The weird experience of liking a game before it's 'fixed'

I was one of the weirdos who gave Battlefield 2042 a positive review at the same time as it was being called the worst Battlefield of all time.

Its detractors weren't wrong, we were just coming at it from different perspectives. BF 2042's giant 128-player maps did have desolate stretches where you could wind up stranded, hoofing it without cover, but I liked that. It created eerie, lonely moments that brought me back to playing Battlefield 1942, as did the glitchy hovercrafts (Battlefield games are supposed to have wonky physics!) and the goofy custom game modes you could make with the Portal scripting tool.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that I wasn't singing in the same key as the rest of the chorus, and EA launched an extended 'we're listening to your feedback' campaign, overhauling the maps and refocusing on 64-player modes to 'fix' the game. They weren't wrong to do it, but I didn't go back much.

I had a similar experience with No Man's Sky: What an odd game that was at launch, when it was engulfed in an inferno of criticism and accusations. Expectations for the endless space exploration game had gotten out of hand—thanks in part to some fuzzy marketing verbiage from developer Hello Games—but I remember liking the eerie solitude. (Maybe a pattern in my tastes is emerging here.)

No Man's Sky is now one of gaming's great redemption stories. Hello Games weathered that cosmic-scale scorn and remade it into a game that, for many, is much more like the game they'd wanted and expected back in 2016, with 32-player multiplayer and base building.

It's a great story, and Hello Games has earned a lot of respect for it, which funnily has us all smiling and clapping for the upcoming Light No Fire, another game inspiring enormous, probably too-high expectations.

But that original, 2016 version of No Man's Sky still sticks in my mind as a singular experience. Hello Games founder Sean Murray also remains fond of it.

"I've gone back to the original, played the game without any updates," Murray told us recently. "And I've got a real soft spot for it, to be honest. It's a more esoteric experience. It's a little bit weirder, but it's got its charm."

The post-launch work on both of these games obviously improved them for a lot of people, and in the case of No Man's Sky has resulted in a decade of happy spacefaring (fans even paid for a billboard ad to show their appreciation).

But I do lightly object to the common use of the word 'fixed' in the context of these overhauls, as if realigning a game's design is equivalent to solving a crash.

Murray got himself in trouble playing coy about the multiplayer features No Man's Sky didn't have in 2016, but it was still a cool game back then, and nothing has been quite like it since—not even No Man's Sky.

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