IS IT REALLY SEAN MURRAY’S FAULT? – NO MAN’S SKY CONTROVERSY
*Disclaimer* I am not an official critic by any media standards and I have not personally played any aspect of this game. Therefore, I will only do a few lines discussing what I have seen in regards to the game itself then I will break into the controversy surrounding the game. Take my following words with a grain of salt*
To begin this article, my first impression of No Man’s Sky is an acid trip. From the footage of gameplay I’ve seen, it looks like a mess between acid trips and Futurama on Autism (I am autistic, I have an autistic pass card in case I triggered anyone).From the interviews and the presentation revealing the game, it looks like the concept isn’t entirely horrible. I can easily see what the game design team were aiming for – a vast, seemingly never ending game where the player can influence it to their own liking. Meaning, a game where you can be your own god (or goddess) of your own universe. You can build, or destroy a planet, choosing to interact and thrive or go Armageddon on the life forms.
However, despite my views on the game, I do not side with or against anyone in this controversy and wish to bring another point to the matter at hand. Two things that stood out to me in this entire thing is 1) the entire media drama surrounding the game and 2) critics who clearly don’t understand games enough to properly critic them.
When watching an interview with Sean Murray discussing multiplayer and No Man’s Sky, he didn’t explicitly mean multiplayer in the way most of the people assume he did. Due to the ambition and scale of No Man’s Sky, I doubt you would be able to encompass a proper social dynamic in the same way previous game developers have for, let’s say, Elder Scrolls Online or World of Warcraft. In an interview, he basically says that yes, while you can meet other players, due to the vastness of the game, the chances of playing with someone else would be rare, and if not rare atleast impossible.
Therefore, Sean Murray was telling the truth in regards to Multiplayer from the get go but instead, interviewers, critics and other members following No Man’s Sky closely took Sean’s words, and the words of the rest of the team out of proportion. You seriously thought a game with such complex design meant to simulate a genuine surreal universe could handle standard mechanisms we normally see?
I feel sorry for Sean in that he TRIED to tell the gaming community that playing with friends would be a thing that COULD happen but would be rare, he TRIED to get the message across in his interviews how rare multiplayer would be but when the very thought of multiplayer was even mentioned, media outlets decided to run with it and provide much more pressure and hype so when the developers finally decide that any part of a multiplayer system would be pointless to implement in such a game, the community blew up with victimization of how ‘unethical’ and ‘lied to’ people felt.
Excuse me, this is what happens when you believe the hype, follow critics far too much, misinterpret the interviews and now because of your poor comprehension skills, want someone to blame because you feel betrayed. Maybe there are OTHER issues surrounding the game but I am saying it now – multiplayer or any idea of implementing one is not one of the ”issues” you must get your knickers in a twist over. Sean Murray pretty much stated in early interviews that even if multiplayer was implemented in the final outcome, chances of playing with strangers or even friends would be slim. You’re in a game, with a universe that has planets thousands upon thousands of light years away from each other. You could have each human on the planet play the game and not meet a single one of them due to how ambitiously big the project was. It was a game meant to revolutionize the gaming industry by introducing completely new systems.
This brings me to a couple more points:
You cannot assume each and every game will fit into a standard model we’ve seen before in games. This is where gaming media failed when advertising and discussing the game because they held expectations that, due to the nature of the game, couldn’t be met
Cannot expect everything in the beta, alpha or first release to be the final product. Even when games get updated, it’s never a final product until a game designer says it is. Therefore, you cannot expect some things to be still be implemented in the final product.
Onto my last point for this article which is: Critics who can’t critic games.
This is my referral to a panel by GT Live where one of the hosts gets emotionally frustrated he ends up leaving set while discussing No Man’s Sky. In his ‘wise words’, he mentions he can’t ‘understand what you’re suppose to do’ and how he can’t understand the interest in ‘open world games’. Now, earlier in the video I was watching there was an interview where Sean Murray himself EXPLAINS the purpose of the game – to be able to do whatever comes to the players’ imaginations. Basically, it was suppose to be a game similar to the likes of Sims and Minecraft and, on a personal level it saddens me to see that some people don’t have an imagination when it comes to gaming but that’s not all – this same ”gaming critic” couldn’t understand the difference between the genre of No Man’s Sky to that other, let’s say, Call of Duty. He tried to critic No Man’s Sky under the same pretenses that one would critic a First Person shooter but, as a video gamer, that’s like comparing apples to oranges. I find it appalling that gaming critics still don’t know their games well enough to know that different genres require different models to critic them.
For example, to critic Call of Duty and Halo, you would have to compare weapons to weapons, maps to maps etc. In an RPG, you compare open world to open world, world size, quests, character design etc.
Overall, my point to all this is this: don’t buy into hype. Don’t assume that trailer will be final product and above all, really look into interviews and into what the person is saying before getting upset and potentially lynching for all the wrong reasons.
Below is a video encompassing a wide variety of interviews, gameplay and other media content surrounding No Man’s Sky including the examples I give in my article above.