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Linus815

Member
Oct 29, 2017
19,796
NMS - do we have any way of knowing if the guy was lying?

I understand that multiplayer wasn't there at launch but isn't it likely they were working on it and it just wasn't ready ?

Sean Murray literally gave interviews in the weeks leading up to launch promising features and talking about stuff that wasnt in the game

NMS may have become a much better game since then but Sean Murray absolutely did lie through his teeth. I definitely don't think he deserved abuse for it, but it was pretty fucking dodgy at the time.

I can only assume he learned a lot from that experience as he's been doing a lot less talking/hyping since.
 

gozu

Member
Oct 27, 2017
10,344
America
Peter Molyneux made Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper and Black & White...among others so he had SOME reason to believe in his method. His games DID make me happy when I played them. B&W even had mouse force feedback support (from the same immersion guys who then went on to lowkey dominate console vibration). He got worse over the years, for sure, with his mobile game and Milo, and he should get 0 credibility from now on until he releases at least a couple of unhyped hits where he doesn't lie. This will probably never happen, but whatever. The man already did much, much more than his fair share for gaming. I would happily drink a beer with him and rib him a bit over his crazy salesmanship.

Hello Games is a better example of snake oil salesmanship, because the BS on that one was on an epic scale. Way, way more than Molyneux (with the exception of Milo, lol). I told everybody way, way, way before the game released it was utterly nonsensical to claim to have even 10% of what the dev claimed was in there. I told everybody procedural generation had limits, and always disappoints (remember Spore? Yeah me neither) when used as the main gimmick instead of to generate tree branches or rocks or other stuff that it is actually good at. But did anybody listen to me? Nope! :'(
I wouldn't have a beer with the dude. I don't think he set up to lie but when push came to shove he choose the easy path of telling everybody the lies they wanted to hear and he did it well, too. Not a hint of doubt or guilt. I wouldn't be able to trust him.

CDPR feels like the least harmful liars of the bunch, and I expect they will eventually regain some good will in 2023, after years of patches, when Cyberpunk 2077 bugs go down to acceptable "just lightly janky" levels. WT3 was also pretty janky at launch and still is jankier than average yet is beloved by most, including me, because the ambiance and writing were so good. Cyberpunk is not a departure from form as much as it is a worsening of it. CDPR will be forgiven and regain credibility if their next game is actually released when it's for real done. Then again, maybe leadership won't learn their lesson? I should note I am judging them on their TV ads since videogame TV ads are known to get more artistic license. I would have drinks with them but I would always assume they will show up at the bar one hours late, and then having to "run a quick errand".

Finally, you omitted the most egregious example of all: Star Citizen and John Roberts. The God emperor & father of lies that makes everybody else look like 2bit street hustlers. How can you have this thread and not bring him up? ;)
I wouldn't let this dude near my family. That thicc boi is the most dangerous sociopathic liar of them all. He has cult members on this very forum that come out of the woodworks to defend him despite the comical, Trump-level brazenness of his lies.
 
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Mass_Pincup

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
7,129
You sound like one of those bitter reddit gamer outrage pushers, tbh. Molyneux made amazing games and No Man's Sky delivered despite the immense pressure they had to face. Neither is comparable to Cyberpunk, context is a thing.
The immense pressure they put on themselves by lying unprovoked ?
 

Alexandros

Member
Oct 26, 2017
17,815
My friend, the wording of your post is not "this dude lost my trust". It is very much more dramatic than that so either rein yourself in or cop to your intentions and given your actions in this very thread those intentions seem pretty blatant.

I honest to God have no idea what kind of intention you might be reading in my posts beyond "this person lied about the product he was selling and I don't trust him".
 

MatrixMan.exe

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,500
Generally speaking, if a game promises that 'you can do everything', I can assure you that you won't be able to.

Outside of the examples, you provided, how many developers have actually promised this though? I can seldom think of any. Expectations are more often not set properly than developers outright saying "you can do this in our game" right up until release and that ending up not being true.
 

excelsiorlef

Bad Praxis
Member
Oct 25, 2017
73,326
I strongly object to this characterisation of Murray and Hello Games - especially the highlighted.

Yes, Murray and HG made some massive mistakes and deserved a fair degree of valid criticism, but it was far more complicated than them being 'Snake Oil Salesmen' hoodwinking the paying public.

Watching everything with Murray pre-release of NMS and by his own admission in interviews, he HATED the spotlight and all the attention. It was just that he was the head of a very small studio and the only one who could represent the company in public. He made some massive errors and failed to keep expectations realistic, but with the weight of a Sony marketing push behind them, it's pretty clear that the entire team were out of their depth when it came to messaging and they fucked up.

In the years since No Man's Sky was released, Hello Games have done more than enough to improve and expand their game to evolve it far beyond what they initially promised in many regards. And all of it has been for free.

They earned valid criticism for the build up to launch, but if you seriously consider everything that they have done since the game was released to try and make up for their mistakes and deliver a game that was worthy of what it was always promised to be and you still consider him a 'Snake Oil Salesman', then I don't know what to tell you.

It's a completely different scenario compared to CD Projekt Red for a myriad of reasons.

If anything Sean working to get NMS to be a great games after a failed launch is proof he's not a snake oil salesman... a snake oil salesman would have taken the launch sales money, said tough shit and moved on to his next game

And Molyneux's problem was of over enthusiasm and ambition. Yet the Fable trilogy are all wonderful games.
 

excelsiorlef

Bad Praxis
Member
Oct 25, 2017
73,326
Didnt people shit on Sean Murray for ages especially on places like ERA ? He and the team worked their way up again with a bunch of patches and updated, otherwise people would still trash him.

Sony marketing hyped the game up way too much and he got caught in the moment, with no means to slow down expectations once the train left the station.

Constantly dude was mocked from every corner of the earth
 

Deleted member 51789

User requested account closure
Banned
Jan 9, 2019
3,705
Even with the caveat, it's hard not to read a huge dollop of bitterness when OP is talking about NMS.

It wasn't a great launch and there was overpromising, but in a context of pressure to release from Sony when the game wasn't ready, a tiny team for such a massively hyped project (partly Sean, but also a lot of Sony pushing and media fawning) and a studio lead who had no media training it's surely understandable as to what happened there without sounding like the Grinch.
 
Aug 9, 2018
666
Everyone will have to decide that for themselves. Would you feel comfortable in buying a Hello Games title day one? I personally wouldn't. If you feel differently I respect it but I don't agree with it.
It would depend on what kind of game they would make next and if it is very interesting to me then sure. I think the work they did fixing NMS at the very least earned them a second chance.
 

dodo

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,997
i was bitterly disappointed in NMS when it came out (and yes, I do think there were some pretty egregious fibs in the marketing—the thing about skybox colors being determined by particles in the atmosphere comes to mind) but considering that murray and hello games were a tiny team catapulted into the stratosphere by marketing and the hype cycle and they took the criticism to heart and made good on the game, I have a lot more empathy and goodwill for them than Peter Molyneux (a career liar who has never listened to criticism in his life whose work no one cares about in 2021 anyway because of this) and CDPR.

hello games put the work in after rightfully getting flack. people like them more now because of that. it's really not a mystery. they overpromised and underdelivered, got burned for it, and turned things around, and they're a way smaller and younger company than other similar stories (square with FFXIV, bungie with Destiny, CDPR if they ever manage to turn 2077 around which i doubt but that's besides the point)

And yet, gamers and journalists don't really seem to mind all that much. Yeah, the backlash is coming, but usually you see a ton of people then arguing that they like the game that came out of it anyway. That is so not the point. It doesn't matter if the snake oil actually tastes fine. Don't sell me on features that don't exist. Don't paint a picture that you'll not be able to deliver. Just don't fucking lie to me. You're fucking over gamers, you're fucking over journalists (that should know better, so shame on you!) and you're fucking over other developers.

this is more embarrassing than anything sean murray has ever said frankly. this is deeply pathetic stuff coming from a dev. do you envision this as your industry rockstar doesn't play by the rules moment? because it mostly just makes you look like a giant baby
 

Deleted member 5127

user requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
3,584
I personally never got the uber hype for Cyberpunk. I mean yeah, it looked interesting and the setting is great, but a setting or one great game (Witcher 3) doesn't necessarily mean the game is going to be fantastic. So I was always cautious.
 

Stoney Mason

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,921
Unfortunately under promise over deliver doesn't generate pre-release headlines and buzz in the same manner as the opposite approach does.
 

Good4Squat

Banned
Nov 2, 2017
3,148
I would guess it's about lack of impulse control and fomo. Also, people tend to forget rather quickly once the shiny new thing appears. Personally I pretty much don't have any developers left that I trust sight unseen. Both Bioware and CD Projekt have shown me that I have to take more of a wait and see approach.
 

Kyuuji

The Favonius Fox
Member
Nov 8, 2017
32,235
I enjoyed No Man's Sky when it came out and have every year and update since. To me there was everything I was looking for from it, in it. Why would I harbour resentment over it, especially this far down the line. You dumping on other devs isn't something new though, considering you outright called devs that use cursors in console games lazy and went in on another dev here questioning whether they cared to do their job correctly.
 

Alexandros

Member
Oct 26, 2017
17,815
Since then they released the last campfire, wich was great from day one.
Every NMS update is more content-packed than what people were hoping for, everytime.

So yeah I would feel confident.
I mean don't you think they would have learned a lot from their mistakes, after all they've been thru ?

Hopefully they did, yes. I'd still prefer to err on the side of caution and wait for reviews and customer impressions before buying.
 
OP
OP
thomasmahler

thomasmahler

Game Director at Moon Studios
Verified
Oct 27, 2017
1,097
Vienna / Austria
This thread is really really weird, and nothing that you have posted since has really moved it past you pretty clearly having gripes with Hellogames and what happened to you. It is a shame that a dev behind a really admired game feels it is appropriate to basically seemingly call for the "Never forgive, never forget" mantra over a game
I don't care about Sean Murray or have it in for him at all. I just absolutely thinks he falls into the category of developers who straight up lied about their products, like Molyneux, like CDPR now. He was one of a few people I mentioned, but somehow people seem to get hung up on this example because apparently it's okay to lie if you ultimately ship the product you said you would? I don't understand that logic. Advertise with what you'll actually ship, don't take people's money promising the moon and then bank on shipping that at some point later down the road if you get caught in the lie.

Maybe I'm getting old and am just not a fan of the hype culture that some people seem to revel in. I enjoy craftsmanship and I think there needs to be fair competition among developers. If devs and publishers know that it's okay to lie or to spin tall tales to squeeze money out of peoples pockets, then I think we're in for some dark times. Even if you then ship the game you initially advertised years down the road, is it the right thing to hand out awards to the person who got caught lying? I'm not sure, let's discuss?
 

Linus815

Member
Oct 29, 2017
19,796
If anything Sean working to get NMS to be a great games after a failed launch is proof he's not a snake oil salesman... a snake oil salesman would have taken the launch sales money, said tough shit and moved on to his next game

And Molyneux's problem was of over enthusiasm and ambition. Yet the Fable trilogy are all wonderful games.

Nah, Molyneux literally stood out on stage talking about features that the dev team wasn't even aware of themselves. That isn't enthusiasm, that's pretty much straight up lying to hype your shit and throwing the hard working devs under the god damn bus by setting up unrealistic expectations both to consumers AND your own team.

and his career didn't end with Fable, the fuckery with Godus was probably the worst showing of all,. The blunder with the winner of his cube scam game was really the icing on the cake. Promised several rewards, delivered on none of it.

Molyneux has made some of my fav childhood games, he is a legendary game designer when all is said and done but its impossible to deny the crap he's pulled.
 

gozu

Member
Oct 27, 2017
10,344
America
I definitely don't think he deserved abuse for it, but it was pretty fucking dodgy at the time.

Define "abuse". He didn't deserve death threats (I assume he got them? Everybody always immediately gets death threats against them and their family because humans are very cool) but he absolutely deserved to get dragged for his lies. He went above and beyond, led, I assume, by uncontrollable greed or fear. I don't know which. I assume greed.
 

Stoney Mason

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,921
I enjoyed No Man's Sky when it came out and have every year and update since. To me there was everything I was looking for from it, in it. Why would I foster resentment over it, especially this far down the line.
While the game did improve over time and that should rightfully be mentioned it also should certainly be mentioned that they mislead and lied in some cases pre-launch also. Both things were true.
 

Deleted member 81119

User-requested account closure
Banned
Sep 19, 2020
8,308
I don't really see the problem. Everyone is perfectly capable of forming their own judgement as to whether they buy a future game from a developer that has lied before. What purpose do you think your post serves? Igniting gamer rage?
 

C J P

Member
Jul 28, 2020
1,302
London
This complaint feels like it's at least partially rooted in dissatisfaction with the kind of games that get mad hype - big open world games that promise the moon, living breathing environments, etc. etc. - and the kind of games that, regardless of how brilliant they are, have to work harder to build a following. Which is a legitimate frustration. But these examples feel strange.

Peter Molyneux is deservedly kind of a joke now (which is sad, because he's also given a lot to the industry). Cyberpunk was hyped because CDPR's previous title was arguably the GOAT RPG; they released what is by all accounts a broken piece of shit and are accordingly eating a lot of shit for it right now (they should be eating shit for a bunch of other stuff too, but that's by the by). I doubt journalists will ever take their marketing at face value again, regardless of how much they do to fix it.

No Man's Sky is the weirdest example, because the complaint seems to be that they fixed the game, changed their tone and people stopped yelling at them. I mean, that's how it's supposed to work. Outside of people who've committed criminal offences or treated their employees badly, permanent pariah status should be reserved for those who don't listen and won't learn.
 

crimsonECHIDNA

▲ Legend ▲
Member
Oct 25, 2017
17,438
Florida
I'm curious about what you would deem appropriate here, should Hello Games be forever blacklisted for their well documented launch issues, or NMS be essentially ignored regardless of its current quality?

Obviously a Scarlet 'L' should be permanently tattooed on Sean Murray's head to make sure Gamers never forget his overselling of NMS base-launch content.
 

Deleted member 51789

User requested account closure
Banned
Jan 9, 2019
3,705
He was one of a few people I mentioned, but somehow people seem to get hung up on this example because apparently it's okay to lie if you ultimately ship the product you said you would?
You've specifically said NMS affected Ori's marketing, and you dedicated two paragraphs to it rather than one. Not that hard to see why people are focusing on that
 

Stoney Mason

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,921
Nah, Molyneux literally stood out on stage talking about features that the dev team wasn't even aware of themselves. That isn't enthusiasm, that's pretty much straight up lying to hype your shit and throwing the hard working devs under the god damn bus by setting up unrealistic expectations both to consumers AND your own team.

and his career didn't end with Fable, the fuckery with Godus was probably the worst showing of all,. The blunder with the winner of his cube scam game was really the icing on the cake. Promised several rewards, delivered on none of it.

Molyneux has made some of my fav childhood games, he is a legendary game designer when all is said and done but its impossible to deny the crap he's pulled.

People think Molyneux suddenly started lying/ "Exaggering" with Fable. He did it on every single big project he ever worked on pre-fable and post fable. It was just part of his DNA. And it was an issue whether the game eventually turned out fun or not.
 

Ghostmaster

Member
Oct 25, 2017
244
I feel like this thread is conflating two completely different things.

First of all, gamers are definitely not forgiving, in the slightest.

There is a reason why people were ready to give Molyneux a chance - because he made great games, unique games. There are no games like Black & White on the current market. Hell there are no games like The Movies in the current market. If he didn't make those games people wouldn't be so willing to forgive some of his failures.

If Hello Games just decided to ditch NMS and start a new project they would have had a huge problem finding an audience for it. On the one hand it is admirable the work they've done on NMS but on the other realistically it was the best and perhaps only course of action for them if they wanted a future for their team.

People believed CDProjectRed because The Witcher 3 is largely believed to be one of the best games of all time, people will be much more wary of CDRed's next game.

The problem of pre-release hype is real, but it is much more complex than devs or even pubs just lying.

People want to believe hype, some people take hype too seriously, there is a huge conflux of enthusiast journalists and vloggers and youtubers who aren't really interested in journalism but present their takes on games as valid as actual journalistic pieces which further increases the hype, pubs want to make people FOMO with preorder bonuses, etc... There is a myriad of reasons

This is definitely a big problem, but also very complex and has been a problem for a long time, people have been used to hyping games based on still screenshots back in the day of gaming magazines. In order to fix it, it would need to be tackled from multiple directions and I'm not sure any side has that much of an interest in fixing it. After all, for some people, hyping and discussing games before release is even more fun than playing games themselves.
 

excelsiorlef

Bad Praxis
Member
Oct 25, 2017
73,326
Nah, Molyneux literally stood out on stage talking about features that the dev team wasn't even aware of themselves. That isn't enthusiasm, that's pretty much straight up lying to hype your shit and throwing the hard working devs under the god damn bus by setting up unrealistic expectations both to consumers AND your own team.

and his career didn't end with Fable, the fuckery with Godus was probably the worst showing of all,. The blunder with the winner of his cube scam game was really the icing on the cake. Promised several rewards, delivered on none of it.

Molyneux has made some of my fav childhood games, he is a legendary game designer when all is said and done but its impossible to deny the crap he's pulled.

Arguably though once he went too far... his career was over so even there it defies what this Dev is saying in his weird op that feels like borderline bizarro PR for his studio

Like I was more focusing on Molyneux when he was making games people bought lol.
 

jem

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,757
I don't care about Sean Murray or have it in for him at all. I just absolutely thinks he falls into the category of developers who straight up lied about their products, like Molyneux, like CDPR now. He was one of a few people I mentioned, but somehow people seem to get hung up on this example because apparently it's okay to lie if you ultimately ship the product you said you would? I don't understand that logic. Advertise with what you'll actually ship, don't take people's money promising the moon and then bank on shipping that at some point later down the road if you get caught in the lie.

Maybe I'm getting old and am just not a fan of the hype culture that some people seem to revel in. I enjoy craftsmanship and I think there needs to be fair competition among developers. If devs and publishers know that it's okay to lie or to spin tall tales to squeeze money out of peoples pockets, then I think we're in for some dark times. Even if you then ship the game you initially advertised years down the road, is it the right thing to hand out awards to the person who got caught lying? I'm not sure, let's discuss?
No one has said it's okay to lie - Sean Murray and Hello Games received an absolute shit ton of criticism for the launch of NMS.

However, given how they have subsequently handled the game many believe they have redeemed themselves. Something which you are also clearly not happy about.
 

RowdyReverb

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,934
Austin, TX
06b1e4a15c374ced56da09ffc2dd242d.jpg
 

Moff

Member
Oct 26, 2017
4,786
Snake Oil is not working though. But I enjoyed all the games in the Op, Fable, No man's sky and cyberpunk 2077. played all of them when they launched.

dishonest marketing is inexcusably bad, of course. but the products were still good judged on their own merit.
 

julia crawford

Took the red AND the blue pills
Member
Oct 27, 2017
35,292
Anyway i just want to say i forgive everyone. Anyone y'all think got your money unduly. I forgive them. Let it be known. I shall perform this carnal and spiritual absolution for all and any who have sinned thusly.
 

Deleted member 81119

User-requested account closure
Banned
Sep 19, 2020
8,308
I'll be honest, if this thread was about how gamers should do a better job at remembering when they've been burnt by hype cycles before...it would have been fine. Lots of people would have agreed.

But learning and growing is very different from being resentful and it comes off as extremely toxic when you call out a fellow developer as a snake oil salesman who loves the spotlight.
 

dodo

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,997
i'm gonna be way more hesitant about buying any moon studios games because of this behavior than whatever sean murray puts out next lmfao
 

Mivey

Member
Oct 25, 2017
17,827
Industry is build on constant hype cycles. People don't want reasonable and sober analysis of what a new game is likely to be. How a proposed new technology is probably not going to be as amazing as promised.
No one would read articles in that tone, and now one would listen to journalists that are overly cautious like that. Instead people want shows like E3 to be about hype and dreams and visions.

I'll give some credit for No Man's Sky for actually improving on the game until it reached a state where even most critics agree it's pretty good. But it's undeniable they could have just released as Early Access on Steam and build up a reputation from there. Doing what they did, overpromise and under deliver, was a great decision commercially. They would have been morons to do it any different.
I think no small part of the blame on that is on the customers too. No one is forced to get hyped, you decide to buy into it.

But learning and growing is very different from being resentful and it comes off as extremely toxic when you call out a fellow developer as a snake oil salesman who loves the spotlight.
Eh, it's deserved in some cases. Molyneux was in every sense a snake oil salesman, and I think CD Projekt earned that title too with Cyperpunk. The only one where it's questionable is Sean Murray, and even there it's undeniable that they knew they were promising much more than they could deliver.
I like it when people in the industry speak frankly. There's enough bullshit marketing speech.
 

excelsiorlef

Bad Praxis
Member
Oct 25, 2017
73,326
Ironically this thread hella turns me off from being interested in Moon Studios' work so that's an interesting accomplishment
 

Forkball

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,941
Molyneux has been hurt due to unfulfilled lofty promises, and both Hello Games and CDPR will have to make serious efforts to convince people their next titles won't have disastrous launches.
 

SinkFla

Member
Oct 26, 2017
9,447
Pensacola, Fl
or publishers pushing horrible money making tactics. but nah attacking devs that were out of their depth (and open about how they fucked up because of that) is an easy target I guess

Yeah lots of cynicism out here lol. And snake oil isn't a very good metaphor or euphemism IMO. Big difference between someone buying snake oil but believing it to be a magical elixir/ailment cure and someone buying a glitchy/incomplete/subpar game but believing it to be a good/non-glitchy game? That person is at least still getting a video game lmao.

I'd say a better metaphor would be a box of donuts. Expecting a dozen but then some of them taste like shit lol.
 

C J P

Member
Jul 28, 2020
1,302
London
People think Molyneux suddenly started lying/ "Exaggering" with Fable. He did it on every single big project he ever worked on pre-fable and post fable. It was just part of his DNA. And it was an issue whether the game eventually turned out fun or not.

It was never really linear with him. IIRC he dialled it back in a big way for Fable II and III before the Godus bollocks. Just couldn't help himself.
 

Deleted member 51789

User requested account closure
Banned
Jan 9, 2019
3,705
I'll be honest, if this thread was about how gamers should do a better job at remembering when they've been burnt by hype cycles before...it would have been fine. Lots of people would have agreed.

But learning and growing is very different from being resentful and it comes off as extremely toxic when you call out a fellow developer as a snake oil salesman who loves the spotlight.
Yeah I feel like that's where it started but then it fell into what felt like a personal vendetta against someone for something that the OP has been holding onto for a while.
 

Kyuuji

The Favonius Fox
Member
Nov 8, 2017
32,235
User Banned (5 days): Off-topic derailment and personal attacks. Previous infractions for hostility
Ironically this thread hella turns me off from being interested in Moon Studios' work so that's an interesting accomplishment
Been that way for me since this line at another developer here over cursors in games, and thinking devs like Bungie's UI team are lazy lol.
..makes me wonder if you're one of those folks who just generally feel that PC controls are better than controllers. Usually people with that attitude just try to shoehorn PC stuff into console games, cause 'the PC is doing it better anyway.' - But that really just means that you didn't want to do your job.
www.resetera.com

I hate this trend of UIs that use a free floating cursor on console

Would love to see the data of that research, cause a lot of research that gameDevs get is just really dumb. I remember on Ori we got a bunch of User Research feedback from people that wrote into their little dataSheets that they never played on a console or held a controller in their hands...

The attitude is a major turn off.
 

score01

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,701
I get the general sentiment in the OP but it does sound overly bitter.

Talking of trust, didn't we have a Moon Studios dev pressure a reviewer to up their score in the Ori2 review thread when they marked it down due to performance issues that were allegedly 'fixed' in a day one patch (it wasn't). I swear i remember that but could just be my coke addled brain.
 
Aug 9, 2018
666
No one is saying it was ok to lie. This thread makes it seem like those mentioned in the OP never got any consequences for their action. It's basically advocating for forever shunning a developer for their mistake no matter what they do to try and fix that mistake.
 

toy_brain

Member
Nov 1, 2017
2,207
Hum.

Sean Murray has been consistently open about how he wasn't ready for the spotlight and did not have any training for media presence and that it was very hard for him to be clear and concise with what he revealed about the game and how he spoke about its features.
Yup.
Two things seemed very obvious to me about Sean Murray when he was showing off NMS.

1. He was (is) a massive maths nerd.
2. He had been given the very basic PR training of "Whatever you do, never answer a question with 'No'".

I have a number of maths-nerds as friends (yes, they are just as much fun as that sounds), and it was obvious to me that Murray was just that. He was always talking about how the procedural generation worked, and NMS' marketing leaned heavily on that in the early days. His excitement was always directed towards the use of procedural generation to save memory, generate worlds, and do all sorts of clever programming tricks.
And whenever an excited journalist asked him if something was possible in the game, he never just said 'no'. It was always a swerve, or a suggestion that they might be able to add it. This is classic PR speak and I have no idea why people keep doing it, or even teaching it as good practice. It always screws up in the end, when its time to deliver.

Molyneux and CDPR I have some distain for, but NMS seemed like the press whipping themselves up into a frenzy, and Murray being unable to (or possibly not allowed to) just say "no, that shit isn't in the game so calm yourself down!"
 

excelsiorlef

Bad Praxis
Member
Oct 25, 2017
73,326
Been that way for me since this line at another developer here over cursors in games, and thinking devs like Bungie's UI team are lazy lol.

www.resetera.com

I hate this trend of UIs that use a free floating cursor on console

Would love to see the data of that research, cause a lot of research that gameDevs get is just really dumb. I remember on Ori we got a bunch of User Research feedback from people that wrote into their little dataSheets that they never played on a console or held a controller in their hands...

It's amazing what some people say here with a big shiny purple sticker that makes them stand out and in this case directly identify who they work for.
 
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