Don't really need to preface this. You can read it for yourself.

So yeah. They don't respond to any specific critique, but rather the overall feeling people have as it currently stands.

Personally, this response leaves me feeling mixed. On one end I like the game a lot and this gives me hope for it's future, and on the other there's no longer any question that NMS is early access in all but name. If only they labeled it as such, they could have avoided most of the lukewarm response...

Either way, I'm still playing it and probably will for awhile. I feel like even if it grew stale I would still revisit it to see what changes they make over time. Hopefully one day it reaches its full potential.

Curious to see how others feel?

Edit: Forgot one thing. Them saying "as always it matters what we do and not what we say" irks me to no end. Maybe they should have followed this rule the 3 years they were promoting the game?

Not that I would have expected one, but it's hardly a response to actual major issues and discussion around the game. Also this bit:

"What matters now, as always, is what we do rather than what we say."

Could be read some different ways. Maybe I'm reading too far into it but with few words and no further acknowledgement of the complaints based on what was said about the game in marketing it, I take that as a defense of all the messaging pre-release. Especially the bold part. Otherwise you can just read it as "hey we're working on it!" but I think the "as always bit" stands out. Whoever wrote this got paid to do so and I usually take concision meaning every word has been thought out.

I agree with you on Early Access and also the many who have cited price being a huge issue for this one.

Link?

I think that they're stuck between a rock and a hard place at this point. On the one hand people that were disappointed with NMS at release (including the day one patch) will want specifics about what Hello Games are going to do to make it more like the game they wanted. On the other hand though, if they were to give specifics then the response would just be "yeah, we've heard these kind of promises before, Shaun". So from that point of view saying that what they do matters more than what they say makes some sense. That's obviously not going to please everybody, but in all honesty that ship's already sailed long ago anyway. Hopefully they can salvage some of their reputation by providing really substantial post-release updates and support. That could turn some of this around but it's going to be hard to dispel the negative feelings that have attached to the game they put out in the first place.

@csl316: Here you go: http://www.no-mans-sky.com/2016/09/development-update/

This whole thing is very PR speak and feels more like them trying to spin things in a positive light than actually adressing the problems people have with the game. As pretty much all studios would have handled it.

@csl316: I did put one in, but it must have gotten borked. Should be there now (the red text is the link).

Why U no link???

Anyway, I have no ill will towards that little team, but I'm planning on waiting a full year before buying the game. I dig the aesthetic and think there will be enough features and polish by then.

@galacticpunt: is it still not showing up? I see it on my end. Weird.

@rongalaxy: I can see it now, they probably just hadn`t updated the page.

I really feel bad for these guys. They worked hard on this thing for years only to become the focus of gaming fandom's white-hot hate. Of course they fucked up the marketing, and I'm sure Sony had an all-too-willing hand in doing so, but they're clearly trying to do right by their fans. And even in doing so, they're still going to be met with many people who are unhappy and want them to do more.

They're in a rough spot and as a developer (not in games), I don't envy their position one bit. Sounds like a god damned nightmare. I wish them the best of luck and hope they're still finding some joy in their work, because I imagine I'd sure as hell be disillusioned at this point.

Eh. I like the game. Honestly the only feature I want is to turn off space pirates randomly attacking me. I guess more multiplayer would be cool but I've had a lot of success with "local co-op", just fire it up, pass the controller around and discover some planets.

I like the game quite a bit the way it is, so the fact that they're committed to improving it over time is just icing on cake for me. I hope this encourages people to lay off them a bit because the amount of abuse they've been getting is ridiculous.

Man as much grief as I gave WB over Arkham Knight, even they were more upfront than this.

Pretty glad I passed on NMS. Guess I'll check back in a year to see if it's actually fleshed out.

I guess the good news is that by the time they are actually finished the game, it'll have been out for a while and will be on sale?

I don't think this shows that NMS launched in early access. It just launched super buggy. I don't see any mention of actual new features being added, just some of the many many many bugs being fixed.

I don't understand how people like this game. Usually I get where people are coming from, but the game exhausts its content in the first few hours and from then on is just an endless cut and paste with minor, uninteresting, variations. I played games like Freelancer that had more interesting things to do and variety 10 and even 20 years ago.

Translation: "Thanks for your $60, suckers!"

fwiw I thought Joe Danger kinda stank the little I played of it. It was like bad Excitebike or Trials. Heard the sequel was better though. That was one reason I ended up not buying NMS,

Yeah, it's a way of quietly saying "hey, as always, our promises mean nothing (wink wink sorry not sorry). we know what matters is what actually ends up in the game." It still provides cover for them, basically saying players should never have held them to their word, but it also slyly acknowledges and accepts how people have felt about the over-promising. You could almost take it as them owning up to something, but not really. Sneaky.

Damned if they do. Damned if they don't. Either their fans will feel neglected or their detractors will over-analyze everything they say and use it as ammunition.

They can't win. Like...listen, I'm not excusing the game or the developer or anything like that, but like...I'm not even sure how to put it into words. Like, okay, if your comment can be summed up as "fuck this game" and/or "fuck this developer" then why even participate in the discussion. It just seems like you're angry for the sake of being angry. And I'm not even really talking about this thread, just "the Internet" in general.

And I know it sounds like I'm going off topic, but it also kind of relates to my point. They would have been equally as well off if they just hadn't ever said anything. Even if they had a detailed plan laid out with what they plan to fix and how, people would still be angry. Even if they stopped playing or have never played the game to begin with, hordes of people would still chime in just to shit on them.

I kinda just want them to just not say anything and just work on the game. When they put out a patch, then throw up the patch notes, then go back to radio silence.

Then again, that's probably why I'm not in PR. I like my sanity too much.

I'm surprised we've heard anything to be honest, but this is the usual PR spiel to try to spin the situation in their favour.

What else did you expect them to say?

I haven't played the game, and don't intend to. Hopefully this will go some way to satiate people still interested in this. Not that I imagine there's many of them left at this point.

Just continuing to release patches is really their best option at this point, in my opinion, so this seems like a relatively safe way for them to at least say something. Any attempt to directly address criticisms would've been absolutely ripped apart by the internet outrage machine and probably would've only added more fuel to the fire. There's nothing they can say that's ever going to ease the minds of the angriest and loudest voices out there - they're locked in with their opinions and are not going to budge.

"finally" responds? Haven't they already responded after the PC release saying they doubled their company size with QA people and stuff? It has the same tone as that as not really being a direct response (specifically to the refunds and allegations of misleading advertising) and just an update on what they have been doing, which is fine, but it's another case of people's expectations not matching what they're doing (the No Man's Sky of dev blogging?)

Anyway, it sounds like Sony is also fast-tracking their patch certification process, since they have managed to release multiple patched to the PS4 version. It kind of seems unfair to the other indie games, but I guess Sony really needs to save face in this case.

Why would they keep working on the game?

The copies have already been sold, the reviews are in, and they've already made their small fortune.

They could just start fresh on a new game, and try to just wash their hands of this weird mess and start from square one.

@audiobusting: this is them finally affirming that they are listening to all feedback, not just bug support. It seemed like they were just gonna go along and pretend like nothing happened besides having to fix bugs.

@levio: the game looks salvageable with a reasonable amount of effort, and if you want to run a business that grows and everything, one of the most important things to do is to keep your customers happy. If there is no actual business benefit to support your customers after a sale, why would any game studio provide patches to their games? It's important for the long-term reputation of the company. Another benefit to this is to add more value to their product, encouraging even more people to buy it.

@levio: In addition to what @audiobusting mentioned about building good will for your company and products, in the age of digital games and infinite shelf space, a lot of games tend to have a much longer tail on their sales. With some substantial post-release support and strategic handling of pricing and bundles, games can continue to generate significant income for years beyond their initial release.

At this point, it's clear what happened. They had great ambitions for the game, some of which turned out to not work out. In the meantime, people can still point to earlier interviews / videos where those ambitions are brought up. Scared to scare off people from buying their game, Hello games decided to just pull through on working on the game and hoping that they can implement more stuff after release.

When the game gets released, a lot of people find out that either it's not the game they want or they are dissapoined that certain ambitions aren't there. The goal for Hello games is to continue building on their game and hope that the second group gets satisfied, while the first group would never be satisfied, because it's not a genre they enjoy. Marketing and hype has certainly affected a great deal of people, and Hello Games did a bad job at deflating the hype and being straight with the audience. That said, it's understandable why they would (hype = $$). So close to release, there's no way Hello games is going to be like 'yo.. we fucked up, we shipped an half assed game, you're right to be pissed about paying us 60$'. Telling people how they will improve the game and show people that they are dedicated to make No Mans' Sky better is the right approach. Maybe in 10 years we will hear the honest ' yo, we fucked up ' story.

I don't understand the negative outlook and dissection of the wording on the statement. I wish them the best in making the game better. If there's one thing I have faith in for this team it's that they want the game to be good and just vastly underestimated the resources they needed to build what they wanted to. I feel like if there is any venom in the statement it's only in response to the ridiculous amount of conspiracy theories and entitlement that the worst segment of the fanbase has put out.

As for myself, this will definitely go down in history as one of my personal most disappointing games of all time and it would probably take a lot to bring me back to it. I don't think that my expectations were that inflated; I really had very few conceptions about the game going in but pretty much every aspect felt under baked or slight. I've spent as much money on worse and less interesting games in the past though, so I don't see the point in the outrage. I'm just moving on and leaving room for myself to potentially be surprised in a few months or years.

For what it's worth: I played this game for about 20 hours in the first few days it came out, put it down and haven't touched it since. This thread got me hot and heavy on the idea of more No Man's Sky, and the smoothness of it now is pretty amazing. It's gone from ~1 minute to boot up to about ten seconds, it runs at a locked 60 FPS for me (before it fluctuated between 30 and 60, even on my 1080), it alt+tabs much friendlier, the dithering is way down, gamepad controls seem better, the transition from space to planet is smoother. it just runs much, much better. Not as good as it should, but it's made some big steps.

It's cool and all that they are dedicated to improving the experience over time, but that just means that people unable to get those patches because of bandwidth caps etc are double screwed in the end. This game needs a serious disclaimer on the box stating "NMS STARTER PACK ONLY: Requires 2.0 patch for FULL experience"

People did this to themselves. All he had to say was the number of planets and people start to think its going to be the best game ever. He never claimed it was anymore than it was but people had crazy expecations that could never be met. I read an interview a few months before release when he said that this is not the game that people seem to be expecting. He was afraid that people would be dissapinted but he could not stop people from hyping the game and blowing expecations out of proportions. The speculation about what the game was hyped the game to something he would need 10 more years and hundreds of more people to make. People should have read more about what he actually claimed it would be and not what they wanted it to be. A massive amounts of planets yes but he never claimed it would be the game to end all games so to speak. Don't forget that it was a really small team that made the game.

My prediction: One of two things will happen. Either you'll never see a game from Hello Games again, or you'll see one more that will end up bombing because of NMS and they'll go bankrupt.

“I can tell you definitively that there is absolutely an acorn and it does absolutely grow into a tree..."

Aloha Games!

No Man's Sky has already been successful enough that I think Hello Games is guaranteed to develop another game. If that game is good, I see no reason why it wouldn't sell well.

I realize that a lot of people in the midst of this furor feel like Hello Games and Sean Murray are burned forever, but I personally don't think they've done anything so egregious for that to be the case. A lot of people actually do like No Man's Sky or at worst feel indifferent towards it, and future patches may be able to turn around the opinion of some others. As much as some people want Hello Games to fail, I think they're going to be fine for the foreseeable future.

@chaser324: Yeah, I sure hope so. I haven't even played NMS, but the toxicity surrounding that game is extraordinary. Can't see that not having an impact on any future games they make.

I think you could take that a step further and mandate that ANY physical game with a day 1 patch that requires an internet connection should have a big "ONLINE CONNECTION REQUIRED" label on the front of the box.

Sorta reminds me of the saying, "actions speak louder than words." Yet they haven't done anything to fix the problems? So...

While I certainly don’t condone people being burned for eternity, I feel the misinformation (read: lies) does warrant some consumer backlash. You can’t look at the end product of NMS and compare it to the earlier statements and videos made by Sean and not come away disenchanted with the result. There are around 70,000 reviews on steam – more reviews than I’ve ever seen on any game – and the overall rating is 37%. A significant majority of players dislike NMS and by extension, Hello Games. I’m not a marketing analyst or business professional, but I can’t see HG walking away from this crapstorm. There have been far too many bridges burned between Sean and his audience. Unless the studio drastically rebrands itself, the vitriol and stigma will haunt Hello Games until its dying days.

Ugh, we've been over this. He did claim it was more than it was. If you say otherwise you, with all due respect, don't know what you're talking about.

Up until the final weeks before release he straight up lied about, among other things, multiplayer being in the game.

Hype and overblown expectations were likely a factor too in peoples disappointment, but that's hardly the whole story here. The way he has presented the game and undeniably claiming it was way more than it was is inexcusable. And not just early on when you could call it a vision for the game, but right down to release did he not only not retract his earlier statements about the game, but doubled down on them.

Like I said, inexcusable. Even less so with a run-of-the-mill 'yo, we're listening to your feedback and dedicated to keep working on the game' rather than a 'yo, I fucked up. I'm not used to this much attention and didn't know what to do anymore.'

Even though Hello Games' post-release behavior has been mostly disgusting, they have made some performance improvements. I have an aging PC (GTX 970, i5-3350P), but the game runs at an unwavering 60 fps maxed out at 1080p. I had to run it locked at 30 fps at launch, so at least they are still putting in some work. I originally hated this game and swore I'd never play it again, but have since warmed up to it. As long as I avoid any mining-related tasks, I enjoy the game. Shooting lasers at rocks is not fun to me.

I not surprised they didn't address specific complaints because there isn't any. All the feedback is random ethereal shouting.

I wonder if they are basing their messaging akin to Sony "No matter what don't say anything." This statement seems like a real non-response.

Well, I will say this: The game is basically everything they said it would be, just a lot uglier looking. I see the one thing people keep brining up is the multiplayer, which is not there. But let me ask you this, is the lack of multiplayer really a complaint when the head of the studio said the possibility of running into other players was extremely low? Cause he basically said, you'll never see anyone else. And now people are upset because you don't see anyone else?

So, what are people really caught up in? That the game is ugly or that there is no multiplayer (when there never was supposed to be)?

It`s not just that it`s ugly or because of the multiplayer (Which I think it`s wrong to say that it was never supposed to be there since they explicitly said it would be on mutiple occcasions, even if they also said it was not he focus of the game). If you look at the first E3 trailer (which is still the first trailer on the steam page) the game they show there is a lot more "alive" and exciting (than what I have seen from gameplay videos and heard from other people, I have not played the game personally). Things like flight down near planets (like chases through canyons, tons of animals at once and large scale space combat is straight up not in the game or is in there in a much much smaller capacity. I was never very excited for the game and thus not that dissapointed or angry about how it turned out, but if someone sees that first trailer on the steam page and bought the game because of what they saw there or if they only viewed preview material and not reviews I understand why they would be angry and disapointed.

For the most part I think it was just really bad marketing from the Hello games and Sony. The fact that the E3 trailer is still on the steam page though makes it feel like they are delibaretly misrepresenting what the final product is.

@bojackhorseman: He didn't say you wouldn't see anyone because there's no multiplayer, he said the universe is so large that the chances of you seeing anyone would be infinitely small, but it's not just that which people are miffed at, i'm assuming you've seen or heard of this list of features missing from the retail release.

I don't want to sound like a know it all but i saw all this coming, the first reveal was great looking but obviously arranged to be that way, every randomly generated game i've seen has failed to bring together a cohesive world but you give people the benefit of the doubt, Sean Murray never spoke in real terms about the game always leaving questions unanswered or open to interpretation, for every promised feature there was a gameplay trailer which didn't show any of it, if you purely judge the game by features shown and not any of the arranged trailers it would be flying, walking, shooting rocks... which largely turned out to be everything you do in the game, all the exciting events and discoveries in the trailers are things which would, unless scripted, never really happen. As far as the poor PC performance at launch goes, we assume due to Sony's involvement that it was developed primarily for the PS4, with the extreme pressure placed upon the small indie team due to over-hyping what was always going to be a simple game, and the various incidents which occurred at the studio during development, the team was very rushed so the state of the game at launch was almost destined to be iffy.

The main targets to blame for all the backlash is marketing, due to the dev team size and probably original game designs and budget it was always going to be a walking simulator with space travel, there was nothing wrong with that at the start and there's still nothing wrong with that now, but it got blown way out of proportion even to the point where it's being sold at full price.

@bojackhorseman: Can't say I'm 100% tuned into the feedback they've gotten, but I think that what people have been complaining about is a bit more intangible than that. The "promises" around the game centered around planets with ecosystems and inhabited star systems with interstellar politics. They aren't things you can do so much as things you can see, like, I dunno, a space safari. It seems like the necessary intricacy and depth of their supporting systems didn't live up to that promise.

It's beyond this. Many games are less dynamic than their marketing. The problem with No Man's Sky is that...there's essentially no game in it. There's nothing to do. Throughout the marketing there was discussion of how you could be a pirate or a trader and there were factions and space battles and things to interact with. The actual game has these things only in the most perfunctory way possible, and you can't really engage with them. The space battles are not only boring and rudimentary but they aren't really things you trigger, you just get attacked, and the rewards for winning (or penalties for losing) are minuscule. The aliens you can "interact" with are basically static objects in the environment, always in buildings, and the interactions amount to a single dialog option for dialog you can't even understand until you collect the vocabulary, and which aren't interesting when you do. Nothing interesting happens from increasing faction and you are never given quests or meaningful interactions.

The "gameplay" consists of gathering a shockingly low number of elements and items to do some very rudimentary crafting and some very rudimentary "survival" which basically consists of having enough fuel to maintain your ship and exosuit's systems.

The game features a "long" sort of guiding path that leads to absolutely nothing (I won't spoil it here but really there's nothing to spoil if I'm being honest.)

Many of the systems Murray described basically don't exist in the game. Even those that do exist are ludicrously rudimentary compared to any other major $60 game on the market, and even compared to games like this from the 1990s! The gameplay of No Man's Sky would've been mildly impressive in 1986 on a PC game (obviously the graphics are much better than that) but in 2016 it's just insulting.

It's clear that Hello Games didn't have time or resources to build much more than an admittedly pretty neat planet generation algorithm, and they shoved that out the door for $60 with a ton of promotion and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors in "gameplay" footage they showed the and the promises Sean Murray made.

I think people should be even angrier than they are, especially at Sony, which promoted this thing and likely pushed it out the door one quarter baked to fill a hole in the PS4's schedule.

I've played worse video games, even from first parties, but I've never played any game with first party involvement that was so transparently unfinished.