Thomas Mahler Takes Aim At Cyberpunk, No Man's Sky And More

PN: Thomas Mahler, the director behind Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps, has taken to gaming forum ResetEra to vent. He is tired of “snake oil salesmen” getting hyped up by the games press and consumers, only to fail in delivering their promises.

[Sonic-and-Crash]

no matter if Cyberpunk or No Man s Sky had their problems ...the amount of work to build these games are in a completely different (superior) league than to build a simplistic platformer with LED lights that jump here and there .....he is not showing a good profile making these comments

agree about Molyneaux though ...he was lame all the time

[PrinceAli]

You guys CAN NOT keep using this awful excuse... ESPECIALLY for Cyberpunk not soo much for No Mans Sky tbh

[RememberThe357]

No Man's Sky had their development completely fucked by a flood and Sony sort of shrugged and told them to release it anyway then abandoned them when the game got blowback. Completely different situation from the shitshow that was the Cyberpunk launch in which Sony did the right thing and told them to take their ball and go home. No Man's Sky is now the game they promised years ago. They have their redemption and they earned it. I have a hard time seeing how CDPR can actually achieve what they promised from what they released. Like the way they sold the story turned out to be completely different than what the game became. I don't think we'll ever see their original vision or scale.

[Mr Pumblechook]

@RememberThe357. Your comment is spiteful as it takes a couple of facts and deliberately twists them with fiction to suit an immature narrative.

You say "No Man's Sky had their development completely fucked by a flood and Sony sort of shrugged and told them to release it anyway". In reality, what happened was when Hello Games experienced a flood on the 24th December 2013 just days after demoing it for the first time at the VGX awards. No Man's Sky was released on the 9th of August 2016.
https://www.polygon.com/201...

It was after the awards that Sony secured a timed console exclusive, and Sony did not pressure Hello Games to release the game early. In fact, Shuhei Yoshida in an interview with Eurogamer said Hello Games oversold the capabilities of the game. He said: "I had the opportunity to play the game right before launch - and I restarted playing the game on launch day with the Day One patch - so I could see the struggle for the developers to get the game out in the state that they wanted. I understand some of the criticisms especially Sean Murray is getting, because he sounded like he was promising more features in the game from day one."
https://www.eurogamer.net/a...

[-Foxtrot]

@RememberThe357

Flood or not, they still released a shitty unfinished game which was a fragment of what they promised compared to all the PR interviews and gameplay videos.

They might have supported it and changed it over the years, good for them but I mean did they really have that much of a choice? If they moved on they'd never be trusted again. Besides I still don't think the game it is now is on the same level as what they originally promised and hyped up, it's better but it's still not there and I don't think it ever will be.

Indie Studio or an AAA one, gamers should never forget.

I really don't know why people give Hello Games a free pass because they've kept supporting it, I mean Fallout 76 is still getting supported but I'm not giving them a free pass, I still remember how they launched it.

[RememberThe357]

Oh damn you right they did really pull a CDPR back in the day. Guess they got me with the PR on both sides of that shit show. But that doesn't change the fact that they turned the game around and today it's incredible.

And Plumbus, Sony doesn't need you to cape for them Capitain. I'm not spiteful, just ignorant lol

[LoveSpuds]

I agree with the sentiment here squire, but I do think you are grossly underselling how expertly crafted the Ori games are.

[edwardmde]

That is true but a consumer has a right to get what they pay for. Those who bought Ori got just that and nothing less.

[SPEAKxTHExTRUTH]

Simplistic platformer? That's proof that you clearly haven't played Ori.

[zacfoldor]

I disagree. Game design isn't bound by genre. A 2d side-scroller is not inherently lesser of a game than an open world RPG, in any way. It is simply harder to conceptualize. SotN for example, is still a far better game than most open world RPGs ever made, no matter their production costs. It is simply harder to stand out without a huge budget and fotm genre hopping.

[Christopher]

The only thing I'll contest in this article is that they downplay what Hello Games has done in NMS and they act as if they still haven't delivered on "promises" when in reality they've gone way beyond that in the last few years.

They deserved shit for their release and expectations, but they stuck it out until it not only met what players expected but have done way more than that since then.

The question here is if CDPR will do the same or not. There's no excusing their release, but how they recover from it says a whole lot about them.

[JEECE]

I still don't understand how people were so taken by surprise at NMS. You could watch long gameplay sessions well before release and see what the game was. Granted, it wasn't what we all had hoped for from the initial trailers, but it wasn't like you couldn't see exactly what the game was before it launched.

[Elda]

Very true. I watched gameplay trailers & made up my mind that NMS was not the game for me.

[1nsomniac]

Because the gameplay trailers were fake and contained fleets and space wars and battles between factions. that to my knowledge are still to this day not in the game. Certainly weren’t in it for the first year of release. It was so fake that they got taken to court in the UK by the Advertising Standards Agency which was unprecedented for a game.

Still confuses me why we still get people with this “I watched the gameplay sessions I knew what I was getting”.
No one knew what we were getting because we got something very different. Fact. Whether you like it or not.

[JEECE]

Yes, some of those things were scaled down (fleets are in the game, just smaller than in old trailers).

But I'll return to my point that it was fair to be disappointed the game was scaled down (as so many games are), but you should have been disappointed when they showed the game in the months before release and it was not what the trailers from 2013-14 looked like.

Put differently, if I tell you that I'm going to sell you a Porsche for $10,000 dollars, and I send you a picture of a Porsche, you have a right to be excited, and then when I show up on the day of the purchase with a used Toyota Camry instead, you have a right to be mad that I didn't bring a Porsche. But what is silly is to then give me your $10,000 in exchange for the used Camry, drive it for a week, then complain all over the internet that I tricked you into buying a Camry instead of a Porsche.

[1nsomniac]

Like I said fleets were not in the game at all at launch. No small fleets. No fleets at all. The same as the flourishing varied wildlife or vegetation. The same as the dynamic wind and storms environmental simulations. The same as the spaceships. The same as the multiplayer.

Your analogy makes absolutely no sense and is not relevant in anyway to the situation.

[JEECE]

See, your comment is getting into the arbitrary. "Flourishing wildlife and vegetation" is a subjective term, so this is just an instance where people like you decided what they expected the game to be, then said "the liezzz" when it was different than what you concocted in your head.

The game absolutely had wind and storms at launch, so you are outing yourself a little bit on that one.

Also it had spaceships, so I'm going to assume that's another case of "in my imagined version there was more variety, the liezzzzz!"

Also, they took great pains years before the game launched, even in the period where they were arguably misrepresenting features compared to the final version (again, you could have seen that these features were scaled back in the gameplay shown leading up to launch), to explain that the "multiplayer" portion of the game was passive multiplayer like Journey, not co op like Destiny (source: https://www.gameinformer.co...

The whole "multiplayer" thing is the perfect example of people creating features in their heads rather than paying attention to what they were directly told about the game.

And my analogy is perfect. You got mad because the thing you bought was the thing you were shown right before purchase, rather than what you were shown years before.

[1nsomniac]

No you’re just making shit up. Is there still the wildlife and vegetation that was shown in the initial gameplay trailers? Still to this day, no there is not!

Yes of course the game launched with wind and storms I didn’t state they didn’t. I said they were no longer the environments simulations that were shown in the gameplay demos. Much like watch dogs.

Again, of course it had spaceships. It’s a spaceship game. It didn’t have the ships advertised or anything on the same technical level.

They explicitly stated in interviews that full multiplayer would feature and that “it would be technically possible to meet your friend online but due to its massive procedural worlds it would be almost impossible. You would never find the same world” this was then later PROVEN false and he had to apologise. That is why multiplayer suddenly had to be addressed as it was also printed on the game case.

You can’t just twist facts because it upsets your ideals!

They got taken to court for false advertising and forced to fix their game! What’s wrong with you people. It’s fact. Why are you wasting your time and everyone else’s pretending that never happened?

[BattleCat]

He is 100% right, but sorry, ori ran also like shit in the beginning. Sometimes like 5fps in some scenes.

[Tacoboto]

He had an interview with Digital Foundry for Will of the Wisps where he expressed his and the team's disappointment with how it launched.

It's a vastly different reaction to, for example, the CEO of CDPR liking then unliking Tweets slamming Sony for pulling the game after they themselves directed users to Sony for wanting refunds on their deliberately-unfinished product...

[RememberThe357]

And forgot to talk to Sony about said refunds. . . What a moron.

The fact that management at CDPR is still intact is reflective of how seriously they took this fk up. They got their money and they're gonna move on.

[qalpha]

The game had awful sound glitches for me that made it unplayable for 2 months after launch.

[Silly gameAr]

Is it wrong of me to say that his games are associated with a company that is known for being one of the best snake oil salesmen in the industry?

[Atom666]

No, that's fair. MS has made a lot of money by doing just that. And they enabled Molyneux all those years.

But Ori wasn't one of those products, so aside from taking an easy shot at MS, it really doesn't change things.

I'd be pissed too if I was him.

[RememberThe357]

Weren't we all pissed off at these games? They're almost black holes of revenue for the rest of the industry. Someone who actually kept their word and worked for it lost sales to broken games that over promised.

[Atom666]

@remember

Yep, I thought it was pretty universal.

I get the general comment that MS is guilty of a lot of overhyped nonsense over the years. And no one can ever say that they weren't called out on it (especially on resetera of all places).

But both Ori titles were amazing.

Just like any line of work you may be in, imagine if someone else in your field gets tons of hype and attention over your own great efforts, and it turns out that they screw up and drastically underdeliver.

I know I have colleagues like that. I'd love to vent about them.

[PS-Gamer-1986]

You aren't lying so no, it isn't wrong of you to say it. I wonder what this man has to say about crackdown 3 and the power of the cloud btw.

[RauLeCreuset]

And Sea of Thieves. Those were curiously missing from his critique.

[Magog]

No Man's Sky wasn't a surprise to anyone who was actually paying attention and was a really small team. Guy is an ass for calling them out.

[JEECE]

Yep. It's baffling. You could watch long gameplay videos of the game several months before it actually launched. Also, for all the flack Sean Murray gets, he specifically explained in 2014 that NMS wasn't going to be a multiplayer game like Destiny that you could play with your friends (source: https://www.gameinformer.co...

All the youtubers and their parrots freaked out at his "liez" because he said the game has multiplayer, but he had taken pains for years to explain that the multiplayer features were passive like Journey, not active co-op like Destiny. Honestly the snake oil salesmen for NMS were youtubers who apparently watched a trailer, decided what they wanted the game to be and hyped it up as if it was going to be that game, ignored all the information that explained how it was really a fairly simple indie game, then freaked out at release when the game turned out to be what it had been in all the previews rather than what they had imagined in their heads.

[Aussiesummer]

Yeah no. There are plenty of videos with him blatantly lying, plenty. He knew exactly what he was doing.

[JEECE]

@Aussiesummer

I mean, there are videos of him from a few years before the game talking about features that didn't end up in it, yes (many of the "lies" are more based on arbitrary expectations, but he did say there would be a planetary physics system that wasn't in the final game). But literally almost every big game cuts features (this doesn't make it okay, I'm just saying NMS wasn't out of the ordinary in this respect). Plus, my main point is that there were long gameplay videos and impression pieces of what was essentially the final game out in the months before launch. So even whatever disappointments were reasonable should have happened in the months before launch, not after.

[Zhipp]

They said the game would be one thing, and it released as another. they mislead their customers. It doesn't matter what size the team was, they could have been more honest about what features would and would not make it into the game well before release.

It's easy to look back and, with the benefit of hindsight, reinterpret what was stated, but when the overwhelming majority of customers were expecting a different product to what was delivered, there was clearly some misleading going on.

[Aussiesummer]

How is he an 'ass' for calling out his straight up lies? This is what he is talking about, gamers just don't seem to care when these devices lie and decieve. They make all the excuses under the sun.

[annoyedgamer]

Why is he on ResetEra? That site is run by anti game activists.

[qalpha]

Because a lot of game journalists are on that site. So, like you said...anti-game activists.

[Aussiesummer]

Couldn't agree more.

[GordyNYC]

Making a 2D platformer isnt the same as an open world rpg...

[JEECE]

Seriously. If I win a recreation league basketball tournament, I'm not in a position to criticize an NBA team for losing in the first round of the playoffs, even if their coach came out before the season and guaranteed they'd make it to the championship game. Yes, I technically would have done a lot better at the thing I did, but the thing I did was much easier.

[rlow1]

Ouch, this ones a barn stormer of a rant.

[ecchiless]

where is the slam for sea of whatever, fallout 76... wait no slam cause those are ms studios???

[BrainSyphoned]

Ori and the Blind to your own launch state Forest.

[leahcim]

ORI 3!!!!!.....oh cra..p

[N2NOther]

He's not wrong.

[SoloFish]

He seems to forget Ori and the blind forest was broken in the early days around 2015 before the definitive edition. I had to keep deleting the game and re-downloading where it wouldn't start on xbox. There was also a save game bug which lost progress.