As we draw nearer and nearer to the much anticipated (understatement of the year?) indie darling No Man's Sky, the increasing degree of toxicity displayed among the fanbase and the general gaming community has been an unfortunate, if understandable, display of tall poppy syndrome as onlookers were treated to a roller coaster ride of leaked gameplay, shattered hopes, rekindled hype, and a healthy helping of crabs n' salt. All drama aside, the game is going to be out soon and hopefully hitting the ground running thanks to an (apparently) much needed and surprisingly thick day one patch. No Man's Sky launch has also been memorable as the only time that I can remember large video game publications breaking review embargoes to host gameplay on their sites before the game was even released, notably by buying copies of the game from retailers who had broken the August 9th street date so they could stream it for themselves. I understand that review embargoes are shitty for everyone except publishers, but seeing professional journalists resorting to this kind of behavior just seems petulant - you couldn't wait like to get your clicks for a few more days?
Besides all of the drama (and there's plenty more where that came from) I can't help drawing a comparison from all of this stuff to Bethesda and Todd Howard, aka the Patron Saint of Steam Sales. Bethesda games, similar to No Man's Sky, take place in vast worlds filled with a bulging, nearly "limitless" amount of stuff to do and see driven chiefly by the player's own exploration. Bethesda games are also massive hype machines with maybe the most fervent, let-them-get-away-with-murder type of fanbases visible in mainstream gaming despite a routine amount of bugs, technical glitches, poor optimization/ UI decisions, and general writing that belie their success. When some of the all-time most popular mods available for your game are bug fix compilations, you know you have something pretty special on your hands. Hello Games' Sean Murray has been catching flak for his "lies" regarding a range of No Man's Sky features in a relatively short period of time, while Todd Howard has a pretty well documented Spin Zone tendency that has really never backfired. Since Bethesda games are pretty much universally smash hits, that must mean that either 1) the people who care about this stuff are such a small minority that it doesn't effect Zenimax's books either way (very likely) and/or 2) those same people end up buying the game anyway after they disperse enough energy grumbling on forums (almost certain).
I'm not saying Todd Howard or Sean Murray shouldn't be held accountable for the shit they say - they absolutely should, with the important caveat that these people are salesmen. Yes, they put enormous energy into these projects that they care deeply about, but they want you to buy that product enormously as well, so of course here and there they are going to splurge and let out a half-truth to drum up additional interest. As someone who has spent waaay more time playing Bethesda games than I will probably ever play No Man's Sky, I just find it interesting that people continue to support these massively buggy, ugly, and outdated Elder Scrolls / Fallout games while leveling so much more (comparative) criticism at Hello Games' first big effort when early, pre-patch gameplay has shown it to be infinitely more stable and bug-free than, say, Fallout 4 or *shudder* New Vegas was at launch. While I'm not personally incredibly grabbed by either Hello Games or Bethesda titles much anymore, No Man's Sky is definitely promising to be a very interesting experience.
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