10 Massively Misleading Trailers NOTHING Like The Final Game

3. No Man’s Sky

I hate to put No Man’s Sky on these lists because I feel like that studio has had more than enough pile on hate for one lifetime but it has to be said, nobody expected this game from that trailer.

And by ‘this game’, I, of course, mean what arrived at launch. No Man’s Sky is a completely different beast now and one that far more players are genuinely enjoying. At launch though, well we return to “oof”. Those on the studio’s side say it was a matter of misinterpreting scope and accidentally making false promises while some gamers still call the difference between the marketing and what was released as an outright scam. At its core the trailer seems to be somewhat accurate. The worlds look about right though they’re far less densely populated with interesting flora and fauna than suggested, and it is largely about exploration which seemed to be the case.

That’s sort of where the similarities stop, though.

Procedurally generating a universe meant that a lot of the time players were landing on really boring, often repetitive, and sparse planets. The space battles of the trailer were pretty much nowhere to be seen until a post-release patch, multiplayer was absent, and the basic quest structure was maddeningly repetitive, largely asking you to find the same sorts of things to fulfill the same sorts of tasks for reasons that were ambiguous at best.

It’s really admirable to see how far the game has come in the years since and whoever you want to put the blame on, we can all agree this is a prime example of the dangerous industry hype machine.