After the toxic reception that No Man’s Sky received after its launch, things are looking up for the game. Hello Games broke their silence at the end of last week and released a major update to the game that addressed many of the complaints around the original release, and now the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has cleared them of wrongdoing in how they marketed the game.
In particular, the game’s Steam page came under fire for featuring trailers from early in the game’s development which show features that weren’t present in the game at launch – fun fact, those trailers are still on the Steam store page, despite Steam’s own updated guidelines. In a fairly extensive investigation that saw Hello Games provide a detailed explanation and rebuttal to each of the complaints, the ASA determined that No Man’s Sky was close enough to the advertising, largely down to the fact that it’s a procedurally generated game.
The opening of their assessment reads:
The ad contained several screenshots and two different video trailers for the game, as well as a text description. We understood that, as NMS was procedurally generated, player experiences would vary according to what material was generated in their play-through. The summary description of the game made clear that it was procedurally generated, that the game universe was essentially infinite, and that the core premise was exploration. As such, we considered consumers would understand the images and videos to be representative of the type of content they would encounter during gameplay, but would not generally expect to see those specific creatures, landscapes, battles and structures.
camdaz
I’m glad they’ve been cleared of any wrongdoing.
I’m really enjoying the game and have never uttered a bad word about it. And I’m looking forward to trying the new stuff in the last update when I need a change from WD2.
MrYd
The new stuff is fun, but (a) appeared 2 days before FFXV, and (b) appears to be just the start of what’s being added. A foundation, if you will.
And it’s already providing endless supplies of entertaining screenshots. Looks like there either isn’t a height limit to base building, or if there is, it’s so ridiculously high that nobody will reach it, until some stubborn bugger manages to do it just because they can.
duke
Have a butchers at this Mr Yd
https://gfycat.com/TidyCooperativeKillifish
TSBonyman
I think some pc-users have altered the game code to remove height restrictions but it’s probably still limited on PS4. Someone will have to test that out..
TSBonyman
I expected that result anyway but it’s good to know that common sense prevailed in the end.
MrYd
It’s the ASA, so the only possible verdicts are “not upheld” or “upheld, now don’t do it again”.
Except that second option only ever seems to apply to advertising campaigns that have already ended.
gazzagb
Hello Games “said the quality of the graphics shown in the ad was inferior to the graphics the game was capable of exhibiting and was representative of the quality of the graphics of the NMS experienced by an average player”. Well that’s bollocks! The ASA are either blind or just plain useless.
Not that I was expecting anything to come of this mind, and I bet Ubisoft are relieved with this ruling too!
Avenger
The ‘essentially infinite’ part was funny. If I read it correct, they are basically saying the game can generate anything from crap to utter brilliance, and its no one’s fault if they are unlucky and get crap. The question is whether it can create utter brilliance.
Nevertheless this was inevitable, the Internet’s issues are rooted deeper in things which aren’t really tangible when we’re talking advertising standards.
gazzagb
I’d love to know how much Hello Games spent on some lawyers for this! And they were probably lucky that the ASA just based it off the trailers on Steam, rather than all the interviews where Sean Murray says you can do stuff that’s a blatant lie.
JR.
Good.