REVIEW: No Man's Sky

“The game will be multiplayer,” just one of the many lies Sean Murray, creator of No Man’s Sky, told all of the supporters of his game. No Man’s Sky was set out to be probably one of the most amazing and ambitious games that I and many other gamers have ever seen. It is a vast, sci-fi space exploration game where everything within it is procedurally generated by a set of coded algorithms. Nothing would be the same, everything that the player has discovered would be a new experience while traveling among the stars and all 18 quintillion planets in the game. But sadly, if not everybody that bought the game, most gamers were disappointed with this letdown of what could've been an outstanding game.

Hype. Once the game was announced, a lot of people were excited about it immediately, no doubt about it. It's not that the game was even overhyped by the gaming community. Sure, we were all super excited for this game, but the developers are the ones who truly overhyped it. I feel as if they just made it out to be that there were going to be all of these features in the game just to collect more supporters. It's understandable, they are a small indie developer company with about 15 people who work there. They were trying to pull this game off as if it were a AAA title. They lied to their very own fanbase about several dozen features that would not be in the final product in order just to get more consumers to buy their broken promise of a game.

Video games will always inevitably receive some changes and content cuts while in production, but this isn't what happened with No Man’s Sky. The development team deliberately lied to the public about features that would be in the game, and then when August came around those features were missing in the final product. One of the biggest missing features was probably the fact there was no multiplayer. Now, fans of the game knew that Sean Murray had stated that the game wasn't “a multiplayer game,” as said a variety of times in interviews, such as during one with Games.ch. But he DID say there would be multiplayer, no matter how uncommon it would be to run into other players. On the first day of release, two gamers streaming on Twitch managed to find one another at the same location exactly on the same planet within the same solar system. But, to their surprise, they couldn't see each other. Do you know why? Because Sean Murray lied about the multiplayer feature. Soon after that, gaming stores, such as GameStop, literally started covering up the part of the case where it showed that there was an optional online play feature.

That was only one of the biggest problems. There is a full list of missing things within the game, such as: planetary physics, ship classes, space factions, asteroid landings, space station & fleet destruction, space fleets, traveling freighters, large scale battles, ringed planets, sand planets, complex creature behavior, and so much more. You can see why gamers were very, very upset with the outcome of this game and the creators of it.

To add to the list of things that is wrong with the game is that it was very buggy, glitchy, and it crashed a lot. The graphics were also downgraded, along with the complex AI system. In every single gameplay trailer there was, the graphics looked astounding. Every pixel was crisp and clear, the details in everything were just absolutely beautiful. Once the game released however, it was very noticeable how the graphics had been downgraded. Colors weren't as vibrant, there were less pixels on screen, the details shown in previous gameplay just wasn't there in the world. Another thing shown a good bit of times within gameplay footage was complex creature behavior. For example, in the very first announcement trailer for the game, a large creature chased a herd of smaller animals out of the rumbling trees, it scared them away and they all reacted to each other. Shortly, players of the game noticed that the creature life was extremely glitchy and simple. The wild life was nothing extraordinary, just simple minded programming.

The game has gotten so many complaints and bad reviews, that Steam and the PlayStation store are giving back FULL refunds to players. The game is also under investigation for false advertising, which was frequently shown in trailers, screenshots, and talked about in interviews.

Despite all of these bad reviews and complaints about the game, not everyone who bought it disliked it. Some gamers are actually quite satisfied with the end result of No Man’s Sky. Those gamers are most likely the ones whose expectations weren’t raised as high as Hello Games was trying to set the bar for the game. The game truly is beautiful, and very fun for the first couple of hours, it just becomes very repetitive and there are just so many deeper problems within it.

Overall, No Man’s Sky has received a pretty bad rep since the time it was released to now. While the team at Hello Games (developers of NMS) state that they are doing all that they can to update the game to fix glitches and bugs within the game, that doesn't mean anything for the very long list of missing features.