They really turned it around. You should check it out.
But yeah, super crappy launch.
But yeah, super crappy launch.
the launch was beyond super crappy, and "turned it around" is underselling it.
"the engoodening of no mans sky" was a youtube video that came out ~5 years ago and covers the story of the launch up until the point the video was made. since then they've had several more really amazing (and compeltely free) updates.
This. I really feel that the good will they burned up with the launch - and I'm not denying it was very poorly handled - they've made up for 10x over since then. Every expedition is like a whole new DLC, but they've released every single one of them for free.
Obviously it's not purely ego driven (if at all), so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative.
I suppose the fact that it sold so much throughout the years gave them enough runway to actually work on it with no worries? And I suppose that people would be skeptical of a new game launch by this studio, thus dooming them to work on NMS for eternity... we'll see how Light No Fire's launch will do.
I've been wondering about this for a few years now. Do they really sell enough new copies of the game to fund development of several new expeditions a year? I suppose they must, but it's still surprising - more so as the years went on.
Honestly though, at a certain point, they could've started charging for the expeditions as DLC and I wouldn't have even complained.
Everyone says this and I really disagree. It's been a year or so since I last play but I have been playing off and on about every year.
Whenever I start a new game, it feels basically the same. Once I get into the universe, there are way more things to do but nome of them feel like they matter.
The game is a classic example of a mile wide and an inch deep. Every update just seems to bring a new system that feels, in itself, feels about as satisfying as the game did on launch.
Despite the valiant and admirable effort to continue updating the game (and for free), I still don't think it's come close to the game that was promised. It's still the launch game in my eyes; nothing seems to matter. I can just also build a base (or any of the other new features) that doesn't matter too.
It's a fun game for maybe 30 hours a year (300 hours!) and that's an accomplishment but I don't think it's come close to fulfilling it's original promise.
The Expeditions can really help with this, as they provide a more traditional linear, quest-driven way of going through the game.
In a lot of ways its Space Minecraft, so you have to make your own fun, your own stakes. If you don't like it, then you don't like it.
I think it's the fact that NMS has a lot of systems, but they are just separate, and they have a lot of limitations. Ships are separate from bases which are separate from freighters. They sometimes interact if it's explicitly coded, but nothing is allowed to be emergent.
In Minecraft I can put 100 nether portals in my basement if I feel like it, and I can set up a sheep farm in hell. I can pour water into my base and have a mini pool with fish. I can make copper golems that move items, and that opens a whole can of worms.
In NMS, it feels like I have no freedom to experiment at all. For that reason, it's been pretty hard to get into. Everything feels so baked in place. The only thing that really scratched that itch of mine was making big farming factories. But I was not interested after that.
“…they never added pay-to-win, they never added microtransasctions or paid DLC, they never made VR as a second game. They didn’t give up on the game or scale their resources back to do it. They didn’t come out and call gamers entitled, they didn’t have loot boxes, they didn’t start work on the next big project or sequel. They didn’t do much of anything except get back to work.”
https://nmsspot.com/2020/01/09/a-walk-through-the-no-mans-sk...
As for NMS itself, it all comes if you dig survival and building type of games, and you'd to step into Star Trek-style away missions.