No Man’s Sky has been the game to look forward to ever since the massive space exploration game was announced at E3 2014 – a massive game conference where many game studios announce their upcoming plans for new games and consoles. The developer team, Hello Games, projected the game as the biggest, most immersive sci-fi game that could be imagined in this day and age.

When they premiered the game by showing the first trailer, viewers such as myself were absolutely dazzled. It featured things such as colorful orange grass, giant creatures towering over the trees, advanced technology in the form of a spaceship- it takes the player out of a planet’s atmosphere and into the vast open space within moments of hopping into the cockpit and flying straight into a heated battle between several spaceships. All of these elements felt straight out of every kid’s imagination, and were put together with beautiful animation and music to sell the game’s image immediately as the next big hit for those gamers who enjoy space and exploration.

Once the trailer was over, my excitement immediately set in since I love space and exploration; I had to know more about this game. It seemed almost dream-like to me, a game of such massive possibilities and such beautiful design was all I wanted and based around the mystery of space-exploration; NMS was promised by the developers to be ‘that’ game. But what happens when it isn’t everything that was promised?

First of all, compare the E3 trailer and any video of gameplay after the game was released; not only does it appear different in graphic quality, it feels different from how the game was supposed to, or advertised to, behave. While the E3 trailer showed what appears to be a handful of carefully designed creatures with their own behaviors, movement patterns and interactions with the environment and other animals, most players in the game have found ugly, mushed-together creatures that awkwardly lumber about, not paying any attention to what is randomly generated around them. The trailer and pre-release gameplay showed worlds that felt organic and immersive, while the sight of actual gameplay has been popularly a running joke amongst the players.

Even though the game upon release had faults, a good amount of players enjoyed their first few hours traversing the strange alien planets. Some players remain enchanted by the game’s creativity and are enjoying it now, some players hated the first few hours and loved it soon after, others loved it upon release but despise it today. Brenna Hillier of vg247.com is an individual who has a deep love for sci-fi, but abhorred NMS after putting quite a few hours into it.

In her review, she describes NMS as “painfully repetitive, the basic actions I’m repeating don’t feel fun or meaningful, and the world building hasn’t drawn me in.” Throughout the game, the acts of collecting resources, analyzing flora and fauna, and traversing space and planets becomes a mush of the same unexciting motions and design choices. After the dullness of such repetition has set in, Hillier determined that she “would literally rather clean my bathroom than continue with No Man’s Sky, Netflix [playing in the background] or not;” Hillier’s obvious distaste of NMS has been the agreeing opinion among many players, some have even taken to returning their $60 copy rather than continue playing the laggy and lackluster game.

Much of the discrepancy over NMS is sourced to a reddit post that points out almost every flaw that people have identified in the game and each of the features that developer Sean Murray promised would be included in the game, but is nowhere to be seen. The reddit post exploded with feedback from players and hate towards Murray for ‘making such blatant lies about what would be included [in NMS].’ The studio, Hello Games, is a very small team of less than 20 people, so mistakes and flaws are expected to be present; the gaming community is usually very understanding of this fact, and a big majority consider flaws and glitches part of a game’s ultimate charm.

Where Murray made his huge flunk was how he teased exciting features being part of the game in interviews, but failed to come clean in stating that they would be absent from the game’s content. This made many players feel lied to, and now some have lost hope in any new games at E3 because of the letdown from Hello Games. Whether or not this matters or affects the enjoyment of the game is up to the player, but media dishonesty and teasing features that are nonexistent are dream-crushing news to many gamers like myself who have been hooked on the hype of NMS since its very first breath being revealed to the gaming community in 2014.