Earlier today, following more than a month of inactivity, the Hello Games Twitter account tweeted that under-fire space explore 'em up No Man's Sky was "a mistake." The tweet was quickly deleted and the account made private which, alongside Murray's own account's renewed activity (until today, Murray hadn't posted since August), led some to believe one of the accounts/both had been hacked.
Amid the confusion, Polygon, Mashable, Forbes, and Kotaku reported Murray had responded via email telling the former "The tweet is from me, but somebody from the team took it down. We have not been coping well".
The others, however, reported being sent emails which suggested a "disgruntled employee" was to blame the most comprehensive of which was published by Kotaku. The replies were however inconsistent and all sites reported follow-up mails falling on deaf ears.
PC Gamer reached out for comment, however Hello Games has tweeted this in the meantime:
A strange afternoon in the videogame Twittersphere, indeed.
"No Man's Sky is a game about exploration and survival in an infinite procedurally generated universe," it says on Steam, and setting aside your personal feelings about how successfully that vision was ultimately realized, Hello Games can at least point to the fact that its algorithm did indeed spit out a gazillion planets (for people to grouse about).
More astute analysis of how it all happened can now be found at 3DGameDevBlog, which has posted an in-depth breakdown of No Man's Sky's procedural generation. The report gets bogged down in detail fairly quickly with code snippets and whatnot, and there's a certain amount of guesswork going on as well. But what emerges is a picture of a game that may have fallen short of its pre-release billing, but is nonetheless a remarkable technical accomplishment.
"It is a very elegant and clever procedure because it is very easy for artists to add new content for the procedural generation. And in fact for every new part they add the new number of total combinations is increasing exponentially (if the part will be available in all tree paths)," author, site founder, and lead programmer Greg Waste says, explaining how the game's models avoid coming together in random jumbles of skin and bone.
It's a subject he's in a position to know something about: He's created archive explorers and exporters for FIFA, NBA2K, and Shadow of Mordor, and he's got a few "scientific projects" listed on the page as well, including a gravity simulator, fractal generators, and a "Pokemon Battle Revolution importer." He also created the No Man's Sky model viewer, available at the No Man's Sky Mods site.
"From what I know they got two or three artists working on the models. The mindblowing thing about this generation procedure is that if they had double the number of people working EXCLUSIVELY on that part, the game content (just for the creatures) would be hundreds of times larger. And this fact alone shows me the capabilities and the potential that [the] NMS game engine has."
Similar praise is directed toward texture rendering and animations, although the author said that he hasn't researched animations to the same depth he has the other aspects. He also acknowledged that while No Man's Sky "is a real gem" from a technical perspective, as a game it's undeniably lacking although he lays its shortcomings squarely at the feet of Sony, who he says quite clearly rushed the release.
"The game that we got is not even close to a finished game, and obviously not even close reaching 80 percent of the capabilities of the underlying game engine. From inspecting the files this is CRYSTAL CLEAR. Its closer to a tech demo than a game. Trying to deliver the same stuff over PC and PS4, simply butchers the game and probably trying to make it work on lower end specs and as high framerates as possible, butchers the game even more," he wrote.
"Personally I m expecting updates and LOTS of them. I can forgive lots of HG s mistakes on the game release, overpricing, lack of communication, even the lack of features (like multiplayer, which honestly I don t give a sh*t about), BUT what I can t forgive is that, considering that pre-release [was a] pretty messed up and pressured situation, they didn t at least deliver an overall ingame engine configuration. What modders are doing right now is to dive into the files and try to find ways of making that VERY SAME ENGINE, create richer and more diverse content, and most of the time they succeed on that, simply because it IS capable of delivering way better stuff that it is doing right now."
Even without digging down into the technical side of the analysis, the conclusions are interesting, and I hope the author is correct when he predicts that Hello Games is "sooner or later going to deliver." But ahead of that, as we said last month, Hello Games founder Sean Murray needs to start talking again. The Twitter account has been silent for a month, and the last development update was posted at the beginning of September. It seems clear that there's something here to be salvaged, but the longer Hello Games allows No Man's Sky to look like an abandoned project, the less anyone is going to care about what it's able to do down the road.
In No Man's Sky, much like in real life, it's only possible to use a spaceship to fly between planets. Well that's how it's supposed to work, anyway: using cheats you can do whatever you damn well please, and one YouTuber took on the task of using a jetpack to fly between planets. Turns out, you can.
Using trainer software to gain infinite jetpack and health, TheyCallMeConor climbed from one planet to another in two and a half hours. The YouTuber also stopped to land on an asteroid, proving that theoretically, you can walk on the floating mounds of Thamium9.
Check out the footage below. If you're curious about plugging some mods into No Man's Sky, check out our round-up here.
Much has been said of No Man's Sky's missing giant sand snake, first glimpsed in an early trailer for the game. Much of what's been said is "Hey, where the hell is the giant sandsnake?" because no one, as of yet, has actually seen it in the finished game. Here's a gif of it from the original reveal trailer, to refresh your memory:
While that particular giant sand-dwelling snake is M.I.A. (along with the sand planets themselves, so far), I've managed to find something similar in Early Access survival game Osiris: New Dawn. Or rather, it found me, as you can see below.
James wrote about Osiris: New Dawn recently, notable in that it's being made by a developer who hates survival games. I've spent a couple hours, mostly uneventful ones, wandering around the game's dusty world, pounding on rocks with a hammer to extract minerals, shooting any bug monsters that got too close, and trying to find enough plutonium to build a forge so I could start crafting a decent planetary home for myself.
That's when I wandered into a crater and got eaten by what space scientists would call "a giant goddamn sandworm." As you can see in the gif, I was completely unprepared for this. It's a rare event in a game where I'm carrying a gun around that I don't immediately empty a clip into anything that twitches, because I am a huge 'fraidy cat. But here, I was so completely dumbfounded I simply had no reaction. I didn't even try to run, I just stood there like an idiotic vacuum-sealed collection of calories, the kind giant goddamn sandworms manage sustain their existence with.
I've since been eaten by that worm, and others, several times. I did shoot at one, right in its giant goddamn mouth. It had no effect. I tried to run from the others: that didn't help either. I found a dead one, as you can see above, but when I walked over to build my inflatable habitat in its skeletal mouth (I thought it would be a cool place to live) another sandworm, still in the prime of its life, promptly ate me.
I'll have some more thoughts on Osiris sometime next week, though I'm sure it's clear that my mission is to kill one of those giant goddamn worms somehow.
It s one thing to pull a still from a movie that accurately represents how the final cut will look and feel, but videogames are another matter. Trailers and screenshots are put out well before the game is complete, which means they re inevitably going to need visual band-aids here and there, and communicating everything the game is trying to achieve systems, story, style in a single frame is difficult. Enter the bullshot.To make their games look as good as can be, some publishers pose characters and snap screenshots with a free camera, sometimes even downsampling from high resolutions to reduce aliasing, or using Photoshop to make them pop just a little more. While these marketing screens convey key information and look nice, they can be misleading . We ve gathered a few of the worst offenders in recent years in part because they re funny, but also because it s a practice that should be called out. We d much rather see what a game actually looks like to play, especially when these screenshots appear on a store page. Leave it to us to take the unrealistic screenshots after release, because we love doing it.
Even our favorite games aren t excused from bullshot shame. The Witcher 3 is a damn good-looking game, but to get shots resembling this quality we had to take them at 3840x2160 which we doubt many players can do at a playable framerate using a mod to enable a free camera and console commands. Also, who the hell is that horse because it sure isn t Roach. Impostor resolution, impostor horse get out of my computer.
This screen wouldn t be a huge offender if not for the clearly posed gang of pirates. Each has their own stance. I like pointing guy on the far left. What s he trying to do? Buddy, you re at the rear of the pirate pack and all your dudes already know where the assassin you somehow just spotted is. But maybe he s just a stickler for photo balance, a guy who can t help but obey the rule of threes. That s some good AI.
Racing games tend to be the biggest bullshot culprits. Take Split Second for instance. It s a great looking game most racing games nowadays are but this shot looks like someone just discovered Instagram filters. I love a good filter, but this one turns up the warm colors and vignettes with reckless abandon. Look both ways before you cross the street because it s blurred to hell.
Gearbox tends to eliminate aliasing by taking the shots at a super high resolution, but to really make their images pop, contrast is turned way up. It makes the comic book stylings much more apparent, especially because detailed textures are used throughout the entire image, no matter how far objects are in the distance. With everything in such clear focus, it makes the image look flat.
I m not sure what kind of holy light exists just offscreen in every other bullshot, but it s not working well to bring out this central locust s best features. It makes even less sense when you notice that the blinding light is coming from the hole in the ground at the bottom right. Besides the awkward blur and focus muddying half the picture, I can t figure out what s going through that locust s head. Is Marcus holding it up with a light grip on the shoulder? Impressive. Is that shock or rage or is that just how their jaws always are? These are the questions Gears of War 4 needs to answer.
This one s a toughie. This shot from No Man s Sky isn t touched up, but it uses assets that aren t representative of what the final game produces. In my experience, the creatures look like remixes of a handful of variables and characteristics after 10 or so hours in, and vegetation can t grow that tall without the use of mods. It s not entirely surprising that No Man s Sky is under investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK, even if players are still enjoying it for what it is.
The biggest giveaway here (not that you need one) is what I ve dubbed the Holy Mammoth. Before the rise of modern religion, there was the One True Mammoth, from which all bloom lighting emitted. It seems to have blessed the screen with an abundance of golden light, impossibly smooth edges, and perfectly posed figures.
It s rare to find a racing game screenshot that wasn t taken at some forbidden, transcendent resolution, so I have to hand it to The Crew with this one. That said, this shot is posed beyond reprieve. Four cars, perfectly aligned to frame up nicely and balance out the shot with a lovely airplane cherry up top.
I won t be too harsh with Crysis since it s still the go-to for good-looking PC games in some respects, but the soldier getting lasered is impossible to ignore. It looks like he s waving hello to the tentacled aliens above, though I suppose his pose is meant to imply he s flying backwards due to the force of the white hot laser blasting a hole in his chest. Either way, Crysis isn t capable of such a believable ragdoll animation, but I suppose a twitching bundle of human appendages doesn t look so good in still life.
I think future soldiers will be smarter than this. I figured future war would entail guns that can fire from far away and not meeting in the middle of a short corridor for shootouts. Instead, we have two soldiers firing into a stoic mechanical man and another presumably about to kick their head in. My favorite detail? That explosion in the background lost in the shallow focus. While the Black Ops 3 might look this good, it s rarely this nonsensically positioned.
Here we have another checklist shot trying to show off as many systems and features as possible while still looking pretty. We ve got destructible walls, a shielded player, a shotgun firing, a grenade, some barbed wire in the bottom right, and some pretty detailed textures. Problem is, the final game doesn't look nearly as nice, and while the destruction is fairly granular, it s not to the level of detail expressed in this screen. Look at all those tiny individual perforations. If only.
I played this scene just over a week ago and it looked great, but not like this. The scene glows an icy blue and the blacks are super deep. Someone turned up the contrast. Also, who s kicking up all that damn dust? It doesn t look natural, like it s being used to balance out the color and weight of the shot.
There s so much going on in this shot it feels like one of those hidden object pages from Highlights magazine. Let s see, we ve got a three-wheeled buggy thing, a dude with an easily readable expression shooting out the vehicle s side, we can see two bullets in the act of ricocheting off the soldier, a truck in the far right, a building on fire above, some gorgeous snowy mountains in the background, a remote detonator in the player character s hand and it s all in perfect focus. No jagged edges, some nice airbrush effects on the wheels to imply motion. This is an ascendant bullshot. This is art.
To better understand the potential consequences of the UK's Advertising Standards Authority's investigation into No Man's Sky, we reached out to a number of legal experts proficient in the realm of video game law for their take on the situation. Stephen McArthur, a "Video Game Lawyer" of McArthur Law Firm, Ryan Morrison of Morrison Lee, Jas Purewal of Purewal and Partners LLP, and Tom Buscaglia, The Game Attorney, agreed to lend us their knowledge and explain what this investigation could mean for Hello Games, Valve, and the industry as a whole.
What's the ASA, and what power does it have?
The ASA is an independent authority with the power to issue, but not enforce, sanctions on advertising that breaches the UK Advertising Codes. As such, its judgments are not legally binding, and it is up to the offending company as to whether it follows the ASA's recommendations.
It's highly unlikely the ASA will advise any sort of blanket refund or remuneration.
That said, the ASA has proven quite successful in the past, requiring French Connection, the fashion brand behind the FCUK slogan, to submit all its marketing material to the ASA for vetting before it can be displayed, as well as banning an Apple iPhone ad for false claims about the device's internet capabilities.
The key precedents
The law on false advertising in video games is developing fast, particularly over the last few years, Purewal tells us. He points out that many recent cases in the US have been unsuccessful, citing the class action lawsuit against GTA V over the omission of its online mode at launch. In the UK specifically, Purewal notes the ASA has previously ruled on Wolfenstein: The New Order and the Dungeon Keeper mobile game, with the Dungeon Keeper example of most relevance. The ASA determined that the content and features shown in an email ad for the game were misleading due to their being locked behind paid currency, despite the ad emphasising that the game was free. Because it was not clearly stated that the gameplay depicted would require in-app purchases, the ASA deemed EA in breach of the UK Advertising Code, requesting the ad be taken down and for future ads to make clear the differences between free and paid gameplay features.
McArthur mentions a few more examples worth examining in greater detail. Though these are US cases and as such hold no legal sway over the ASA's decision, the similarities between them give us a solid idea of what does and doesn't constitute false advertising.
The 2013 lawsuit was initially filed against Sega and Gearbox on behalf of all owners of the game, but in 2015 Gearbox was dropped from the suit and the scope of the case was reduced from its class-action status to only representing the two plaintiffs. Sega, meanwhile, was called out by the ASA and admitted that trailers for the game "did not accurately reflect the final content of the game." Consequently, Sega settled for a reported $1.25 million and added disclaimers to its videos advising that the footage pertained to demo versions of the game, rather than the final release.
Killzone: Shadow Fall
A class-action lawsuit against Sony was dismissed in 2015 after a US federal court found that evidence of false advertising was insufficient. The suit alleged that claims of 1080p fidelity in marketing material did not reflect the actual resolution of the running game. Due to Guerrilla Games' technical implementation, however, the difference between what they promised and what they delivered proved too minor to constitute false advertising.
Nvidia GTX 970
The GTX 970 debacle was recently resolved out of court, with Nvidia agreeing to pay out $30 to all purchasers of the graphics card within the U.S. Nvidia has maintained that the nuances of the 970's not-exactly-4GB of VRAM were lost in translation between engineers and marketers, agreeing that promotional material was misleading but insisting that any confusion was unintentional.
The consequences
Of these precedents, both the Killzone and Nvidia cases deal with technical absolutes, claims that are fairly straightforward to prove one way or another. 1080p is a defined standard, and 4GB of GDDR5 is 4GB of GDDR5, not 3.5GB of GDDR5 and 500MB of something slower. False advertising in these cases comes down to hard numbers and clear expectations.
The No Man's Sky claims, though, aren't so easily defined, and that's where Aliens: Colonial Marines serves as the most instructive example. Morrison highlights the fact that the Colonial Marines case was reduced from a class-action suit to one representing only the two plaintiffs, a ruling made due to the difficulty of proving which players had purchased the game based solely on its false advertising, and which had picked it up for other reasons.
It's a similar case for No Man's Sky. Of the claims the ASA is investigating, how many people bought NMS purely on the basis of it having flowing rivers? How many copies were sold on the ability to fly close to the ground? Was the promise of bathing wildlife a deciding factor for a significant chunk of the audience?
Given how impractical it would be to prove any of these claims, it's highly unlikely the ASA will advise any sort of blanket refund or remuneration. Morrison suspects something more along the lines of a strongly-worded warning advising Hello Games to be more mindful with its marketing in the future. Purewal expects much the same, pointing to the settlement between the FTC, Microsoft, and Machinima over paid endorsements on YouTube. "The impact on the consumer is indirect," he says. "They may not see ads in a particular way done again."
In legal terms, any comments made by Sean Murray in interviews or in Reddit AMAs are not considered advertising.
As for what the ASA's decision could mean for the US, Purewal notes that "the US federal regulator for advertising (the FTC) or potentially state bodies, are under no obligation one way or the other."
Morrison doubts that it will have much impact, even if the ASA concludes that players have been misled. "Under American law, I don't think they've broken the law," he tells us. Rather, he attributes the frustration and disappointment surrounding No Man's Sky to a misinterpretation of the marketing material. Videos and screenshots depict the ideal planets, the ideal wildlife, the ideal experience and that's not necessarily what everyone's going to get. Procedural generation is inherently unpredictable; no trailer could equally represent 18 quintillion planets' worth of content in just two minutes.
Both Buscaglia and Morrison emphasise the challenge Hello Games faced in capturing the vast possibilities of a procedurally-generated universe in a handful of gameplay clips and screenshots. Because players have effectively no control over what chunk of the universe they will be thrown into, their experiences will all be different; some may enjoy nothing but lush planets full of diverse wildlife, while others may jump from dead world to dead world, never encountering the vibrancy depicted in the promotional trailers. That doesn't make this false advertising, though. Like all marketing material, trailers are designed to show off a game in its best light.
The key distinction here is separating possibility from certainty; it may be unlikely that a player will stumble upon the idyllic worlds teased on the game's Steam page, but provided they do actually exist somewhere in the game, the accusations of false advertising will not float. As Morrison puts it, "Is it a legitimate complaint? Yes. Is it a legitimate legal complaint? No."
Morrison also points out that, in legal terms, any comments made by Sean Murray in interviews or in Reddit AMAs are not considered advertising. Claims made in these forums do not fall under the official marketing umbrella, and as such do not hold up in a legal context. Any hypothetical lawsuit would be limited to the media distributed by Hello Games as a whole.
Is it a legitimate complaint? Yes. Is it a legitimate legal complaint? No.
Lawyer Ryan Morrison
Buscaglia is less concerned about the possible legal ramifications than he is the message all the outrage sends to other independent developers with ambitions of exploring procedural generation and non-deterministic experiences. "The thing that bothers me most about this sort of thing is the fact it can have a real chilling effect on people pushing the boundaries on procedurally-generated content," he says. "I hate to see people who are willing to push the envelope and try to make something really revolutionary like this get smashed by the people they're doing it for."
McArthur foresees a similar outcome, stating that "the biggest impact here will be that it sends a message to other game companies to be careful about what they put in their trailers and not to oversell their games with unrealistic 'gameplay footage.'"
After restating his belief that Hello Games has neither broken the law nor purposely deceived any of its players, Morrison closes with a piece of advice it's always worth reiterating: "People need to stop pre-ordering games." If you aren't 100-percent confident you know what you're getting, give it a week before handing over your hard-earned cash. Watch Let's Plays. Read the reviews. A little research goes a long way.
No Man s Sky is a unique case of videogame marketing controversy. What it promised was so nebulous a huge procedural universe where who knows what you ll find that expectations had unlimited space to grow into. They could only plummet back to a craggy rock of a planet on release. We just didn t know how hard the landing would be.
But some of what has No Man s Sky under continual fire from players, and now investigation, is predictable videogame marketing backlash. After 10 years of covering videogames, I ve seen game after game fail to align with its gorgeous E3 trailer and expertly composed screenshots. I ve seen games that looked finished at one E3 such as Star Wars 1313 disappear from the next, never to be seen again.
To some degree, this happens just because games change a lot during development, but in other cases, the games we see at E3 never even existed outside of that specific demo. How and when games are shown to the public varies between developers, publishers, and budgets, but for the biggest of them there are some common practices that repeatedly end with a 30 page NeoGAF thread comparing stills from two years ago with the game that released. Here are five reasons everything we see before a big game is released is suspect (and why we don't recommend preordering).
The vertical slice
Vertical slice is an industry buzzword that few marketers use publicly and yet we see them all the time. The term can mean different things depending on the context, but when it comes to games, a vertical slice is a complete demo that showcases all the intended features. A hypothetical vertical slice for, say, Deus Ex: Human Revolution would be one complete level with stealth, combat, enemy AI, dialogue, and so on a segment of the game that reflects the final product, but nothing beyond it.
Ron Gilbert called vertical slices one of the dumbest things the game industry has ever come up with. Critics of building vertical slices too early point out that building a finished level as a starting point actually means building most of the game as a starting point. From a linear, horizontal perspective, one level might be a small portion of the player s experience, but all the elements of that one level HUD design, art and animations, control systems, and so on represent the bulk of development. To focus on a slice first, instead of iterating on a sketch of the full game in a more holistic approach, can lead to obvious problems. What if things that worked in that one demo level don t work in all cases? What if the limitations of that level are pasted onto the rest of the game, homogenizing the whole thing? Shouldn't development be iterative?
But showing a big, untextured prototype with a placeholder HUD to executives and investors isn t necessarily the best way to convince them it s a winner and the same goes for the public. A vertical slice is the first completely realized piece of a game, so it s what screenshots, trailers, and press demos are based on. We see the effects of this all the time at PC Gamer: We ll do an interview with one creative director or another, and they ll talk about all sorts of exciting ideas, but the only screenshots the publisher will provide are from one level that has nothing to do with those ideas. Because that s the only part of the game ready to be seen.
It s unlikely that this one slice is going to stay perfectly static, with the rest of the game built around it to conform. If the vertical slice was created early in development, there s going to be iteration and discarded ideas and new ideas as the whole picture is painted. The vertical slice itself may even be painted over.
When BioShock Infinite was shown in 2011, it hardly represented the complete BioShock Infinite we played. After that slice was built for E3 and shown, the characters changed, the powers changed, the HUD changed, the story changed, and entire scenes were cut. Ken Levine and the team at Irrational learned and discovered new things about Infinite as they went as I think we d want them to. But it means they crunched out something that didn t look quite like the game they d ultimately make.
Bungie s Halo 2 demo at E3 2003 is another prime example. By Bungie s own proud admission, buckets of blood and sweat (and probably a few tears) were poured into making this demo something spectacular. I m not sure any developer today would openly admit that it made employees sleep in the office for days to build an E3 demo that isn t representative of the final game but that s what happened, and it still happens.
Vertical slices can also be visually more impressive than the whole, and this happens often enough to get its own term: downgrading. I m not a fan of the word, because I don t think it helps us to label developers saboteurs of their own games when they addresses technical problems or make artistic changes, especially as we also complain that games aren t optimized enough.
Take The Witcher 3 for example: It s a gorgeous game that runs well, but it wasn t gorgeous in the exact same way it was a year before release, and there was a brief controversy about it. This, again, was because the demo shown at E3 was designed a la carte.
"If you're looking at the development process, we do a certain build for a tradeshow and you pack it, it works, it looks amazing, CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski told Eurogamer. And you are extremely far away from completing the game. Then you put it in the open world, regardless of the platform, and it's like, 'Oh shit, it doesn't really work.' We've already showed it, now we have to make it work. And then we try to make it work on a huge scale. This is the nature of games development."
The Witcher 3 was still a great game, though, so the whole thing seems a bit frivolous now. If we don t give work-in-progress footage a little flexibility, we re saying that developers aren t allowed to make new decisions after releasing a trailer, which isn t realistic. There are also changing hardware specs to consider.
But I don t think we ought to let them off the hook completely. Another example comes from The Division s E3 2013 trailer, and prior to that with Watch Dogs. These weren't drastic changes, but they're symptom of those E3 demo grinds, and I m skeptical that CD Projekt and Ubisoft were both totally unaware that they d have to scale back the graphics in the real games. Bungie certainly knew what it was doing with Halo 2.
At the very least, we re due an explanation when it happens. Most things that are advertised to us are advertised after they re already done a Heineken always tastes like a Heineken (water with some bubbly piss in it) so games are somewhat unique in that they re advertised while still being brewed. I can forgive a game that undergoes slight discoloration, so long as we know about it before it s released. In general, don t trust big reveal trailers to look like the games they re promoting, especially if the release date is still a ways off.
Target footage
The other thing to look out for are videos labeled target footage. Target footage is the precursor to a vertical slice, an artist s rendering of what a game could look like. There may not be any game systems driving target footage at all. It can just be an animation showing how a game is supposed to look and play, and may have been made during pre-production as a sort of visual design document, as this Assassin s Creed 3 target footage was.
Often target footage is used internally by developers and publishers as a clear example of a game s vision it isn't typically 'marketing,' but I've put it here because sometimes it s shown or leaked to the public. If you see anything labeled target footage, consider it a nice idea for a videogame and nothing more.
Bullshots
When a developer wants to show off their game, sometimes they take some nice-looking screenshots and send them out to press and put them on their website, and that s it. But when big marketing budgets are involved, people can be hired just to take screenshots. They use tools to unlock a free camera, manipulate time, and downsample from ultra high resolutions. This is how you see Geralt on a perfectly posed horse, looking crisper than a starched shirt. We lovingly call these 'bullshots.'
Every developer is trying to make their game look good when they take screenshots, but heavy supersampling and compositing elements in Photoshop crosses a line for me. I m not accusing CD Projekt of all that necessarily the screen above is just an example of some obvious manipulation.
This happens a lot, in part I think because bullshots have an endearing quality that affords them an oh, you guys attitude. It s funny to see a publisher try to pass off an obviously manipulated screen, as if we weren t going to notice its perfect composition and total lack of aliasing. But if it s unclear, as much as we think bullshots are funny, we hate receiving them. We never want to run a preview full of screenshots that obviously aren't achievable through regular play, and we call it out when those are the only screens we have. Thankfully, this is happening less and less, with more publishers allowing us to take our own screenshots or video directly from preview builds of their games (which, of course, may still look better than the final build) or releasing closed betas.
To be clear, we love the screenshotting community, which uses the same techniques to turn game worlds into photographic subjects, and we celebrate it every week in our Pixel Boost column. But those independently created, ultra high-res Photoshop-manipulated screenshots aren t used to sell the game, and the artists who create them usually tell us how they achieved the look. It isn t the same as putting an absurdly good-looking screenshot on a Steam store page without mentioning the game was running at 5 fps when it was taken.
Press demos
Imagine jumping into the middle of an open world shooter with no introduction to its rules or systems or even what its HUD looks like. That s how I experienced Homefront: The Revolution for 15 minutes on a crowded PAX show floor last year. I had an inventory full of guns and gadgets I d never used, a motorcycle I hadn t learned this game s specific modeling of, a UI I d never seen before, goals I had no context for, enemies I d never encountered, and an Xbox controller, which I hate using for FPSes.
It s the wonderful world of hands-on previews, which I think are valuable (and I would say that) but are naturally flawed impressions of games. It s a previewer s job to quickly identify what they think is interesting, working, broken, fun, troubling, or exciting about a game, and when a preview is done well we get a clear picture of a game s goals, its strengths and weaknesses, causes for skepticism, and reasons to care. But previews always come with the caveat that we re only seeing what a developer has chosen to show us, and are colored by the circumstances of the demo. I d guess that very few started playing the PC version of Homefront by plugging in an Xbox controller and loading up a mid-game save while surrounded by thousands of people on a convention showfloor.
Sometimes public and press demos are different from the actual game, which can be intentional. In Shaun s preview of Dishonored 2, for instance, he notes that the difficulty was tweaked to account for lack of experience. Arkane wanted press to get through the entire demo despite necessarily being newcomers, and designed the experience to be as positive as possible. That doesn t invalidate Shaun s thoughts he came away with observations largely unrelated to difficulty but it does mean we don t really know what Dishonored 2 is like to play.
Even if a demo is consistent with the actual game, it s of course an incomplete experience. Back in March, Chris wrote a hands-on preview of No Man s Sky, in which he describes everything you can do in the game: wandering a planet, mining resources, fighting space pirates, visiting a space station. He played an accurate vertical slice for 30 minutes. Had he seen No Man s Sky s horizontal, he would ve seen that same slice repeated to infinity, varied just enough to encourage exploration but not enough to be as compelling as we d hoped and that s what he described in his review.
The questions Chris asked in that preview were on point. For instance: The procedural generation guarantees you'll never see the exact same thing twice, but does that really mean the things you see will be interesting? But because he d only seen the vertical, they were unanswered questions, and they remained that way until No Man s Sky released.
Earlier and later access
For our part, we should always ask questions and be skeptical (without being cynical, I d hope) of advertising, never taking it at face value. It s advertising, so of course they re trying to make their games look as good as they can, and of course Daniel Craig doesn't drink Heineken. No one does.
There's a line somewhere between choreographing a nice screenshot and releasing the notoriously misrepresented Aliens: Colonial Marines.
Games are different from other media: really fundamental changes can take place over the course of development, and we have to allow for some of that. (In my opinion, we should really chill out about changes to grass rendering quality.) But there s a line, of course, that exists somewhere between choreographing a nice screenshot and releasing the notoriously misrepresented Aliens: Colonial Marines. When the latter happens, we should absolutely call it out and make it loudly clear we don t want that crap.
Publishers are listening and the industry is reacting. Look at how many games now release in Early Access, all their flaws and missing pieces on display this was not a model five or so years ago, except in a few cases like Minecraft, and now it s a major pillar of PC development. Look as well at publishers such as Bethesda, which announced Fallout 4 just a couple months before releasing it. Meanwhile, EA and BioWare have only just shown us gameplay footage from Mass Effect: Andromeda, and that s out early next year. Some publishers still subscribe to the classic multi-year videogame press cycle announcement, teaser trailer, first look preview, cinematic trailer, hands-on preview, gameplay trailer, another trailer, second hands-on preview, launch trailer, reviews but it s less and less the standard.
The solution has either been to show us everything up front from the start blemishes and all or to hide games out of sight until they re complete or nearly complete. Part of the deal when it comes to avoiding game marketing that doesn't match the final product is that we get less information about games we re looking forward to, and fewer big E3 surprise reveals.
And so the No Man's Sky saga continues. Beyond the hype, the promises, and the prolonged silence from developer Hello Games and head honcho Sean Murray, it appears the UK s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) an independent regulator whose role is to regulate the content of advertisements, sales promotions and direct marketing in the UK [by investigating] complaints made about ads, sales promotions or direct marketing is now investigating the game s seemingly misleading promotional material.
Frustrated with the disparity between the game s trailers, screenshots and general information used to advertise No Man s Sky on its Steam page and what actually features in-game, Reddit user AzzerUK issued a formal complaint to the ASA. Ultimately, he or she feels the game s advertising is misleading and misrepresenting of the features found in the actual game.
I can't speak about other countries, but in the UK [there] are regulations about providing advertising material that could mislead a consumer in some way [for example] displaying things that do not, in fact, exist, says AzzerUK. The ASA say they have received a number of complaints, and so the points below are not necessarily all related to things I personally took issue with, but are the issues they have picked out at the most clear-cut problems from amongst all complaints.
In the ASA response, they say that both Hello Games and Valve have a joint responsibility, and so both organisations have now been contacted by the ASA and have been told to respond to the following issues which the ASA picked out as the primary issues (compiled from a number of complainants that contacted the ASA).
The points AzzerUK details can be found in full here, however the list takes issue with: UI design, large-scale combat, flowing water, size of creatures, behaviour of ships and sentinels, and aiming systems, among other perceived discrepancies.
Although the ASA is a non-statutory body (which means it can t interpret or enforce legislation), it does have the power to have advertisements which breach its code of advertising practice removed a process which of course prevents them from being used again.
This process has now been put in motion, and, should the ASA deem any of the promotional material to fall foul of said codes of conduct, Valve and Hello Games will be required to respond. Sanctions could follow if offending material is not removed.
A section of the ASA s reply to AzzerUK reads as follows:
"We will ensure the advertisers are made aware of any points relating to other marketing material under their control (such as the Hello Games YouTube channel and website).
The outcomes of ASA investigations are cross-applicable to other marketing making the same claims, so any decision reached in relation to the Steam page would apply to other advertising for No Man s Sky where the same (or materially similar) claims appear."
Speaking to Eurogamer, AzzerUK also notes feeling personally misled and while not necessarily harbouring ill-will towards Hello Games and/or Steam, felt obliged to contact the ASA after seeing just how vastly different the trailers for No Man's Sky were from the actual released game .
The investigation is ongoing, however we ll update as and when we know more. This latest twist in the No Man s Sky tale comes off the back of Sony president Shuhei Yoshida declaring Sean Murray "sounded like he was promising more features" than he could deliver, at this month s Tokyo Game Show.
Unexpectedly and without warning, Hello Games has announced that a new patch for No Man's Sky is ready to go. It is not, at the time of writing, live on Steam, but the studio said on Twitter that it's been released and the patch notes are up now at the NMS website.
It doesn't look to be a major update, but there are some significant fixes. It's now much much more robust at recovering corrupted save files, and it's no longer possible to bypass the Antimatter blueprint, which would leave you stranded in the game's second system. Framerates have been improved when scanning colossal structures like space stations, and galaxy generation [is] more robust during compiling, whatever that means.
So it's a tune-up, rather than a comprehensive upgrade of places to go and things to see, but that fits with what Hello said earlier this month when it rolled out the 1.07 update: Our focus is first on resolving any issues people have with the game as it is, then on future free updates which will improve, expand and build on the No Man s Sky universe. The full 1.09 PC patch notes, since they're not all that terribly long, are below.
The game is now much more robust at recovering corrupted save files.
It was possible for players to circumnavigate obtaining the Antimatter blueprint using very specific steps, leaving some players stranded in their second system. This is no longer possible.
PC and PS4 galaxy generation more robust during compiling.
Exosuit messaging system no longer confuses “on planet” and “docked in station” visor notifications, removing all doubt as to the location of the player’s Starship.
Improved framerate when scanning colossal structures such as Space Stations or Outposts.
Fix for some terrain resources being indestructible and therefore unmineable.
Exosuit messaging system now able to correctly differentiate between resource types.
Deposits discovered by scans will now display as the correct element.
Gek Factory door manufacturing standards have been improved; they no longer take critical hits from Grenades.
Drone vandalism detection improved.
Wanted level now increases when destroying Factory doors however powerful the players Multitool may be.
Pulsedrive systems now fully offline during warping.
Players are no longer able to open crates of any type if their inventory is full, no matter the contents, preventing loss of resources.
When interacting with a Terminal, it will print out the players Journey progression. Some strings in this print out where cut-off in Asian languages, these now display correctly in all supported languages.
Fixed an occasional bug within the Exosuit system that caused controller prompts to display the wrong button.
Changes to player Standing with the Gek, Vy’keen and Korvax now display correctly within the stats menu.
Fix for loss of resources when transferring fully stacked items between the player’s Starship and Exosuit in a specific order.
Fix for stacking products exploit. Resources salvaged from dismantled technologies now fill inventory slots as expected.
Exosuit and Starship messaging system now always displays the correct number of collected resources.
Discovery menu improvements, including fixes for incorrectly displayed planet names and creatures displaying as their molecular structure.
Discovery menu now supports planets with an abundance of life. Specifically, planets featuring 15 creature types can now reach 100% completion.
Multitool Beam Coolant and Exosuit Aeration Membrane upgrades now increase their respective stat wheels as expected.
The player can no longer buy multiple products when they do not have enough slots to do so, preventing loss of both the unit cost and the extra products.
Japanese localization fixes. Including: scrolling text issues, overlapping prompts in the ship messaging system and Multitool names displaying incorrectly.
Fixed clipped text on save game restore buttons in all supported languages.
Fixed errant title bar on the menu screen.
Player Standing now updates in real time when interacting with members of the Gek, Vy’keen and Korvax races.
Minor fix for saves of a duration less than 2 minutes displaying as “1 minutes”.
Improvements to various settings within the options menu, including advancements in mouse smoothing and refined gamma settings allowing for increased tenebrosity.
Fix for creature generation crash.
Fixes to prevent FPS spikes when encountering momentary performance bumps on PS4.
Fixed a rare issue where pressing and holding a button would cause the game to crash under specific circumstances.
Creature footfall now audibly echos within caves.
Fix for perpetual day time if the player updated in a specific order.
Bump shader version numbers for patch 1.09
Fix for a rare situation where a player’s save could get stuck in a crash loop due to saving at very specific point in planet generation.
Improved detection of available PC CPU cores and optimised settings for low-end CPUs with few CPU cores.
"I've not got around to playing No Man's Sky yet," says modder Robert Prest in a video showing his recreation of No Man's Sky in Doom, "but I've based it on what I saw in the trailer." In the mod, called No Guy's Sky, you can visit planets in a spaceship, mine resources, speak with aliens, and visit space stations stocked with vending machines. There's even a center of the universe, helpfully marked with a billboard reading "CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE."
Prest, who is also working on a Doom mod based on DayZ called DoomZ, explains it took him about three weeks of work to create No Guy's Sky, though he originally expected it to take only three days. Planets, foliage, and creatures are all randomly generated, and the video shows several aliens built from a combination of Doom monsters and human faces, such as that of Neil deGrasse Tyson.
You can fly over the surface of planets using a jetpack, use a laser to mine minerals, and you've even got a backpack with an extremely limited inventory for storage. Prest may have not played No Man's Sky but he's definitely done his homework.
Planets are randomly named (and can be renamed, just like in No Man's Sky), and there's even a map inside your ship where you can pinpoint your location in the galaxy as your travel toward the center. Speaking to aliens requires guessing at a response in their language, which will either anger them or result in a reward of money or starship fuel. Encountering a space station happens randomly, and gives you the chance to spend your loot on a new ship.
The mod/wad hasn't been released yet: Prest says he's working on fixing a few textures first. We'll let you know when you can download it and play it for yourself.
