“Feel the sting of an enormous missed opportunity.”
Ouch.
I’ve been enjoying No Man’s Sky. But even I’ll admit that the game has fallen short of some of its lofty promises, something Jason covered in greater detail the other day.
Alternatively, you could just watch Honest Trailers mercilessly skewer the game for just over four minutes. Because that’s the gist of their approach — the universe is sparse, missing promised features, and not worth the price of entry.
Just as a small hint: there’s a big spoiler around a minute in about the end game — so you might want to skip that.
Pretty rough.
Comments
27 responses to “Honest Trailers Rips No Man’s Sky To Pieces”
I’m gonna leave this here too, made me laugh.
Personally, I love the game but they’re not wrong.
Yeah, like I see where NMS kind of flopped and let people down but I still want to play he heck out of it.
Ditto.
But the hype-train was so strong with this one, I’m not surprised at the disappointed backlash. To be honest, I expected it. It reminded me of all the promises made about “Black and White” ….. another game that never delivered. Sean … let Peter Molyneux be your example of what NOT to do when selling a game.
I do get a Molyneux ver 2 with him, but not completely sucked into what BS hes saying
I don’t think much was actually promised by the devs that wasn’t delivered. I put over 20 hours into the first planet alone, and the graphics look like the ones in the demos, as does the game play.
I think the hype was mostly in people’s minds, this was a small indy type dev team, what did people think they were getting?
I love the game, and it is better than I expected.
I think it’s not about the hype train – if you watch the release trailers – the final game was stripped of so so much stuff. I still have fun playing it but pretty stupid in the end – basically a silent crowd funding gank. Hope the updates and dlc bring better stuff zzzz
I am continually reminded that avoiding the hype train for games, films and books is a great idea.
I am loving my time with NMS because I didn’t have huge expectations of it. I read about it in Gameinformer and it piqued my interest (being a big sci-fi fan) then saw it on GoG about a week before it was released so I purchased it. I hadn’t seen any videos or read any blogs on it, I went in relatively blind.
I will admit, some of the things that have been apparently dropped, sound pretty ace, but it continues to exceed my expectation levels.
Also, those complaining about the price and content, obviously didn’t pay $60 for the ‘demo’ of the latest SW:Battlefront + $60 for the remainder of the game (or DLC, as EA calls it).
Battlefront and examples like it frustrate the hell out of me. If only because they’re proving the wrong point.
A lot of DLC naysayers are unjustified conspiracy theorists, self-entitled and ignorant of why DLC can benefit both consumers AND the industry, keeping artists and writers hired and productive on affordable, otherwise unlikely-to-be-seen content well past the point that they would normally be fired, when the ‘what you get on the disc’ product has already been sent away for months of unproductive bureaucracy – sorry, valuable third-party/platform-specific quality assurance and certification.
And then you have Battlefront, proving right every crackpot who claims that publishers deliberately release unfinished or low-content games at the price of a finished/fulfilling game, just so they can double-dip on the ‘missing’ content sold separately.
Because there’s really nothing to prove them wrong, here. The game WAS low-content. It sold content later. There’s not really anything to dispute there beyond their intentions. And who the hell has any evidence that we can trust a AAA publisher’s word on their intentions?
I am not anti-DLC in any way. I own the base games and all DLC for Civ5, the Bethesda RPGs, Battlefield games (among others) and feel the addons were justified, but Battlefront leaves the taste of bile in my mouth. I bought the DLC to make the game ‘complete’ then realised I just paid $120 for a game and that experience has single-handedly made me suspicious of all AAA DLC.
In the future I would consider buying NMS DLC as I believe the game I am currently playing is worth $60. Whereas Battlefront I paid $120 to make the game worth $60.
Oh my god. You used the correct pique. All hail!
I think its the only time I have used it though haha! Tick that one off the list…
It bothers me that these kinds of typos are now so common that when I see the correct usage my brain tries to tell me they’re wrong.
Lol. SW: Battlefront was well worth $60. Just because it didnt have a tacked on single player campaign of corridor running doesnt mean it wasnt worth full price. As for maps? What? Didnt have all the extra fluff that no one plays in online shooters anyway? It was always advertised as a multiplayer game and thats exactly what we got. Everything about it was top notch, from the animations, sound, gunplay, atmosphere… everything.
No Man’s Sky consists of clicking on rocks and managing your tiny inventory. all so you can move onto the next barren wasteland to do the same thing.
Did you buy the $59.95 season pass or are you still just playing the base $68 game that shipped? If you did, I am afraid you paid more than $60.
Also, I didn’t complain about the game itself. I loved it! I would regularly find myself getting lost listening to the sounds and looking at the sights of the game, it really is stunning. It was the underhanded tactics employed to get money out of everyone that annoys me. They were announcing DLC before the game was even released! To be honest, I don’t think I would have an issue if they said, here is a $120 Star Wars game (which included everything), instead they teased us with a few maps and modes then held the rest for ransom.
Just the base game for $60. Put about 55 hours into it before any DLC came out and that was enough for me.
What new modes did they add? Does anyone play them? I do think DLC packs for shooters are a bad idea as it splits the playerbase, but you’ll often find that people only play 1-3 modes on the most popular maps anyway.
I don’t get the inventory thing. There are pods everywhere that let you add extra slots to your inventory. I low fly around the planet exploring and finding aliens to talk to and learn the language. I have found three abandoned space ships so far and optioned them up. The planets aer anything but barren, with beautiful underground cave systems, underwater areas, forests.
I think people are so used to instant gratification, and race from planet to planet without taking time to discover the game.
It is far from just clicking on rocks.
Avoiding the hype train is easy if you follow the right game media and critics.
Dont preorder games and hedge your bets on return policies.
Its wierd to see the hype train when so many commentators pretty much predicted this after the first demos of Sean Murray standing on stage letting no one touch it but him… massive universe, limited gameplay and a small development team.
Yet the hype train carried… I think I saw one commentary video show a clip of a podvast where an honest game critic predicted some of this and caused a hyped up fan boy to walk off the podcast.
I mostly use Gameinformer (and Kotaku sometimes) for my gaming news, even though I game on PC and occasionally Xbone, having a mixed platform source of news helps keep the fanboy circle-jerk loop to a minimum.
Also, I cant wait for the S%*tstorm that will ensue when HL3 is announced. People will lose their minds!
I haven’t taken the hype train in years.
But even going in to NMS blind, I’m struggling to meet the terribly low expectations I had of the game already.
In the beginning it was great, the unknown stretched out before me and it truly appeared limitless.
However, I quickly began to have a problem I saw many others having. As I progressed, peeling back the layers of content, I found myself questioning if that layer was the last. The vague communication meant I was unsure if I had only scratched the surface or seeing the big picture.
I had friends asking if they should get it, and I was having trouble giving them an honest answer because I could feel the limits, but I couldn’t confirm them.
Now, I know that what I have been doing since I started, is the end all bread of NMS. There is no more layers, and I kinda guessed that as I crossed a purple field to reach another beacon.
“This is it, Nami” I thought to myself, knowing my exit from NMS will be a quiet and humbled exit from a lonely universe.
Just one more region, System, Planet…….you don’t know whats out there! I repeated to myself, but I knew.
But to really own the issue, I’m angry at myself.
I didn’t play in to the hype, but I didn’t ask the right questions or accept the realities we all know.
Come on, did we really believe that an indie team of 15 people, could achieve something that none of the huge AAA have been able to?
As I watch back over the countless “Sean Murray lied” videos appearing around the net, I cringe. Not because of the developer PR bullcrap, but because when you sit back and honestly listen, you know deep down that the vision was never possible.
We can talk about the future, and I kinda hope there is one for No Mans Sky, but this is how it will be remembered.
Yeah, its an odd game for sure! I am getting the same feeling as Sid Meiers Pirates! used to give me. I played hundreds of hours of that repetitive game and the most exciting thing about it was guessing the colour of the governor’s daughter’s dress or the rumour mill in the tavern. I turn to games like that for a relax, like one of those little Zen garden things. In NMS I stop and smell the roses. If I get the urge to destroy them, ill boot up GTAV Fallout4.
Yeah fair enough, but this game was never marketed as a zen garden rose smelling simulator, that’s why people are so angry.
People bought the sprawling space epic that was meant to have it all, and turned out to be an insanely large daycare sandbox with no toys in it.
Drop you mind off and watch it eat sand, come back in 60 hours to find it still eating sand.
Man cannot survive on bread alone, even 18 squizillion different kinds.
I’m with zzzonked on this. Battlefront was great out of the box. I enjoyed the heck out of it. I have the Pass but still go back to the vanilla maps because they’re excellent. The game modes also offers a more diverse way of playing the game than any other multiplayer fps I’ve played. You got your hero shooter with heroes vs villiains, you got your close quarters with like 3 different game modes, your classical open battlefront modes, a lite starship combat mode. The expansions, to be honest, are a mixed bag so far. I’m not a fan of a lot of Cloud City. But Vanilla is great.
Part of it is also I really like the streamlining of Battlefield gameplay. It’s essentially Battlefield with cooler (to me) maps and without the 40 superfluous different types of assault rifle. It’s so good.
I’ve gotten more out of this than Overwatch.
wish honest trailers would do something useful for once and take off this sea (er abyss) of negative gaming entitlement and attitudes of late. That would be hilarious. That has become way worse than any game I have seen and paid money for in years. The new Jim Sterling sums it all up perfectly.
Not harsh at all. Video was more honest then any “critic” review I read.
Disappointment not a factor for myself. Early NMS had nothing but hype and faith to invest in.
No self effecting hype or belief, no disappointment.
Game is the worst high profile game I played in a decade, at the least. The more I played it the more I hated it.
i have this game and read some of the hype and even hoped for the things that are missing in the game. but i have still done 12 hours of this game in the last 2 days and only getting about 3 hours sleep, becasue i cant put it down even though it is repetitive and mind numbing, i dont know what it is, but i wanna learn the Gek language and i wanna max out my ship, exosuit and multi tool and i wanna break in to research labs and piss of sentinels, and wanna take pot shots a freighters and then have my ass handed to me, i cant help it, im addicted.
Oh my god, this was perfect.
The beginning of the game sucked me in. Then four hours later I realised I was doing the exact same thing as in hour 1. Then I did some googling, and learnt I’d be doing in hour 300 what I was doing in hour 1.
no bueno.
also can confirm acid at a planetarium is a totally worthwhile thing to do.
p sure we’re entitled to a refund under australian consumer protection laws. the end product of no man’s sky definitely fits 3 of 4 major problem criterion, and the fed court recently smacked down Valve for being deceptive too.
https://youtu.be/A8P2CZg3sJQ
Pretty much saw it coming after the manila-folder style of gameplay in Elite Dangerous.