In the second part of an ongoing series examining the British game industry, IBTimes UK speaks with Joe Danger creator Hello Games.
No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games has hailed hitting a ‘very positive’ Steam user review user rating for the first time, eight years after the game’s controversial launch was slammed by players.
Responding to your post to me.
Prior to launch
Sean literally went on television and said the only way you can see yourself is if someone else runs in to you. But that would be incredibly rare. Then he goes on to say it’s a shared world so if your friend destroys one planet, you’ll be able to see those changes in your game, which was another lie.
These were the reasons we bought it for $60.
Here’s a reminder in case you weren’t round back then.
https://youtu.be/cJ-tgaE37U...
People make mistakes they got a 2nd chance and actually did good with the resources when we have developers supported by huge publishers who stop patching games months after launch
These were first time developers who didn't know how to handke all the hype and kept saying yes to all questions. Yes whatever they did and how they release the game at launch was not right is not right but the way they handled it afterwards and fixed so much and released so many free expansions they deserve credit for that
Mass Effect Andromeda and anthem are clear example of that
Im told im lying so i come with proof and somehow im still wrong here comes the copium 😅🤣🤣 🤣
He dreamed big but couldn't deliver by launch. That video hasn't aged well, Almost all of those "bullshit" counts have actually been delivered upon. I've no doubt this was the original goal but was just too lofty for a small company in the time that he had. His interviews closer to launch weren't nearly as grand as he clearly realised where he had to cut back on ambitions but the damage had been done as an inexperienced guy trying to be the media guy as well as make his game. He made mistakes but hats off to him for dreaming, and yet another warning to people who get overhyped by something prelaunch not to drink the kool-aid and manage expectations.
That video is old and half of it was debunked. But it also doesn't contradict what I said below nor does it contradict what Sean said.
I think it was on Colbert that Colbert asked him if you’d be able to grief your friends, and Sean said yes. That’s an empirical lie. I think Sean is a next gen Peter Molyneux. When they announced Light No Fire (I think it was the Game Awards) Sean started bloviating again and Geoff literally cut him off to keep him from saying anything stupid. I don’t know as it’s from ill will, I think he’s genuinely excited about the projects and starts describing what’s in his head instead of what is guaranteed to be there, very similar to Molyneux. But to act like he didn’t misrepresent things is simple blindness. Thankfully they ultimately delivered on the vision, which Molyneux rarely does.
I've a lot of love for Molyneux too. I know that's not a popular view. He had dreams bigger than his studios capabilities too. I'd rather dudes like this that try big and fail rather than all these boring as games we usually get. There was more creativity and interesting new mechanics and genres that came out of the glory days of Bullfrog and Lionhead than there's been out of the entire AAA gaming industry since.
Good for them, but this is not the model we want to continue following. A bunch of empty promises and lies at launch. That being said they didn’t take to blaming the reviewers and self-pity. They buckled down and fixed their game. Good on them.
I really wonder just how much of it was true before they lost nearly everything in that flood and had to restart from a super old build after the announce trailer
@jwillj2k4
This has got out of hand, please check previewtrailer of the game and you see everything was in the game at lauch but that creature running and mowing down trees. Those animations wasn't in the game but every thing else was. And almost forgot, that spacebattle also came later.
I know because I platinumed the game in the first week and it was *great*.
Many people got bored and thought that it was an all out simulator with stuff that Hello Games *NEVER* promised but you know how forums and comments are, someone make something up and everyone that never played the game think it's true.
After that they released *over 35 named updates* *FOR FREE* so of course they deserve good ratings!!!
If you bought the game at launch for 10$ and thought it sucked, you probably believed in all the *forumlies* to begin with and that's on you imho so "A bunch of empty promises and lies at launch" is simply not true...
Even as you wrote your post, you’re contradicting yourself lmao..
Everything was absolutely NOT at launch.
One of the biggest lies was “no two people will ever meet, however, if they did go to the same location, you would see each other”. This got me and my coworkers buying this at full price. I think it was around two hours after the game came out that the people proved he was lying.
@jwill
It's literally in a Game Informer article where Sean states they won't be there at the same time and won't be able to see each other. The article was written before launch and literally was called "Stop Thinking of No Man's Sky as a multiplayer game." In that Sean states that there are "great mp games out there, if that's what you want go have fun with those, our game isn't that." (paraphrasing).
Just look at this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/No...
Found the exact quote: "I guess the whole of the entire community could organize to go to one specific spot and then they would find that they weren't all there at the same time." -Sean Murray
@zeke those large space battles were rare but in at launch. There are old YouTube videos confirming them.
@thorstein Ok, I guess I missed them then. Or just passed them minding my own business and not really put that one in memory. I just remember I had lots to do and it was fun for me from day 1. Seems alot of people online can't handle that people like myself actually liked the game from day one but I don't care tbh.
I play it in PSVR2 and I enjoy it, expansion after expansion. :) A great game just gets better and better as times passes by. Worth the inital price x 1000 for me.
@zeke
Absolutely. My platinum was in August 2016. I played in VR too. I have moved on but only after amassing 650 hours.
I love the game and will go back to it on occasion. I knew it wasn't for everyone but it was the game for me.
No Man's Sky is such a great example of gamers just creating a narrative and ignoring all contrary evidence. Even if you buy the idea that Hello Games falsely advertised the game in the first year or so that it was being developed and advertised, you could literally watch long previews in the months before launch that showed what the game was going to be. So even if they "lied" in 2013-2015, you really couldn't claim to be deceived by that in Fall 2016 when you could watch long previews that Spring.
The whole "they promised Destiny style multiplayer" is the worst lie of all. As @thorstein points out, Hello Games was going out of its way two years prior to launch to get people NOT to think of NMS as a multiplayer game. Screenshots of the article he referenced can be read here:
https://imgur.com/0BxODLP
It's also astounding to me that people assumed that everyone in the entire world was going to be on the same server. That's like joining a random server in COD while your friend is on the same map on another server, going to the same location, and getting mad at Activision because you didn't find your friend.
Get over it. It a videogame. It's been years. They not only addressed every complaint, they have gone well beyond anything the game could have been initially, even if it had lived up to expectations. So much about what they "lied" about was blown out of proportion. People still whining today are like scorned ex girlfriends.
We’re commenting on an article. No one asked for you to chime in so if you don’t like it leave.
Congrats Hello Games. Even though I believe they redeemed themselves years ago, I'm glad that they kept up with the constant improvements and free content updates. It shows that they value their IP and I look forward to what their new game will bring.
Yeah, NOPES and Sean and his crew can go eat a sack of dixs. Biggest bait and switch by a completely unprepared team. You can keep singing this “they fixed it” years later BS all you want. Don’t care about the crap they added, this broken technical marvel still clips through the environment in a what became a giant disingenuously marketed tween game.
“very positive”. it launched 2016….and you are STILL worried about the game’s reputation (now patched several times). That says all you need to know. Get real.
There are 20 different formats to balance, with "around 140 combinations of graphics options" on PC.
"Which I hope conveys the complexity involved in releasing a large cross platform game like ours." - programmer Martin Griffiths.
Hello Games' new project would feel impossible to create even with 1,000 people behind it, the developer has said.
Speaking to IGN, studio co-founder and managing director Sean Murray said that, while it's not a sequel to No Man's Sky, the new game is just as ambitious.
Sean really? Haven't you learned a thing since your first game about over promising?
Here we go again…. Yes he did. That’s why there was a class action lawsuit against him. With an ultimatum. That’s why we’ve received a free overhaul of the entire game.
@ 1nsomniac
What exactly has he promised about the new game? All I can see is him saying it's ambitious.
Edit: Hold on, maybe you're talking about No Man's Sky?
Oh, but if we want to hate something, we need to read into everything and create our own narrative./sarcasm.
If he hadn't learned anything, he would have offered a long list of specific features, released an E3-style pre-rendered cinematic trailer labeled "in-game footage", and made the round of talk shows gushing his enthusiasm for the project.
All we have here is: "We're working on something. It's a challenge for us."
If anything, he has demonstrated again and again that he has learned to be very disciplined in how he communicates with the public. He doesn't even make promises regarding updates to NMS until after they have released. All we get ahead of time is a single, cryptic emoji on his Twitter feed.
It seems to have been mostly just a matter of him underestimating the time it would take to do what they wanted with it. They have yet to announce a release date for the new game, so they have as much time as they need for a proper launch this time around.
NMS is also currently far beyond what was ever promised.
It’s like he’s trying to throw all the good will away that he’s earned with these free updates. Under promise-Over deliver. The hype train that leaves too early will likely run out of steam before it’s destination.
Well that's just poor planning of your resources. I don't see what time you leave having any bearing on fuel
C'mon now haters. How many teams this small even have the guts to try to make games this ambitious? Most of them are happy to make the billionth pixel art rogue like.
By far. Particularly since about 40% of the promises they supposedly made were just things the community made up from watching trailers.
So go the Star Citizen route and get paid for your idea. Then you can create infinite ideas inside a game while never releasing the game.
‘You can experience parts of Star Citizen now’ would be a more accurate statement.
I absolutely love Joe Danger and am really looking forward to what these guys make for the PS4. Another British developer based in Guildford, its a smallish town just outside London (30 minutes drive from me), and it seems completely ordinary, but if you look at all the development teams that have been based there, (Bullfrog, Media Molecule, Hello games and dozens more), it really is quite astonishing.