As some of you may have heard, No Man's Sky has been delayed till August of this year. When I first read the news I was upset. I have been waiting on pins and needles for this game to come out and now, when it is just within my grasp, it gets snatched away. I even upgraded my PC in anticipation of this game. It ended up being somewhat of an ordeal and after a few weeks of troubleshooting and spending more money than I had intended the upgrade is complete and stable (so far). This only served to heighten my anticipation through the sense of overcoming this obstacle and so the news came to me harder than it normally would. If you haven't read the article for yourself you can check it out in the link below.
No Man's Sky delayed till August-Playstation.blog
After reading the article I quickly overcame my grief and I actually feel really good about Mr. Murray's decision. There is so much anticipation for this game and it has so much potential that it deserves however much time it takes for it to achieve that potential. As Nintendo's famous game designer Shigeru Miyamoto put it, "A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever."
If there is some element of core game play that still needs polish then of course it needs to be addressed before release.
Back in the day when you printed the cartridge that was it- the end of the story- and you had to live with it. With our current technology we can just update the game with a quick downloadable patch so if it is something small then maybe it isn't worth delaying the game. With how vast the game world is it would seem like it would need to be something significant if it effected enough players to warrant delaying the release. As an artist you always have this tricky balancing act to decide between spending a little more time putting just a little bit more polish on your work or just letting it go and accepting it as good enough. Where do you draw that line? On one hand you may never be one hundred percent satisfied with your work and so it will be delayed indefinitely. On the other, if you release a game before you feel comfortable simply because you have a due date and you don't want to disappoint future customers or whoever you run the risk of having a sub par product, failing to fully capture your vision, and eventually losing those customers anyway.
In the end only the team at Hello Games knows enough about the current state of the game to make this judgement call and they have made it. Based on the amazing things they have shown us so far I think we can trust their judgement on this one. It will sure be a hard wait till August though.
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