This might be unpopular, but it feels like the “redemption” story around No Man’s Sky has become more of a cultural comfort narrative than an honest look at what happened.
Let’s be real — most of those updates were just delivering delayed promises, not generosity. The game we were originally sold was missing a lot of advertised features, and Hello Games never actually apologized for lying. On top of that, every update brings more bugs and half-fixed systems, and the community acts like free beta testers for Light No Fire, while still framing it all as “passion” and “commitment.”
It’s like Hello Games built a shoddy, unfinished building, declared it open anyway, and then decided to use it as a testing ground for their next building — and somehow it wins “Best Ongoing Building” every year.
So why do people keep buying into this narrative? Because it’s a comfortable story? Or is it somekind of parasocial relationship going on there?
NMS made 78 million in 2016, this can’t be compared to a failed AAA game or indies where devs walk away from financial failure, another emotional argument?
According to the number of upvotes, it seems that their angst is a reflection of the game industry in general. Hello Games had indeed performed to expectations by not walking away, but does that warrant mythologising the redemption arc? Even when the state of the game is buggy?
That’s just a flat out lie or a delusion.
The most famous example is how “the game was supposed to be like GTA” some people cry over. Source for that? A interview they did where they stated “we want to be more like Rockstar”. The interview was about development cycles, had nothing to do with the game itself, but one YouTuber saw it and made a video about how “Cyberpunk is going to be GTA in the future, expect bowling”, shit like that.
It was never supposed to be anything than it isn’t.
I heard that argument bunch of times, someone even showed me a trailer that supposedly showed these “missing features”. The stuff missing? Wall-running and ripping off turrets. That’s it. That’s literally it. They gave a really good explanation as to why wall running is missing, it’s also a flavour feature, not like adding it back in would change the gameplay significantly, so people crying over that is just… weird to me.
The fact is that Cyberpunk was a victim of some of the most ridiculously over-the-top hype in gaming history. And when the game released in the state it did (which - to anyone who’s ever followed anything released by CDPR - was the most benign and obvious thing in the world), people lost their minds, because they were expecting The Gaming Messiah to show up and End All Gaming Suffering. Just stupid from the top down.
They hyped it themselves in endless promo dev videos leading up to launch. I watched all of them anticipating a very different game than what we ever got.
All I know about CP2077 was that the CEO actually admitted reputational damage to CDPR, which is already a class above Hello Games’ silence about their willingness to lie during initial launch.
I don’t think Hello Games lied as much as you may think. Sony lied, and others layered their own expectations on top.
HG turned to Sony for publishing and marketing help around release. Sony, like any game publisher, wants to get as many sales as possible, preferrably on release day to look the best (for further marketing when sales slow down: “X million dollars on release day” kind of stuff). So Sony had a huge hand in promoting the game, and undoubtedly crunched time on HG, reducing their ability to get what they wanted to out the door.
Plus, people hear what they want to hear and read what they want to read sometimes. Game journalists and streamers and influencers and such layered their expectation on each other, chalking up the game to more than was promised by HG, only to be disappointed when it wasn’t. Murray even said the day before its release that it “maybe isn’t the game you imagined”.
And sure, not to absolve HG of all the blame here, there was underdelivery and bugs. They got swept up in a storm of shit larger than they were ready for. They probably could have said more at the bungled release, but I wonder how much (if any) they couldn’t because of Sony’s hands in the PR. Iirc they were allowing returns of the game past normal return timelines? Given all of that, though, they committed to their game, even when Sony left, and even if players left and didn’t come back. That’s why people talk about it’s comeback story.
For Cyberpunk, though, I’m less supportive of that comeback story because CDPR had other majorly-known games (Witcher). They knew how game-dev-crunching and publisher pressure reduces their ability to deliver. They understood how marketing grows hype and expectations of their games. They even saw how NMS’s release went, and they still fumbled their release horribly. I’m happy for those that play CP2077 and enjoy it today, but I’m less on-board for that one.