this is an understatement (on both fronts) in my opinion.
the launch was beyond super crappy, and "turned it around" is underselling it.
"the engoodening of no mans sky" was a youtube video that came out ~5 years ago and covers the story of the launch up until the point the video was made. since then they've had several more really amazing (and compeltely free) updates.
"Sean we forgive you" became a meme for a reason. The fact that to this day they keep working on the game is truly noteworthy; they could have called it quits at any point in time, especially after NMS got good enough.
Obviously it's not purely ego driven (if at all), so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative.
I suppose the fact that it sold so much throughout the years gave them enough runway to actually work on it with no worries? And I suppose that people would be skeptical of a new game launch by this studio, thus dooming them to work on NMS for eternity... we'll see how Light No Fire's launch will do.
That and I'm pretty sure they are using NMS as a backport target to test systems for Light No Fire (which is an instant buy for me, Hello Games have completely redeemed themselves in my eyes).
> so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative.
I've been wondering about this for a few years now. Do they really sell enough new copies of the game to fund development of several new expeditions a year? I suppose they must, but it's still surprising - more so as the years went on.
Honestly though, at a certain point, they could've started charging for the expeditions as DLC and I wouldn't have even complained.
I wonder if the ports play a role in getting additional updates over the years. Every year or so, NMS gets a port to a different platform, with a sales bump, and maybe part of that process includes adding just a little bit more to the base game.
at this point, i think they continue because of the goodwill it builds. as the other comment says, light no fire will be an instant buy for me because of the support they've given no mans sky over the last decade
> the launch was beyond super crappy, and "turned it around" is underselling it.
Everyone says this and I really disagree. It's been a year or so since I last play but I have been playing off and on about every year.
Whenever I start a new game, it feels basically the same. Once I get into the universe, there are way more things to do but nome of them feel like they matter.
The game is a classic example of a mile wide and an inch deep. Every update just seems to bring a new system that feels, in itself, feels about as satisfying as the game did on launch.
Despite the valiant and admirable effort to continue updating the game (and for free), I still don't think it's come close to the game that was promised. It's still the launch game in my eyes; nothing seems to matter. I can just also build a base (or any of the other new features) that doesn't matter too.
It's a fun game for maybe 30 hours a year (300 hours!) and that's an accomplishment but I don't think it's come close to fulfilling it's original promise.
I can't articulate why, and I'm not even a big fan of Minecraft, but it honestly feels way deeper than NMS.
I think it's the fact that NMS has a lot of systems, but they are just separate, and they have a lot of limitations. Ships are separate from bases which are separate from freighters. They sometimes interact if it's explicitly coded, but nothing is allowed to be emergent.
In Minecraft I can put 100 nether portals in my basement if I feel like it, and I can set up a sheep farm in hell. I can pour water into my base and have a mini pool with fish. I can make copper golems that move items, and that opens a whole can of worms.
In NMS, it feels like I have no freedom to experiment at all. For that reason, it's been pretty hard to get into. Everything feels so baked in place. The only thing that really scratched that itch of mine was making big farming factories. But I was not interested after that.
This is totally valid and many people feel similarly. I wouldn't entirely agree that it's only an inch deep (this isn't Elite Dangerous for goodness sake) - but it's certainly sometimes harder than it should be to find the deeper parts of the game.
The Expeditions can really help with this, as they provide a more traditional linear, quest-driven way of going through the game.
This. I really feel that the good will they burned up with the launch - and I'm not denying it was very poorly handled - they've made up for 10x over since then. Every expedition is like a whole new DLC, but they've released every single one of them for free.
“…they never added pay-to-win, they never added microtransasctions or paid DLC, they never made VR as a second game. They didn’t give up on the game or scale their resources back to do it. They didn’t come out and call gamers entitled, they didn’t have loot boxes, they didn’t start work on the next big project or sequel. They didn’t do much of anything except get back to work.”
Just a side note if someone decides to watch that The Engoodening "docu-meme": the channel author reads a very "rich" fanfic involving Sean at the end of the video - you've been warned lol
As for NMS itself, it all comes if you dig survival and building type of games, and you'd to step into Star Trek-style away missions.
Why does it matter if it’s coming from Airbnb vs some other business? Should the originating business crowd out interest in the actual topic for the reader?
Yeah like if I’m in quicksand and asking to be helped out of it the appropriate response isn’t to say “the mud pit I’m sinking in is just as bad.” It’s to go get a rope.
The nice thing in this case is that Django will meet you where you are with your preferences. Want to go the manual route? Sure. Want it to take a shot at auto-generation and then you customize? Very doable and. Want to let Django take the wheel fully the majority of the time? Sure.
is this like the "it takes 50 hours to set up a project management tool to work the way you want"? what happens if you onboard a superstar that works with django some other way?
> what happens if you onboard a superstar that works with django some other way
If you hired a "superstar" that goes out of their way to hand-write migrations in cases where Django can do it by default (the majority of them) you did not in fact get a superstar.
I have yet to see anyone hand-roll migrations on purpose. In fact the problem is usually the opposite, the built-in migration generator works so well that a lot of people have very little expertise is doing manual migrations because they maybe had to do it like 5 times in their entire career.
Either way the end result is a single file in migrations/ that describes the change, though you do have to write it with Django's API if you want further migrations to work without issues (so no raw SQL, but this low-level API is things like CreateTable() and AddColumn() - and is what Django generates automatically from the models, so the auto-generated migrations are easily inspectable and won't change).
No. Django is very good at having the autogenerated/default stuff be consistent with what you do if you want to write manually, it's not one of those "if you want to use the magic as-is it all just works, if you want to customize even one tiny piece you have to manually replicate all of the magic parts" frameworks.
Most countries don't have a notion of a formally licenses physicist either. That doesn't make it right to call astrology physics. And all of the practices around using LLM agents for coding are a lot closer to astrology than they are to astronomy.
I was replying to someone who claimed that getting real productivity gains from this tool requires engineering and needs to be approached as such. It also compared learning to use LLM agents to learning to code in emacs or vim, or learning a programming language - things which are nothing alike to learning to control an inherently stochastic tool that can't even be understood using any of our regular scientific methods.
I think it's relevant when people keep using terms like "prompt engineering" to try and beef up this charade of md files that don't even seem to work consistently.
This is a far far cry from even writing yaml for Github/Gitlab CICD pipelines. Folks keep trying to say "engineering" when every AI thread like this seems to push me more towards "snake oil" as an appropriate term.
I’ve never been on a team that migrated to Aurora PG for raw query perf. It is slower than a bespoke setup that is optimized for raw latency, but Aurora is going to hold up under much higher traffic with much less fuss. It also has an excellent snapshot/restore facility.
Auto vacuuming is enabled now. We did have some near misses due to long running vacuums that barely completed before wraparounds, but got things tuned over time.
I did none of that work but was on the team where it happened.
But yeah, super crappy launch.