Despite all the bad press, No Man’s Sky isn’t a bad game. In fact, it’s an incredibly cool game and one of the most unique releases in many years. It also significantly disappoints compared to what the creators themselves repeatedly promised. It’s a space exploration game with a lot of big holes and dull spots… but it looks like Hello Games is going to keep on fixing it, probably for years to come. So put down the game. Come back in September 2017, then again in September 2018, and see how it’s shaping up.

Put Down No Man’s Sky And Come Back Later

No Man’s Sky is a victim of its own hype—a great deal of which was created by Hello Games itself. The game promised a great deal of features that it didn’t deliver… not just in hypothetical developer diaries, but in actual game trailers and commercials from just a few months before release. It’s a big scandal, and rightfully so. No Man’s Sky, quite simply, promised too much and didn’t deliver… not in terms of big ideas, but actual features.

That’s because No Man’s Sky advertised itself as the perfect version of No Man’s Sky… but the game that was actually released was far more down to earth. Compare the game to Minecraft (original thought, huh?). The version of Minecraft you can play today is vastly more sophisticated and complex than the version of Minecraft that was first released to the public—even the version that became the behemoth we know today is far less sophisticated than what Minecraft fans now know and love.

But here’s the difference: Minecraft presented itself as it was, and added on a huge number of new features over time. No Man’s Sky presented itself as it could be. It’s such a clearly wrongheaded move, and we don’t know why it happened yet. Were some features too buggy? Were they cut at the last minute? Or was it all wildly optimistic from the start? We just don’t know yet.

We do know this: No Man’s Sky is going to improve over time. We don’t know how much yet. But if it advances half as much as Minecraft has, it’ll be an entirely different game two year from now, with far more features. It’ll be much more like the game that was advertised to us in the first place… the No Man’s Sky that should have been. We may yet get it, eventually. So let’s go play other things until then.