So, No Man's Sky is finally released and available to the mass public. The people have finally gotten their chance to play and the overwhelming response seems to be, more or less, "underwhelming". I'm wording it kindly, the spectrum seems to run from "Good, not great" to "THEY LIED!!". So. Yea.
Seems this game got the hype train really going strong. Maybe too strong. People had been waiting for No Man's Sky for years. During that time, Sony and Hello Games had been talking about NMS almost any chance they could; every E3 until 2016; PlayStation Experience 2014 and 2015. What they always said was "No Man's Sky is a procedurally generated universe with tons of planets to explore." That's paraphrased, of course, but that was about the gist of what we were told. Each time, they showed trailers and screenshots and a little bit of gameplay, but never really showed us what the moment-to-moment gameplay would involve.
Now we know: mine, craft, repair/refuel, repeat. You mine minerals, craft new components, repair/refuel your ship, maybe go into space to sell some junk, dive back onto planets and do it all over again. There's a loose mystery/story to maybe motivate players to fly towards the center of the universe, the overall goal of NMS.
But there's little incentive you to do so. In some ways, that's kind of the point; it's an exploration game, so go explore! There're more plants than you could ever hope to see so go see some of them! Even if it's just a tiny fraction, go out and see something new! If you want, you can make your way to the center of the universe, or you can go off and do your own thing. Trade materials, buy a new ship, discover life on a distant planet. That seems to be the real point to No Man's Sky but for some players that's not enough.
Some people had bought their Super First-Class Hype Train tickets and were all-in, expecting NMS to be this amazing Space Odyssey, a game that could take them an entire lifetime or more to finish. In some ways, it could. As I said, there are more planets than any one person could ever hope to see. Hell, the entire human race could never hope to see it all. But people apparently wanted more than just exploration. They wanted super deep space combat, they wanted incredibly deep economy, they wanted to be space pirates, or space heroes stopping space pirates. They wanted this or that and got it in their minds that No Man's Sky could -and would- be anything they could dream up. Well, the hype train finally reached its destination among the stars, but when its passengers got off, they saw it fell short of their lofty ideals.
Hype can be a great blessing to a game when done right. The best way to build hype for a game, in my opinion, is to talk about a game roughly a year or less before its release. Any more than that and you risk doing one of two things: Overhyping its by talking about it too much too early in advance of its official launch, or you don't hype it enough and it becomes a soft launch, nobody knows it's launching until it's on store shelves, and then nobody knows what it is.
Hype is a carefully considered art, and when its done well, it can really work for a game. Watch_Dogs is a great example of good hype and good marketing. But when hype is done wrong, or overdone, it can really work against a game and cause a lot of negative perception if you don't show or say real moment-to-moment gameplay.
