I'm partly worried they change their vision of the game just to satisfy players.
(note: I haven't played the game yet. I'll probably once I get a machine, console or PC, powerful enough to run it)
On one hand, the fact that they are working on the game to make such an update is great! The UI has been refined, which was really needed. Also, Creative Mode. Please yes. Collecting resource (or anything) is definitely something that bores me. Now we can finally just wander in space and explore, without useless "gameplay-thingy-stuff" just here to create an illusion of challenge.
Oh, and writing messages to other players. This is actually awesome. Asynchronous multiplayer that still make you feel alone!
On the other hand… While building stations is fun, and teleporters are convenient, the game lose a bit of its "passive ephemeral exploration" philosophy. Most exploration games give to the player the ability to
own the world. They are conqueror, they put flags, build things, tame nature to let a print and make the universe their own. Players are the center of the world. Which is fun, really! But No Man's Sky is one of the few games that took another approach: you explore to discover, but you have no impact on the world. You are meaningless, everything is astronomically big, any action you do is insignificant, and leaving a place means never finding it again. It's not a world to conquer, it's one to get lost in. The player is just a part of it. And this is also fascinating, and really a clever design (among mistakes that the game made)!
But it's also a little niche, and not what most players expected from the ads (whether it's the responsibility of Sony or Hello Games is irrelevant here). People have been asking for crafting, building bases, fighting, multiplayer… “Doing stuff”, because they want to do stuff to feel powerful. Which, actually, is fine. But really not the point of No Man's Sky. Like, I've seen people asking for a multiplayer allowing to meet players, build communities, cities, and having some sort of big MMO… But No Man's Sky doesn't have its title for nothing: it's mostly about lonely wandering! Making it multiplayer would completely go against the game's spirit.
Of course I'm not one of Hello Games' game designer, but we can still understand a big part of Murray's vision by listening to his interview, and what he was the most interested about. Analysis of the game also help to understand it better, what it did right, what it did wrong… And what identity it succeeded to have.
Now, this update is great great news, and I'm impatient to see what is there to come for this game. Which, while very clumsy and disappointing, is exceptional in its game-design and what it achieved on a technical level, with some audacious ideas. Let's fix what can be fixed and make this little gem enjoyable!
But I have still a bit of worries. I hope Hello Games won't loose their track by pandering to players who just want another "Ultimate Space Opera Game". They've already shown they're not good for it anyway: their original ideas are great, and should not be put aside with traditional game codes just to please more gamers.
Gamers are already done with this game anyway. Forget them!
