You may have seen that a little known game called No Man’s Sky was launched recently. You may have also seen that it wasn’t quite everything people had hoped for. This is to be expected, there were some lofty targets being set and a good 24 months of hype to contend with. It was always going to be tough.
However – one piece of criticism really caught my eye and the eyes of a couple of hundred Twitter and Reddit users. It was this;
I guess this illustrates a serious problem with how gamers see game development effort :/ #NoMansSky #gamedev pic.twitter.com/H0ZDxojWpk
— Kornel Kisielewicz (@epyoncf) 14 August 2016
The ridiculous notion that online multiplayer could be implemented by a single person in a week was, of course, very quickly shot down. The problem is that this sentiment is pretty deeply ingrained into a large number of the game playing public.
“Developers are lazy. They should just add this, that and the other”. It boggles my mind to think that people are still standing by this ‘developers are lazy’ schtick. It’s been going on for years now and it’s really about time it stopped.
A slight disclosure here – I am a programmer and I have made some small arcade apps in my time. So maybe it’s easy for me to say you should give them slack or maybe this is only an issue because it hits so close to home for me, but I still think a little less ignorance wouldn’t go amiss either way.
I would have hoped with the democratisation of game engines that more people would have dabbled in game-making themselves and discovered the pitfalls first-hand. I honestly implore you to try and make a game. Not even a new game, go and make Pong. See what goes wrong, what corners you have to cut and what design decisions you overlook. Can’t be that hard, right? It’s only Pong. Honestly, take a look at this gamer complaining about mirrors not working and then a follow-up post explaining just how difficult it is to get functional mirrors into a game. This is just mirrors, let alone online multiplayer spanning an entire universe.
Another thing that a lot of gamers don’t seem to appreciate is that game development isn’t a case of simply going from point A to point B and making mirrors work. It’s a complicated mess, a house of cards that can collapse at any time and all the while you have publishers demanding features, requiring demos to be shown and holding the purse strings. Publishers, often the people paying the developer’s bills and promoting the game being made, have been lambasted for years. Sure, it’s getting better, but in the world of NDAs we’ll never know the full story behind many a terrible game release. Instead we’ll just blame the developers and call them lazy? Let’s not.
This all being said, I’m not giving Hello Games a free pass on this one. There were certainly ‘messaging’ issues that should and could have been overcome. If there’s no multiplayer, then just say so. Instead we were treated to cryptic answers in interviews. To be fair, these answers may have been given because, quite frankly, at that point in development Hello Games might not have known exactly what was and wasn’t going to be in the game. If things can go wrong when making something like Pong, I can only imagine the U-turns made when making something of the magnitude of No Man’s Sky.
As always, there’s caveats to even this defence. There have been instances of straight-up lies making it into trailers and other pre-release materials. We’re all familiar with ‘bull shots’ and the nefarious Aliens: Colonial Marines’ over ambitious ‘target render’ trailer.
I think we’re past this now though. Gamers are more savvy when it comes to being lied to and publishers are more wary of making promises that can’t be kept. What we’re not past is the fact that making games is a truly messy affair that never truly goes to plan.
So by all means be upset that the game isn’t what you thought it’d be. Be upset that straight answers weren’t given sooner. Let’s not get angry at the fact Hello Games are ‘liars’ or that they’re ‘lazy’ – because Hello Games, and 99.9% of all other devs in the known universe, are neither.
My advice, try it yourself. Even with the smallest project you’ll see that things go wrong and the end result will be different.
