No Mans Sky apologists on Episode 442 of the Bombcast

Let me start with I haven't had time to play it yet (buying it on PC). I am always online, but I know a couple people who aren't online and to have them buy this game to get what's on the disk is just shitty.

No Mans Sky was launched not finished, I’m sorry but if there is a physical disk for an “offline” game it should come complete, or at least 90%. If you want to make it this living thing on a console it should have never been billed as an “offline” game. It’s like Call of Duty (another $60 game) shipping with 3/4 of the single player missing and patching in another 1/4 of the game day one, with more to come. I don’t think anyone there would give that a pass. I don't care the size of the Dev team (that shouldn't matter), both games cost $60 both had high billing by Sony.

I think it’s really shitty on the last podcast most everyone seemed to be so giving this game a pass. This should be unacceptable today, unless the game was online only or only sold digital as a pre-release game. With how much they want to add I feel for those getting 1/4 the game on disk and wondering WTF why is everyone talking this up so much.

Should SONY bill the PS4 as online only because folks who don't go online can't download the firmware updates? Should games not be allowed to be patched if they have an offline mode? If people don't connect to the internet with their PS4, that is on them. Free updates are out there for the taking. It is not Hello Game's or SONY's fault if some folks refuse to take advantage of that.

It's not a hill I am going to die on but it is certainly worthy of criticism. I don't even care about the game but not something to totally give it a pass on if they went to the length of putting out retail and charging full price.

It's not that day one patches aren't the way of things and understandable but you can still criticize. I think a lot of people just don't have this as a negative issue.

I think we live in a world where Day 1 patches are pretty commonplace so everybody's used to it and it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Don't get me wrong, I agree that in an ideal world we wouldn't have to download a big patch on launch day to get the full experience but the reality is that sometimes compromises have to be made in order to meet release schedules and publisher demands etc. This was already a game that was repeatedly delayed (sorta) so I don't think it comes across as altogether too unexpected. If this is a compromise that's needed in order to get the games printed and shipped on time then in my opinion it's totally worth it.

As a small aside, I think Black Ops 3 had a sizeable Day 1 patch as well but I think people especially gave them a pass because everyone who still cares about those games plays them online anyway (yes, massive generalization but it's just something worth noting I think).

People seem to forget that patches are a good thing. They make the games better, not worse.

Sorry man, this is the way life is going for ALL media, not just games. Don't have access to internet? Odds are you won't be fully utilizing your apps/programs/other weird life things that all seemingly connect to the internet now.

It's the way it has to go and it is the trade off you have to accept. Someone people won't be able to utilize online features, updates, patches, what have you, and while that sucks the majority of players are connected. You never build any business decision to cater to the minority, and those not "always online" are today's minority. Yes some people just do not have a choice in the matter, but those people need to be true to themselves and pick a form of entertainment that they can fully utilize in their life.

Hell I'm still of the idea that if the Xbox One had kept it's always online feature as well as the other stuff that got scrapped due to the outcry, it would be a better system I would interact with more, instead of sitting on a shelve for a year gathering dust.

Disregarding size, I don't think I've put in a new game in the last two years that hasn't had a day 1 patch.

Where do you live where people have the latest consoles and know about No Man's Sky but don't have an internet connection?

This is how internet related stuff has worked for a long ass time now. Instead of blaming people for making their stuff better, blame whoever is responsible for your internet being shit.

very rare nowadays to be disconnected entirely from the internet. unfortunately it's a demographic they can't realistically cater to, especially in this day and age and with the way games "go gold" (see Rami's article).

if it's really an issue maybe wait a few months for new printings of the game which should include these crucial updates. it's shitty but there you go.

I went to college for 4 years and gaming was blocked from their network. I dealt with it, played older games, because living without internet means accepting you have a weird situation, no different than if I'd gotten deployed

If you live in a place where there is no internet connection, I think you'll find No man's Sky is not really going to be the top concern...or the worse inconvenience. Even in the context of games or technology in general.

Most people are going to give it a pass because most people have an internet connection. I understand the argument, but it just seems like an argument from a decade ago.

Plus, if you are playing ANYTHING at all nowadays, you still need to figure out a way to update your console or PC in order to make things run at all. So, those who have this problem and care enough about it to solve it already know how.

Well I dunno, by and large, playing video games in 2016 means that you need to be connected to the internet for some reason or another, like it or lump it. While this does inconvenience what I imagine is a small percentage of the playerbase (and potential playerbase), the benefits of internet connectivity, even for an "offline experience", are pretty massive.

To the OP's point, maybe it should have been marketed with that note attached to it, but I'm just wondering if the phrase "offline experience" in 2016 sort of already implies, "hey look, you still need to be able to download stuff, so keep that in mind".

I dont think the criticism is always just internet or no internet. Some don;t have great internet, and downloading, say a 4 gb patch can take some time, coupled with PSN download speeds. (if you are playing on ps4)

It is certainly a fair criticism and just because "thats the way things are" doesn't mean it isn't an annoyance for some. I don't really care either way at this point in my life, but I can appreciate the fact that it can suck to purchase something and still have to await some sizeable download in order to dig into it.

"video game development is hard" is maybe something that amplifies some frustration with stuff like that. No one denies it, but it also isn't the responsibility of the consumer to be sympathetic when you are selling a product, then using vague excuses to justify little things.

Meh, those are kinda two separate arguments, but they seem slightly blended together in these situations. I think ideally neither side would want to push patches for games, but it does help the experience overall. For me, the size of patches have just gotten so large so quickly, that I can at least appreciate the disapproval some gain.

Day 1 patches if anything remind me of playing PC games in the 90's where the installation process took forever. Also if there was a patch it would be a real pain to get and install.

That's just screwy. Offline experience means offline experience. I agree 100% with the OP here. When you sell a disk version of a game at full price it should be complete (especially when it's marketed as being complete) . The industry has taken a turn for the worse when early acces became a thing. They noticed that they could sell a non complete version of a game and get away with it. So gradually we got to this point were a major publisher has the gall to sell a feature incomplete version of a game at full retail price on a disk. Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man but I find this very sad.

People without the Internet could bring their console to a friend's house and download it there. Worst case scenario, wait for the second run of the disc (or the GOTY edition) with the patches on the disc and buy it then.

Their decision to release NMS with a Day One patch is a reasonable trade-off, IMO: would you rather release it now for the 95% of the player base with decent Internet connections? Or wait 1-3 months for the 5% who don't? And what if they kept working on the game in the 1-3 months it would take to put the current patch on a disc and released that as a Day One patch? People would still be complaining it was released unfinished.

Isn't there also an issue with people who do have internet yet have a data cap ? I think that this issue will be inconvenient to more than just people without internet (that said I assume most data caps aren't 2 to 4 gigs of data per month...).

Don't most on-disc games have pretty major patches these days? And don't those patches almost always fix bugs and add stability?

If we want to discuss developers using the day one patch as a way to fix an incomplete or unfinished game, let's do so with a game that was actually incomplete or unfinished at release. No Man's Sky was a complete game before the patch. It simply added more to an already finished game.

If you're that upset over this patch your issue isn't with the 15 person team at Hello Games, it's with the current structure of certification and online connectivity.

@finaldasa: Yeah Hello games is just a 15 person team. But Sony isn't.

And you are right the current certification process is fucked up. There seems to be less and less care for quality control. Ultimately consumers are just as much at fault here. We are all too eager to get our grubby hands on whatever is the new shiny thing. We have enabled the industry to shovel out halve finished games. I hope the industry puts better self regulation in place at some point but I fear this will only remain a pipe dream.

I've been banging on this drum for this past week, so apologies for sounding redundant - but it really is fascinating to hear all this defense of the online requirements when this is exactly what the XB1 was slammed for when it launched and no one back then was saying "well who doesn't have an internet connection these days!" People came up with the wildest situations of soldiers on submarines or going hiking and not being able to go online with your console in the middle of the woods. It is so strange to see the general feeling on this flip over the past two years and makes me wonder if Microsoft were just ahead of the times or what.

The title of this thread is gold. Pure gold.

@bdead: Not sure what Sony could have done? They weren't working on the game and they don't own Hello Games or the No Man's Sky IP to my understanding. So they weren't in the UK working on the game. They were probably more focused on assisting any port work to the PS4 and ensuring the game passed certification and didn't miss a release date.

Since No Man's Sky was printed on disc, there was always going to be 1-3 months times between final certification, aka "gold", and the actual release date. From there the dev team sits down and begins working on a patch because...they should? If they can spend some additional time to make a game even better, shouldn't they?

And the next update will make the game even better! And so on. So is that next patch the "real" game? No. What's on disc runs, contains the basic ideas and design originally envisioned, and is a full game. The patch should, ideally, be included in the final product but if you're a position where you aren't connected the game you get on disc is still acceptable to Hello Games and Sony.

If the game never leaked and they just called it a Day One patch with bug fixes, just like every other games does, most people wouldn't even know about what changed. If you have a problem with the whole situation then you have a problem with the way videogames and entertainment as a whole work now on an internet-connected world. To me this all feels like there's a bunch of people out there who are just going way out of their way to find any excuse to say bad things about No Man's Sky. Do I like the way things work now with most games needing internet connection for something? I don't. But let's not blame one single game for everything.

@hike77: I bet you haven't read Rami's article on Day 1 patches. You have no idea what you're on about.

http://ramiismail.com/2016/08/patch-the-process/

@finaldasa: Sony did publish the game no? If they had better standards they would have hold back the release until the game was in a more complete state. But I guess releasing incomplete or buggy games is the new norm now. The developer is fine with it so fuck the consumer right? How cynical and anti consumer can an industry get?

@bdead: I don't think the game was that buggy or incomplete before release. Nor do I think publishers or developers are releasing incomplete games just to screw over consumers. And if they were, just don't buy it.

NMS is a game I've really wanted to play. If I were to get NMS today, with my current internet speed, it would take me three straight days of downloading to get this patch. There is no faster internet in my area. I wish I could wait for a disc "Full Version", but that'll never exist especially in today's gaming environment. The only time in recent years my internet has helped me is with MGSV, I never got all those additional patches that ate GMP from players.

@kawiji said:

The title of this thread is gold. Pure gold.

And it only gets better with the opening line "I haven't actually PLAYED this game yet" but OP is apparently comfortable in their assertion that the duders are "apologists."

Even though they make it PRETTY clear that it was actually the community that ran away with and projected all this 'HERE'S WHAT THE GAME WILL BE!' stuff onto it while the devs were ACTUALLY trying to rein some of that in.

It's kind of shitty, but that's where were at. For people saying not having the Internet isn't that common, you clearly haven't lived outside of a major metropolitan area. Large portions of the US can not get decent Internet access for their homes. They are either stuff with very expensive and bad satellite internet or dial up. That's just how bad it is in America and without mentioning how bad Internet companies are with data caps. My area's Internet provider will just give you a new super expensive plan if you go over so much data enough. It's kind of a shit excuse to say "this isn't the hobby for you anymore if you don't live in a big city", but that's where we're at until someone does something about the US's horrible Internet situation.

Have you been playing video games in the last 5 years? A lot of games go gold unfinished and get fixed with a day one patch. You just don't hear about them because people don't stream early or get the patch ahead of release with their early copies.

Wut? You're not playing on your Xbox One because you don't like the games that are on that console, not because it isn't "always online" like they wanted it to be at first lmao

I always think it's lousy when on-disc games are wildly different from what the eventual game ends up being, but not everyone feels that way. And that is okay. Everyone draws their own "line too far" in a different place; someone putting that line in a different place than you does not make them an "apologist".

How do you know this game isn't 90% complete? How do you measure completeness these days?

The only thing I don't like more than NMS' marketing and messaging from the initial reveal to its release is opinions from people that haven't played w/e they're criticizing.

this is it. No Man's Sky killed videogames forever.

i hope you're happy sean

I mean, that one dude finished it without the patch, right? So it's not like the disc was blank. These patches happen for almost every game now.

Also this thread title is so needlessly inflammatory

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 wasn't given a free pass, and literally 99% of the game had to be downloaded.

So push the game back (again) for the minuscule minority of players that might not be able to download a patch? How does that make any sort of sense. The title and first post are straight up toxic and cynical at best. Chill man, it's a video game, that is indeed finished as-is on disc, and it's a good one. Games launch with day one patches all the time - honestly I can't remember the last game that didn't have a day one that I played. You're also making a ton of assumptions about the way a game is released - Rami goes into what cert is in that article but apparently you don't give a shit about that - the devs have to have a working and ready version ready to ship for the platform holders, which they did. The game was finished and will evolve over time just like any number of other games that we play. I don't get the hostility toward NMS at all, and it's really bringing out some of the things I'm embarrassed about when I talk about video games with people that don't play them.

Yeah you lost me at apologists. As if there is some no man's sky defense force on the staff. Come on.

As with everything surrounding this game people have let their expectations get way out of whack with reality. People are treating this like its the second coming of Christ. It's not. It's a video game like other video games. Day one patches are so common now I honestly don't even remember the last game I played that didn't have one. The patch by its very nature is to improve the quality of the product, I don't see any issue with this.

@vinsanity09: Incorrect, I like a lot of the games on it and most games nowadays aren't exclusive. I'm not playing on it because I think the infrastructure of the Xbox one is absolute trash, and the system is a weird mess that doesn't know what it wants to be. All of this I attribute to the last minute restructure it had when the fallout from their first "always online" pitch happened.

I think if they woulda kept with their idea they would have had a somewhat decent box. Instead they have a messy thing that isn't enjoyable nor simple to use. It's such a shame since I was 100% 360 and never owned a PS3 last gen, I'd love to say that I still support MS, but the Xbox one is just plain not good, to me.

...Wait what?

I don't think 'Day One patch is bad' is a good argument.

Imagining his happy, smiling face looming over a burning Earth.

(The wait to Friday is killing me inside)

Just go to mcdonalds and download the patch.

To expect a major game release not to have a patch of some sort the first week - I think that's unrealistic. Even if it was "billed" as a offline game - I think even games that aren't considered to be "online" get patches the first day or week. But, I can understand your frustration. Heck I just bought a few used Vita games and those required updates from PSN as well.

Do you not remember what happened when the game's release date was held back for about 5 weeks? Actual death threats towards Sean Murray and his team.

They've railed against day one patches almost ad nauseam, so I think it's kind of a given that "yeah, this sucks." But it's also how practically every major release has functioned for the past number of years, to the point that the world's started giving this practice a pass. So really the question becomes: why should No Man's Sky be expected to answer/diverge from what every other game is given a pass for?

The reason the guys take it easy on this game is because of how incredibly small the team is. Their struggle can actually be emphasized with, where it's harder to excuse one of the bigger companies for not fixing their shit when they have all the manpower in the world. Even still, it's not like they're totally exonerating Hello Games. I thought they made it pretty clear that it wasn't a great look.

you're basically saying "people who disagree with me are apologists"

the reaction by some of the internet for this game has been insane and almost temper tantrum like. not saying anyone here has been but its such a bummer. death threats and people being called shills for not hating on it. its so silly

Seriously this game had day 1 DLC and it didnt cure cancer? What a fucking joke. /s

Saying a game with an important day 1 patch is basically the same as what the XBOX One almost was is a silly thing to say. And by silly I mean dumb.

Also Day 1 DLC and On Disc DLC being immoral/anti-consumer is such an unreasonable sentiment that shouldn't be a thing as late as 2016. "It's the principal of the thing" has become a sort of replacement for "I don't really understand why this upsets me".

This is an extremely surface idea of what the XB1 was slammed for before (not 'at') its launch, so this is an incredibly disingenuous argument to make. At its worst, the situation with No Man's Sky is that anyone with a physical copy and no Internet connection will be playing a less complete version of the game. I certainly won't hesitate to say that that sucks for those people, and that maybe a disc-based version of this game was in itself a mistake, but it's also not an easy thing to remedy without serious changes to the way games are released, especially on consoles (see: Rami's article). However, even all that said, it's still probably better for those people with lousy or capped Internet services to still have some version of the game than none at all.

With the Xbox One, before they rescinded everything they'd been saying, Microsoft seemed to want to build an infrastructure where physical copies of games could no longer be resold, given to friends, played on consoles other than your own, etc., on top of the required online stuff. It was an extremely consumer-unfriendly and arguably antiquated vision that got justifiably shot down because of how restrictive and hostile it feels to the players. There's a reason that didn't get put into fruition, that we no longer see Online Passes in games, that extreme DRM is mostly gone (successful DRM schemes now only work if it's disguised as convenience, something Microsoft's plans with the XB1 never touched on other than that family sharing thing they'd mentioned).

These are barely comparable.