Trivia / No Man's Sky

• Colbert Bump: While 65daysofstatic had experienced some popularity before, their involvement with the game has given them a surge in popularity.
• Dummied Out:
  • A massive Sand Worm was seen during one pre-release video of the game, which never made it into the final product. Even after the NEXT & into the BEYOND update it still hasn't been added into the game. Sean Murray has stated the reason for this is because during testing, it was an incredibly difficult Boss in Mook Clothing that just showed up randomly and, more often than not, would completely overpower the player. He said that they just weren't fun to fight. They would eventually be re-added in the Origins update, only showing up in specific planets, so players have a general idea to be prepared.
  • Portals, as featured in the trailers, can be found in the game, but originally couldn't be interacted with. Since the Atlas Rises update, they can be activated & traveled through.
• Executive Meddling: When Sony made an advertising exclusivity deal with Hello Games, one stipulation was that nobody in the development team could say anything that could potentially hinder the sales of the game, which caused problems when the team started to cut promised features and mechanics, and thus forced Sean Murray to insist or imply that those features were still in the game during the infamous interviews and continued to do so even shortly after the release of the game, which explains why the team decided to go radio silent to fix the game, and it wouldn't be until their deal with Sony was up that they openly started communicating with the fanbase.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: There are two special editions.
  • A Limited Edition of the game for the PS4. It includes a steelbook case, a comic book, an art book, a PS4 theme, and codes for in-game content.
  • An Explorer's Edition is available for the PC. It includes your choice of a Steam or GOG.com game code, a cast metal replica fighter ship, an enamel pin, a backdrop to show off the ship, and a mystery item, the nature of which was revealed at launch.
• Lying Creator: More than half of what the developers promised to be in the game, per the promotional material, were either nerfed or didn't exist in the initial launch version of the game. This caused the game to be known to its detractors as No Man's Lie, One Man's Lie, No Man's Scam, and other such insulting nicknames to call attention to this. Various major free updates added in a majority of the missing content.
• Not Screened for Critics: Review copies of this game weren't given to PC users at all, and the No Man's Sky review embargo was lifted on August 9, the same day as the game's release date. Hello Games didn't like that leaked copies footage got published on the internet, claiming that it "didn't represent in which the game would take on its release day". As it turned out to be, the leaked copies of the game were in fact a perfect representation of what the game would look like on its release day, and many players were in for a bad surprise.
• Rule 34 – Creator Reactions: The Engoodening of No Man's Sky, a video by Internet Historian mostly explaining the game's history (and which was otherwise well received by Hello Games), reads aloud an NSFW Real-Person Fic about Sean Murray at the very end that the creator found during his research. The real Sean subsequently warned people against watching the end of the video, noting that while flattering it was a bit uncomfortable... until the video shot to the top of trending and caused a sales spike for the game on Steam, at which point he jokingly tweeted that "actually maybe it's ok."
• Schedule Slip: Sean Murray originally asserted that the game would be released in 2015, but without giving an official release date. In November 2015, over 2 years after first premiering at VGX 2013, an official release month was given as June 2016. Not until early March 2016 were the final release dates announced as 21st, 22nd and 24th June 2016 for the US, Europe and the UK respectively, and about 4 weeks before that date, it was pushed back to the 9th, 10th and 11th of August 2016. Sean Murray allegedly received death threats because of the delay.
• Streisand Effect: Before the game was launched, a Reddit user was able to purchase an early copy of the game and posted his findings to the site. Many fans were upset over this, but the creators stated that fans should just ignore the findings, that this sort of thing isn't the real deal. Even more, Sony ended up forcing YouTube to take down a video from Rooster Teeth's "The Know" news channel talking about the findings, which two of the many hosts called out the company for when they found out how they did it. There were review embargoes in place, which sent up a lot of red flags for many consumers. This led to the game at initial launch receiving a score of 64 on Metacritic with a user score under 3.0 during its first three weeks. On Steam, user reviews were as low as 12% at one point.

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