No Man's Sky, the game that hurt a lot of gamers' feelings and broke a lot of hearts, has now gotten less of the news spotlight as people have gotten over it with lots of lessons learned. Last news I heard about it, nah why do I care, all I know is that it's packing up and riding towards the sunset. I feel sorry for my $60.
When it comes to gaming, if you fall short of expectations after you've given out a lot of teases, then you're in trouble. No Man's Sky sealed the deal when it comes to this. People are just sick of false advertising.
Hello Games and Sony have been promoting No Man's Sky for years and everytime a glimpse of the game comes out, gamers would go wild about it and as time passes by, the expectations for it created a foundation that it should be an excellent game. This is the part where the developers already lost. With a game that's exposed too early to the public and all hyped up, there's nowhere else to be but to be the very best, no I'm not talking about Pokemon Go here.
Enough about the heartaches, lets dig through some analysis
According to a post at We Write Things, Strategy Analytic's Michael Goodman spoke to them about No Man's Sky's underwhelming loss. He says that he didn't know how Sony would expect the game to be. He agrees that much hype has been put into the game too and just like movies, when the game came out, many people were playing it only to find out that it wasn't really what they expected.
"You have that opening box office weekend where it does really well and then all of a sudden it just dies a quiet death..." This is what Goodman feels about the game that started out with high buzz and then leaves everyone asking themselves why did they get this game in the first place. At this point, I'm thinking, 'yeah let's just let the game die in peace.'
Goodman also thinks there's no build-up in the game, you grind for something that turns out to be nothing after all. He compares No Man's Sky with The Witcher III's gameplay where you could play a hundred hours or so and still feel the roller coaster ride of your adventure. For No Man's Sky, it seems flat, like you do stuff for no reason at all, you just follow the quest requirements and that's it.
"When we think about most games, there's a build up and then the boss fight. More build up and another boss fight. [In No Man's Sky] you never had the boss. If you think about a game like Witcher 3, you could play that game for 100 plus hours, but there's peaks and valleys to it...It's not just doing the same thing, over and over and over and over again. I felt like I kept doing the same thing in [No Man's Sky],"
With my own experience, I felt quite betrayed by the game's creators as I was excited about the game's promises. I preordered the game and found out that what I did was stupid. At one point I wrote something about No Man's Sky receiving so much hate that it didn't deserve but as days went on after that moment, I realized maybe everyone's right.
I stopped playing the game after I transferred to one planet and realized what I am going to do are the same things I did with the last planet so I dropped the game after 4 hours of gameplay. I searched online to find out how the game ends, and I was glad I just spent so little to it because according to this review, the outcome sounds like less than mediocre, just a bunch of text telling you that you have done your quest with the Atlas mission thing, no cinematics, no dramatic stuff, just plain old text.
