So, naturally, I grew curious to see just where No Man’s Sky is now as someone with no prior experience with the game whatsoever. It is one of the greatest redemption stories in the industry, and has allowed the game to build a dedicated fan base that has contributed to the online consensus of the game seemingly growing to be that “it’s good now.” Large update after a large update has led to them adding new features such as multi-player, fleet management, base building, and a whole lot more, and it was all in the form of free updates and without any microtransactions anywhere to be seen. Instead, Hello Games began a years-long process of incrementally updating the game until it lived up to the fan base’s original expectations, and has even continued far beyond that point. But, this was not the case for No Man’s Sky. There were pockets of fans who enjoyed the game for what it was, but they were easily drowned out in the ensuing uproar that dominated the online discourse around the game.įor many games, especially ones from a studio the size of Hello Games, this would be the end of the story.

This all led to a disastrous launch with thousands of unhappy fans, even going so far as for Sony and Valve to bend the rules of their refund policies. However, fans anticipating the game also filled the gaps of their pre-release knowledge with a lot of their own speculation and hopes for the game. And many media outlets did contribute to the building excitement by expounding on the revolutionary procedural generation tech and making high claims about how the game would provide infinite replayability and was industry-defining. Some were extremely small, but others were quite large, such as the inclusion of multi-player. Hello Games did objectively claim there were features in the game that were not present at launch. The overhype of No Man’s Sky is particularly hard to dissect even now due to how many different pieces of it there were. Developed by indie studio Hello Games, the three years after the game’s reveal drew an incredible amount of attention, and in turn, hype.

The release of No Man’s Sky in 2016 was explosive.

No man&#39;s sky joining friends

No man's sky joining friends