Because most other game developers would have crapped out the initial project and moved on.

Because instead of the usual triple a studio promising the moon for sales then delivering a pebble and not giving a shit, it was a guy who got caught up in the hype and handled it badly, and then him and his small studio worked their asses off to make the game justify the price charged. I know it's hard to drop the cynicism living in the modern world has instilled in us, but I genuinely think it was a collosal fuckup and not malicious, and they ACTUALLY put the time and effort in to deliver the promises they could and a fuckload more atuff that wasn't. In a day and age of companies lying on purpose for profit and not giving a shit, it's a breath of fresh air.

Idk, idc. The game has been getting free updates for years and I enjoy it. Most devs would have ditched immediately.

and somehow it wins “Best Ongoing Building” every year.

Except it doesn't. It's been nominated for Stream's Labour of Love award six times in the past ten years, and never won it. In fact it's never won any Steam Awards. It won Best Ongoing at the Game Awards twice, out of a decade of being ongoing, and it won a similar award from PC Gamer once.

Why not? The studio worked hard to deliver a good product.

lol, look at OP's only other post. Looks like another account for my block list.

Delivering on delayed promises is more than most game companies will ever do. Their actions in fixing and adding to the game is the apology. Every update does bring bugs but you say this like the game is in an unplayable state. It's perfectly fine 99% of the time and the 1% it's not is usually fixed within the week. As a day 1 owner who could barely run the game on launch it's come so fucking far. It literally took half an hour for the game to boot during those early days. There wasn't much to do on top of that. The systems were confusing and the game would crash almost every time you booted it. Everything has been fixed and refined for FREE!

Compare this to a company like Paradox and Colossal Order who killed Cities Skylines 2. That game released in the sorriest state I think I've ever seen in my life(including SimCity 5). The graphics are ass. The simulation didn't actually work. The traffic was worse than the original. Every system in that game was fucked beyond belief. On top of that they charged people on day 1 for additional content. Content that took almost 2 years to deliver. Now their original dev team got fired and a complete unknown with two games is supposed to take over the current king of a genre for a redemption arc. Cities Skylines 2 was murdered and set the modern city builder genre back almost 2 decades by continuing the reign of SimCity 4 as the best Modern City Buider ever.

When you compare that to what Hello Games has done with No Man's Sky you will see why we celebrate them. This isn't some exaggeration or accident. It's years of steady, consistent work that has turned a broken and potentially career ending product into the recommended space sim of this generation.

Praise where praise is due: They did pump out a ton of free updates. Does this compensate for the terrible state the game was released in? That's something everyone needs to judge for themselves imo.

Does the game have what they once promised now? Is it "good" yet? I think that's a more difficult question. If I was to criticise Hello Games for anything, than that even now they have not met some of the expectations they set. At least not for me personally.

And I'm not talking about bs speculation or hype, I am talking about things they have said would be in the game, some of which are still not here, and many of them feel like an alpha version of what you would expect. I can't help but feel disappointed even today.

I think the company is shit for delivering a shit product. It is less shit for finally delivering some of what was promised but it's still a shit company

My favorite game to compare NMS to is actually battlefront 2, one of if not the single worst launch in video game history, after realizing their mistakes putting in the time and effort to make the game actually run well then continuing to update the game for free even after no one is expecting more content. Yes the core mechanics of BF2 is not the best even though there isn't a single loot box or p2w mechanic left. Same with NMS the core game is still the same, it's not a brand new concept or ground breaking new mechanics to the same game they just keep working on it, fixing bugs and adding new things. I genuinely think with the state of companies like Bungie charging for Destiny expansion in 2026, a 70$ Pokemon game with 30$ dlc, and AAAA flops this is all we can ask for back your games, COMMIT to long term development and not charge for what seems like a joke of content backed by fomo

I agree, and a big part of that is that everything they’ve added over the years just feels bolted-on.

I tried to give it a shot a little while back and tried to do one of the things that was initially promised you could do, be a trader. Pretty standard space game fare. Only to find out it’s a pretty pointless and broken experience because the way you do interstellar trade in that game is by putting goods in your pockets and walking through portals that exist in every single space station. You never even get in your ship lol.

The game still just feels like a tech demonstration of a bunch of disparate systems that fail to integrate with eachother in any meaningful way. They’ve made the puddle much wider over the years but their outright refusal to make it any deeper is absolutely nuts.

"and Hello Games never actually apologized for lying." Good. I don't want a corporate apology. Apologies from companies literally mean nothing. What matters is your actions. They have updated the game, for free, and still have no microtransactions. No third party launcher or account needed. Can be played offline. You buy the game, you get the game. That is RARE these days.

Should they have released the game in the first place? No. If you don't support that, then don't buy it. I don't really like that, so I bought it on sale for like $30 instead of its full price of $60, which in my opinion was worth it.

There are plenty of problems in the gaming industry right now, I think NMS's "redemption" arc is the least of your worries.

I think the true test of that arc will be when. Light no fire releases.

They continued to work on the game years after its bad reception. They could have stopped and ignored it. But they worked on it and gave lot of free updates that changed the game dramatically. Other companies would ask money in form of DLC in example. The launch was a disaster and they deserved the hate. But the "redemption" is a different issue and they earned the good will.

A redemption arc implies fucking up in the first place and working to rectify the previous mistakes.

They lied and the game was missing a lot of features at launch, but now all those features (and more) are in the game, which is still being updated for free a decade later.

I don't like the game, and I wish the devs acted differently so that a redemption arc wasn't needed in the first place, but it is what it is. The devs worked their asses off, the game is now playable and feature complete and is still being updated, and from the looks of it Hello Games have learned from their mistakes and are not promising the moon for their next game.

I played it last year, I wasn't Impressed. It was meh at best.

I also feel weird about it. "omg they updated a lot blah blah." I believed them and loaded the game and it's boring AF. I just assumed it's a genre I didn't like but it feels like it's unworthy of praise for me too. You're not alone dawg.

The last time I played it was like 2018-19, but even then it felt very much "mile wide, inch deep."

It's still nothing like what it was promised to be, in fact. Sure, they added a lot of free content, a lot of updates, I'm sure fans are enjoying them... but it's not what was promised as already in the game before launch.

Another fake redemption story is Cyberpunk. They fixed some of the bugs to make it playable, revamped the skill tree, and added paid DLC... cool? That doesn't change the fact the game is missing half of the promised content, including some that was on the trailers.

There's a lot they promised that isn't even in the game now, and frankly is not really possible. They've also added a lot that they never promised.

Also some things like coop are still jank