How sky-high hype formed a storm cloud over No Man’s Sky

There’s a lot of words being written about the release of No Man’s Sky, a long-awaited video game set in a procedurally generated universe with an effectively endless number of planets and lifeforms. The game has been in development by a relatively small team of developers for years, and the hype around the game reached epic proportions – to a point where it just became insane and crazy, with people clearly expecting way, way more of the game than it could ever deliver.

Ars has taken a look at the course of the hype train, and this is the key paragraph for me:

When Murray and Hello Games (as well as console publisher Sony) actually did show and talk about No Man’s Sky, though, they were actually relatively restrained and realistic about what they were promising. Unlike Spore and Black and White – both of which saw saturation PR campaigns that promised revolutionary and industry-changing gameplay features that mostly didn’t end up working out – it’s hard to find many concrete promises made by No Man’s Sky’s developer and publisher that haven’t ended up being true (with the possible exception of the multiplayer issue discussed above).

And that’s all she wrote, for me. I’ve been following the development for this game for years, and it’s always been crystal clear for me what this game would offer: collecting resources, discovering new worlds and species, expanding the basic capabilities of your ship and tools, rinse and repeat, until eventually reaching the centre of the universe. That’s what the developers promised, and that’s what I’m expecting tomorrow when the PC version unlocks.

All the additional hype around No Man’s Sky comes from people themselves, and from stupid journalists hyping the game through the stratosphere without ever having played it. Had you stuck to what the developer and publisher have said over the course of the past number of years, instead of letting yourself get strung along the hype train by the press and Reddit, you’d know exactly what to expect tomorrow.

9 Comments

  1. 2016-08-11 11:30 pm
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