the opposite viewpoint.

~~~
zzalpha
_I don 't think either camp is wrong, just different ways to tell a story. I
really favor the later, and I really hate when my agency is abridged as a
player because some writer wants to tell a story I don't care about. At the
same time, I'm sure plenty of folks have the opposite viewpoint._

This is a false dichotomy.

Skyrim, for example, is absolutely both of these things, offering a strongly
directed central narrative and lots of open world exploration opportunities.

~~~
vorpalhex
Skyrim is definitely a gem of a game. I wouldn't however call it "directed" or
"central". I've had several playthroughs of it as just a hunter or a spelunker
and totally ignored the main story of dragonborn/background war (which is a
strength of the game, not a fault).

I would consider Fallout 4 to be much more directed. You _have_ to be the
survivor, you _have_ to save the patriots, you _have_ to ultimately destroy
one of the three powers. Sure you can ignore the plot for a bit, but you can't
advance any storyline. You can't play PI or explore vaults unless you've
advanced the story.

------
Nursie
I found with NMS that I couldn't really see a game in it.

The planets were lovely, the creatures fascinating, but other than grind fuel
and occasionally get eaten by something, there wasn't much gameplay.

With the later addition of base-building I was able to ... build a base. W00t.

Lovely tech, pretty planets and stuff... not much compelling to actually do.

~~~
rxhernandez
> Lovely x, y and z... not much compelling to actually do.

This is pokemon go in a nutshell yet it seemed to work for niantic.

~~~
Jiig
I think the compelling part of pokemon go is not the game its self, but the
social interactions it created.

------
dkersten
I tried No Mans Sky a year ago and it was so utterly shallow and boring. Lots
of breadth and zero depth. I tried the "foundations" update at some point,
built a little base and... it felt empty and pointless and still utterly
shallow. The game might have been "ok", or at least, I'd have been less harsh,
if it didn't have a AAA price tag (and if Hello Games had been honest).

I did not try the next update, and while its added a lot of the originally
promised features, from what I've heard and seen on youtube, it still looked
shallow and lacking depth and substance. So I've given up hope that these 19
quintillion planets will ever be interesting enough for me to bother playing
it again.

Also, regardless of whether they eventually pull of what was promised, it
doesn't change the fact that Sean Murray mislead or even outright lied to
everybody and that leaves an extremely bitter taste. I for one will never buy
anything that Sean Murray touches or has anything to do with. So in many ways,
the damage is done.

------
etchalon
Counter opinion: [https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/18/16164520/no-mans-sky-
one-...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/18/16164520/no-mans-sky-one-year-
later-ps4-pc)

~~~
alexc05
Honestly - I loved the first iteration and have jumped in to play it again
this time round. I love it still (again).

It's changed a lot. It's upgraded again there is a tonne of stuff to do, lots
to see and explore and plenty of "hooks" to give you the excuse to see them.

NMS gets a lot of hate and I don't think it's deserved but hey if the author
doesn't want to play it, then it's no skin off my nose.

They can do what they want.

~~~
EpicEng
>NMS gets a lot of hate and I don't think it's deserved

Should we just ignore all of the hype and promises _made by the developer
/publisher_ which were never delivered on? That's where the hate comes from.
They promised something much more than what they delivered.

Yes, they've made improvements, and that's great, but it _still_ doesn't
contain some of the biggest features promised while the game was still in dev.
The marketing of this game was very deceptive, and they deserve what they got
for that.

Besides... most find the game pretty boring.

~~~
dageshi
>Should we just ignore all of the hype and promises made by the
developer/publisher which were never delivered on? That's where the hate comes
from. They promised something much more than what they delivered.

The people who pre-ordered should've waited till the reviews came out and then
bought?

I have rarely seen a level of delusion from a fan base than the one around
NMS, they collectively hyped themselves to a level of frenzy before the game
came out that could only lead to disappointment.

~~~
TremendousJudge
>I have rarely seen a level of delusion from a fan base than the one around
NMS

Just wait until star citizen crashes down _hard_

~~~
LeoNatan25
You assume it will ever be released. :-)

------
the_af
> _No Man’s Sky inhabits this frustrating space alongside games like the nu
> Deus Ex games, the original X-Com, or the Mass Effect series. It offers
> something you just can’t get anywhere else, but it does so in a deeply
> flawed and annoying way._

X-Com flawed and annoying? Them's fighting words! The game is a masterpiece.
It didn't feel frustrating back then; it felt like it belonged in my top 5
most engaging and enjoyable games, and I know this is a widely shared opinion
in gamers my age.

edit: well, one of the commenters from TFA agrees with me:

> _The original x-com was “deeply flawed and annoying”? I mean if that’s your
> opinion, cool, but surely you realize that most people consider it a classic
> and using it as an example of a failed game is only going to confuse us._

~~~
jerf
X-Com shipped with a broken difficulty selector, so that all games were played
on "Easy" regardless of your setting. The gameplay could be slow and ponderous
at the best of times, and at the worst of times (chasing down the one last
alien) could be quite maddeningly slow, literally at times 10-30 minutes of
nothing. (Then the last alien gets the drop on you and your dude dies.) Some
of the mechanics are pretty opaque in the era before "I'll just read a
complete disassembly of the game engine on GameFAQs." Some of that is probably
a part of the love for the game, but by most modern standards that's a flaw in
a game. (Having to discover mechanics is not intrinsically a flaw, but making
them somewhat undiscoverable kinda is.)

I'm not sure I'd defend the "deeply" part of "deeply flawed", because IMHO it
still belongs in a different category than some of those other games; it came
much closer to doing what it set out to do deliberately, it did not just
accidentally back into being a good game despite itself. However, I _will_
defend that X-Com was somewhat flawed. The very fact that they could ship the
difficulty selector broken, because nobody noticed, because the difference was
not big enough to be noticeable, is a pretty decently sized problem on its
own; that affects everything from top to bottom right there.

~~~
the_af
Because X-Com was widely considered a masterpiece _by the standards of its
day_ (unfair to compare it to today's games, and anyway that wasn't the point
of TFA) it's extremely confusing to list it as an example of a flawed or
frustrating game.

You already mentioned the pace: that was one of its strong points, not a
weakness. I -- and most of its fans, I'd guess -- liked the game _because of
its deliberately slow pace_ , not in spite of it. Why, I remember about 15-20
years ago I debated with someone about real-time vs turn-based games, and why
I preferred the latter, _and used X-Com as an example!_.

Like you also mentioned, I don't think most people realized about the "Easy"
setting bug back then (I certainly didn't!). "Easy" was difficult enough
anyway, so I think this criticism doesn't apply. We're not talking about bugs
here (which happen in every game), but about "flawed" gameplay, and how you
experienced the game _back when you played it_. Nobody complained about the
broken difficulty setting, so this couldn't cause a frustrating experience.

To me, picking X-Com as an example of a flawed game is like picking a movie
everyone considers a classic masterpiece and declaring it flawed because there
is a scene which is somewhat out of focus: it's an act of snobbery.

------
EngineerBetter
Not a particularly well-researched post. Sony did not publish the game, they
provided marketing budget. This means that they were not in creative control.

~~~
avar
Furthermore, they could be forgiven for making statements saying e.g
multiplayer was included a year out since it was an aspirational goal, but
they were lying to the bitter end right up to release, either explicitly or by
omission.

------
aaron-lebo
Ugh NMS. Didn't get superhyped but bought it at launch, listened to that
soundtrack by 65daysofstatic for a few weeks, played the game for about 30
minutes. It was just so boring. They had the tech to make universes but made
the core gameplay so boring you didn't care. How is that possible?

The game is now what it could have been, but it makes me uncomfortable even
enjoying the game because I remember the dev lying on the day of release about
multiplayer. That breaks some kind of contract between producer and consumer.
Oh, and the FOV on the PS4 version is horrific, interesting way of extending a
consoles lifespan.

I think NMS is a glimpse of the future, but hopefully someone else will take
their formula mainstream.

~~~
newforice
I think all games should focus on one platform, the PC platform. Consoles
drain developer's time and attention from making the actual game. And don't
get me started on knuckle-dragging VR.

~~~
cwyers
The consoles are much easier to develop for -- debugging GPU problems across
hundreds of GPUs by three manufacturers is so much harder than doing so on a
single (or two, if you count the two major consoles) GPU type. They also make
a larger share of the revenue than PC games do. They don't drain attention,
they put attention where the most revenue for the least work is.

And from a user point of view, PC gaming just got exhausting for me. Driver
updates, keeping up with GPU upgrades... or I can plunk down some money on a
box that Mostly Just Works. Yes, there's parts of console gaming that annoy
me. I dislike having to have a PS4 and an Xbox One, which are like 80-90% of
the same damn hardware, to play all the games I want. This goes doubly because
the PS4 has marginally better hardware (minus the controller, which is
improved from previous generations but not as comfortable as the Xbox
controller) and the Xbox has outrageously better software, so I'm missing out
on something no matter which console I'm using and I can't crossplay with
friends on a different console. But those annoyances are small potatoes given
how much time I've sunk into getting PC games to run optimally.

~~~
ratherbefuddled
I have a PC that's nearly 5 years old, that wasn't top of the line (budget
about £800 without screens) when I bought it and took me half a day to put
together. It runs every game I've tried on it at least at medium and usually
on high. I've spent zero time optimising it, not put a single h/w upgrade in
and driver updates get run about every 6 months for a few minutes. PC gaming
is way beyond "mostly just works" and has been for some time from my point of
view.

------
hacker_9
This product was really always about trying to push the limits of procedural
generation technology. It failed as a game if you ask the gamers, but exceeded
expectations if you ask the developers (lucky devils are now millionaires).
This 30 second clip pretty much sums up how great their marketing was:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KxRp8jeliQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KxRp8jeliQ)

~~~
zerohm
In the lead up, when they were touting 6.84 * 10^23 planets or whatever, my
thought was, how is that fun? If it will take all of humanity 10,000 years to
see your entire game, what good does that do players now?

------
georgeecollins
As a game designer this resonated with me: " it’s easy to say “yes” because
you already wanted to have X and you’ve already thought about how you’d go
about making it happen. People love you, your work is valuable, and you don’t
want to say no. "

Along the way in my career I heard something that I remind myself to help me
with this problem: "Promises are like babies, fun to make but hard to keep. "

------
HugoDaniel
I love the soundtrack. Many lines of code were written to it

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRI-o9JDfCI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRI-o9JDfCI)

------
dschuetz
Having read this article the only remaining real flaw in this game is - Sony.
I'm sorry that I didn't know that it was actually Sony behind the publishing
which backfired into the face of Jean Murray, and not _Sony_. Damn.

------
lawless123
The UI is clunky and impossible to efficiently use.

Compare the galaxy map to the one in Elite Dangerous in which it is far easier
to control the camera.

They meant well but they might be better restarting

~~~
m-p-3
Update 1.35 is improving that, you might want to check it out.

------
tw1010
Looking at this from a totally different angle, I find the fact that we
collectively have such a high standard for games to be such a positive signal
that life today is moving along swimmingly. The fact that this is what bothers
us (rather than a depression or a big war) is wonderful. (Or maybe I've just
been reading too many history books recently.)

------
arielweisberg
A lot of NMS problems go away if you mod and cheat your way to game balance...

Play it your way.

------
KirinDave
I was just on vacation and played a bunch.

They should have done an early access thing, because it's actually a quite fun
game now and it was somewhat oversold at launch.

------
grabcocque
Because they've focused on a different set of priorities from the ones he
wants, thus they're incompetent and sadistic?

Ok.

~~~
zzalpha
Actually, his most basic, underlying thesis is that it's _impossible to
determine what their priorities are_. To the author, the game is incoherent.
If you cleave to that view, then it's impossible to understand why the
developers changed what they changed.

His example of Dark Souls is a perfect one. He acknowledges that, while the
game isn't his thing, he can at least intellectually grok why Dark Souls is a
good game, and how it has been optimized and refined for the specific play
style they aimed at.

The author claims the same can't be said for No Man's Sky.

So, no, it's not that it's a different set of priorities. It's that it appears
to be an _incomprehensible_ set of priorities. And that's a real problem, if
you believe in the thesis (which, I assume, will be explored in subsequent
installments).

