Haha, I'll bite.

I don't hate NMS or HG. And it doesn't upset me that people are enjoying it. However, what bothers me is that people have been talking about it for 5+ years as if it had been fixed up to be at least as good a game as was originally promised. And that's just not true. This gets missed in all the conversations about this game.

Like, originally someone offered to sell you a fully self-sufficient farm on multiple acres of land. You buy it, and what you actually get is a CSA box of vegetables at your doorstep. Vegetables are cool, but that's not what you bought. Over time, the quality and variety of the vegetables went up. You got access to the farm. You saw it didn't actually have any grazing animals or compost management or energy generation, but, you know, they were building a greenhouse. After a few years they started building a composting toilet! Well, ok, just a regular outhouse, not a composting toilet, that was too complicated. You still don't own the farm. It still isn't close to self sufficient. But they're doing some neat things, they have chickens now, and you're entitled to as many vegetables as you can eat. That's all fine, but you were in the market for a built-out farm.

That's what it feels like. Many of the promised features will likely never exist. (And not unreasonably - they'd be massive undertakings.) I've gone back to the game twice to check it out after huge updates and saw:

- They added features like vehicles that I never wanted

- Most of the new features were extremely limited in scope and felt half-baked, like character customization

- The ugliest and most irritating/boring parts of the original game weren't being improved

Now, all that said, this is Worlds 2 and I hadn't even heard about Worlds 1. My information is several years out of date. Since I already own it on PS4, I'm willing to take another look! Some of this stuff sounds really cool! But if they haven't resolved any of the failures in the core gameplay mechanics, I don't know if it's ever going to be a great game.

I saw the "Engoodening" video when it came out and while I get it, there's a lot of praise due to a team that will spend 5 years, let alone 9, making big mechanical improvements to games for free... it's not like it's unprecedented. Paradox Interactive has been doing that for decades, and they've often done it better (although they've had their own huge missteps, they're largely debatable, and the delta between promise::delivery has never been near the scale of NMS) (and admittedly the free updates are usually only about half of the content,the rest being paid DLC). And further, every time I get suckered into checking again, NMS boots up and just feels like a cheap, poorly thought out toy again.

So yeah maybe I'm someone who "holds a grudge for 9 years" in your eyes, but I feel like I'm actually just the only reasonable person in the room. I think being wary of NMS updates is far more rational and honest than telling people it's better than it was ever promised to be, when it's just clearly not. People who enjoy it now should say they enjoy what it is, not that it has surpassed expectations, because expectations were originally set impossibly high.

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An additional point is that the behavior of the (CEO? Lead Dev?) around launch was downright shit, and that was never addressed. Direct lies, even after launch. Silence for months. No mention ever of the missing features.