• Sean Murray crawls out of the woodwork to talk No Man's Sky
    59 replies, posted
https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/zmk4w8/we-spent-an-hour-talking-to-hello-games-about-everything-no-mans-sky https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/jul/20/no-mans-sky-next-hello-games-sean-murray-harassment-interview https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-20-the-big-sean-murray-interview
As disappointing as it was on launch, this comeback is a great and heartwarming story.
To be fair I can't even remember how bad the launch was. I don't even know what promises they didn't keep or whatever. I only remember that when it came out I didn't think it was interesting but the game as it is right now looks pretty good.
It would have been very easy for them to bail and go their separate ways after that game launched and got the reaction it did. Kudos to them for sticking by the game and update by update, eventually start making it true to the vision they originally sold.
Disasters and publishers didn't force them to lie to consumers about the state of the game on release - but I hope they are redeemed and forgiven if the final product is good without forcing people to pay for DLC.
Waypoint's interview is very lengthy but also a very enjoyable read. Sean continues to be a cool guy that's still very passionate about the game, and I'm glad they're finally comfortable about talking to the press again. Really looking forward to the NEXT update.
I wonder what drives people to be so upset at a game to the point where they have to send death threats to make themselves feel validated.
Some interesting points about talking to the press as a game developer, and why most people just follow a script instead of just casually sitting down and talking about what you want your game to be. And this bit from the eurogamer article: I'd love to to take credit for that as some sort of selfless act or whatever, but people don't realise it's easy for that story to run away with itself. I know I'm bias but these facts are pretty much out there - there were stories that there were massive drop-offs of people playing No Man's Sky. I think PC Gamer did this thing where they were comparing our chart with lots of other games, and it's actually normal, and No Man's Sky is doing better than those games. We could see that, we could talk to Valve and to Sony who were super helpful and they were telling us people are playing this game for a phenomenally long amount of time. You guys were writing stories about there being massive refund rates, and that's not true - our numbers were slightly above average on PC, but that's par for the course when you have a game that sells a lot of copies and people play it on min spec machines, below min spec machines. They were way under the average on PS4, say - but we had no credibility to come out at the time and say these things. Who would believe us? Probably no-one will believe me now. That's why we were doing updates. We're not doing it altruistically. You can see when our updates come out, we go to the top of the steam charts, our numbers go up the same as it would for any big title. I'm not saying there's no story there - there's definitely problems, there were definitely people who were angry. But you give me too much credit by saying we stuck with the game out of altruism.
It is still open how good that new update will be but I think there is another thing they need to change, the price. Almost 2 years old now and still full price on Steam.
PC Gamer, IGN and some other outlets have hands on impression articles up for the new update. Mostly positive.
Just a shame the damage has been done to most people. Second chances are pretty rare, especially when your meltdown was as big NMS' was. Really sad, since they have worked their balls off ever since.
tbh i think if the game released at $40 or $30 it wouldn't have had nearly the backlash it did
I liked the Waypoint article too, even though Klepek is a worthless chud.
Doubt it, the kind of shit they pulled would have gotten then shit anyways, even if it was free.
I think, at least in my case, the marketing sold me a different game than the developers intended. There's a question that kinda sums up my whole issue: Austin: Do you think that statement you just made though is the sort of thing that maybe gets people's hopes up? I think, as a creator, I completely sympathize with the ambition: you want to make the “perfect game” for someone, you want to be able to fulfill their sci-fi fantasy. And, you know, I'm excited about Next , but isn't it statements like that—”Do you want to be a space pirate? Do you want to command freighters?”— I know those are specific features that you've already talked about regarding Next , but where people's ears will perk up and say, "Well, l maybe this won't be the lonely thing for me this time, maybe the action will feel more like Elite: Dangerous or like Call of Duty ," or whatever the thing is that they will fill in the gap for? Back then before the game came out I was picking up these bits and pieces, it's building, it's survival, procedurally generated, action, space fighting, factions, NPCs, etc. And I envisioned an entirely different game than what the devs intended to be a chill, relaxing experience. I wasn't the target audience but I mistakenly thought I was. To be honest they bungled the launch, but even with shitty marketing and outrage they seem to have been successful somehow.
Most. I'm still surprised they didn't get sued into oblivion for fraud.
Im sad that because of the promises they left unfulfilled, they couldnt expand on the exploration and world generation, instead having to morph the game into a new thing and adding the "promised" features.
honestly with how the internet is, death threats will be sent either way.
The base game had nothing but a foundation to build a game on and it should have been sold as early access if at all. NOW it should be considered as a 1.0 release coming out of early access. NOW it has features. It has optmization, better terrain generation, better flying, freighters, base building, terrain vehicles, better PC support in general as it felt very much like a straight port from console, different game modes, and now multiplayer. Got to give them props for sticking with it, but the launch was a joke. $60 for SpaceEngine with sound effects is all it was
Didn't hello neighbor get actively worse as time went on tho
Reminder that they NEVER lowered the base price, and it's still sixty fucking dollars two years later.
The current state of NMS was funded by nearly a million pre-orders sold through deceptive marketing, if it had flopped you'd still have the same mess it was on release At best it means they aren't actual thieves, that's not good enough to sing their praise for not running with the money. The last thing we need is encourage developers to lie to get their early access game funded so they can patch it later and have people forget all about it.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/433275534542372875/469404486079873044/Sean_Murray_NEXT_03.png "The haters must pay for their insolence"
In my humble opinion the devs have been doing a fucking admirable job of fostering goodwill and delivering on the original promise of the game, kudos to Murray and the boys (and girls). I always thought it was unfair just how much flak Hello Games got, I think Sony is to blame for parading them around for like three E3s and forcing them to release it as a full $60 game (since as I understand Sony co-published the game and by co-published I mean they probably payed the majority of the bills), putting a tiny game studio of like 20 people in a position of impossibly high expectations. But now it seems like they're actually peeking their heads over the summit of those expectations, which again is just fucking inspiring. I just wanna send these guys a cake or something.
Hello Neighbor's full release is embarrassingly terrible.
How so?
there is some XB1 gameplay out on the web from people who got early.
I may blame sony for making them push the game out, but I blame Murray for the disinformation. It wasn't just vague wait and see stuff, it was flat out intentional. During interviews he was asked stuff, like "Will you be able to play with your friends?" "Yeah." "Is there a competitive element to the game?" "If you want that, yes" "Can you grief other players?" "A little bit" "Can you customize the look of your character?" "Sort of" "Do you ever get a good look at your character?" "You can see other characters and they can see you" And we only realized there wasn't any multiplayer when two guys found the same planet and tried to find each other. And it was like this about every aspect of the game. That's all on Sean
I don't think he was so much a compulsive liar, but rather, a bit too naive and optimistic about what they could implement in the time allotted to them. And I mean, it's not hard to see why. Guy was working to make his dream game a reality and just wanted to gab on about what he wants the game to have or what they were working on at the time. I'm sure there's a lot of people in this thread who would end up doing the same if in a similar situation, just probably not on such a massive scale as Sean did. Does this excuse how he handled the hype up to launch? Of course not, and even he admits that he handled things very poorly. There's no debating that the launch and hype of NMS was just a mess on all sides. I'm being cautiously optimistic about NEXT (gonna wait to see what the general consensus is), but even if Sean/Hello/Sony fucked things up initially, I have respect for Sean and his team actually sticking with the game instead of running off with the money or dropping it due to the massive negative reception it got. Even if NEXT is fucking shit, they will still have my respect for supporting the game.
No he literally lied. He did it repeatedly about features which were never planned. Up until after the game launched he was telling people you could play with your friends and see othe players but it was "very unlikely". In reality there was no multiplayer feature at all on launch. Whenever he was asked about a feature he said either a straight "Yes this is in the game" or he would pull the whole 'Oh I'm a shy developer and I can't go into details' shtick when in reality a lot of what he was confirming was never planned to be in the game. On a liar's scale of Todd Howard to Peter Molyneaux, Sean Murray falls much closer to old Petey.
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