How did they make No Man's Sky fun? (Case Study)

As a case study of what to do and what not to do in making games, I think the history of No Man's Sky is a valuable lesson. From getting completely negative reviews last year it is now getting mostly positive reviews.

If you could pin it down, what do you think is the one ingredient that flipped it from being a boring monotonous game into a fun game? If we could find the exact moment it changed from being a bad game to a good game this would be very useful.

One thing I noticed is they added cars which you drive around in 3rd person. And driving around is fun. So maybe that's all it was. But basically that changed the whole game from being a 1st person survival games into a 3rd person rally driving game.

So that's one thing. Another thing is they put in a story mode which apparently is less linear. And I guess the idea that you can upgrade your cars/spaceships to progressively faster quicker models adds an additional `carrot' to keep you wanting to advance.

So is that all you need to make a bad game into a good game? Add an interesting story and let people drive around really fast going 'wheeeeeeeeeee!'

 

Sounds like my kind of fun.....weeeeeeee

 

This isn't very much of a case study. Here, let me do it.

The main thing I would question here is your claim that it was a "boring, monotonous game" before and is now a "fun game."

I suspect that the people who strongly disliked the game beforehand would also dislike what we have now.

Additionally, directly after release it was subject to the displeasure of many, many gamers who felt betrayed by the game not matching up to the hype (some of the hype fabricated, some of it fueled by Sean Murray himself).

Additionally, developers working on a game long after release is viewed quite positively by gamers, so their opinions would be shifted by that, regardless of the quality of any improvements.

So there's a lot more going on here than simply the quality of the game. However, to analyze the game itself irrespective of these other factors:

We should take a look at the things that were added in these updates to get a good idea of what might have changed the perception of the game.

The game has had three major updates: Foundation, Pathfinder, and Atlas Rises. Those links are to the press release for each one.

Foundation, the first one, introduced Creative Mode as well as Survival Mode (also keeping the Normal Mode). It introduced base-building and freighters. There are also a significant number of smaller things, like automatic resource harvesters or buildable beacons which point towards points of interest or more readable icons and UI improvements.

Pathfinder, the second, introduced some graphical updates. It also introduced base sharing and Workshop report. It introduced the possibility to own multiple ships, and segregates those ships into different types such as cargo or fighter, which affects their handling. It also introduces the previously mentioned vehicles, along with features like racing. It also introduced further trading possibilities, more base customization, introduces various types of Multi-Tools, and more weapon types (on ships and multi-tools). It introduced perma-death and photo mode, as well as various other changes.

Atlas Rises, the final thus far, introduced a brand new story. The galactic map has been improved, and new planet types were introduced. Crashed freighters now appear on planets. Missions for factions have been added, and depth has been added to the trading system. A terrain manipulator (can create or destroy terrain) has been added. Portals have also been added. Some gameplay improvements like low flight, or summoning a ship from anywhere, have been added. New ships have been added. And co-op has been added, in a limited form.

...

I'd intended when I started this to go through all of the improvements one by one and describe how they improve the game, but that would take far too long and I've already spent quite a while on this post.

In any case, it's very clear to see that they've changed the game enormously. They've added a ton of new features which completely change the way the game is played. They've created things like the different modes, or base-building and freighters, to cater to totally different types of players.

It's really no surprise that things are turning out so well. They've put in a ton of work, and it's paying off.

 

It's a pretty simple case study. The lesson learned is "Don't run out of money and release with terrible bugs and missing promised core features."

To avoid that, it boils down to feature creep and poor planning.

 

You think a game money-hatted by Sony ran out of money?

 

Are you under the impression that publishers just freely pour money into your company for as long as you would like them to?

 

Please point out where I implied that. And please point out how a phrase like "as long as you want them to" applies to a game with a three-year development, standard time for a new IP (one with a dozen or less developers, as well).

It appears Hello Games didn't want any development funding from Sony for the game, but I guarantee you they weren't strapped for cash.

Edit: Oop! Insert foot A into mouth B! Should have accepted that Sony money.

 

Before release of the game, I talked about it to friends that the media around it reminded me of surrounding hype pre release of Spore. In reality I think that was a very correct assumption to make.

I don't know much about No Mans Sky, but I do dislike Spore a lot. And it was not because of the game, but because of my expectations of the what the game were supposed to be like, and the media eating the marketing for it raw.

My impression of No Mans Sky is mainly the same, it's not bad, it's not really that interesting at all to dissect, if it hadn't been for the hype it had gotten.

 

You may be underestimating people's ability to send money down the drain.

Overall, it sounds like they did roughly the same thing as X series normally do and made massive past-release changes. As if they were early access, pretty much.

 

I saw that comparison mentioned many times before the game released.

 

The bad reviews was mostly the company setting unrealistic expectations for the game as part of the pre-release marketing. Some of that came from them, while some of it was from the community that the company did absolutely nothing to counter. They basically ran with whatever people thought the game would be until it released, only to have at that point a majority of the people interested in the game having the wrong idea of what it was.

Was it a bad game that became good later? I don't think so. It is just that the expectations now for it are pretty clear. No longer clouded by company hype.

 

People buying the game at the start had very different expectations to people buying the game now.

The game didn't become any more fun. They just stopped making sales to people that weren't interested in the game.

 

The No Man's Sky phenomenon baffles me. It's a REALLY good game that people talk about as though it was utter rubbish. When a game doesn't fully meet some people's expectations, that doesn't drop it from a 10/10 to a 1/10. It's still a game that stands well above a LOT of other games. And it's definitely a game that's better than 99% of anything, that any of us on this forum will ever produce. And yet some people on here talk about it like it's such a big failure, and they could have done so much better if the development on it had been handed over to them. It's funny.

 

You don't remember the developers discussing multiplayer features shortly before the game's release that turned out not be actually be in the game?

 

Sure, but that doesn't make the game automatically bad. Actually it doesn't affect the game at all.

 

It sounds like you're mixing up a ton of different things into one kind of confusing paragraph.

First, you feel it's a REALLY good game. Highly debatable.

Then you point out that people are extremely critical, overly so, of it. I agree in some cases. Though like Joe_Censored said, some portion of the hype was directly fueled by Hello Games, not to mention all the fan hype that they almost certainly saw but never squelched.

Then you point out people acting like they could make a better game. I haven't really seen that myself, but I can understand your point.


But to say that someone's expectations from a game (fueled by the developers themselves in some cases) shouldn't affect their opinion of the game is ludicrous. That's simply how humans work.

 

The problem was the expectations were set so high, and the developers and publishers did very little to temper expectations. The 1/10 reaction was mostly backlash, rather then a reflection on the quality of the game. Which is part of why the OP sees the shift to mostly positive reviews. Now that the backlash is over, people are rating the game on its merits.

Unity forums could be the poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

 

It certainly affects your personal experience of the game if you bought it based on how it was promoted, only to find out after you sunk your money in that much of what you thought you were buying isn't there.

For example, imagine if Toyota promoted their next version of their Prius saying it will get its power from solar charging, will be fully self driving, and can automatically start and drive itself to your location at the front of a store to pick you up instead of having to walk to the car in the parking lot. Then you buy the car based on these marketing claims, only to find none of them to be true. It is just a good car with excellent gas mileage. Does it matter to you at that point that it is still a really good car? Or are you going to be pissed you spent money on a series of lies? What is your review of this really good car going to look like given what the company claimed you were actually buying?

 

I don't know how that could happen though, at least to me. Maybe that's why I'm having trouble sympathising with this.

If I'm heavily invested in a game (and I would be, if I'm following the hype, right?), I would also make sure to read reviews and user impressions once it's out, so I can adjust my expectations.

And I most certainly wouldn't buy a car based solely on its marketing.

 

Consider the fact that "pre-order culture" is a relevant term.

 

Yeah, I know, but I don't really get that either.

I preordered games 3 times in my life. I regretted one of them (Guild Wars 2). But even then, I put the blame on myself for preordering, so...

 

They're pretty much my thoughts, too.

I don't think it's a bad game. But it's not my kind of game. Before it came out there were loads of people who thought it was going to be their kind of game who were then disappointed to find that it wasn't. Plenty of those people rated the game poorly because of that mismatch.

It's now been out for ages, so the people rating it now probably don't have that expectation mismatch. They probably also didn't go into it with ridiculously high expectations, which would help.

From what I can tell the game has been improved a lot, which has probably helped. I think the real key, though, is that the audience has probably changed, and the game has found its niche.

 

The problem with the mmo genre from a developer perspective is EVERYONE promises more then they deliver. The combination of them being relatively infrequent, hard to scope, and players wanting to believe the promises and investing more in them because of the long dev cycle... It creates a dynamic where over hyping pays off.

Studios with savvy business people understand this well and leverage it for all it's worth. Because everything really hinges on launch sales. If you have a good launch, you can then usually fix what is wrong, assuming you have a solid core to start with.

 

The worst thing about NMS was that they continued their strategy of misinformation after the release and then went totally quiet. On the first day 2 people were on the same spot in the universe and couldn't see each other and the whole internet was wondering if the multiplayer feature was a lie or if it was just broken.
All they got were some really dumb tweets from Sean Murray that provided absolutely no information.
That's not how you treat your customers and at this point Hello Games was dead for me. Sure, they are a small studio. But if you market your game like a big studio, sell it for the same price as a big studio then you have to handle the consequences like a big studio.

 

"I was told by the manufacturer this lawnmower could technically mow wet grass as well.
It doesn't.
But my annoying neighbour makes sure to remind me it's still a good lawnmower every month or so.
A year later manufacturer thought it was a good idea to add wheels to said lawnmower."
No Man's Sky.

 

I agree with some of the other comments here in that this is a good example of how not to make a name for yourself in the industry. If Hello Games/Sean Murray try to release another game on PC in the near future, I guarantee it will receive backlash regardless of how good or effective their marketing is. The flip of 'Steam reviews' (not a particularly useful metric btw), will do nothing for them in terms of company image, which was destroyed in the launch of No Man's Sky.
Don't lie to consumers, especially as a small studio when you rely on positive word of mouth and brand image.
I don't believe there is much to be learnt from the developments of NMS in recent term, there is more to be learnt about how not to behave pre-release, especially when you get a lot of limelight.
It doesn't matter how good NMS gets, it will always be remembered as a game that had lots of controversy at launch, and a developer who lied. There is a reason we don't see Peter Molyneux around anymore, and it's exactly this.

 

It might not objectively affect the game, but that's not in question. Disappointment occurs when reality turns out to be somehow less than expectations, and if you don't want a disappointed audience you're going to have to take that into account.

 

marketing mess aside...
I think they suffered from having too small a team to make a very large game, ran short on money and had to release early.
There were loads of bugs after the latest update, either old or newly introduced so they do not have a good handle on QA still. Even now you can fall through the ground on PC.
It is not a bad game, just a more laid back and time consuming game than most, which is not for everyone. And was launched too early.

 

Game quality is in the eye of beholder. It is not an absolute thing.

In case of No Man's sky...

Let's say someone is shopping for a car, go to dealership, is promised a car, but instead of a car they get a lawnmover... they aren't going to be happy. That's what happened with NMS.

No Man's sky overdid it with marketing hype and promises. That's what caused greatly negative perception.

The game was promised as some sort of "next big thing", and instead it was just one more free roam survival game.

 

I would disagree with the opinion that it was a good game but that the expectations were too high at the start.

If we look at what the first release of the game was, it was basically walking around collecting rocks and cataloguing them. Whichever way you look at that. That is NOT fun. Even if you are a trainspotter or a butterfly collector, you'd be hard pressed to be that excited about cataloguing a bunch of rocks.

Then you went to another planet which was more or less the same with different coloured sky and did exactly the same thing.

If you sold a game like that for $5, people might at best give the review that it was "worth a couple of hours to pass the time". But I doubt anyone would be jumping about with excitement at collecting rocks.

My opinion is that at the start what they created was a basic game engine with a few boring objectives. Just enough to call it a "game". And then after a year actually added the gameplay and the fun factor.

I would compare this with a game like FTL. Which has pretty average graphics but is all about game-play.

But what I'm not sure about is exactly the precise thing they added to improve it. It may be as simple as adding a progression system such that the more you do, the better things you collect, which lead to better things etc. And you could create a game like that with very limited graphics and it would still be just as fun.

 

This is not quite true. Some of us were able to make a solid gameplay loop out of upgrading our exosuits and ships, while travelling and sightseeing. And you also had the getting to the center of the universe thing, with its very light story elements.

I won't say it was a "good" game, but it wasn't as bad as you imply.

I still feel that most people who weren't able to enjoy it at the beginning still won't be able to because the fundamental gameplay is identical. But they added significant customization, context (through missions and the story), and deeper systems. These might have influenced some.

 

I'm trying just to go by the general response and reviews on Steam. At the beginning most people (not all) just didn't find it that "fun". (Despite apparently spending 6 hours on it!) And then at some point in time, the reviews changed to "at first it was just a way to waste a bit of time, now this game is actually fun!" There's still no real multiplayer so they didn't get everything promised. None-the-less they now like the game. I think the crime they did at the start wasn't really the breaking of promises it was the crime of not delivering something fun.

 

That's just it though. It wasn't aimed at those people originally. It was supposed to be a game purely about exploration and every one of them my current 200+ hours were clocked before the expansions were released doing nothing but exploring.

 

Hmmm. OK, so you think what they had a niche game for people who liked exploring, but then they hyped it up to the general public who aren't really interested in that kind of thing. And then they had to kind of dumb it down, in a way, to keep the general player interested. Could be.

 

You're assuming it's the general public that encouraged them into changing course away from purely exploration, but why couldn't it have been Sony? Sony clearly invested in them to some degree and they would have wanted a good guarantee that they would profit from it. Keeping gameplay as it was intended would have been a risk.

 

Pretty sure that is what happened. I just took a look at the original VGX 2013 trailer and while it's deceptive, it isn't promoting half of the crazy stuff folks came up with later. I think Sony got a hold of them after that and started marketing it into some crazy thing.

Also, "dumb it down" is kind of insulting and not really true in this case.

 

NMS definitely does have some solid technical achievements regarding procedural content, and I agree that NMS is a better game than most people on the forum have made. But, that is not the real point. NMS had near infinite hype, and it fell way short of delivering on that hype. It was touted as a vast procedural multiplayer universe where players could do anything. It ended up being a single player rock collecting game. Of course players felt slighted.

The videos and screenshots showed amazing ecosystems that do not exist in the game. Sand worms, dinosaurs, etc. And on launch day, those videos advertised a game that did not exist for players. A lot of players felt like NMS was a blatant example of false advertising.

Having said that, I agree NMS is better than a 1 out of 10 score. However, I don't know what score would be fair in the case of NMS. So much of the amazing hype surrounding the game was tied to half truths or outright lies. Players had a right to be angry about it. It was such a big deal that Steam changed their policies regarding video and images for games on the Steam store. Developers are now required to have honest, real videos and images on Steam.

 

Probably I should say "make more accessible".

I wonder why people wanted sand-worms so much? Could it be because it is quite a difficult technical achievement to make them? If they burrowed into the terrain, the terrain has to be changeable. And then create tunnels where the worms tunnelled through. What were people expecting the sand-worms to do exactly? Were you going to be able to ride them? Or shoot them and cut them up into slices? I would play a game with just sand worms in it - even a 2D game.

One thing to remember, however, is that although Sean Murray didn't make himself very popular, he did make himself incredibly rich!

 

Even that isn't true in this case. It's the opposite actually - gamers were expecting deeper interaction than what they got.

 

You are missing the point. They made a niche game and sold it to the general public. The general public rejected it. Hence all of the negative reviews at the start.

Today the general public knows what the game is, and is not buying the game. Only the original niche audience is buying it. And they are enjoying the game. Hence the positive reviews.

It's not that the nature of the game has changed any. It's that the nature of the people writing the reviews has changed.

 

It wasn't just that the game was niche but marketed to the general public. The initial game -- I don't care who you are -- was downright boring. Did anybody like it at the beginning?

 

?? Maybe

 

I rescind my comment.

 

I liked it well enough, though it got old fairly fast. The fact that you find it boring hardly means that everyone did, especially in a world where Farming Simulator and Trucking Simulator exist.

 

Indeed. I regularly get positive feedback from parts of my game that I'm personally not keen on at all. Just because they're not for me doesn't mean that other people can't like them.

 

OK, lets leave aside the fact that for some people the original game was fun. What I was trying to get at at my original post was that something was added to the game that took it from being disappointing to most people who played it, to fun for most people who played it. (Check out the Steam reviews to see).

And my second point is that it is now getting mostly positive reviews despite not actually fulfilling the original promises i.e. multiplayer, sand worms, etc.

So either people are happy now because 75% of promises are fulfilled and they are happy with that. Or they are happy because despite a lot of promises not being fulfilled, they still enjoy the new aspects of the game.

My personal opinion is that if you buy a game and it is not what you expect but it is fun and worth the $30 you pay for it, then you will still give a good review. Whereas if you buy a game which is technically everything you were told but is not fun then you would give a bad review.

Like when I go and see one of these new CGI superhero movies. Yes, it delivers action, explosions, sfx and so on. It lived up to all promises. But did I enjoy it? No. I couldn't give a monkeys about magical flying men in lycra so I give it a bad review. And then I go and see another movie like Spring Breakers which is nothing like the trailer but was fun. So I give it a good review.

 

And what others are saying is that it's not necessarily something added to the game that did this.

They are not the only two possibilities.

 

The original promises were only made to those people who brought the game on preorder or in the very early days.

Today everyone knows that is in the game. There are plenty of reviews showing what the game actually is. So noone is buying it based on the original promises.

Expectations of what a person will get if they buy no man's sky have changed dramatically since the out of control pre release hype.

 

My two cents on it... it's not so much "they made it fun" period because that has little meaning on its own. But I get what you mean how did they make it fun for the people who thought it was not fun last year.

Basically they listened to the user community and acted on that feedback. When you have your target audience very openly telling you what they don't want and what they want it provides a quite clear direction to focus your efforts. In such a case it is almost a given that sooner or later this result will be achieved... basically the perception of the game has flipped 180 from last year by many in their player community.

And since the devs focused on what the players were asking for the perception is now this game is exactly what it was promised to be a year ago. Which is probably not accurate technically speaking but is accurate as far as the players got a game as good or even better than they were expecting.

I don't think looking at spot items such as vehicles and such is useful. Sure that may have been a part, maybe even a big part for some people, in this specific case but may not be for another game. The only important thing to take away IMO is they gave their player community what they were strongly asking for. And that will be different for different games.

 

We have alluded to it, but it's really not this simple. It's a combination of whether you enjoyed the game, and your expectations (which may affect your enjoyment) for the game, and probably other factors.

I just recently gave something a bad review for something that shows up twice, for like 15 minutes total, in a 40 hour experience. That aspect of it was bad enough to bring me to not recommending the experience, even though I quite enjoyed almost all of it. It's just this hodgepodge of possible effects which all combine in unique ways for an individual.

Again, as others have already said, there really is no simple easy answer.