No Man’s Sky – Botched Game Launch or Botched Journalism?

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The highly anticipated indie game No Man’s Sky is set to come to PS4 on August 9th in North America, August 10th in Europe, and on PC worldwide on August 12th. Though not all games offer early review units, a majority do and while No Man’s Sky would give press their turn at reviewing the game, copies wouldn’t arrive for them till today, one day prior to the games launch.

With some retailers breaking street date and offering the game for sale, sites like Kotaku and Polygon along side your currently relevant YouTube/Twitch streamer and quickly began to offer their take. Never mind you that especially for journalists, they had an embargo to think about because loyalty be damned for some extra clicks and after all, they were able to justify it by saying it’s not their fault select stores were selling the game.

The only problem other than a lack of clear integrity? The game they were playing was nowhere near the finished game that will be arriving tomorrow. Keep in mind there will be some extremely light spoilers about the game (in just the bullet section) in this post.

So how did we end up here? Things started to unravel about the game that had ‘leaked’ versus the game that would be launching on August 9th when details about the day 1 patch were released by Hello Games founder Sean Murray.

 When we went gold five or six week ago, we posted on twitter, and literally every reply was like hope you are going on a nice holiday!. Some of us have, but I didn’t want to, not yet. I pictured myself somewhere staring out the window thinking about this game I’ve been working on for five years.

We’re under a pretty intense spotlight right now, and hopefully it’s easy to imagine how hard it would be to switch off from that, or how deeply we care about people’s first impression of the game.

In fact most of us were back here the day after we went gold, working on this update. We’re already proud of what we put on a disk, but if we had time, why not continue to update it? 

The 824 MB patch which is now live on PS4 includes:

  • The Three Paths – there are now new, unique paths you can follow throughout the game. You must start the game on a fresh save, with the patch, as early choices have significant impact on what you see later in the game, and the overall experience.
  • The Universe – we changed the rules of the universe generation algorithm. Planets have moved. Environments have changed biomes. Galaxies have altered shape. All to create greater variety earlier. Galaxies are now up to 10x larger.
  • Diversity – Creatures are now more diverse in terms of ecology and densities on planets.
  • Planets – we’ve added dead moons, low atmosphere and extreme hazardous planets. Extreme hazards include blizzards and dust storms.
  • Atmosphere – space, night time and day skies are now 4x more varied due to new atmospheric system, which refracts light more accurately to allow for more intense sunsets.
  • Planet rotation – play testing has made it obvious people are struggling to adjust to this during play so it’s effects have been reduced further…
  • Terrain generation – caves up to 128m tall are now possible. Geometric anomalies have been added. Underwater erosion now leads to more interesting sea beds.
  • Ship diversity – a wider variety of ships appear per star system, and are available to purchase. Cargo and installed technology now vary more, and ships have more unique attributes.
  • Inventory – ship inventories now store 5 times more resources per slot. Suit inventories now store 2.5 times more per slot. This encourages exploration and gives freedom from the beginning. We’re probably going to increase this even further in the next update, for people in the latter game phases, and will allow greater trading potential.
  • Trading – trading is deeper. Star systems and planets each have their own wants and needs, based off a galactic economy. Observing these is the key to successful trading. We still working on adjusting this based on how everyone plays, but all trading values have been rebalanced across the galaxy, giving a greater depth. A bunch of trade exploits were uncovered and have been removed
  • Feeding – creatures now have their own diet, based on planet and climate. Feeding them correctly will yield different results per species, such as mining for you, protecting the player, becoming pets, alerting you to rare loot or pooping valuable resources.
  • Survival – recharging hazard protection requires rare resources, making shielding shards useful again. Storms can be deadly. Hazard protection and suit upgrades have been added. Liquids are often more dangerous
  • Graphical effects – Lighting and texture resolution have been improved. Shadow quality has doubled. Temporal AA didn’t make it in time, but it’s so close
  • Balancing – several hundred upgrades have had stat changes (mainly exo-suit and ship, but also weapon), new upgrades have been added.
  • Combat – Auto Aim and weapon aim has been completely rewritten to feel more gentle in general, but stickier when you need it. Sentinels now alert each other, if they haven’t been dealt with quickly. Quad and Walker AI is now much more challenging, even I struggle with them without a powered up weapon.
  • Space Combat – advanced techniques have been introduced, like brake drifting and critical hits. Bounty missions and larger battles now occur. Pirate frequency has been increased, as well as difficulty depending on your cargo.
  • Exploits – infinite warp cell exploit and rare goods trading exploit among other removed. People using these cheats were ruining the game for themselves, but people are weird and can’t stop themselves ¯\_(シ)_/¯
  • Stability – foundations for buildings on super large planets. Resolved several low repro crashes, in particular when player warped further than 256 light years in one session (was only possible due to warp cell exploit above).
  • Space Stations – interiors are now more varied, bars, trade rooms and hydroponic labs have been added
  • Networking – Ability to scan star systems other players have discovered on the Galactic Map, increasing the chance of collision. Star systems discovered by other players appear during Galactic Map flight
  • Ship scanning – scanning for points of interest from your ship is now possible. Buildings generate earlier and show up in ship scans
  • Flying over terrain – pop-in and shadow artefacts have been reduced. Generation speed has been increased two fold (planets with large bodies of water will be targeted in next update)
  • Writing – The Atlas path has been rewritten by James Swallow (writer on Deus Ex) and me.  I think it speaks to the over-arching theme of player freedom more clearly now. Early mission text has been rewritten to allow for multiple endings.

To give you a feel of before and after.

Day 1 patch aside for a moment, Sean is already talking about what gamers can expect next:

 Next up we’re adding the ability to build bases and own giant space freighters. Temporal AA and my new cloud rendering tech should be coming soon too. It will really change the game again, and enhance it visually.

This universe we’ve built is a pretty large canvas, we’ve got a lot of ideas. This is the type of game we want to be. 

For those not wanting to be spoiled by the patch notes, in short, the game that’s been more or less reviewed and streamed by the press and what you and I will get to enjoy tomorrow are two very different beasts. Rami Ismail writes on his blog which is an absolute must read:

 When you make a game for console – no matter which one – you have to realize the systems developers and platform holders are dealing with weren’t built for 2016. These systems are legacy systems, built upon legacy systems, built upon legacy systems. It’s like the system you are or were forced to use at your day job, if you’ve ever worked in retail, stock or booking systems, or at any checkout. Many of these systems interface closely with bureaucracy and console technology, and instead of radically changing how systems work between generations and breaking everything at a console launch, console platforms tend to try and not break things that work. As such, many of these systems are unwieldy, complicated, intricate and really built for teams that can afford to hire more people to read the manual and figure out the systems. These systems come from an age before indie, and some of the manual pages still refer to mailing copies by postal mail. Despite that, the console creators and their teams all work super hard to ensure developers have a smooth process, improving their systems where possible without touching the legacy foundation, and ensuring players get a functional game. 

What Rami goes on to detail is the extremely complicated endeavors a developer must go through before being able to release their game.

 Knowing that, it should be easy to see why Day 1 patches are often huge. For a game that goes on disc, the ‘gold’ build that went through certification is one to three months old by the time the game launches. That gives developers half a month to two and a half a month to do a month and a half to three and a half months’ worth of work to make the game ‘perfect’ while still hitting the release date with the patch. If your studio is huge, you probably have an internal QA department that (for good reason) slows things down internally, but if your studio is nimble and small, you can change enormous portions of the game in that span of time.

So in the hypothetical example of No Man’s Sky, when No Man’s Sky launches, for most people, it’ll launch into the intended experience thanks to the Day 1 Patch. That build is as close to what the developers envisioned as they worked, learned and improved upon that vision. That’s No Man’s Sky. The version that is on the disc, however, is months old. The only way to avoid that kind of thing is to not launch on disc. 

Some quickly fall back on the tired argument that a game, when released, should be the ‘final version.’

 One could argue that developers then, should make certain that a game is perfect when they submit it to disc, which is not an invalid stance. It’s just an impractical stance. If you’ve got months to improve upon a game that went through cert, do you think you would leave those months? Do you think audiences would appreciate a developer just kind of doing nothing for three months? Can you imagine the Kickstarter outrage if a developer, three months from launch, posted ‘we’re done, it’s good, we’re not touching it again until you get to play in three months’? Anybody arguing that a game should be done when it goes ‘gold’ is living in the 90s. 

In the case of No Man’s Sky or even Uncharted 4 and frankly every major title released, what goes on the gold build that’s then released on Blu-ray for the game’s physical release is irrelevant. Instead what matters is the version that we play on day 1. For No Man’s Sky, that’s the game which includes all the additional tweaks outlined above. Unfortunately for the press, when they began to realize that what they had been openly discussing, despite being asked not to by Sony and the developers until they received their review copies today would not be a proper characterization of the game, instead of owning their mistake, they quickly began to deflect blame upon the developers.

Now I don’t mean to pick on Arthur as he’s a smart guy but his tweets will give you a taste of what many who had clearly covered a version of the game that wasn’t meant for the public thought when they heard about the patch, and it’s a shame. In fact I’d love to see the reaction of the same journalists who have an issue with gold versions of a game requiring day 1 patches if Sony/MS announced a digital only version of each console next because that would certainly go a long way towards addressing their problems. Or we can look at this from another perspective and any members of the press that complain about day 1 patches to from now on, never edit their work when they’re done writing. Instead, when finished, simply press publish. 

Ultimately when dealing with any company, be it Sony or Microsoft, journalists should have a sense of wit to themselves so that they don’t fall in the lull of corporate PR and simply regurgitate what they’ve said. At the same time, it does no one any good when cynicism is injected into every interaction and thereby creates little trust between both parties. In this case, many sites said “Sony be damned! Even if they asked us to wait till Monday, I have a chance to get the game early and give my ‘hot take’ on it before anybody else and I’ll do it” without taking a moment and asking themselves, “Why does Sony want us to wait?”

Do they simply have a botched game and they don’t want bad PR? If so, why even bother with review units? If that’s not the case, what’s the difference between what’s currently out and what I’ll be getting on Monday and so maybe it would be best to reach out to the company and inquire about it. Their own reputation aside, and I’m not frankly convinced how many of them actually care about it (looking at a majority of the people at Gawker), what some journalists have now done is created a false premise revolving around No Man’s Sky.

Seeing how I won’t be getting a review copy, I have no idea if the final build of No Man’s Sky will be any good. For all I know, the game could be a complete mess. However, what has happened is over the weekend, with so many takes on the game out, many gamers who might not tune in to their favorite sites on a daily basis may have read one of those original reviews/previews and decided that the game isn’t meant for them. This is a shame because not only is the information they’re basing their judgement on false, but it also hurts the extremely small studio in a profound way if sales figures begin to get affected negatively. After all, they’re not EA or Activision with a monster annualized game that, no matter what is written about it, will sell a boatload.

If I have any criticism of Hello Studios, it’s this: Why not make the patch mandatory much in the same way that I cannot play Destiny without downloading the most recent update? As for the answer, I’m sure it’s a technical one based on how the game was built out from the start. In the end, while some (read: journalists) might once again be pivoting from accepting any responsibility by crafting a tale of how No Man’s Sky is an example of a botched game launch, it’s instead an example of botched journalism. 

Discuss:

Do day 1 patches bother you? Are you looking to purchase No Man’s Sky?