There is a great video about NMS redemption arc but I can’t find it, it’s not this one from the Internet Historian, it was someone else I think https://youtu.be/O5BJVO3PDeQ?si=x0BkndpLB_TGsN56

NMS is one hell of a redemption story, a really amazing job at persevering to follow through on their vision.

There’s now a new candidate for the same thing, a game called Techtonica that just released this month and totally tanked.

In the early access builds, the game was the lovechild of subnautica and factorio, two of my favourite games ever. It had the gorgeous and eerie alien open world exploration and compelling storyline, along with all the conveyor/inserter and min-maxing goodness that I crave.

It had some optimization problems as you scaled up, though, and I suppose sales in the early access must have been quite bad. My guess is that, with money running out, they opted to release on consoles for that extra buck, and completely gave up on solving the optimization issues.

Instead, they chopped up the world map into “levels”, that you unlock by constantly feeding this elevator/drill thing.

This totally breaks the open world immersion, the sense of scale from the big map, the unease one felt when running through all those miles of cavern, the thrill of finding gorgeous spots out there or hidden loot…

Plus, the dialog is at times incoherent with the revised narrative/progression path, and the factory production chains are a mess and the math doesn’t work, the balancing is just awful.

I mean, it’s still a gorgeous game and worth playing, but it has the potential to be so much more :(

This is well deserved. When the game first launched I could tell something was off about it. It obviously had a dreadful launch.

I can’t remember how many years later I was in the mood for a space exploration and saw NMS had an update. I grabbed it for about £8. Since purchasing it seeing constant substantial updates has been amazing. Every time one comes out I think “Ok guys, you’ve redeemed yourselves, you’re allowed to stop now!”

I like to work on a £1 per hour with my games, I’ve played 85 hours (I know, rookie numbers compared to what some people have) and I’m really pleased with my purchase.

Seeing the pride they have in their game and the efforts they have gone to to make the game they wanted and the lessons Hello Games have learnt, it leaves me looking forward to Light No Fire.

Okay now I might buy it just for the redemption arc.

Because I bought it blind (no expectations), I actually enjoyed the game at launch. It was very chill.