Why you shouldn't believe the hype, part 2

I wrote previously why you should not listen to the hype, when it comes to video games. Well, yet another excellent and rather infamous example has appeared recently: No Man's Sky.

Like with Evolve, this one was also highly anticipated and extremely hyped. However, No Man's Sky is arguably an even more blatant example because of all the broken promises made by the hype. At least with Evolve not many promises were made that were then broken or left out of the game; it simply turned out that what sounded like a great idea wasn't all that great after all; it just didn't work.

No Man's Sky, however, is more blatant than that. The pre-release material, teaser trailers and project leader interviews all promised a large bunch of features that were not in the final version of the game after all.

For example, teaser trailers were highly scripted animations that showed things that are not in the final game. These include things like the ability to fly above the surface of planets (in the actual game you can only land from orbit in a scripted sequence; you can't fly over the surface), gigantic space battles with factions and fleet warping in to join the fight (neither of which are in the actual game; moreover, the huge destroyer ships do not even move in the game), herd behavior including things like stampedes and animals felling down trees, sand planets with gigantic sandworms, and mysterious teleportation devices on the surface of some planets (again, none of which appear in the actual game).

Moreover, interviews with the project leader hinted at many features that, once again, do not appear in the game. Such as the game being a massively online multiplayer game, where people could encounter each other. Or having a wide variety of available space ships for different purposes. Or factions that the player can join, or fight against. It's not a multiplayer game, and people cannot encounter each other. And there is only one type of ship. And there are no factions.

And that's just scratching the surface. The game has been given the moniker "No Man's Lies" because of all that.

The amount and severity of broken promises and false advertisement was in fact so bad that several distributors (including Steam, Amazon and Sony) offered a special refund policy for this game.