D4 vs no mans sky

PC General Discussion
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this is the most important comparison to make.

no mans sky clearly outlines the path to success from a barren empty boring terrible MVP (minimally viable product) to a successful game with a successful following.

no mans sky was released completely overhyped and absolutely did not meet any standards on august 12th.

there was 0 communication from the devs until november 26th when they released a patch that fundamentally changed the way the game worked, and added some of the most asked for features in the community.

followed by another patch in march, that again added a plethora of asked for features and options.

so, it took hello games 3 months to fundamentally change their game to try to undo the damage they just inflicted themselves. they did this while not saying a single word anywhere, on any platform, because anything they said at that point was a negative, because everyone hated them. so talking is useless, you need action.

now lets look at d4, released in june, we are now 1 week from october.

we have gotten plenty of talking points in campfire chats, great, lots of talking, what changed?

what was added to appease the community? some exp changes and spell fine tuning doesnt count, those probably took a few hours of work. what exactly is blizzard waiting for to just look at a formula that takes a failed MVP and spits out a popular game in 1 year time?

the parallels between the 2 games at launch are absolutely undeniable. the path the 2 companies took after launch are completely different. except history shows hello games came out with a successful game at the end of their path. so why would you take a different path than that? its not even some secret sauce, its common knowledge what happened and how, so why not do the exact same thing?

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puts helmet on. prepare for the white knights. (ground rumbling)

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I think it’s a fair comparison.

I’ll give alot of credit to hello games. What they manage to do with turning that ship around has been remarkable even by industry standards. Its tough though even the X series couldnt do it

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I think the main difference was that No Mans Sky devs admited their game needed improvement.

When D4 devs talked about resistances need to be fixed, they were laughing about it.

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No man’s sky eventually got good.

D4 will never be good, the base game is terrible, and no one cares about reskinned d3 combat.

2018 graphics for 100$ isn’t enough to keep people interested.

Aarpg from Wish.

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Although I hope for game improvements, I also feel a similar worry to the above poster?

With games like NMS, Cyberpunk and FFXIV, they all sucked when they came out, the developers recognized it.

There’s kind of a recognition on some level with IV, they’re patching in missing features which is great!

Itemization though is commonly referred to as one of the biggest problems in the game and the developers have basically not recognized that very much at all. There isn’t really anything like a roadmap to correct this issue at all at the moment, even minimum acknowledgement…

I hope they start addressing that in future campfires and such.

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The comparison doesn’t work because this game is actually working as intended. No Man’s Sky team recognized they needed to rebuild the game because it wasn’t what they envisioned or sold it as. Whereas, Diablo 4 is working as intended 100%. The developers’ job is to try and reorganize these necessary evils, that everyone hates, to a point where people don’t complain about them anymore; to hide them.

Why don’t they just get rid of them? Because these are imperatives for the engagement metrics that the game is designed around. Like having to pick up blocks in NM dungeons. They don’t want people to be able to speed through things because that will decrease time engagement metrics, thus lower profitability projections. And if eventually they are cornered into having to remove those dynamics from nightmare dungeons, they will simply just replace the slog variable to some other aspect of the game. Like the ball under the magic cups.

Until that philosophy is departed from, this game will never be in any kind of playable condition. It might appeal to a small group of players, which Blizzard is hoping pays a lot of money for cosmetics every time they are rolled out.

I’m almost a certain that is their goal right now. Basically just another Diablo Immortal business plan.

I really hope I’m proven wrong.

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Blizzard already knows what they can get away with, since they’ve been down this road before. They already made a billion on D4, and by the time D5 rolls out everyone will be saying what a great game D4 has become and pre-ordering D5. And apparently not many people will remember a disappointing release.

Which is pretty much exactly what happened with D3, from what I can tell. Here’s a quote from an old Reddit thread posted by a guy asking why D3 had such bad player reviews:

“D3 was a nightmare at launch, filled with bugs preventing logging in. Once these were fixed, the game was really disappointing for many people. The AH was a bad system, the end game was so dumb and boring. The game director Jay Wilson was mainly at fault because he didn’t give what people wanted in updates. He also said that he was working on PVP and then told everyone a couple of months later that he would not make PVP in the end. Once he was replaced and RoS was released, the game became so much better. Now D3 is a really good game, with a good loot system, more build diversity then before and a really nice endgame.”

Sound familiar?

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Correct me if i am wrong but No Man’s Sky developers made multiple free expansions to win back customers.
On the other hand Blizzard is taking their sweet time with basic qol features etc because of their most important pipeline. You know, they are already working on the second paid expansion

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It’s hard to imagine that people would spend money on another d4 product after this.

Do people not realize that after the d4 flop, this company has not made a single good game that wasn’t a remake in 15 years?

So strange, lol.

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NMS’s developers wanted to fix and improve their game so they slowly did.

Blizivision has clearly demonstrated where their priorities lay.

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Well the thing is, Diablo 3 still doesn’t come close to Diablo 2 – using the standard of Diablo 2. It became a good standalone arcadey game. But the same people complaining about d3’s failure in the beginning would say the exact same things today about it in comparison to Diablo 2 – which was the expectation.

I mean maybe they turn Diablo 4 into a pet collecting game and pokémon fans start migrating over. Then it gets called a great game. It’s still always going to suck compared to Diablo 3 and 2. But all of a sudden you’ll have a new demographic here demanding Diablo 5 be a pet collecting game.

That’s the only dynamic we are seeing. That and new players that were too young to play the previous games becoming used to mediocrity and demanding it in the future.

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This is some major revisionism. No Man’s Sky wasn’t fixed in three months. The Foundation update didn’t include anything of notable substance beyond base building, which was very limited in application initially. The Pathfinder update also didn’t do anything of note beyond the inclusion of a land vehicle you could drive in.

It can be argued that No Man’s Sky’s truly felt like a better game with Atlas Rises update, which added a whole slew of new content to the game and revised the main mission story arc. That didn’t come until a year after the game’s initial release.

However, most people will tell you that No Man’s Sky’s redemption began with No Man’s Sky Next, which not only added more content to the game than any other prior update, but also finally added the multiplayer component that was just not there at launch. This also added an overhaul to graphics, new planet varieties, a third-person mode, an expanded base building system (you could now build as large of a base as you wanted and you could build it on any surface), customizable avatars, and an update to planet generation. Next also kickstarted more frequent content updates and activities being added to the game via smaller-scale updates like Abyss or expeditions.

This came nearly 2 years after the game launched, in July 2018. So to sit here and say that Hello Games fundamentally “changed” No Man’s Sky in three months is just flat-out untrue. Make no mistake, I love No Man’s Sky and will go to bat for it any day, but you’re not being honest about the timeline it took to fix the game.

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Havent tried NMS because it got such poor reviews. Is it any good these days?

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It’s the same as before but you can build bases and play with death turned off. If you want a space adventure i recommend purchasing the cheapest ship on Star Citizen. (Or spend 10-100k and buy a whole armada)

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No Man’s Sky - Passion project by small group of dedicated developers.
Diablo IV - revolving door of 9000+ people showing up to do the work necessary to collect their pay cheque.

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Yes, No Man’s Sky is very good. The core gameplay loop is ultimately the same (go to planet, scan environment/fauna, farm resources, sell resources/use resources, do missions, etc. etc.), but the dressing around that loop has been significantly updated and overhauled. Exploration is more surprising thanks to more varied procedural generation (you might come across a planet full of volcanos or perhaps there’s a giant sandworm on one), there’s deeper customization, and the central player hub provides an abundance of upgrade systems that enable you to play the game how you please. There’s also some surface-level roleplaying going on via choices in dialogue that will effect the outcome of certain scenarios (you might get ambushed by a pirate fleet, for example, and you have the option to either pay them off, bargain, or threaten). The game also provides several ways of playing through different modes. If you’re not interested in the gameplay loop, you can go creative mode and do whatever you want. If you like the gameplay loop and want more of a challenge, survival mode offers that as well.

It goes on sale quite frequently so I recommend picking it up if you’re interested.

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As someone who has played on again, off again since the release of No mans sky I can tell you that the three month benchmark you are setting here with “Fundamentally changed how the game worked” is hyperbole.

The foundation update added rudimentary base building with nothing else that changed the fundamentals of gameplay. Everything else in the game that had major complaints wasn’t changed and it did little to keep people interested in the game.

Next came the pathfinder update in early 2017 which added exo craft, and vehicles…which was fun to toy around with until you realized that if you built up your suit upgrades with rocket boots you could traverse better than with these vehicles…I rarely used them. Still, the fundamentals of gameplay haven’t changed.

It wasn’t until a year later, the one year release anniversary that atlas rises was released that we started to see some real change…but that was for a well defined story, lore, and portals being added. While it was decent it didn’t do much for the crowd that wanted much more out of gameplay and didn’t really care about the lore, and a streamlined mission.

It wasn’t until NEXT released a year and a half after release that we saw some real changes that really brought players back.

We all get it, vampirekid…you can’t stand this game. You are trying to gaslight with your statement that no mans sky “Fundamentally changed the way the game was played” in three months with a comparison to this game to fit your narrative.

No mans sky definitely came a long way, and we should give them all the props they deserve cause they could have just taken the money and walked…but it sure didn’t fundamentally change until a year and a half later.

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I’ll just add that No Man’s Sky, despite all of its changes made, updates, etc never brought back even 15% of the player base they had at launch. Peak amount of players currently is roughly 20k, all time high was only 212k. Similar to how Diablo 3 never recovered from its horrible launch, and similar to how D4 will not recover its player base either.

Yes people will come back for new seasons and updates, including myself, but the majority that left before Season 1 aren’t coming back. They’ve moved on and aside from possibly a free expansion (which will never happen), I doubt there’s anything that would bring back even 10% of those players.

It’s very hard to regain trust in a player base, almost near impossible. The only successful game that has done this and actually obtained even more players over the years is FFXIV, no other game has come remotely close after a failure of that size. They are the exception to the rule.

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I somewhat agree, though I’ll point out that No Man’s Sky not being able to retain the playerbase it initially had isn’t so much because of its launch (though I’m sure it plays some part in it) more than it is the game being an acquired taste. I think a lot of people like the idea of No Man’s Sky but aren’t necessarily keen on a game having exploration as its main selling point.

Because even though there is a gameplay loop in No Man’s Sky, the game is truly about exploring an infinite universe in the hopes that you’ll come across something awe-inspiring. It’s a slow burn of a game, oftentimes capitalizing on what you find rather than what you’re rewarded for finding it, and that doesn’t jive with most people.

Similarly, I don’t think Diablo IV’s problems are as innately problematic as Diablo III’s problems. I think Diablo IV’s biggest problem is a lack of content or gameplay loop at the endgame. To be clear, this is an issue, but not nearly the foundational issues Diablo III had. We can go on and on about itemization, and while I’ll agree it’s an issue, I don’t think it’s as big of an issue for the broader community.

Finally, it should be noted that FFXIV only regained trust in its playerbase over a prolonged period of time. ARR was a success in that it righted all the wrongs 1.0 did, and the people who played ARR at launch were very positive about it, but the game wasn’t a knockout success in that everyone flocked back to the game overnight. In fact, I’d argue that the game’s popularity and player numbers didn’t really begin to soar until Stormblood in 2017, four years after the fact.

All this to say: I don’t think it’s impossible for Diablo IV to do the same thing here.

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