When No Man's Sky was first teased in 2013, it was well received and and immediately began generating hype. "An infinite procedurally generated universe filled with all sorts of strange flora and fauna and terrain features to discover on countless worlds" caused it to fit right in with the likes of Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen as people have been scrambling to get their hands on the perfect Space Sim. As short and vague videos of zooming over gorgeous planets and wandering through alien forests, shooting down pirates and blowing chunks out of asteroids out in space were released, people went crazy and with the continued vagueness about the game's actual game play as well as the typical indie studio mistake of making ambitious promises they don't have the ability to keep, they hype train for No Man's Sky reached biblical proportions. As the years dragged on and people got more and more eager to get their hands on what they believed would be a game that would bring about the second coming of Christ, the hype train reached speeds that would only result in a catastrophic crash...and that is exactly what happened.
People believed that a dev team with only a couple completely unrelated games under their belt comprised of only 15 people would be able to do in just 3 years with barely any funding what Triple-A studios with hundreds of people and millions of dollars behind them have been unable to. So when the game finally launched just a couple short weeks ago, people were met with the harsh reality: No Man's Sky was very obviously a game made by an inexperienced indie studio with just 15 people behind it. Optimization issues, crashes, bugs, laughable generation of creatures, the rubiks-cube syndrome (in which yes there might be a quintillion combinations but they all just look like a rubik's cube, so to might there be a quintillion planets in No Man's Sky but only a handful of those will be distinguishable from any of the others), and a lack of easily noticeable depth to the game. It was a video game, not the answer to world peace, and that is what people need to realize about hype: the end result will NEVER live up to the expectations of years worth hype, so declaring "there ain't no breaks on the hype train" will only result in your experience being far less than it could be. Hype killed No Man's Sky's first impressions.
So is No Man's Sky any good? Yes. It actually is in spite of everything that has happened. No, there is no multiplayer, no the game looks nothing like the trailers, and yes, it is disappointing compared to what the hype made it seem like it would be, but in the same way that Elite: Dangerous is a niche title that requires a certain kind of person to enjoy it, so to does No Man's Sky require a special kind of person to truly appreciate what it offers. Pictured here is a planet that I discover in what I dubbed the "Horizon System". The planet, Horizon 1, was a lush tropical forest world of large islands and shallow oceans teeming with life and filled with rare and valuable resources, protected by highly aggressive sentinels. The world had frequent rain storms and gorgeous sunsets that reminded me of mangos, which only added to the feeling of being in a tropical paradise. Deep caverns filled with glowing crystal formations, as well as being dotted with the ancient ruins and monoliths of the Vy'Keen race of aliens ensured that I had hours upon hours worth of content to explore here. And that's really what No Man's Sky is about: exploration. Finding something you haven't seen before, something that catches your attention and imagination and makes you say "I want to see everything on this planet!". The game's narrative and ultimate goals might be shallow, but the lore and interactions with the various alien races and the exploration of planets is very deep indeed. Somebody who truly loves the journey of a game rather than the destination and finds relaxation in wandering aimlessly wondering what they're going to find next will find endless enjoyment in No Man's Sky.
If people would learn from history and stop getting so hyped over things, and realize that it's okay for people to like things they don't, disappointment like what happened to No Man's Sky would be kept to only the truly atrocious games such as Arkham Knight, Ride to Hell: Retribution, Aliens: Colonial Marines, and anything Konami produces post-Kojima, then niche titles such as No Man's Sky will get the praise and attention they deserve. On top of that though is also another underlying problem: the fact that publishers and studios have banked in on preorder culture as hard as they can and are now purposefully trying to drive the hype up and then suppress pre-launch reviews to make sure that their day-1 sales are as high as they possibly can be, so that way even if day two sells four copies because the game turned out to be utter garbage, the company can still say they had a successful launch and then move on to the next project to do the same exact thing.
DO NOT GIVE IN TO HYPE CULTURE.
"anything Konami produces post-Kojima"
ReplyDeleteOh Snap!