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Players Seek 'No Man's Sky' Refunds, Sony's Content Director Calls Them Thieves (tweaktown.com)
thegarbz writes: As was covered previously on Slashdot the very hyped up game No Man's Sky was released to a lot of negative reviews about game-crashing bugs and poor interface choices. Now that players have had more time to play the game it has become clear that many of the features hyped by developers are not present in the game, and users quickly started describing the game as "boring".
Now, likely due to misleading advertising, Steam has begun allowing refunds for No Man's Sky regardless of playtime, and there are reports of players getting refunds on the Play Station Network as well despite Sony's strict no refund policy. Besides Sony, Amazon is also issuing refunds, according to game sites. In response, Sony's former Strategic Content Director, Shahid Kamal Ahmad, wrote on Twitter, "If you're getting a refund after playing a game for 50 hours you're a thief." He later added "Here's the good news: Most players are not thieves. Most players are decent, honest people without whose support there could be no industry."
In a follow-up he acknowledged it was fair to consider a few hours lost to game-breaking crashes, adding "Each case should be considered on its own merits and perhaps I shouldn't be so unequivocal."
Now, likely due to misleading advertising, Steam has begun allowing refunds for No Man's Sky regardless of playtime, and there are reports of players getting refunds on the Play Station Network as well despite Sony's strict no refund policy. Besides Sony, Amazon is also issuing refunds, according to game sites. In response, Sony's former Strategic Content Director, Shahid Kamal Ahmad, wrote on Twitter, "If you're getting a refund after playing a game for 50 hours you're a thief." He later added "Here's the good news: Most players are not thieves. Most players are decent, honest people without whose support there could be no industry."
In a follow-up he acknowledged it was fair to consider a few hours lost to game-breaking crashes, adding "Each case should be considered on its own merits and perhaps I shouldn't be so unequivocal."
This guy left Sony in december 2015. Why lie and say "Sony's Content Director Calls Them Thieves" ?
I don't particularly care for Sony (read: I think they're miserable bastards), but come on!
With that kind of game supposedly based on exploration, you have to invest quite some time to find out that no, there's nothing to do here. 50h might be stretching out a bit, but even 20-30 hours of gameplay should not be enough to find everything if the game was not as empty as it is.
What's going on is you start the game, you fart around trying to get the stuff to get off planet. Then you fart around trying to get the stuff to go to other star systems. There is this impression that the good bit will start once you get past these initial challenges. However it doesn't. The next start system has more planets with the same active items (buildings you can go in).
There are no instructions. So you don't know if you are missing something important.
It can easily take 50 hours to work out that it isn't going to get better.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
There is a lot of grinding in this game. Mining, mining and more mining. 30-40 hours to realise there is no depth and it's all just the same seems reasonable. Lots of games need big time investments to pay off, and NMS needs time to see that the claimed features aren't there, especially if you started playing on day one.
You can never get that time wasted blasting rocks apart for nothing back.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
HAVE ANY OF YOU ACTUALLY ASKED FOR A FUCKING STATEMENT FROM STEAM REGARDING THEIR REFUND POLICY ON NMS?
Let me address this:
Firstly Slashdot is a news aggregator. No one here will go out and ask anything. They will find links and post them for discussion. Let me do that for you now.
Steam will refund a game owned less than 14 days and played less than two hours. With lots of people reporting refunds after many hours of gameplay their policy or statement becomes completely irrelevant, as the story here is that they aren't following their policy. And neither is Sony.
Feel free to do your own real journalism on a real journalism site. After you're done maybe post the story to a couple of news aggregators like Slashdot.
But before you do fix your capslock key, shouting makes it looks like your have tantrum issues.
The game is set up to strongly, strongly hint that you unlock content as you move down one of two content paths.
You don't. Everything can be unlocked on the first planet.
The only way you're going to discover that is by talking to other players or after many hours of grinding.
I personally broke Steam's two hour limit simply trying to get the damned game to run, primarily due to the horrible way the options menu is set up. (Eventually I discovered you can just edit an XML file to fiddle with options. That and a day-one patch probably fixed my issues - but also sent me past the refund time limit.)
The developers weren't just intentionally vague, they outright lied, straight yes-or-no answers to straight yes-or-no questions about what was in the game, just days before the release. Then even after release they continued to lie about it. When two players went to the same place at the same time to see each other (something the developers had continually insisted was possible), the developers pretended it was a bug - even though they knew damn well that it was physically impossible. The game has no real-time net traffic needed to support multiplayer and there is no serious player model included in the game files (there's a couple comical temporary development models in there, along with a monkey in a hat, the Fallout logo, and a bunch of other amusing stuff, mind you).
The reason that so many people played for so long before seeking refunds was because the developers kept insisting that things were in the game that most definitely weren't. And they put in this huge "grind" to try to slow everyone down, to drag out how long it would take for them to find this out. When a player playing nonstop for 20 hours managed to reach the center of the galaxy (the goal) on the same day as release, going through the relentless over-and-over clicking to do so, the developer's "solution" to the "problem" was to cut the distance you travel per warp by a third, tripling the clicky busywork. And they introduced a bug at the exact same time they did so.
And BTW, after being told that everything's at the center of the galaxy - that the creatures get weirder, there's more going on there, that there's a big exciting ending there, you know what's actually there? Absolutely nothing. You go to the center and the game actually punishes you. There's no ending, just an animation of you flying out of the center and it crash lands you in the next galaxy, which is no different from the current one.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
(Some of the videos taking on the subject are really quite brutal / amusing )
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
The game content isn't worth $60 USD. The procedural generation and art style kind of reminded me of Spore. That game is like 8 years old now. Spore was another hugely hyped piece of fail.
Had it been released as an experimental indie game with an exploration/screenshot based self-fulfilment motivation as its published gameplay feature, at a price point suited to match, it would've sold very well and not had anywhere near the subsequent negative press.
Unfortunately it's far more profitable to feed the hype engine, suck in a few million gamers to pay full price and treat the small percentage of refunds as a cost of doing business.
The major publishers then wonder why people don't pre-order..
Turn the game on Friday night, and turn it back off Monday morning.
Steam will count in-game pause as "gameplay". I learned that the hard way when I tried to return a game. Steam counts the executable being open as "gameplay". Someone who walks away in a long load screen and doesn't come back until after a leisurely dinner may have never seen any gameplay, yet be out of the return period.
Learn to love Alaska
SPOILERS! Hype delays the suckage finding. After all the hype and *PROMISES* it takes a while to find out it's broken. You have to complete the Atlas quest before you find out it sucks. It takes a while to visit all five planets to find out they are all so similar. It takes a while to discover flying to the center of the galaxy just boots you to the next one. It also takes a while before you find out multplayer IS MISSING! If they had said "sorry guys but we had to take it out" but the developers have been tight-lipped about that. It takes more than a couple of hours to realize it doesn't deliver what was promised.
> The developers weren't just intentionally vague, they outright lied, straight yes-or-no answers to straight yes-or-no questions about what was in the game, just days before the release
Sadly this is correct. Summary of the all the things promised but not delivered, along with things that did make it:
http://www.onemanslie.info/the...