Where you go in your head
Why ‘No Man’s Sky’ is just okay
AUGUST 17TH, 2016 — POST 226
The worst thing about hype is how hard it is to live up to. One of the central problems with mass cultural products like games, movies, and to a lesser extent music, is that they’re a lot easier to market well than to make well. We saw this recently with Suicide Squad, saw it a while back with Season 2 of True Detective. With both of these, a certain cast of characters, a certain creative team inspires confidence from the jump. Trailers — now one of the most precise art forms — drip out. These trailers show just enough: just enough for the audience to fill in the gaps. Then the product launches and the wheels start to fall off. And we’re seeing it again with No Man’s Sky.
The (practically) PS4-exclusive No Man’s Sky worked a little different, however. Instead of a marketing budget that dwarfed the production budget, as is common with Hollywood’s tentpole releases, hype around No Man’s Sky was one of the most deadly: organic. When the title was promised to literally deliver a universe, you can’t blame people for having high expectations. But as of now — having received 6s from both Polygon and IGN — No Man’s Sky sits at 72 on Metacritic. Moreover, the user score — in most cases predictably higher than critic score — sits at 4.9/10. As far as games are spoken about colloquially, that’s pretty shit.
It’s hard to point fingers at anyone, however. We can point at Jared Leto for Suicide Squad, or Nic Pizzolatto for a bad follow-up season of True Detective. But to blame Sean Murray of the tiny Hello Games — No Man’s Sky’s creator studio — seems a little weird. Sure, they said they were (or, more accurately, their computers were) building a universe complete with eighteen quintillion discoverable planets. But we took that and ran with it.
Speaking with Polygon, Eve Online executive producer Andie Nordgren had this to say about current player dissatisfaction with what has been delivered for No Man’s Sky:
“I think space itself invites people to imagine things on a huge scale.”
And herein lies the rub: No Man’s Sky, before it was released, was just an idea. It was Sean Murray sitting you down and saying “Imagine you’re a spaceman”. It was a dream in a very real sense, one that indulged in infant wonder. The lone star field explorer as a concept is immediately understandable, imaginatively permutable, and infinitely expandable. This is something no game could ever be.
The function of hype is to keep a product in your head for a period of time before release to make a purchase decision easier, at least so far as hype is weaponised in marketing. And what can fit in your head probably doesn’t have any chance of fitting into the world; especially not onto a game disc, wrapped in a blue plastic box, and sold for $60. What No Man’s Sky before it was a game was an invitation — not to buy, but to imagine, to think. Really, to create.
I’ve written before about the creative space mass cultural products like franchise movies open up. And it seems No Man’s Sky did a lot of the same things. The disappointment with the game — the 4.9 user score on Metacritic — is not a disappointment in the face of a promise for wild interplanetary exploration that wasn’t met satisfactorily. No. The promise that was made up front was that the idea of No Man’s Sky was an idea you were free to run away with. No wonder a game that has you holding a plastic controller and doing the same thing over and over feels like a let down.
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