Hi – I’m Hamish Black, and welcome to Writing on Games.
So, No Man’s Sky sure is a thing, eh?
Or at least, I think it is – judging from the extremities of the discussion surrounding
the game on the internet, you’re either going to hear it described as some deified
force which will eliminate all the world’s ills and will contain the scope of every video
game ever made, or it will be the video game equivalent of shaking a crisp packet about
and trying to amuse yourself to the sound it makes – I dunno, that was a weird comparison,
but hey, this is the internet we’re talking about, so hyperbolic claims regarding the
quality of a game very few people have played at this stage is totally kosher!
Seriously though, I think that the situation the game is in is unlike any we’ve seen
in recent years as an industry – from its announcement which generated such
excitement, to the radio silence that followed it, to the reveal of gameplay which helped
temper more even-headed people’s expectations, to the delays, it still managed to maintain
enough of an enigmatic quality that people are clamoring for it.
The reason?
They simply need to know.
There’s a reason the key question people have asked since the reveal right up to the
present day is ‘what is it you do in No Man’s Sky?’
This is great from a marketing perspective – intriguing people to actively want to
know more about your product is really the best case scenario for any marketing executive
– I can only assume that pre-orders are through the roof.
The problem?
When it comes to the perspective of the product and the response from consumers, regardless
of what extreme side of the argument the proles fall on with regard to how the game has been
handled (or, indeed, how it will actually play upon its release), the game will only
disappoint these people.
This is a game whose message got way out of hand, and it’s such a multifaceted beast
that I think it’s important to trace where those errors may have come from, and why blaming,
harassing and abusing the small team at Hello Games is possibly the worst response one could
have to this whole situation.
By the time you watch this, PS4 owners will be able to play this (as if they haven’t
already been playing it for several years already because of retail breaking street
date), and I’ll be over here waiting for my PC version – with that in mind, this
is not a review, just a series of observations regarding a product which may represent a
sea change in the way small companies get the message out there about their games, in
order to avoid a similar shitstorm to this.
First off, however, we’ve got to go back to the beginning.
The game was teased at the 2013 VGX show, with a trailer that touted a seemingly endless
universe to explore, with the adage ‘Every Atom Procedural’ becoming a phrase that
stuck in people’s minds as they witnessed a lush, lived-in landscape being explored
from a first-person perspective of a player character, who proceeded to enter a spacecraft
and seemingly effortlessly exit the planet’s atmosphere to go in search of new environments.
Already, the scope of the game seemed huge, and when it was revealed that this was the
work of Hello Games (the studio behind the Joe Danger series of all things), this really
got people’s heads turning.
I mean, at the time of this reveal, Hello Games had only just expanded their team from
four members.
The idea that a little over four people could create this massive universe and everything
within it was somewhat astounding to people.
This was somewhat compounded by the game’s official announcement at the Sony E3 press
conference in 2014, which saw Hello Games founder Sean Murray coming out and, in typical
indie dev fashion, charmingly fumble through a speech invoking Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke
and a childlike escapism that he associated with science fiction.
This, however, was the point where No Man’s Sky became something of an uncontrollable
beast.
Talk of the boundless nature of the game’s universe, to the point where they weren’t
even aware of everything that was out there, littered the speech.
Seriously, listening to this speech again took me right back to that period of time
where we had even less of an understanding of what No Man’s Sky was, and it’s incredibly
easy to understand where people’s heightened expectations were coming from.
The way Murray spoke about how the players would help the devs discover more about the
game world seems so absurd that, looking at it from the 2014 point of view, brings to
mind questions about whether this is even really a game or not, or if it’s more of
a bastardised science experiment.
Later, talk of the world being so big that they needed to build robots in order to track
it all compounded this idea.
When you consider it, it’s a really destabilizing idea of how we view games – we typically
have the idea that these are very carefully constructed experiences designed to entertain
us.
What Hello Games described, however, was something more akin to a game almost creating itself,
with their role being less developer and more curator.
Seriously, go back and read/listen to some of the interviews this dude gave regarding
the game – I’ll come onto why people should back the hell off of Hello Games, but it’s
easy to see where the ideas of ‘the last game people will ever need to buy’ came
from.
The more cynical of us, however, whilst remaining optimistically curious about the scale of
this game, were more interested in finding out how these conclusions were being approached.
Like, ‘I get what you’re saying about it being infinite and having all these elements
but in order for this to be truly convincing, you have to explain a bit more about how all
of this works.’
It couldn’t possibly work in the way they described.
As silence turned into more silence and the rumoured 2015 release window seemed to slip
further away, it was clear that Hello and Sony (the publisher of the game) were forced
to draw the devs out of hiding in order to actually show people that the game was still
happening.
One of the crucial points for me was when people finally got their hands on it around
about July 2015 and came out saying ‘well, it’s one of those survival games.
It’s a really, really big one of those though.’
That was when my expectations were lowered significantly (given the ubiquity of hunter/gatherer
survival type games on Steam at the time), and this was the best thing to happen I think.
To this day I’ve still remained totally intrigued by the game’s scope and I’m
just excited to get in a spaceship and fly around cool looking environments.
That’s all I need from a game like this.
It may not be the earth-shattering experience people were expecting earlier in the game’s
development cycle, but it didn’t need to be.
I’m excited to finally get my hands on it when it launches on PC – that’s it.
If it turns out it doesn’t control well, I won’t be too disappointed.
Unfortunately, this message didn’t seem to get through to a lot of people online – many
of whom still took the extremes of either ‘it will be the greatest thing ever created
by a mortal’ or the exact polar opposite.
As release dates approached, delays upon delays were announced.
This is where things began to turn messy, as June and July 2016 release dates slipped
and the internet decided to focus all their energy squarely on the individuals at Hello
Games (who, at this time, are still a relatively small team considering the game they’ve
been working on).
Combine this with the absurdity of someone paying nearly $1300 for a copy of the game
two weeks early, before taking to Reddit to announce that he’d reached the quote-unquote
‘goal’ of the center of the galaxy in a mere 30 hours, going against the idea people
had ingrained into their heads that they’d be playing this game forever and ever and
ever.
Not only this, but user daymeeuhn announced what had become some people’s latent worst
fears – that the game was indeed merely a very big version of the survival-crafting-exploration
experience that many were already very familiar with, as well as the fact that the game was
buggy.
Again, the internet did not respond kindly to this, with Hello Games having to control
a shitstorm of people hurling abuse their way, as well as having to deal with the fact
that many retailers have simply been breaking street date – leading to Sean Murray pleading
with people to not post reviews of that version of the game given that a massive day one patch
was coming to fix known issues, as well as stating that progress in pre-release versions
would be wiped upon release, leading to another shitstorm of abuse being thrown his way as
people proclaimed the game to be a complete failure before even laying hands on it.
Either that, or fighting with other people on the internet who were still staunchly defending
that it’d be the game to end all games.
All for a game that for all intents and purposes, kinda looks like Minecraft in space.
This is a situation that ends badly for anyone who didn’t at least attempt to remain cynical
– people expecting the world have their expectations remain unmet and Hello Games
get a bunch of abuse thrown at them by shitheels who seemingly don’t understand the complexities
of game dev, and can’t read beyond the surface level of something they see on the internet.
So what can we take away from this debacle?
Well, for one, and I can’t emphasise this enough – STOP HARRASSING HELLO GAMES AND
THE INDIVIDUALS THAT COMPRISE IT.
I realise this is the internet we’re talking about so nuance doesn’t necessarily enter
into the equation, but even if you think that someone deserves abuse for this (which they
don’t), at this stage you are completely misdirecting your ire.
They may have announced the game far earlier than they should have, sure, but at this stage,
Hello Games likely have little control over what they can and can’t say regarding the
process.
This is exemplified by the fact that after they announced delays and people got super
pissed, only after a number of weeks were they actually allowed to announce that this
was perhaps not the result of development issues, but litigation coming from Sky for
the use of the word in the game’s title.
If things seem too simple to actually be true, they probably aren’t.
Your problem isn’t with Hello Games – it’s with the bureaucracy of business, a lack of
transparency between publishers and the public, and of legal procedure, specifically copyright
law.
When you get pissed off when you read that the game can be completed in 30 hours and
isn’t the massive world-altering experience you thought it would be, you shouldn’t be
pissed off at Hello Games.
You should be pissed off at marketing execs who doubtless exploited the vacuum of speculation
the lack of communication with the public was causing in an attempt to rake in pre-orders,
rather than trying to maintain calm in the wake of Murray’s arguably hyperbolic statements
regarding the game’s scale.
By exploiting the narrative provided of Sean Murray being a nervous but charming man, they
distracted from the fact that game publishing is often undertaken by faceless businesses
looking at units sold above all else.
They gave the world a friendly face to the game’s development – a brilliantly devious
marketing move, but one that made a target out of Murray when anything went wrong, basically
throwing him and his team under the bus.
Think about it – when Watch Dogs came out, the game was hyped to a similar level, and
disappointed as a result.
The difference is that people couldn’t direct their hate at any one person – Ubisoft is
a corporation, Sean Murray is a person.
Your problem isn’t with Sean Murray – it’s with marketing teams who used him as a smokescreen
to disguise bureaucracy.
Perhaps more importantly though, you should be examining your own capacity to read between
the lines.
That the guy posting these numbers stated very clearly that he mainlined the game without
stopping to explore much.
When you get pissed off that a game has a day one patch, you should be examining the
idea that day one patches might actually be a good thing, designed to make the player
experience better rather than be used as an excuse to get the game out more quickly.
When you get find yourself getting sucked into the hype, maybe you should consider the
fact that only leads to disappointment and come to terms with that.
Ultimately, if you’re spewing hatred at individuals on the internet at all, maybe
your problem isn’t with Hello Games – maybe it’s with you.
So yeah, that was a bit of a different approach to an episode I guess.
I hope you enjoyed my take on the whole No Man’s Sky situation and realise that this
isn’t meant to be some kind of scathing attack on you if you feel jipped by the whole
process and the way the hype was built up – just to perhaps consider that the situation
is more nuanced than just ‘HELLO GAMES FUCKED THIS UP’.
I know I might be asking the impossible here given that it’s the internet, but just think
about the wider implications of things like day one patches, marketing and hype in general
before attacking people.
I’m still excited for No Man’s Sky given that, like I say, I had my expectations tempered
long ago – are you still excited for it, or are you done with the whole thing?
Let me know in the comments below.
Also, I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank my Patrons for their continued support
– I really couldn’t make the show without you guys.
Your names should be scrolling on the screen as we speak, and if you want your name on
here, please consider pledging!
Every pledge means the absolute world to me.
And with all of that said, I’m Hamish Black and this has been Writing on Games – I’ll
see you next time.