No Man's Sky in the news for all the wrong reasons

[Ryzza5]

It seems that every day there is a new article, video, or reddit thread adding more and more things that Sean Murray promised but (as yet has) filed to deliver in the initial August 2016 release No Man's Sky on PC and PS4.

 

 

Have plans changed drastically at the last minute, or has Sean been outright lying the whole time during his interviews?

 

Can you land on an asteroid?

Can you fly into a star?

Can you fly between solar systems without warping?

Do the the planets rotate and orbit stars?

Can you find other human players and play together?

Are the possibilities endless?

 

 

These are some of the things Sean has said definite yes' to, but players have been discovering otherwise. The planets do not move. The stars do not exist. What we have is just a basic skybox no different to the starry sky you'd see in Project CARS or The Crew at night. Warping between systems is basically a loading screen.

 

 

Players who have decrypted/unpacked the PC files have even found a special 'E3 planet' that Sean said didn't exist, and was completely random and procedurally generated.

 

Two players stood on the exact same spot of a planet, both streaming the same vista, but ultimately did not determine each others' appearance.

A network technician later used a packet monitoring tool (such as Ethereal) and conclusively stated that No Man's Sky was not transmitting any location to the Internet, therefore making multiplayer all but non-existent. (Why HG would add a last-minute scan feature to increase the chance of players 'not finding' each other and thus exposing this seems a rather odd decision).

 

 

Now, we know that Hello Games do plan to continue working on this title, and that Sean said they would be free (so they probably won't be), so perhaps something like multiplayer was intended to come later long before anyone got close to potentially meeting up. Perhaps HG and Sony couldn't come to an agreement over PS+ requirements, so an existing feature was scrapped and NDA'd. We've seen preorder boxes ship with stickers covering 'network' feature icons.

 

 

If you've missed the news, the video compilation below sums up a lot of it. If you want a more in-depth list of broken promises, well that's currently available here.

 

 

 

So does this mean the game is bad?

No. If you've not looked into every interview Sean has ever done (or read the first part of this post, sorry about that...) then what you don't know probably won't hurt you. In fact, the less you know, the better it is, because game is much simpler under the hood than the experience and feeling it attempts to deliver. An old proverb says 'Expectation postponed makes the heart sick'. Even after release, the hope, the expectation of the potential of this game still seems to be causing massive heartaches and divisions in the NMS community. Some love it. Some feel more compelled to 'complete' it despite it 'not being fun'. Others have been more badly butthurt.

 

When you take a moment a think about it, it's hard to expect a team as small as HG to deliver so much. But that doesn't excuse the scale and arrogance of mistruths that have been spread as recently as two months ago.

 

I will continue playing sparingly in the hopes that future software updates will address some of these features, so if you like, add me on Steam and we, erm, won't play together.

[RobikV3]

About half of the features they promised is missing, some dude posted the whole list and got his account deleted...

 

Here's the list if you want to read into it

 

Its a good game but it definitely isnt worth 60 Euros, In my opinion

[Ryzza5]

He deleted his own post and account, likely due to hate PMs.

[RobikV3]

Maybe I dunno, I don't use reddit its a toxic place

[TIMELESS]

Expectations were always so high it was going to be impossible for the game to live up to them, but what the hell was Sean Murray thinking? Did he decide to just make up stuff as he went a long and maybe add those non-existent features later?

[hassan1995]

From what I've seen and the let's play I'm watching I think it's worth the price tag, it's probably because these types of games appeal to me.