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[Retropunch]

I've been talking about this situation with quite a few people already and it took a while to find a good piece thinking about it from the developer's point of view, but here's one.

I do agree, I think a lot of these were minor features that just didn't make the final cut - this always happens, and should be expected that the game isn't going to be exactly like the expo trailers.

However, Multiplayer is one area which I kinda have to agree with all the screaming 'Sean is a liar' nerds with. It's a big part of any game, and it's not something I believe you can just cut without saying anything about. Yeah, I don't care if you can land on asteroids or not, or if the AI isn't quite as clever as it was made out to be, but they're not reasons you would or wouldn't buy a game - multiplayer is that kind of turning point.

If you turned round to me and said 'here's a space game with endless exploration' and 'here's a space game where you can endlessly explore with other people' they're two completely different games.

That to me is the only real sin - everything else is sorta just standard 'couldn't quite make the cut'.

[Skynet]

That to me is the only real sin - everything else is sorta just standard 'couldn't quite make the cut'.

I agree with you. I believe that "Sean is a liar who overhyped his game for pure profit" (multiplayer) and "Sean made the right decision in cutting out these other features" (everything else). Yet we live in an era of polarization where you're either "for us or against us"...and the consequence is that nuanced views tends to be downplayed or ignored.

[Flying Dice]

I've been talking about this situation with quite a few people already and it took a while to find a good piece thinking about it from the developer's point of view, but here's one.

I do agree, I think a lot of these were minor features that just didn't make the final cut - this always happens, and should be expected that the game isn't going to be exactly like the expo trailers.

However, Multiplayer is one area which I kinda have to agree with all the screaming 'Sean is a liar' nerds with. It's a big part of any game, and it's not something I believe you can just cut without saying anything about. Yeah, I don't care if you can land on asteroids or not, or if the AI isn't quite as clever as it was made out to be, but they're not reasons you would or wouldn't buy a game - multiplayer is that kind of turning point.

If you turned round to me and said 'here's a space game with endless exploration' and 'here's a space game where you can endlessly explore with other people' they're two completely different games.

That to me is the only real sin - everything else is sorta just standard 'couldn't quite make the cut'.

That's the thing, though. NMS was never going to be multiplayer in the sense that you mean it. Literally all you were supposed to be able to do was see other players' characters. No voice chat, no text chat, no gesture commands, no way to track each other, no way to get to each other apart from physically traveling the whole distance.

Yeah, sure, maybe Sean lied about being able to meet other players in the current build. So what? Not in the "hurr he's a liar" sense but in the "what would that being true actually fucking mean". Absolutely nothing. Great, so you could travel together... and only one player would get the discoveries, and you'd have no way of communicating anything (outside hooking up third-party comms) and no easy way to find each other if you got split up.

How would the ability to do the same crap with another person doing it beside you improve the game at all? It's not like there's construction or large numbers of players interacting, and there's no real challenge to overcome. That's 90% of multiplayer nixed, leaving... competing for resources. And maybe not even that, depending on how it was supposed to have worked.

[Retropunch]

So what? Not in the "hurr he's a liar" sense but in the "what would that being true actually fucking mean". Absolutely nothing. Great, so you could travel together... and only one player would get the discoveries, and you'd have no way of communicating anything (outside hooking up third-party comms) and no easy way to find each other if you got split up.

How would the ability to do the same crap with another person doing it beside you improve the game at all? It's not like there's construction or large numbers of players interacting, and there's no real challenge to overcome. That's 90% of multiplayer nixed, leaving... competing for resources. And maybe not even that, depending on how it was supposed to have worked.

I strongly disagree - there are light years of difference between 'no multiplayer' and 'basic multiplayer'. Travelling together, fighting and exploring is kinda enough - it's all there is in most games. Going in, I expected it to be incredibly basic (they'd have showed it off more if it was anything more than that).

The issue is that it's not there at all - I know that all the planets will be uninhabited, I know I can't go on a ridiculous quest to try and meet up with a friend, and I know that there won't be any of the sort of emergent stories that MP can bring. The point is, Sean distinctly said that functionality was in, and never said it wouldn't be - and the lack of it changes the game in a very fundamental way (compared to say, landing on asteroids).

That being said, I don't think it's the worst crime ever as long as they actually fix it. If they can't fix it, they at least need to come out and admit it, otherwise they'll just never be trusted on anything again really.

FYI, construction is apparently in one of the next patches, so there's that as well.

[miauw62]

tbh all the vitriol in this might discourage other unscrupulous devs from making similar scams, so it's a good thing in my eyes.

[LoSboccacc]

None of this means that we can stick a designer in a room, demand extraordinary feats of prediction and shout liar at them when they fail: this is a waste of everyone’s time.

this is totally not what happened. we had a designer showcasing a certain number of features as in game and visible in trailers (see https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no_mans_sky_we_were_sold_on_a_big_list/ ) but turns out those where scripted cinematic that were miscategorized and sold as actual gameplay, and as everyone who calls a cutscene gameplay he's getting called out big time.

now, imagine the amount of salt when said features will come out as paid DLC... he's hinted (but retracted in a non negational way) that paid features where coming... for a 60$ game which is basically full of scenery and void of game.

[PTTG??]

Can you imagine what will happen when Star Citizen comes out?

[miljan]

Can you imagine what will happen when Star Citizen comes out?

Nothing, because star citizen unlike no man sky can be played, and the development is extremely open. So there will be no bullshit lies on release, as people would already play the game and know what is in it and what is not, what was cut out of the game and similar.

[forsaken1111]

Can you imagine what will happen when Star Citizen comes out?

Can you imagine what would have happened if NMS had allowed preorders to play the beta build?

So many cancellations.

[Retropunch]

Can you imagine what will happen when Star Citizen comes out?

Yeah I felt very much like that, but it's gotten to the point where I've kept on going 'They'll never pull this off' and then they keep on delivering. They've already got most of the systems in place, and it's all actual in game stuff that you can beta test.

Yeah, it's taking forever, but it's extremely open development.

[IronTomato]

Also, has there been a successful meetup between two people that anyone knows of yet? I know that thing on launch day where those two people couldn't see each other was probably because of server issues, but at the same time I still haven't heard of any two people meeting up successfully and I really hope they didn't just leave out multiplayer completely.

They left out multiplayer completely. According to this datamining thread, there is no mention of multiplayer whatsoever in the game files (other than the standard boilerplate Steam library stuff....), and since the developers decided to leave behind a bunch of other random stuff like HL2 logos and the E3 2015 demo files...that it seems most likely that multiplayer never really existed in any serious form in the first place.

That's really fucking stupid. I get that this wasn't supposed to be a game where you could go around with your buddies amd fuck things up together or anything like that, but they said until the very end that it was possible to stumble across another human, which would have been a really spectacular and exciting occurence, but surprise, it wasn't just one of the things they cut out and didn't mention, it was probably never something they bothered to do to begin with.

[Kot]

I wonder what the fuck were they thinking. It appears that the whole game was made up as a lie from the beggining, how the hell did they plan to not cause an uproar with this? I mean, fuck the cut content and stuff, but the outright lies? Uh...

[IronTomato]

I wonder what the fuck were they thinking. It appears that the whole game was made up as a lie from the beggining, how the hell did they plan to not cause an uproar with this? I mean, fuck the cut content and stuff, but the outright lies? Uh...

Pretty much my thoughts exactly. My reasoning with thinking that there probably was multiplayer was essentially "Okay, they've been saying you can see other people for years, there's no way they'd be stupid enough to leave it out after all that like people won't notice" but it seems that way for multiplayer as well as a bunch of other stuff.

I mean fuck, I am enjoying the game and all and I get that the game's features aren't written in stone, but I pity the poor bastards who bought the game thinking it was going to be so much more complex than it was, or were looking forward to the features that it ended up not having.

[Chiefwaffles]

It's interesting seeing all the people and reviewers talking about how cool it is to see other planets and being able to go there - how no other game has done that before.

Now, I don't really want to be a hipster or anything like that here, but it's already been done! The first one that comes to mind is Shores of Hazeron, which has the same exact thing! Just with more gameplay and much more uglier (BUT STILL EXISTENT) planets. And it's not just Shores of Hazeron. Elite Dangerous (kind of) and a decent amount of other games do it too.

While it's fine to like a feature, and while No Man's Sky is more polished at what it does to an extent, it's not really groundbreaking. Spore's done it. Hazeron's done it. Elite Dangerous did it. Star Citizen's doing it.


EDIT: If you want even more salt you can watch Angry Joe's review, which is mostly just specific examples of missing promised features

[Moghjubar]

Hazeron really did do just about everything core in NMS... including a bunch of stuff from that big angry 'NMS DIDNT HAVE ALL THIS STUFF' list.

Just waiting for Hazeron itself to be, well, fixed, I guess, with new creatures and ship builder in, steam release, and a return to focus on actual gameplay fixing (and of course if it was as shiny as NMS was right now, hell from what I've heard NMS is less stable than Hazeron ever was too and theres still a bunch of rabid defenders of it so... yeah.)

So far with Star Citizen, I'm torn between thinking what they have out is cool and then realizing that its mostly, to me, just the basic stuff and looking 'pretty'.  I keep seeing a ton of real problems with the game, and the ship marketing really turns me off too, but if, and a big IF they can finally maybe deliver something, I'm ok with it.  I know for damn sure that they won't get anywhere near the 'vision' though.