If you couldn’t tell by now, No Man’s Sky is not the game a lot of people wanted it to be. But what is that game, exactly?
I think we’ve all, at some point or another, wished for The Ultimate Video Game. The idea of a game that caters to everyone with a deft mix of endless breadth, countless play styles, and an intangible glue binding it all together is irresistible.
Even before games were technologically sophisticated enough to achieve the idea, sci-fi works like Snow Crash were imagining such a game, such a world.
It’s no wonder that a handful of developers are trying to make that game. They always have been. Before the modern crop of Star Citizens, it was everything from Spore to Dwarf Fortress. Before that, it was early MMOs like Ultima Online, or sprawling single-player games like The Elder Scrolls II. Before that, it was the biggest Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs).
How exciting would it be if somebody pulled it off?
It becomes a problem, however, when that hypothetical, still impossible game becomes the standard by which many existent games are judged.
Let’s get this out of the way upfront: I have no problem with people who are disappointed by No Man’s Sky. While not all of their expectations are reasonable, Hello Games absolutely claimed some major features would be in the game, and they failed to deliver. I personally enjoy it as a kind of psychedelic outer-space tourism game — more about looking than touching — but there are glaring faction, multiplayer, and snake-monster-shaped holes in its procedural fabric.
It’s only natural to feel let down by that.
But some of people’s grander dreams of the perfect No Man’s Sky — the Platonic ideal; No Man’s Chair, if you will — aren’t really true to what the game was ever about. I’ve seen gobs of people collectively assembling an imaginary No Man’s Sky that’s more Star Citizen meets Minecraft 2 than Sean Murray’s beard-born fever dream.
Large-scale multiplayer, full destructibility, base-building, farming, livestock-rearing, war, peace, romance, player-driven economies, a pristine egg at the center of the universe containing an infinite number of snake monsters, each eating their own tails.
They wanted The Ultimate Video Game. Hello Games promised something big, but I’m not sure they ever promised that.
It’s not hard to trace the lineage of this idea in relation to No Man’s Sky. Space games like Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous naturally gravitate toward the grandiose, and No Man’s Sky slipped into a similarly ludicrous pair of space pyjamas. It aimed for the stars.
But where games like Star Citizen and Elite promised space-faring MMO-type experiences that would cater to any type of player (which they, themselves, have failed to deliver in various ways), No Man’s Sky has always been more about exploration and discovery, ever since Sean Murray and co were demoing it for press in hotel rooms. At no point did they say, “We’re making a spiritual successor to EVE Online.”
Just because a space game is ambitious, that doesn’t mean it’s gonna be the same space game as the other space games, except bigger and more ultimate. I think, however, that some people conflated those ideas to a degree. Because No Man’s Sky doesn’t have features that other, markedly different space games tout, those features are somehow “missing.” It lacks core pieces of The Ultimate Video Game. That’s a slippery slope, one that confines multiple games with different goals inside an increasingly packed cage.
Steam survival games are perhaps an even bigger influence on the No Man’s Sky ire tire fire than the recent explosion of hyper-ambitious space games. Again, in broader strokes, No Man’s Sky sounds quite similar. Procedural generation? Check. Survival mechanics? Check. Some form of multiplayer? Check. I’ve seen countless threads arguing that, because No Man’s Sky didn’t use those extremely particular games cut from a very particular cloth as its launching point, it Fucked Up Big Time. “Why isn’t No Man’s Sky a base-building playground power fantasy? It needs to be an evolution of DayZ, Rust, and Ark: Survival Evolved, or else it’s not A Good Game.” That kind of thing.
And I get why some players viewed No Man’s Sky as an extension of those games. The modern survival genre is more modular than just about any I can think of. It was born of modularity, of developers seeing games like Minecraft and DayZ and going, “OK, I’m gonna do that, except with features X, Y, and Z.” More, more, more. Each game aiming to be bigger than the last. More overflowing with Content and Things and Stuff.
Once again, we find a genre that many hope will evolve into The Ultimate Video Game, a hope bolstered by the fact that survival mechanics have started creeping into countless other genres.
Many trademark multiplayer survival game mechanics, however, would be directly at odds with No Man’s Sky’s emphasis on placid exploration and admiration of your surroundings. Sure, building bases and going to war with your pals would mean more Stuff to do, but it’d be the same stuff you can already do in countless others games. What’s the point of that huge backdrop if everybody’s hunkered down on the same few planets, digging holes and blasting each others’ brains out? No Man’s Sky is about exploration, so it’s only fitting that it seeks to explore beyond those genre confines.
In envisioning No Man’s Sky as a failed attempt at The Ultimate Video Game, people miss the interesting ways it subverts and asks questions of well-worn space and survival formulas. I’m most taken by critic (and my friend) Brendan Keogh’s analysis of the game, in which he points out:
“Many video game titles give you a sense of the core thing you can do in that game (‘mine-craft’ for example). “No man’s sky” is more a warning that tells you what you can’t do in this game: you can’t own these places. This is no one’s sky. You can visit them and check them out and gather the tiniest fraction of the resources they provide, but you don’t plant any flags or build any homes. You always move on and you rarely come back.
All you leave behind you is the digital footprints that note that you ‘discovered’ that planet before any other player. The sheer vastness of No Man’s Sky’s procedurally generated universe exists to instill a sense of loneliness and smallness in the face of a much larger (too large) universe. The game’s transience, meanwhile, ensures you confront that loneliness and smallness by forever moving on to somewhere else that will still never be your home.”
He adds that, as a result, No Man’s Sky stands in opposition to traditional survival power fantasy games, where you’re essentially colonising places and stripping them of their resources:
“This isn’t a power fantasy game where you ‘claim’ a world and build your giant base and form allegiances to take over different parts of the galaxy. Just as the colonialist says that Australia was “empty” before white settlers came here and filled it with familiar ‘things’, most players of conventional open-world games look at No Man’s Sky and see an empty experience.
“But what do you do in No Man’s Sky?” the refrain goes. You go for a walk. You go for a flight. You look at the pretty sights that you know no one, not even a Developer-God has seen before, and then you move on and look at something else. Like a sign in a national park: you take only photos (and what relatively few resources you need to survive) and you leave only footprints.”
In many ways, No Man’s Sky isn’t an evolution of massive-scale space and survival games. It’s a reaction to them, a critique. It’s not as fully fleshed out as it could be, but it stands alone. It charts new territory. It’s unique and deserves to be appreciated on those merits, especially as it asks us to question the meaning behind the mechanics of other seemingly similar games we play.
In some ways, then, No Man’s Sky also serves as a critique of our current envisioning of The Ultimate Video Game. Was that Hello Games’ intention? Who knows. But by simply existing as something markedly different, it forces us to ask questions.
Does The Ultimate Video Game have to be about seeking and obtaining power, even in peaceful pursuits (economic dominance, etc)? Does it need to be something we can fully conquer, or would that destroy our sense of awe and undermine the goal of creating a game everyone can play indefinitely? Most importantly, can there even be a singular Ultimate Video Game, given that, especially in the case of No Man’s Sky, everyone’s envisioning of The Ultimate Video Game appears to be at least slightly different?
Ultimately, though, it’s all a bit paradoxical. As I said earlier, just because a game is big and ambitious, that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be The Ultimate Video Game or follow in other sorta-Ultimate Video Games’ footsteps. The most interesting games emerge by defying expectations, not conforming to them. No Man’s Sky isn’t for everybody. I’m fine with that.
Comments
46 responses to “No Man’s Sky Doesn’t Need To Be ‘The Ultimate Video Game’”
Good read, and the general remarks I’ve seen around here either as posted articles or discussions in the comments generally reflect the above.
I suppose if I could ask for anything now, it’d be the same amount attention and interest in games of a lesser-publicised fashion. We see ads for that Tokyo Mirage Fire Emblem game embedded as articles every other day, that we can’t post in, yet no discussion about that. Same with Monster Hunter Generations. The Ultimate Video Game was already made, it was called Monaco. I wish I could make everybody write about Monaco for a week. That’d be swell….
Monaco <3
Great piece. No Man’s Sky, thus far, has been a great way to feel solitude and be meditative. I don’t want to be interacting with people in a universe- hell, even with most NPCs in the game we’re passing ships in the night. It’s a wilderness hike, and that’s what I like about it
Agreed! I really hope Hello Games doesn’t cave to the “we want your game to be different or we’ll flame you to death” crowd. It is mostly what I expected (with perhaps a bit more survival effort than I had thought). Base building and MMO would ruin the concept of the game for me. Marauding bands of killer players or building mini-empires is not my idea of a fun game. I have a hard time telling what it is that gamers think Hello Games did not deliver on. [The “meet-a-player” scenario might be hampered by player-time effect. Time for one might not be the same as for another — same place, different game-time. It will be interesting to see why that didn’t happen — or whether the claim of “same place but couldn’t see each other” was a really fraud.]
No dude, it’s: “We want this to be the game you marketed to us”
Stop taking things to a false extreme to dismiss a valid problem.
But it is the game that was marketed to me.
I just watched the trailer again, apart from some UI differences, the trailer looks exactly like a highlight reel of my playing of the game. I honestly think people had their own expectations that were way outside the marketing.
I know that the ‘you could see another player’ thing appears not to work, but in a game that has a trillion or whatever planets, it is likely that it would happen so damn rarely that for 99% of players it is a thing that never would have occured anyway.
The game seems closer to the trailers than pretty much any “E3 trailer vs final game” has been.
Delusional ^^ marketed game completely different to the final release – even Sony had to put up a stripped down version of the trailer so they don’t get sued for false advertising. And might I say the main issue here is false advertising!
There are things in the game that point towards the marketed trailers but have been removed or put on the back burner. Sure not every planet is lush and full of life .. Thats cool but finding planets that some how represent the marketed trailer are non existent I think. If you find one stream it .. Im still looking. Hope the future brings the stuff we were advertised. $80 bucks for a Zen garden.
Maybe I need to watch the trailer again, but I was staggered by the beauty of the last planet I saw, also has two big dinosaur things and big dragonfly things. You need to move well off the path with an upgraded drive.
Holy cow, are you serious? That is freaking awesome!!
How long have you been playing? Because I’ve maxed every inventory slot and have quite a stack in my pocket and I have yet to see:
-Large scale space battles
-asteroid landing
-faction battles
-super fauna
-surface to surface portals
-Ships with stats
Geez I could go on for ever, but that isn’t important.
Do you know when this stuff kicked in for you? Which milestone?
I’m firing the game up now, I don’t even care about multiplayer if I’m only seeing a tiny part of the game.
I seriously thought the bare bones thing was it.
Thanks man!!
Nobody can fault your like of the game, but it was not marketed on those features, that is the issue.
Take Proteus, a game sold on the premise of meditative exploration and relaxation, there was no question of what that game entailed, nobody brought it for combat, building, crafting etc
How things are handled from this stage are fairly important. Sean has gone almost full radio dark since release, promising some communication soon, but citing support as the most focus right now.
Good for him, throw yourself in to your work. But eventually he will need to face the music, and while I don’t agree with how many deliver their anger, the catalyst of that anger cannot be dismissed or diminished.
It is a stupid cycle of broken promises and a slap with a reality stick post release. If devs know the problems, and we know the problems then both need to accept their role and stop this crap.
too true. ive been playing a lot of GTA Online and No Mans Sky is my game to get away from getting killed and blown up every time i see another player, man that shits fun though.
I didn’t really buy into the hype train. I didn’t really understand the massive amount of hype because it seemed obvious to me that NMS would be a fairly niche title focused on relaxing exploration, something that a lot of people would find really boring. The core gameplay is actually slightly more interesting and exciting than I imagined based on the marketing.
I’m not going to give them a free pass for being deceptive about the online aspect of the game (strongly implied if not outright said multiple times that players would be able to meet up, just that it would be exceedingly rare) or for showing things in the trailers that AFAICT don’t actually exist in the game. But things that are similar to most of those things do exist. And over 20 hours in I’m still discovering things that feel new and exciting.
So they don’t get a free pass for that stuff, and I think it’s justifiable to be pissed off. But personally I’m not. I think people really let their expectations run away with them on this one and it’s not actually entirely Hello Games’ fault. They misrepresented their game in marketing but not, in my opinion, particularly egregiously compared to other developers in recent memory. We shouldn’t accept that, ever, but it’s an unfortunate fact that that’s the world we live in and people should probably also have learned to temper their expectations accordingly by now.
As it stands I feel like it’s a great game to play for an hour or two in the morning over a cup of coffee, wandering around and looking at the gorgeous (not as gorgeous as the trailers but still gorgeous) planets and scanning goofy looking animals without having to be worried about anything particularly stressful or challenging happening. For me that’s enough.
I saw a thread about Sea of Thieves (that pirate game) the other day, and one of the first comments I see was along the lines of “I hope there’s more to do.”
What is it with people and basically ignoring the entire premise of a game and wish they could do something else in a game? And then complaining when it seems like they missed the entire point of the game in the first place?
I disagree.
There is nothing wrong with thinking, “That looks great, but I wish it did other things as well.” It doesn’t deny what the thing is, only wishes that it could be more.
But there are the people who go “I don’t want to do any of the things the game lets me do.” and then complain about it.
Right, and then there are the people like me, who go, “Is that all there is to it?”
I think those of us saying that were probably a lot more prevalent than the other type… but that could just be confirmation bias.
No, it doesn’t have to be the ultimate video game….
Lets just start with it being the game it was marketed as, stop making apologies and excuses for people, accept our own role in this and most importantly….
Start pushing for an industry that doesn’t do this over and over again, in an insane cycle of half truth, backlash, apologists and bad investment PR spilling in to consumer interactions.
Agreed
At the end of the day,love it hate it amused by it… what was said by the developer and the false advertisement that they are blaming but never corrected cause it would effect preoorder sales… is basically anti-consumer.
Dont accept what hello games did, they failed to deliver most of their promises and hid the truth to bump up preorders. They delivered a partial experience for a full game, and the sad truth it was predicted early before the hype
While I enjoy playing the game, I do agree with you that there are features missing from the final version. I’m also sure that most of those features were in development at one stage, but were stripped out before going gold. Why? Only Hello Games can answer that. Possibly because of game balancing issues, general buggy-ness, lack of time to properly develop it, and such.
The thing is, at the time they were mentioning these features, they would have had every intent on delivering them. Plus, with the whole gaming community clamouring for details on the game, there is such pressure to talk about what was in development for the game at the time.
So we come to this rather awkward situation where what was said in the past, while true then, is not true now. What should have been done better? Ignore the gaming community, and not talk about the game until it’s actually been released? Don’t market it at all until it’s close to it’s final realisation? Or perhaps people should take what shown of a game in development as a indication, not a promise? Should people realise that games can change while in development?
People will hold what is shown of early development as fact. Marketing will supply details of games in progress. A game will change as development progresses. Therefore, in the future, we will find ourselves in this situation again. Unless one of those three factors change.
Meanwhile, I’m kinda actually enjoying playing NMS for what it is. Looking forward to HG providing more features in the future, though I’m happy with what I’ve got.
The thing is – that the promises of what was going to be delivered, combined with the hype as well as (what i consider the key factor) the price of the game really set expectations that it was going to include as much content and polish as a AAA studio game would. It’s a $20-30 indie game and for that price I wouldn’t complain at all however the fact is that it’s not.
The problem I think a lot of people are having with NMS is that it’s not for anybody in particular. We all wen’t into this game hoping to get something different, space exploration, space battles or a survival game etc, but we got none of that. Many different expectations, but none came to fruition.
Well, I got almost exactly what I wanted from the game, and am well over 100 hours into it. It is finally the sort of game I want to play, so I am really happy with it.
I would be happier with the game if the planets were a little bit more varied. Sure, no two planets are EXACTLY the same, but a fair few are so similar as to effectively be the same in the player’s mind. I have seen three or four planets with almost exactly the same colour, similar plants and wild-life, and while you could point to differences, the differences were minor. Many of the planets feel the same, even if they are not completely identical.
I would be happier with the game if the landscapes were more varied. I would be happier if planets had varied terrain within them. I don’t want endless jaggy rocky plains that often have the colour of candy-stained vomit. I want ice-floes, I want big empty deserts that stretch from horizon to horizon, I want waterfalls, I want beaches and actual forests and jungles. Yes there are infinite landscapes but when so many of them are the same and when so many look utterly terrible…. Well, it may be a game about looking more than touching, but I would have liked it more if the sights were more varied. After playing the game for about 15 hours, I am despairing of the prospect of ever seeing anything that will excite me.
It’s been interesting seeing the number of people driven to check out Elite thanks to this, coming in saying “was disappointed by NMS, what’s this thing all about then?” or similar, and taking to it like a duck to water.
I came the other way, was erally disappointed by Elite Dangerous, and am loving NMS.
I am sick to death of insecure fanboys like Nathan Grayson telling us their offensive judgments on how NMS critics don’t have enough imaginations, or they expected too much or perfection, or they wanted more then whats possible….offending unsatisfied gamers by treating them as unreasonable, having impossible expectations or just naive. Blaming gamers instead of the game.
The NMS defence force has been of overdrive telling every one how wrong they are.
I am directly asking Nathan, what were MY expectations for NMS, what is the limit of my imagination, and how that affected my NMS experience ? Can’t do it, of course you can’t. No one Can. So those positions are ridiculous arguments. And they are offensive.
Why are you offended that someone has a different opinion of the game than you do?
I think it’s less about a different opinion and more that the article is telling us our opinion and that it was wrong.
I am loving No Man’s Sky despite of its shortfall but what i have not loved is how its launch became an unpleasant tipping point of grand stupidity of the internet masses.
Yes I get that some can feel slighted or lied to blah blah. but what happened on this launch was an ugly mirror of not just the gaming community as it is now but the way people communicate to each other online, but how manners, decent conversation have given way to hate, entitlement and arrogance.
Every movie that comes out is the worse film ever made, every tv show episode is apparently worse than the one before. Every game launch is a grand conspiracy that only the ‘just’ online can save us all from.
To say you love No Man’s Sky, or defend the idea that it is somehow not that greatest gaming crime ever (but a pathetic tangle of miscommunication and misunderstandings), is in itself the greatest game crime ever. And those of us who do like it are somehow part of the problem blah blah.
Hyperbole on top of hyperbole. Why would any creative person ever try and make something interesting or different in this landscape of entitlement? People have forgotten not everything created is suppose to be of interest to all of mankind. You can dislike something without it being the worse game ever. No its just a game that doesnt interest you. No more, no less. All the other colourful language and hyperbole is not about giving feedback on the game, its about trying to ‘win’ a conversation, trying to out do your friends in insulting it creatively.
For all its failures and fun this game was the one that made me decide how much I hate what has become of the public face of the gaming community.
I wish I could upvote x 100.
I bought NMS with realistic expectations and listening to Sean Murray’s gentle voice. His videos were about exploration and seeing beauty in it and all, which I wanted to do. And the whole idea that there will be numerous procedural generated planets sounded great.
After putting about 10-15 hrs, I started to notice same s##t on different planets. Its like same bloody mega pineapple hopping on every jungle planet or same tentacular bush or same penis shape dino or same bloody spider attacking you in every cold and hot planet. Now , don’t get me wrong I still enjoy playing NMS short session and its soothing music . However, I think if they didn’t charge 80 AUD $ for a game that has very limited variations, I would have more realistic or lower expectations. But that’s my opinion.
Sticking back to no pre-order rule again !
Oddly, my exploration has been really varied, I haven’t seen any spider type creatures yet, but have seen triceratops looking things, panther looking things, armadillos, centaur type beasts, monkey looking things, and a few that defy description. I’ve been on a mostly water planet, a mushroom planet and a deep forest. So far, variety hasn’t been an issue.
I am on my 3rd system only and I am going slow, just trying to enjoy the journey. Maybe I am going way too slow . It took me a while to find antimatter since they gave you that quest in 3rd system only. Dog fight in space has just started to happen, so maybe it will get more interesting and variable with time.
What space system ( in terms of number) roughly are you on?
Before anyone buys, I’d recommend watching a competent and fact filled review.
Angry Joe gets a little loud some times, but his frustration and all his facts are on point.
For me, No Man’s Sky is the game I have been waiting for since Star Raiders in 1979.
This isn’t a game for adrenaline or twitch junkies, it isn’t a game for people who want to fight.
It is discovery and exploration, it is flying spacehips and walking.
It is for the person that would sign up for the first mission to Mars, even though they probably couldn’t return and life would be hard and at times tedious, but the thrill of going to another planet would be more than enough to compensate.
It is an Arthur C Clarke game instead of a Heinlen game.
I enjoy HALO and other space-type FPS games, but NMS has just taken hold of me completely.
I spent the first 20 hours or so on the first planet, exploring everything, flying low over the terrain and enjoying the feel of cruising in a space-ship, watching the scenery unfold below, hitting the scanner periodically and dropping in for a landing when something of interest popped up.
I could jump out of my spacecraft and explore the terrain on foot. I climbed mountains and hiked deep underground through beautiful caves with eerie light and formations. I took just what I needed to survive. I came across animals, photographed them, named them and even fed a few.
I went swimming and explored the underwater world.
Eventually I found a shelter, with an Alien, we conversed a bit and I guessed what he wanted and was rewarded.
I came across temples and religious relics and started to learn their language.
Then I came across an abandoned shelter, over-run with some hideous corruption. A story started to unfold of a fellow traveller and his nightmare, his degredation. I kept searching for more clues and more of that story.
I upgraded my ship and went into space, had a battle with Pirates and only just won. I went to a space station, built a warp drive and headed to another planet.
I already had more than my money’s worth.
Since then I have re-enabled stations that detected distress beacons and I followed them to crashed ships that I repaired and made my own. I got into battles with the sentinels and read more about their origins and the story of the other traveller. I watched other ships land and traded with them. I even bought a ship off one of them.
I have done so much more. This game has been so deep to me, that I struggle to understand the hate for it. It is a different type of game, it runs at a different pace. It has issues, less pop-in would be good, and a few other enhancements would be nice, but even as it is, it has more than earned the $70 I paid for it.
I’m sure it isn’t for everyone, but after watching the trailers, the game was more than I expected.
I’m stoked it came out, and hope it becomes a platform like Minecraft, that is ongoing and updated to become even more.
You, sir, take the sci fi nerd cake for this perfect summary.
I get people are disappointed. That what hype does. It lets people down because they got the wrong idea about it. For me though, it’s almost exactly what I wanted, maybe with a bit more pop up and texture tearing than I hoped for, but still.
People got dissapointed because the devs promised a shit ton of stuff, And then failed to deliever, Thats not hype, Thats the devs being frauds and incompetent morons.
Except that I spelled Robert A. Heinlein’s name wrong 😛
“This game has been so deep to me, that I struggle to understand the hate for it.”
Because hello games promised a lot of things, And delivered on none of them. They gave us an alpha survival game for the price of a full release.
I tried to enjoy this game, But it is so god damn boring, Lacks any depth to the gameplay at all and lacks HOTAS support. Once it improves on those things i might buy it again (Thank you steam refund)
Dont even get me started on the ending when you reach the end of the universe which the Devs promised was amazing. Yeah right hello games, A black screen and a rewind is soooooooooo amazing…
This game would not have the hate it does if it was an alpha that cost $20, Instead they claim its a full release and charge us $80
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTTPlqK8AnY – This review sums up why people dislike the game.
I find it weird they call the hype train the problem… at rhe end of the day Sean Murray, Hello Games and Sony were responsible for starting the train, fueling the train and being too scared to coorect its course or speed out of fears any attempt could derail preorder sales.
As I see it, No Man’s Sky is a game for non-gamers. It’s a game that works well as relaxed exploration and collecting with the occasional bit of combat to mix it up. For non-gamers it’s a great exploration where every planet is different with wonders that encourage you to keep going to see what’s next.
For gamers it’s a semi-interesting game that gets boring the moment you realise that every planet is just a reskin of the last planet. It’s like showing a sculpture that everyone loves, then putting a hat on the sculpture and calling it a new work. Sure there will be people who say “ooh, that’s wonderful” but there will also be a large amount of people who say “That’s just the same sculpture with a hat on it. Who are you trying to fool?”
What is a non-gamer, and why do they own a PS4?
Also available on PC
What is a non-gamer?
Someone who doesn’t play games. Basically someone who doesn’t play games but decides to start with this. It can even work with casual gamers, but most see it for what it is.
I think Good Game said it well in their review with, “After each long session of playing this I felt like I just wasted a big chunk of my life” and “You feel like you can discover anything but at the end of the day you probably won’t, you’ll probably discover a slightly different rock”
For a moment there, based on the facebook link, I thought Grayson was going to be one of those tools who trots out the tired old “entitlement” instead of addressing why people are unhappy.
I didn’t give him enough credit.
Hello Games lied about the game and it’s features.. ie..multiplayer… and now they are fucked. with negative reviews and refunds at an all time high for a release. The honest trailer pretty much sums it up