No Man's Sky is a comeback story at its finest. After a lot of scolding at launch and countless updates, the ambitious game has now broken through a new barrier on Steam.
Most people can certainly still remember: No Man's Sky was a pure disappointment at launch and far from the developers' ambitious promises. The user ratings on Steam looked the same – “Mostly negative” was the order of the day and that hasn’t changed for a long time.
Only after numerous extensive updates and revisions did the ratings slowly but surely climb and finally reach positive levels in 2021. Now the developers are proud to announce that a new milestone has been reached on Steam, as No Man's Sky has finally achieved the “Very Positive” mark after just eight years. 94% of the reviews from the last 30 days confirm this and overall the game has now received a “very positive” rating of 80%.
As Hello Games' Tim Woodley explained, “earning a percentage point becomes exponentially more difficult the higher the rating. To go from 20 percent to 21 percent positive may only take a few hundred positive reviews, while for the Jumping from 69 percent to 70 percent requires 10,000 positive reviews. That's why it's so rare for games to change their all-time rating, and why we assumed we might never be able to do it.”
A really good comeback story, like the one Cyberpunk 2077 recently did, which was a bit of a mess when it launched, especially technically, but after several fundamental updates and almost three years of rework, it is now one of the best action RPGs ever, both technically and in terms of gameplay.
It will now be exciting to see whether Hello Games can maintain the level it has recently achieved with the upcoming game Light No Fire, because that sounds no less ambitious.
In No Man's Sky you can look forward to a new implementation of Normandy from Mass Effect.
