A lot was said about “No Man’s Sky” when the game launched, but the game didn’t exactly see the huge success many expected of it. Quite on the contrary, it quickly flopped and became a hot topic around Internet forums once users started to uncover the differences between what was said by the developers, and what the game actually offers.
And now it looks like the situation has caught the attention of official figures, more specifically the Advertising Standards Authority, who are currently reportedly investigating the claims made in the marketing for “No Man’s Sky”.
There was a lot of hype around the title leading up to its release, and the people behind the project seemed eager and enthusiastic about their work, making various exciting claims about its planned contents. Needless to say, this immediately grabbed the attention of gamers all over the Internet, and people expected the title to be a fantastic, polished release.
And while the game did include many of the things we were originally promised, some were completely absent, such as the complex relationships of predators and prey in the wild, massive space battles, and most notably, multiplayer.
According to some, it wouldn’t have been so bad if those features were only mentioned during the game’s development. However, the current store listing on Steam shows screenshots and other materials which, according to players’ reports, depict scenes impossible in the actual game.
That’s precisely what seems to have gotten the attention of the ASA, but it’s not clear exactly how much the organization can do in this situation. Historically, their typical response to misleading advertising has been to order the removal of all false claims from the ads, and to ban the airing of any ads marked as misleading in their investigations.
The game itself will probably not be affected by this, but at this point the damage to its reputation has already been done. Negative reviews are all over the place, and the developers, who were quite vocal and communicative leading up to the game’s launch, have all but disappeared from social media ever since the controversy started.
Many players saw the lack of multiplayer as the biggest issue, and the one they couldn’t get over. While the developers never directly promised that multiplayer would be a feature of the final game, they did make various statements which almost directly implied that.
In the end, the game apparently offers no possibility for players to see and interact with each other, and it’s a completely solitary experience. Even coming across discoveries made by other players seems to be almost impossible right now due to the sheer scale of the whole game.
That scale was actually one of the main selling points during its development, but it turned out to be another disappointing feature in the final product. Players were promised a huge variety of planets, world and creatures inhabiting them, all driven by complex procedural generation.
The final result was a little more underwhelming than that however, with planets basically varying by their colors and textures, and creatures being generated as a combination of different pre-made features.
Players have also been critical of the overall sense of progression, pointing out flaws that could have easily been addressed by the developers in order to make the title more fun during its course. For example, accessing planets with more dangerous environments could have required the player to obtain specific materials beforehand, creating a natural resource progression.