At long last, No Man’s Sky is upon us, and it has been met with wildly differing reactions.  The center of the bell-curve, though, is a resounding “meh”.

I am a little confused, myself, about what people were expecting.  Don’t get me wrong, I understand the confusion about multiplayer, but as for the rest of the game, it seems about exactly like what I would have expected.  You travel around and find things.  Everything is, to some extent, completely unique, and if you choose, you can name them.  There are planet sized planets, in a galaxy sized galaxy.  That much is, in and of itself, quite a remarkable achievement for video games.  It’s not enough to satisfy the enormous bow wave of expectation it created, though.

No Man’s Sky was announced

After the E3 reveal, the concept sparked the imaginations of players and what might have been a quirky experiment of a game was seen so much higher.  It was on par with an Arkham release.  If it were a game that gave you your own star system to explore, with some randomized alien creatures, that would be interesting on the level of Life is Strange, or Her Story.  In No Man’s Sky, though, everyone would see the same galaxy, the same stars, the same planets, and the same creatures.  This would be a massive shared galaxy to explore.  That changed the dynamic.  So much interest was kicked up that more and more expectations were laid on it.  In the end, many were already tempering their expectations knowing that it couldn’t live up to the hype.

The amazing thing is that much of the hype seems to have been fan generated.  The promise of such a large world to explore, so large that calling it a world is no longer appropriate, with so many possibilities that it is literally inexhaustible in human experience, created so much buzz that it began to feed on itself.  As that buzz increased, as the hype increased, the expectations were raised as well.  There was a lot of time for this effect to feed on itself, having been announced at E3 2014, giving it a full two years to swell.

This game based on an interesting idea, a huge world with endless creatures to find, became something more.  No Man’s Sky would be something that would transcend our definition of video games, and usher in a new era and a new genre of gaming.

No Man’s Sky was delayed

For a game with this much potential variety, there’s a lot that can be worked on.  If it were a small release, the public would be accepting of it even with its quirks because it’s ambitious for its small team.  However, with the huge expectations placed on it, it wouldn’t be seen as a “small” game no matter what.  Add to that the fact that the developer, Hello Games, had only previously developed the Joe Danger series of games, No Man’s Sky developed into something outside of their wheelhouse.

So, the game was delayed.  Hello Games probably had more hurdles to overcome than they thought, and had to scramble to shore things up.  Then we get to the true sign that expectations had become untenable.  Announcing that the game was delayed generated death threats.

After the frothing masses realized that the reporter did not personally delay the game, they started threatening the developers.  A development that makes so little sense that I can’t even joke about it…  So I’ll reference someone else joking about it.

But delays are only delays.  We’re past that now, and we have the game at long last.

And then No Man’s Sky was released

Now that it’s available, we’ve seen the limits of what it offers players.  We’ve seen numerous bugs and stability issues.  We know that, while this is interesting, it is not the transcendent experience that some were expecting.  To me, it seems that most of the difference was due entirely to the buzz feedback.  I see the game that was promised, a huge world to explore, and an endless variety of creatures to find.

The planets and creatures are created by an algorithm.  This algorithm mixes and matches different pieces together in ways that don’t repeat.  So, why does this not while they are effectively “endless”, they do follow rules.  After playing long enough, certain pieces will repeat.  You can look up creatures that people have found that look very similar, but not the same as things you’ve seen.  They can be fascinating, but are truly mix and match, and this can start to break the immersion.

The human brain is extremely good at recognizing patterns, and even if you don’t know what all of the combinations of pieces are, after a while you start to map out what can be changed, and what the options are.  When that happens, the exploration aspect shifts from finding new things to checking off possibilities in a chart.

The consequence of high expectations and failure to manage them

The single biggest controversy, of course, is the multiplayer.  The exact nature of which I had never seen explicitly laid out.  Many players were expecting to be able to interact with each other as they explored.  While the size of the game made that unlikely, once a game is released live you never know what will happen.

It almost seems like Hello Games were betting on the idea that players wouldn’t even be able to reach each other, or the center of the galaxy, for so long that they could address any issues before anyone noticed them.  You NEVER assume that things won’t happen when a game goes live.  To be safe, it should have been considered a given that people would do these things in the first week.  It may be impressive, but not entirely unexpected, because that’s what happened.

Players learned that they couldn’t directly interact with each other, or see each other.  What does that really mean?  Here’s my theory.  The game originally wanted to be interactive multiplayer, but there were problems getting that to work well.  My guess is that the servers would fail when more than a couple hundred users would be on it.  If you think about it, trying to make real time interactions possible across a shared world that big could be problematic.  On top of that, this would be Hello Games first big contiguous multiplayer environment to engineer.  This brings about a lot of issues when it comes to getting the system to scale up well.  It has all the earmarks of simply being too ambitious.

I think Hello Games had to made the difficult and painful decision, late in the process, to drop live multiplayer.  That doesn’t come from nowhere, either.  European boxes were found printed with Online Multiplayer icons and stickers over them to hide them.  This is where I think the delay came from, ripping the exposed pieces of this feature out.

This wasn’t the limit of the bugs though.  So, Hello Games announced they were bringing in more QA.  This is an interesting development.  This game had huge expectations placed on it, and apparently they didn’t even have much in the way of QA on it while it was in development.  What credits I’ve been able to find don’t list QA at all!  This means testing was probably left up to the engineers to do themselves, and maybe the distribution partners.  If true, that’s a terrible way to do things.  QA needs to be brought in earlier in the process, and with something random and procedurally generated like this, you need smart QA to weed out issues with the algorithm.  If they really had so little QA until now, it’s a miracle the game is as functional as it is.

Fan Fallout

To say that people are disappointed is an understatement.  This is half on Hello Games for not managing expectations better, and half on the public for placing absurd expectations on the game.  For Hello Games’ part, we can’t be too certain how much control they had.  While they did self publish, the do have business partners for distribution.  This can, potentially, restrict what they can talk about.  However, this is where the size of the team begins to show, just like with QA.  Community management is an important job that shouldn’t be underestimated, as we discussed on a recent podcast.  Community managers are the ones who get out as much information as possible while respecting any restrictions.  It can be a difficult line to walk.

Right now there are a lot of complaints about how Hello Games is being silent about these issues.  That’s most likely because it is a small team, and everyone is busy trying to fix the issues in No Man’s Sky.  There’s no one left to discuss things with the public.  It’s the same issue that Niantic has been having with Pokemon Go.  The same problem, though with different symptoms, has cropped up with the development of “The Isle“.  It is a difficult problem for small teams to tackle when they wind up with big communities around their projects.  Do you focus your energy and resources on your project, or can you afford to pull some resources away to afford a community manager of some sort?  What is the border line where that becomes a good idea?  Even if you’re getting a lot of buzz, it won’t always be a good idea to hire one.  Buzz doesn’t always equal commercial success.  So do you want to spend money you may not get back and put yourself further into the hole?  Would better community management get you over the hump?  For example, could it have gotten Brigador some more exposure and therefore more sales?

No Man’s Sky could have been a fascinating, if flawed product from a small team.  There are a lot of projects like this, but rarely do they stumble into general audience appeal.  No Man’s Sky caught our imagination in such a way that it did trigger that kind of interest.  A development team of 15 people isn’t enough to handle such a complex proposition with relatively so little time to complete it and with AAA level expectations placed on it.  They will continue to work on the game, and it will improve.  The premise is fascinating, and they may even be able to modify the core algorithm of the game to allow for even more engrossing ecosystems.  In the mean time, though, let’s let them work and enjoy exploring the world they made for us.  Every once in a while, we can still find something amazing.

Kynetyk is a veteran of the games industry.  Behind the Line is written to help improve understanding of what goes on in the game development process and the business behind it.  From “What’s taking this game so long to release”, to “why are there bugs”, to “Why is this free to play” or anything else, if there is a topic that you would like to see covered, please write in to kynetyk@enthusiacs.com