this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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This might be unpopular, but it feels like the “redemption” story around No Man’s Sky has become more of a cultural comfort narrative than an honest look at what happened.

Let’s be real — most of those updates were just delivering delayed promises, not generosity. The game we were originally sold was missing a lot of advertised features, and Hello Games never actually apologized for lying. On top of that, every update brings more bugs and half-fixed systems, and the community acts like free beta testers for Light No Fire, while still framing it all as “passion” and “commitment.”

It’s like Hello Games built a shoddy, unfinished building, declared it open anyway, and then decided to use it as a testing ground for their next building — and somehow it wins “Best Ongoing Building” every year.

So why do people keep buying into this narrative? Because it’s a comfortable story? Or is it somekind of parasocial relationship going on there?


NMS made 78 million in 2016, this can't be compared to a failed AAA game or indies where devs walk away from financial failure, another emotional argument?

https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2016/09/30/august-2016-digital-sales-report-no-mans-sky-generated-78-million/)


According to the number of upvotes, it seems that their angst is a reflection of the game industry in general. Hello Games had indeed performed to expectations by not walking away, but does that warrant mythologising the redemption arc? Even when the state of the game is buggy?

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[–] Saapas@piefed.zip 2 points 5 hours ago

I think the company is shit for delivering a shit product. It is less shit for finally delivering some of what was promised but it's still a shit company

[–] arnitbier@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Of all the fucking things to be upset about across the entire world and this is your fight your gonna spend your limited resources on earth on?

Starting shit online about a stupid topic to feel like you actually mean something

You got some weird shit going on man and not the cool kind IMO

Firstly. Its not a narrative, its a story. The narrative to that story is subject to change but is still based on the real events.

Secondly. You are constantly asking for a logic to the emotion of it all over and to just to have someone explain that to you here. You are going to need to read some psychology if you want them to validate your noticing/noting the parallels between nurturing and being a baby and vulnerability and all that and that making us susceptible to emotional attachment to free things given freely over a period of time if you want but stop asking here its not the time. So to explain. He felt bad about situation. You ever run a studio? Building? Never? Professional obligation mixed up with your personal human judgement? No? Fantastic then assume that its not all fun and promises get made for 1000 reasons. Nervousness. Overconfidence. Obligating yourself to do it later because you said you would. These are everyday practices in that area. He got his big boy pants on and went to the interviews and lied (read: manager promised). (Why he "promised" is subject to opinion and thus the "narrative" you suggested divides right there) 'Promising' like that, however, doesn't work well in that fan type of environment. And he felt bad. It bothered him. We arent always who were trying to be. He fucked up. He let real people down by impulsively talking. He stopped interviewing i think completely. And its likely mostly his fault (unless the studio was talking to each other about those features and making unofficial promises internally which would help explain some of the false promises made)

That would have been his/their legacy if he walked away. And he is CLEARLY totally shit at promising stuff 😂 (and thus the twitter emojis) And it appears he/theyre just not that kind of people. They likely wanted to do those features but probably also said don't tell the media that shit. Likely things they weren't sure they could do but wanted to do and or thought they might be able to do in time. But were not. (shocker, creatives am I right? /s)

So to wit. The updates ARE the fucking apology bro 🤦

Or at least they were for few years or however long it took them to add everything even VAGUELY promised that wasn't clearly "what are our intentions are for the game how is it supposed to feel" type talk. (That people hold him accountable for even now, like star wars nerds and George Lucas. Honestly that energy had to go somewhere 🤓) Now its just see how far we can push it, sales are stable so why stop now, Terraria love-of-the-game, the community rocks I love them type shit.

But your social engagement consists mostly of this so I'm worried you just don't get emotions outside your own views and probably can't be trusted to change that big ol' galaxy brain style opinion of yours this but I'm sure trying here anyways, good practice if nothing else 👍

[–] janewaydidnothingwrong@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Sheesh, I think you're taking this a little too personally

[–] arnitbier@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

A person put in the time, to create an entire post, about how this guy is romanticized and doesn't deserve it, for attention on the internet and I'M the one who is taking it personally huh?

I've seen shit like this posted and reposted for like 8 years now. Did my thing here inconvenience you for what, like 20 seconds? Sorry for giving a frankly good goddamn answer to his direct question addressed to me personally on this here public forum space thing.

Edit: But then again, maybe your right, I don't like this kind of drama seeking and I'm holding him accountable for the trend at large so perhaps I overdid it a little bit 😓 I edited it a little for better tone

[–] WoolyNelson@lemmy.world 141 points 1 day ago (21 children)

Because most other game developers would have crapped out the initial project and moved on.

[–] PP_BOY_@lemmy.world 43 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Indeed. And even delayed fulfillment of the original promises is impressive given how vast the scope of the original pitch was. I'm just happy to have it, even if it took a couple years longer than expected to get.

Take a look at Star Citizen if you want to know the alternative, OP

[–] Goodeye8@piefed.social 13 points 1 day ago

Anthem in some ways is a better example because Start Citizen is never going to release, they can cruise on their promises until the company goes bankrupt. Anthem however was released in an unfinished state hardly reaching the hype it generated and then EA just cut their losses and left it like that.

[–] TalkingFlower@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Bringing Star Citizen up is a race to the bottom.

[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I think they are saying "look at star citizen as the alternative" meaning never finished, but by comparison No Man's Sky is complete now?

Maybe i'm reading it wrong though.

Star citizen is about to cross into a billion dollars in development "costs". It might genuinely be one of the biggest scams in history.

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[–] pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone 51 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Because instead of the usual triple a studio promising the moon for sales then delivering a pebble and not giving a shit, it was a guy who got caught up in the hype and handled it badly, and then him and his small studio worked their asses off to make the game justify the price charged. I know it's hard to drop the cynicism living in the modern world has instilled in us, but I genuinely think it was a collosal fuckup and not malicious, and they ACTUALLY put the time and effort in to deliver the promises they could and a fuckload more atuff that wasn't. In a day and age of companies lying on purpose for profit and not giving a shit, it's a breath of fresh air.

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[–] ISolox@lemmy.world 33 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Idk, idc. The game has been getting free updates for years and I enjoy it. Most devs would have ditched immediately.

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[–] iamthetot@piefed.ca 27 points 1 day ago

and somehow it wins “Best Ongoing Building” every year.

Except it doesn't. It's been nominated for Stream's Labour of Love award six times in the past ten years, and never won it. In fact it's never won any Steam Awards. It won Best Ongoing at the Game Awards twice, out of a decade of being ongoing, and it won a similar award from PC Gamer once.

[–] Aielman15@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago (13 children)

A redemption arc implies fucking up in the first place and working to rectify the previous mistakes.

They lied and the game was missing a lot of features at launch, but now all those features (and more) are in the game, which is still being updated for free a decade later.

I don't like the game, and I wish the devs acted differently so that a redemption arc wasn't needed in the first place, but it is what it is. The devs worked their asses off, the game is now playable and feature complete and is still being updated, and from the looks of it Hello Games have learned from their mistakes and are not promising the moon for their next game.

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[–] kadu@scribe.disroot.org 22 points 1 day ago (5 children)

It's still nothing like what it was promised to be, in fact. Sure, they added a lot of free content, a lot of updates, I'm sure fans are enjoying them... but it's not what was promised as already in the game before launch.

Another fake redemption story is Cyberpunk. They fixed some of the bugs to make it playable, revamped the skill tree, and added paid DLC... cool? That doesn't change the fact the game is missing half of the promised content, including some that was on the trailers.

[–] Alaknár@piefed.social 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)

That doesn’t change the fact the game is missing half of the promised content,

That's just a flat out lie or a delusion.

The most famous example is how "the game was supposed to be like GTA" some people cry over. Source for that? A interview they did where they stated "we want to be more like Rockstar". The interview was about development cycles, had nothing to do with the game itself, but one YouTuber saw it and made a video about how "Cyberpunk is going to be GTA in the future, expect bowling", shit like that.

It was never supposed to be anything than it isn't.

including some that was on the trailers.

I heard that argument bunch of times, someone even showed me a trailer that supposedly showed these "missing features". The stuff missing? Wall-running and ripping off turrets. That's it. That's literally it. They gave a really good explanation as to why wall running is missing, it's also a flavour feature, not like adding it back in would change the gameplay significantly, so people crying over that is just... weird to me.

The fact is that Cyberpunk was a victim of some of the most ridiculously over-the-top hype in gaming history. And when the game released in the state it did (which - to anyone who's ever followed anything released by CDPR - was the most benign and obvious thing in the world), people lost their minds, because they were expecting The Gaming Messiah to show up and End All Gaming Suffering. Just stupid from the top down.

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[–] BC_viper@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

So I was apparently one of the lucky ones. I bought cyberpunk day one, never had a single glitch. I saw all the chaos that went on and expected there to be a couple but I played through the entire game without a problem. Over the years ive played it a few more times after major updates or DLC and had fun each time.

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[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I agree, and a big part of that is that everything they’ve added over the years just feels bolted-on.

I tried to give it a shot a little while back and tried to do one of the things that was initially promised you could do, be a trader. Pretty standard space game fare. Only to find out it’s a pretty pointless and broken experience because the way you do interstellar trade in that game is by putting goods in your pockets and walking through portals that exist in every single space station. You never even get in your ship lol.

The game still just feels like a tech demonstration of a bunch of disparate systems that fail to integrate with eachother in any meaningful way. They’ve made the puddle much wider over the years but their outright refusal to make it any deeper is absolutely nuts.

[–] JakoJakoJako13@piefed.social 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Delivering on delayed promises is more than most game companies will ever do. Their actions in fixing and adding to the game is the apology. Every update does bring bugs but you say this like the game is in an unplayable state. It's perfectly fine 99% of the time and the 1% it's not is usually fixed within the week. As a day 1 owner who could barely run the game on launch it's come so fucking far. It literally took half an hour for the game to boot during those early days. There wasn't much to do on top of that. The systems were confusing and the game would crash almost every time you booted it. Everything has been fixed and refined for FREE!

Compare this to a company like Paradox and Colossal Order who killed Cities Skylines 2. That game released in the sorriest state I think I've ever seen in my life(including SimCity 5). The graphics are ass. The simulation didn't actually work. The traffic was worse than the original. Every system in that game was fucked beyond belief. On top of that they charged people on day 1 for additional content. Content that took almost 2 years to deliver. Now their original dev team got fired and a complete unknown with two games is supposed to take over the current king of a genre for a redemption arc. Cities Skylines 2 was murdered and set the modern city builder genre back almost 2 decades by continuing the reign of SimCity 4 as the best Modern City Buider ever.

When you compare that to what Hello Games has done with No Man's Sky you will see why we celebrate them. This isn't some exaggeration or accident. It's years of steady, consistent work that has turned a broken and potentially career ending product into the recommended space sim of this generation.

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[–] Devadander@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago

Why not? The studio worked hard to deliver a good product.

[–] youngskywalker@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

My favorite game to compare NMS to is actually battlefront 2, one of if not the single worst launch in video game history, after realizing their mistakes putting in the time and effort to make the game actually run well then continuing to update the game for free even after no one is expecting more content. Yes the core mechanics of BF2 is not the best even though there isn't a single loot box or p2w mechanic left. Same with NMS the core game is still the same, it's not a brand new concept or ground breaking new mechanics to the same game they just keep working on it, fixing bugs and adding new things. I genuinely think with the state of companies like Bungie charging for Destiny expansion in 2026, a 70$ Pokemon game with 30$ dlc, and AAAA flops this is all we can ask for back your games, COMMIT to long term development and not charge for what seems like a joke of content backed by fomo

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[–] UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Praise where praise is due: They did pump out a ton of free updates. Does this compensate for the terrible state the game was released in? That's something everyone needs to judge for themselves imo.

Does the game have what they once promised now? Is it "good" yet? I think that's a more difficult question. If I was to criticise Hello Games for anything, than that even now they have not met some of the expectations they set. At least not for me personally.

And I'm not talking about bs speculation or hype, I am talking about things they have said would be in the game, some of which are still not here, and many of them feel like an alpha version of what you would expect. I can't help but feel disappointed even today.

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[–] JackDark@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

lol, look at OP's only other post. Looks like another account for my block list.

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[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

They continued to work on the game years after its bad reception. They could have stopped and ignored it. But they worked on it and gave lot of free updates that changed the game dramatically. Other companies would ask money in form of DLC in example. The launch was a disaster and they deserved the hate. But the "redemption" is a different issue and they earned the good will.

[–] Zahille7@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

The last time I played it was like 2018-19, but even then it felt very much "mile wide, inch deep."

[–] Kronusdark@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think the true test of that arc will be when. Light no fire releases.

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