No Man's Sky: Finally rated "very positive" after eight years
28.11.2024
Translation: machine translated
After the really botched release more than eight years ago, the developers of "No Man's Sky" really got to work again. This has now paid off. The game now has a "very positive" user rating on Steam.
Murray thanks us with a triple "Thank you" and concludes his post with "You have no idea what this means for us". To get an idea, it's worth taking a look at the past.
"No Man's Sky" raised huge expectations among players before its release in August 2016. The studio promised an almost infinitely large, procedurally generated universe that you could explore freely. The option to play together with others was also announced.
The release: The hype train crashes into the wall
In August 2016, the game received 37,801 reviews according to SteamDB, of which only around 40 per cent were positive. A disaster for Hello Games - not to mention the fact that in the weeks following the release, those responsible did not clearly communicate how to proceed.
Eight years of free content updates
If you promise too much and then fail to deliver, you deserve to be penalised for it. However, the studio took the criticism seriously and managed to win back the trust of the gaming community in the years that followed. The team continued to work on the game and released bug fixes and patches to make the game what was promised before release.
Base building was added in November 2016, exploration vehicles were implemented in March 2017 and the multiplayer function finally appeared with the Next update in July 2018. All updates were and are free of charge. To Hello Games' credit, there are no microtransactions, a season pass or expensive DLCs.
So the ratings slowly recovered and because Hello Games kept delivering new content, more and more players became interested in "No Man's Sky" over the years. The game never reached the all-time peak of simultaneous players on Steam again, but since mid-2019 there have always been around 10,000 players online - and the trend is rising. For November 2024, SteamDB indicates more than 21,000 simultaneous players.
"No Man's Sky" today
Here is a trailer just a few months old:
I'll always think of "No Man's Sky" as "that game that failed terribly at first". It deserves the addition "...but in the end it became excellent".
Header image: Hello Games/"No Man's Sky"
Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.
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