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[lastverb]

I'm still going to believe the player models are actually invisible, and that's why you can't see each other.

Apparently you can get into full-pause mode. Also, players were in same place, didn't see each others ship, nor environment interaction and had different time of day. If that's not some planned server-crash workaround (which i highly doubt), then a lot of Seans speeches about multiplayer are a scam, the only online feature is naming stuff, and a tweet about two players meeting each other is Goebbels like propaganda. Unless you can name seeing other players names for stuff as meeting them. Even Spore had more player interaction.

[Flying Dice]

There's an offline mode, which is what people were playing on when the server crashed.

another thing that's weird is what will happen if said central server would stop working? can anyone with a copy test out whether it still works without an internet connection?

btw good old devs are in full pr damage control mode now

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

jumping over backward to avoid answering the question whether meeting was actually an intended feature or not or if they're even planning to add it at some point.

the whole thing sounds like they're quite scared about preorders being cancelled

pls no reddit

I mean. Maybe it's just me. But this is pretty clear "Our server shat itself while we were all catching some sleep, everything MP stopped working." Because discovery updating was also offline.

Never mind more traditional connection problems common to pretty much every instanced game ever: see E:D and DaS multiplayer.

[kilakan]

Heck, darksouls 3 multiplayer was an absolute sh** storm when it launched.  I didn't see anyone freaking out that that didn't have multiplayer cause you couldn't invade the first day...

[forsaken1111]

Another example, World of Warcraft has been having connectivity and server load issues due to the upcoming expansion. This is a company that is well past mature, experienced with dealing with launches etc, has practically unlimited resources compared to an indy studio. Granted the potential audience is likely several orders of magnitude larger, but still relevant I think. And all this is PRIOR to expansion launch

[MaximumZero]

So, just so you're aware, there's been national outcry against my company because we ran out of No Man's Sky in most locations on day one. Why? Presale numbers were nowhere close to actual demand. People didn't preorder because of this stupid "presales are a scam!" culture on the internet, or they're just lazy, or they don't understand how preorders work. If people had properly preordered, this wouldn't be an issue, because those numbers would have been where they should have been, the devs could have seen them and gone, "Holy shit, we need to gird up our loins and prepare for much more network activity than we first anticipated," and fixed the problem before it was a problem.

[Shadowlord]

So, just so you're aware, there's been national outcry against my company because we ran out of No Man's Sky in most locations on day one. Why? Presale numbers were nowhere close to actual demand. People didn't preorder because of this stupid "presales are a scam!" culture on the internet, or they're just lazy, or they don't understand how preorders work. If people had properly preordered, this wouldn't be an issue, because those numbers would have been where they should have been, the devs could have seen them and gone, "Holy shit, we need to gird up our loins and prepare for much more network activity than we first anticipated," and fixed the problem before it was a problem.

But preorders are a scam. Or have you forgotten Master of Orion III and Spore?

[forsaken1111]

So, just so you're aware, there's been national outcry against my company because we ran out of No Man's Sky in most locations on day one. Why? Presale numbers were nowhere close to actual demand. People didn't preorder because of this stupid "presales are a scam!" culture on the internet, or they're just lazy, or they don't understand how preorders work. If people had properly preordered, this wouldn't be an issue, because those numbers would have been where they should have been, the devs could have seen them and gone, "Holy shit, we need to gird up our loins and prepare for much more network activity than we first anticipated," and fixed the problem before it was a problem.

Presales are a massive fucking scam. That said, it is still possible to reasonably predict your sales volume and active user base. The real problem is that it's prohibitively expensive in hardware cost to make sure the launch day surge is handled. Most companies plan for the average usage, not peak. Planning for peak usage would end up wasting money as most of the hardware goes unutilized after the launch.

Basically even if they had completely accurate numbers and knew (just an example) 1 million people would play on launch day but the average load would be ~250k people, it makes more financial sense to plan for the average 250k because if they stood up/provisioned enough hardware for the 1 million at peak launch activity then 3/4 of that would be wasted later on

[MaximumZero]

The thing about preorders is that you can take them back if reviews look bad! We don't do anything with the money but apply it to your game when it comes out. Hard to be a scam when you can get your money back no questions asked. So, do your damn homework just like we've been doing here, and if you want a game, plunk $5 down on it and we'll hold one for you. If you don't want it, get your $5 back, and we'll sell it to someone else. Plain and simple.

Also, yes MoO3 was shit, but Spore would have been okay if the hype train hadn't derailed completely into space and people expected the best masterpiece ever even though EA forced it out before it was done and pumped it full of SecuROM without telling anyone. No, I haven't forgotten, and I'll never forgive EA for butchering Maxis over their stupid decision. (Note, I have a soft spot in my simulated little heart for both Will Wright and Sid Meier. I love pretty much everything they've ever put out.)

[miauw62]

That's a completely different kind of "pre-order" than what most people experience, especially in this era of digital distribution.

[kilakan]

Guys, I don't think discussing the validity of pre-orders in general belongs in this thread.  Please don't as it's a rather sensitive subject.

[umiman]

So the reviews are slowly trickling out.

I'd post some of them here but I'm afraid of giving Flying Dice a hernia so I won't.

Suffice to say there's a lot of indifference and apathy.

That being said, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people going "I told you so I told you so I'm so smart".

[Gabeux]

I've seen and heard some review stuff, but after seeing a dude complain that there's no tutorial or guidance and the survival gets in the way (its a survival game), my veredict on console people reviews is, again, "This is what you get for selling a PC game to console people."

Make no mistake, though, I'm pretty aware the game has a high probability of being repetitive to death - unless what I noticed in streams holds up, that the farther you go the crazier and faster the pace can get. You can even pretty much choose your own pace and difficulty after the 1.03 update, but I don't expect COD players to realize that.
The begging, though, fixing your ship for the first time, can be a chore and boring for most people I'd think. But that's the moment I use to get used to controls and UI in all games, so I don't mind it starting slow.

[Flying Dice]

I've already read most of the reviews, and that's my own impression. A lot of people somehow thought that this was going to be fucking BattleCraft in Space: the MMO. I have no sympathy for them.

Frankly, the way that a lot of people (reviewers included) have been talking about what they thought NMS was, I'm deeply grateful they're pissed off and wrong. There are some issues (among others, the issues with inventory space--not being able to directly craft from a full inventory, not being able to move around all of the stuff in your inventory, &c.), but the whining about the bare-bones tutorial or the lack of constant co-op or PvP is laughable from where I'm sitting. Same as with the people expecting all of this content to be as seamless, detailed, and unique as the set-pieces in a AAA RPG.

Someone over on the subreddit actually put it quite well, saying something like "I expected to be Charles Darwin in space, and that's what I got." That right there. I'm getting the game I expected and wanted, it just cheeses me off that there's a pile of gormless manchildren who have apparently been living in a cave for the past four or five years trying to generate outrage because NMS isn't more of the same shit that they're already playing.

Incidentally, re: the multiplayer thing, here's an interview with Sean from 2014:

It seems like it's a lot of work to incorporate multiplayer with a high chance that it won't even happen.

The only answer that I can think of for this is a really technical one. If we were to make a game where we synchronized every player, what they were doing with every other player, then that would be impossible and no one has ever done that. What we can do is, like many games that you have at the moment, where you are flying around with an open lobby. People are coming into that lobby and leaving it – like if you play Watch Dogs or something like that. Effectively, we have players joining your discrete space. We're not trying to make an MMO where you can play with literally 60,000 people on screen. We handle the case like where other people can fly past in your game or that you can bump into other players in the game.

But that's okay for us because it will never happen. I guess the whole of the entire community could organize to go to one specific spot and then they would find that they weren't all there at the same time. That would be ridiculous.

How many people could be there theoretically?

The lobby that you carry around with you now can, it's almost like I don't wanna say because people will just test it, it can carry a few people. More than what you will see during the normal course of the game.

Will your friends take priority?

No. Just to be really clear, the reason that I'm saying this is we just want to be really clear with people that it is not an MMO. All of those questions are leading toward that. There are loads of MMOs out there. People can play those. We want people to be able to get a sense of playing with other people and to see other people and feel like this is a real, live universe.

If you're thinking, “Okay, okay, I understand all of that, Sean, but let's say all my friends want to go and play together.” That's not what this is about. You've seen the galactic map. I don't want to disappoint people. I don't want to answer your question and then they will think, “Yeah, yeah, he's saying it's difficult, but I'll do it. And then we will play Destiny together, effectively. We will all run around the planets.”

No. If you want to play a first-person-shooter-sci-fi-run-around-on-a-planet game, play Destiny. It’s a really good game. Go play that. We're not trying to do that.

Like Journey multiplayer, that was a huge part of the game for me, but they did a good job in not describing it as a multiplayer game. Journey would have been really disappointing if you entered into it thinking it was a multiplayer game. It's not. Dark Souls I think of as a single-player experience, but I'm really glad of the elements that they have in there.

tl;dr the internet is full of delusional manchildren trying to pretend that the game is something other than what it was billed as. Because that interview is definitely vague and evasive.

[Teneb]

Yeah, can't blame the man for this. He outright states, multiple times, that this is not a multiplayer game.

Though I'd say Dark Souls is something of a bad example as the multiplayer is a pretty integral part of the experience, which is not supposed to be the case for NMS.

[Flying Dice]

Sort of, but I can see where he's coming from--it's the same style, where you'll never encounter a bunch of people at once, you won't come in contact with everyone (or even most people) in a given area, you can't (until DaS3) find your friends deliberately, and you could theoretically play through without ever seeing another player.

Also, Sean Murray confirms that Peter Molyneux is the center of the universe in NMS.