No Man's Sky has reminded me why gamers occasionally have a bad reputation

The discussions on Facebook regarding it, that is...

By Joseph Shaffer · August 12, 2016

I have yet to play No Man's Sky. Though it kind of piqued my interest when I first read about it, I have to say that it doesn't look to be something I'd drop $60 on. I'll wait for a huge price reduction and nab it when it's in the bargain bin or on a tremendous digital sale.

What drives me nuts about this game isn't the game itself, but the discussions surrounding it. Let me give you a sample:

Commenter 1: Scathing opinion, sometimes with clever punchline.

Commenter 2: Grumbly comment about how no one understands what the game is supposed to be or how exploration games work.

Commenter 3: General negative statement about exploration games and the ruination of gaming.

Commenter 4: Remark about how people who don't like the game are dumb and obviously expected it to be [insert "pedestrian" game franchise here]. Occasionally with the term "lowest common denominator" thrown in.

Flame war achieved.

I can only think that (though I hope this isn't the case and I'm just being cynical) some non-gamers might spy bits of these discussion and shake their heads at how childish gamers are. It's one thing to be opinionated and to express even your harshest thoughts, but the discussion surrounding this game seems to be getting steadily uglier.

On the other hand, there's one short "review" on Steam for No Man's Sky that I liked quite a bit:

"No Man's PC can run this game."

Classic.

Comments 14

dementedhut Aug 13, 2016

Sadly, that's not the worse thing I've heard surrounding "discussion" of No Man's Sky. Back in May, when it was reported that the game was being delayed from June to August, the creator of the game said he received death threats.

Genj Aug 13, 2016

I think this is bound to happen whenever a game has a lot of hype leading to release. The most vocal gamers tend to be the least mature. On a side note, this was one of those games that I couldn't understand what everyone was so excited about. It looks pretty but when I heard "procedurally generated" and "survival with crafting" that was enough to turn me off.

honestgamer Staff Aug 13, 2016

Yeah, "procedurally generated" told me all that I needed to know about it. Immediately, I knew that it would have precisely the problems that people now complain of it having: chiefly, a ton of different planets that inflate a number and make the universe sound massive but don't actually mean compelling gameplay because any distinct elements that planets might contain still have to be coded in and there's only so much coding and artwork a development team--especially a tiny one--can provide. To me, the game looks just fine, but certainly not worth the hype it generated ahead of time, and not worth the anger now that it has predictably failed to live up to that hype.

jerec Aug 13, 2016

I'm enjoying it. I find it kind of relaxing to just wander around planets exploring. It's the sort of thing I'll play when I'm tired after work and I'm not interested in doing much else. How long I keep playing, no idea. Right now I've found a decent planet (that isn't too demanding on my life support) and I'm just going to explore as much of it as I can.

Nightfire Aug 14, 2016

I am playing it. I plan on reviewing it. My personal thoughts on the game's quality aside, the community's reaction to issues surrounding its release, particularly the part about having to wait a mere three days to play a frickin' video game is utterly ludicrous.

As for all of the reported technical issues, I have found that almost all of them have workarounds or easy solutions. The problem is, the game detects your graphics settings improperly and insists on enabling a 30 fps frame cap for some reason. The game was barely playable until I turned this off, and as soon as I did, my game ran smooth as silk.

As for the other technical problems, it just seems like typical first-day release wrinkles that will be gradually ironed out in patches. The dev team has already stated they're working around the clock to fix these.

Patience is a lost virtue, it seems.

bbbmoney Aug 14, 2016

I've seen some planet footage and lost all interest immediately. That said, the internet deals in extremes. It's not just gamers.

JoeTheDestroyer Blogger Aug 14, 2016

jerec:
I hope to play the game eventually, but I don't know if it'll be something I play religiously. Maybe now and then, in between projects, pretty much with your mindset that it's a nice wind down kind of game.

Nightfire:
Ugh, I've seen many instances of impatience surrounding anything with a fanbase, be it a video game or a much awaited film adaptation. Reactions to delays or script rewrites tend to be the worst. Patience truly is a lost virtue.

htp:
I never said it was just gamers. Non-members of anything, from what I've noticed, seem to accuse certain groups of being petulant children based on witnessing common internet extremity. I've heard/read such comments about metal fans, horror fans, anime fans or pretty much any fanbase where passion is involved. I think for me this post was more of a way to vent because I'm tired of some of the extreme, uncalled for vitriol towards gamers and from gamers towards other gamers.

EmP Staff Aug 15, 2016

To play a little bit of Devils Advocate, the developers are hardly blameless in this. No one sane thinks death threats are suitable under any circumstances beyond people not thinking the original X-Com is better than the remake, but there were a lot of broken promises that it looks more and more likely were never even attempted to be kept. Multiplayer is the big one. DID YOU KNOW that even though online connectivity was soundlessly scrapped, that the special edition version of the game on Europe was printed with an online play icon on the box that they just covered up with a sticker?

I think NMS has arrived at an unfortunate time when trust in developers from gamers is at rock bottom. After years of paid DLC on disks, kickstarted bollocks designed to gobble up money with no end goal in sight and overwrought shadiness you can't blame people for owning a short fuse.

JoeTheDestroyer Blogger Aug 15, 2016

The multiplayer thing is a big reason I won't drop $60. I'm not big on multiplayer, personally, but canning it silently like that is underhanded.

dementedhut Aug 15, 2016

That sticker thing sounds hilarious. I wouldn't be surprised if someone would somehow, someway use that to sue the developers.

jerec Aug 16, 2016

The biggest story was where two people actually managed to "meet" - they were on the same planet at the same location, but couldn't see each other. And their time of day was different.

But there's nothing to see - the whole game is in first person view. No clue what your character would even look like.

EmP Staff Aug 16, 2016

That was a gem - the devs wrote off online connectivity because it was "gigantically unlikely" two people would ever meet so long as the game was live. Which is a huge claim. Then those two guys were in the same place at the same time on day one.

aschultz Aug 16, 2016

This sounds like the birthday paradox/problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

How many possible planets are there? How many people are expected to play the game?

If there are, say, 50000 people playing the game and 1 billion different planets, the possibility is actually quite good it will happen. 72% chance good. 100000, the probability jumps to 99.33%.

So, yeah, the developers should've considered it.

honestgamer Staff Aug 16, 2016

Except the game supposedly has 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets, not a paltry 1 billion. ;-)

And I may be missing something, but I don't remember any of the prerelease launch hype focusing on multiplayer, or even saying that it was going to be a component at all, let alone a major one. We know it was under consideration during development because of the note on the box, but it's not something the developer was hyping and then suddenly axed at the last minute, the way people are saying.

I didn't follow No Man's Sky all that closely, anyway, because I knew that with so many planets on offer, there was no way most of them wouldn't wind up being depressingly similar (as I mentioned above). 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 isn't as impressive as it sounds when you have maybe 20 unique variations, if that.