Originally published October 2016

Welcome back! Last time, I discussed the ins and outs of how No Man's Sky built itself up and failed to deliver its promises. I also mentioned how it had a few things in common with some other space-faring video games of the past decade: Spore and Destiny.

You may recall, I had a fair amount to say about No Man's Sky, despite simply being an observer who had not played the game. Spore, however, I have played. Spore, like No Man's Sky, was a big disappointment and a victim of the imagination and expectations of its fans, myself included. However, I would argue that Spore is a better game since it has at least some direction and an amount of content that No Man's Sky is severely lacking. The flaws they share, however, are still very significant.

Spore, for those who might not remember, was a game developed by Maxis (RIP), the development team behind huge successes like SimCity and The Sims. Spore was also the last video game project of Maxis founder, Will Wright, who had established a reputation for designing and directing great toy-box experiences for players. Spore was supposed to be the next evolutionary step for the company, by providing players with a massive universe to explore and fill with their own creations.

In Spore, you start out as a single-celled organism simply trying to survive by eating whatever you can. It plays like Pac-Man without any boundaries or much momentum, so it's a bit slow and tedious. Eventually, after consuming enough sustenance and spending enough time in the primordial soup, you evolve into a land animal and the camera pulls back to a full three-dimensional view. Depending on your evolutionary path as a herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore, you get various bonuses when you evolve. Once on land, the creature creator you can use to customize and manipulate your creature becomes more advanced. This is the real meat of the game as you can spend hours customizing your creation with one of the best creation tools ever made for a video game. It was simple and kind of fun to manipulate and change the shape and complexity of a creature. As you explore your home planet and encounter other wild creations, which also happen to be creatures made by other players, you can collect different body parts to further customize your creation. There's a collection of mouths, limbs, eyes, etc on your planet to find and utilize.

You eat, mate, and evolve bit by bit. Eventually, after your creature has reached a certain level of intelligence, it evolves to a tribal state, where the gameplay changes from a third-person action game to a real-time strategy game. Your goal then becomes uniting the various tribes of your species under one nation. Uniting the tribes then leads to the civilization stage of the game, which is basically another version of the same strategy game you were just playing. Both of these stages had some potential but felt rather flat and uninteresting. Nonetheless, the awesome creation tool still exists during this time and allows you to create structures, vehicles, and even a national anthem with some simple musical notes. Completing the civilization stage finally allows you to begin the space-faring stage of the game. From here, you can finally do what we've all wanted the whole time: explore the vast reaches of space, make new discoveries, and forge new stories as galactic explorers... Or not.

Maxis made many promises about Spore's gameplay, and while none of them were lies, or even remotely as vague as the promises that were made about No Man's Sky, they still didn't do enough to deflate some of the exploding expectations about the game. Unlike what has been said about No Man's Sky, Spore delivered what Maxis said it would in terms of gameplay mechanics, but those mechanics never measured up to the expectations behind them. By the time players finally got their hands on Spore, it had gotten too big for itself. I had my own naive expectations about being able to craft a space-fairing species that could expand into a galactic empire, colonize different planets, complete big storylines, and encounter creatures created by other players. I even had some unrealistic expectations that you would be able to start some big conflicts with the other player's species and they would be able to see some statistic or something on their side.

The truth of the matter was that the creature creation part of the game was the only thing that kept it fresh. The strategy portions of the game were too crude and simplistic for their own good to be worth more than 15 minutes of fun. The third-person action sections were rather bland and uninteresting. All the gameplay mechanics featured in Spore were fine, but they were done better elsewhere, with better user interfaces, and with better systems in place.

The biggest disappointment of all—and the portion of the game that ties this so closely to No Man's Sky—was the accomplishment of making it to space. Yes, you could explore the infinite vastness of a universe populated with creatures created by other players, but why would you? There was little reward in doing so. There were no stories to uncover in the vastness of space. There were no missions to accomplish. The lack of direction and creative content made it a sandbox with very few tools to keep things interesting. Even the tools you could use were not much fun or very easy to use because you constantly had to trade currency with yourself to afford them. Rather than give you methods of setting up trade caravans or just some way of having currency constantly funnel in, you had to manually fuel your own economy, which just added hours of meaningless tedium to the experience.

Eventually, Maxis released a story-creator expansion called Galactic Adventures. The expansion allowed players to mod the game using its engine, write their own stories, and create their own levels so that when their space captain was out adventuring through the galaxy, he/she would come across a story-based event written by a player. It was meant to add a little excitement and life to this rather dead and empty universe, but by then it was too late, and not many people cared enough to take advantage of it.

Yet!

Even with all these disappointments in mind, with all the bland gameplay of Spore, and even though I have not played No Man's Sky, from my perspective, Spore is still a better package. While the gameplay of Spore was bland, it at least had some variety throughout the whole game. The goals changed as you progressed and there was more to the game than just collecting resources. It just had a lack of content upon reaching space.

In fact, the creature creator alone makes it better and at the very least more unique. No Man's Sky populates its worlds with creatures that are just formulas of various pieces assembled together by the game's procedural engine. Spore's creature creator gave you the same tools and let you assemble them how you wanted within the realms of its own limitations. People made creatures that resembled steamtrain engines and weird Lovecraftian monsters you would never encounter in No Man's Sky. Not to mention, Spore utilized the same creature creator functionality for players to use in creating their civilization's buildings, vehicles, and spaceships. That, at the very least, added some surprise to the experience when you encountered a world populated by the creations of other players. All you'll ever get in No Man's Sky are basic versions of creatures that other players could have stretched and morphed into something truly interesting—or into genitals because that was also a thing—given the opportunity.

Let's quickly move on to the other epic disappointment example I mentioned at the beginning of this too-long, 3-part essay.

Destiny is a game that experienced a great deal of hype and mystery prior to its release, and intense ire post-release. Destiny was a big project from independent mega-developer Bungie. Bungie, the developer known for creating the popular and successful Halo franchise, had established itself as a developer fully capable of making creative and innovative new brands of fun video games. When Bungie finally announced they were leaving their flagship (Halo) behind to go work with Activision on a brand new project that was going to be "the biggest project they had ever worked on," people were excited and curious about what would come next. For years, Bungie remained quiet about what that project was. They eventually announced that their project was called Destiny and they released an image of a big white orb over the earth. After that, though, they went silent again. It was only a few months before the game came out when they finally revealed what Destiny was.

Surprise, surprise, it was a shooter. That was obviously not a big shock coming from the company that made it big with Halo. What was surprising was that Destiny would be a shooter with mechanics straight out of an MMO like World of Warcraft. This was enough for me to immediately become disinterested in the game, but still, many others were excited to see how Bungie might make a somewhat tired gameplay genre new and interesting. Then it came out.

Like Spore and No Man's Sky, Destiny was still a financial success and was relatively liked by critics upon its release. However, the buildup and expectations around this game gave it the same level of disappointment as the rest. Even the critics who acknowledged that Destiny was a good game still felt like a letdown in a lot of ways. It didn't do enough to reinvent the massive multiplayer game wheel and it didn't do enough to be the best new first-person shooter everyone would be playing. It was panned by many players who had built it up in their own heads, even though they also continued to play the game despite their complaints.

To be fair, of the three games, Destiny is probably the game that has come out looking the best. All three suffered from the same issue of a significant lack of content upon their release, but Destiny has slowly gained more and more content since it came out with its big expansion packs. Bungie has been very active in their attempts to improve and expand the game to the point that minor issues, like the performance in the voice acting for characters, have been changed or removed. After these improvements, even the naysayers or the disappointed have slowly come around to appreciating Destiny as a good game that has only missed the mark in certain regards. Nonetheless, I still have no interest in playing it.

Regardless of how well Destiny has been improved, many of its players have not forgotten how disappointing the game was when it first launched. This leads me to the whole crux of my discussion about No Man's Sky, Destiny, and Spore:

All three of them have been regarded by critics and players alike as decent or good games. They've also been regarded as huge disappointments by some of those same people who like them. How are these successes also failures? The hype and the marketing behind them.

Come back for the last part of my spectator's view of No Man's Sky screw-ups and how they relate to other big-budget, space-faring, disappointments in the games industry. Next time, we'll discuss how the marketing machine behind a game can make a game's release successful but diminish the goodwill the public has in a company. See it here!

If you enjoy reading my lengthy articles about video games, I recently wrote about stories in video games. You can read the story articles here:

• Part 1

• Part 2

• Part 3

• Part 4

• Part 5