gorcorps
aka Brandon
- Jul 18, 2004
- 30,736
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I've got a pretty good metric for knowing when a game is going to be overhyped and underdeliver:
Back in 2006, I read this article, not actually having heard about Spore, but I certainly loved Sim City and the other actual Sim x games (though I never played a Sims game); though I'm not sure if I was aware of Will Wright--the guy behind all of that at the time.
It was a great article and I enjoyed learning the history about all of this, but I had a suspicion that the game as detailed here sounded near impossible. I thought, "wow--that sounds like an amazing game! It will probably cost about $200 considering the hours and team that must be involved to make that sort of thing!"
Some time later, Spore came out, and it was terrible.
Fast forward to a year ago, I read this article. I hadn't heard about No Man's Sky by May of last year (I don't follow gaming anything, so games sneak up on me, and I am fine with that). I thought, holy shitballs that sounds amazing! Then I quickly realized that this game will not be the game in the article. This stuff simply is not going to happen, and certainly not anywhere close to that with the small development team that is mentioned in the article. I did recall reading the Spore article years before, and thought the same thing would happen. Love the New Yorker, but when you come into those subjects with a bit more experience on the matter than the author of the article, you realize that these pieces are a bit puffier than they should be--not accusing them of being misleading, just that these "wow, look at this technology!" articles tend to leave out a lot of the reality of what can actually be done in the mentioned time frame
As bad as the gaming media has been with hyping this game, they've at least offered some cautionary points prior to release (or maybe that was all in my head). When you go outside of those walls and see that a small game like this without a big name (no Super Mario 3) is suddenly gaining mainstream attention, you know something is up.
Apparently, Jack Kennedy (the patriarch Kennedy) once commented about the panic leading up to the market crash in '29, and how he knew something bad was coming: "Once I started getting stock tips from my shoe-shine boy, I knew it was time to get out."
I understand the comparison to spore, and I get the same feeling just not to the same extent. The biggest difference for me is the TYPE of game was what I expected in NMS, where as Spore was wildly different than what I was led to believe. I think after playing for a couple hours in Spore it turned into a terrible RTS game, and I was flabbergasted. I don't remember ever hearing it was going to be an RTS game after you "evolved" past a certain point. I remember expecting a game like "Flow" where you eat to grow, then you grow large enough to make it to land and it's a 3rd person action game. After a while you multiply more and it turns into an RTS, and that's when I shut it off. Not only were the first two modes not all that fun, the RTS portion was completely different than what I expected.
At least with NMS I got the 1st person exploration game I expected. I had fun with it, and I don't feel nearly as cheated as I did with Spore. The scale of game that NMS was hinted to be was above what was delivered, but at least I got the same type of game I expected... just not as deep as hoped.