Why Is No Man's Sky Getting SO MUCH HATE?

@Ryiah I meant that he said it was not designed to be about multiplayer, that a multiplayer experience is not what people should expect from it. That's what I heard in the last few months anyway.

Tell me, what is it that was ever said specifically that the game would have, regarding multiplayer? Avatar visibility? OK, what else? Absolutely nothing! So they failed to deliver the promised avatar visibility, probably because the technical challenges were huge compared to the benefit to the core product. Crime no.1, guilty as charged, and that's it. The other 99% of this game came exactly as expected marketed, which is no mean feat.

There's a huge difference between an MMO experience and avatar visibility. If the game was marketed as the next Eve online, and this is what we get, it would be a totally different story.

 

What was said specifically doesn't matter. What matters is that the market's expectation differed dramatically from the delivered product. In many human endeavours, including marketing, perception is reality.

 

There's a huge difference between simply seeing the presence of the other player and being able to interact with them to some degree and that's what was mentioned in those video clips. That you would be able to see other players and you would be able to interact with them to some degree (being able to shoot them is a great deal for a game that only has limited gameplay to begin with).

 

@BoredMormon no argument there, though I think they were totally unprepared for all the people thinking it was going to the the second coming and rapture all-in-one! The question though is if they actually lied, and while they possibly did regarding avatar visibility, that's all - the whole rest of the game is still what people had any reason to expect based on their comments.

@Ryiah I think that's the core issue, the game is boring and extremely limited, and when you contrast that with the incredibly wild expectations, it's no wonder that people are ready to take up pitchforks in regards to anything the devs may or may not have alluded to in some interview or other.

I still don't think it was a great move by Murray to not clarify things toward the end a lot more, and the whole server excuse is possibly total bull, but it remains that the game was not intended to be a multiplayer experience and as such came pretty much as expected, at least for me.

 

Calling it "avatar visibility" is a bit of an over-trivialisation, don't you think? When my wife and I play Guild Wars together it's not because our avatars are "visible", it's because sharing the experience makes it fundamentally different even if it's otherwise functionally identical.

 

Fair point.

I'll tell you what I think happened:

• Murray wanted you to be able to play alongside other people, like Journey which he seems to refer to a lot;
• Murray says that ^^ is what is going to be in the game;
• Murray realises toward the end that it's going to be very hard to get a parallel experience happening in amongst all the procedural generation and server issues. Coupled with the likelihood that there were a mountain of bugs to deal with toward crunch time.
• Murray decides to postpone it til the next update or two since it's hardly likely that anyone is going to meet up in all these trillions of planets - and keeps quiet about it. But he does pretty much say toward the end that people shouldn't expect a multiplayer experience from the game.
  
• People do meet up, and he says "We didn't expect it to happen so quickly"

End of story. Bad press management, a bit of bull**** by omission, but the technical achievement that is the game rolls out working quite well and exactly as specified (at least on consoles). Unfortunately the game is overall a bit disappointing to all these people who though proc gen was some kind of ether for their own imaginations, and they latch onto his mistakes as if he just sold them a can of thin air.

All this sounds like the sort of mistake anyone could make given the circumstances. It annoys me that it all comes down to that little issue for a lot of people - though not very surprising given the hype-train-wreck (which Hello games had little if anything to do with).

Anyway, that's my view. For me, I'd just cut them a bit of slack and enjoy the game. But these days internet lynches are more interesting than creative achievements it seems ...

 

I have no idea if your idea of events is anywhere near the mark, but a high-risk feature like multiplayer isn't something that should be left so late that you "realise toward the end" that it's not going to work.

Ignore raving lynch mobs. We're developers, what can we perhaps learn from it? A few potential things:
1. Don't advertise features that you don't know you can deliver on.
2. Be clear if the plan changes.
3. Identify high-risk items and deal with them up front.

 

Sure, I didn't say they didn't make mistakes! Anyway this is all just pub talk, I'm just saying I think there's an overreaction. Despite the fact that I think the gameplay is probably fairly boring, I think the devs did a great job of making something pretty unique, and I respect them for that.

 

Proof?

Allow me to counter with the Diablo series, Dwarf Fortress, X-COM, MineCraft etc...

The correct statement should have been "Procedural content and gameplay isn't a magic bullet". You need to do your homework with procedural systems, design them carefully and implement them with care.

No Mans Sky is just an over-hyped product that didn't deliver on the MANY promises made.

I'll just leave this here:

(edit: error - not enough morning coffee, spelling error I did)

 

if you actually care about the ending, don't peek

Spoiler

I think the final nail in the coffin for the "the devs didn't mislead" argument is the fact that there isn't actually anything at the centre of the universe. After the devs built up the main goal of getting to the middle it's a total farce in which it just resets you to the beginning and you get to start over again... parallels to Molyneux seem spot on since there wasn't any grande finale to Godus either lol

edit: dammit, you posted the angry review with that in it whilst I was writing

My greatest issue with NMS is that it is high profile and has greatly added to making the words "procedurally generated" something to avoid in games for many. For all the things it could be used for it ended up being all cosmetic stuff totally irrelevant to the actual gameplay of the game, having a huge breath of content isn't engaging if it's all the same interactions. If the generation techniques are used "properly" they can add a great deal of depth and replayability to games... but we're going to have to come up with a new phrase to describe them now

random generation
procedural generation
made by chimps on typewriters?



edit: oh, and was I the only one who was amused by people saying things like "it's got seemless transitions between space and planet without loading screens" ?

 

Well I guess I have a different perspective to people actually playing it, I consider the tech itself to be an incredible achievement in itself. It was definitely not used properly though and the gameplay really lets it down. I just hope that they realized that it was a mistake to try and go the whole nine yards procedurally, and for their next project use it more as a 'smart asset builder' for a better designed experience.

 

We've already seen the tech in other games though. Systems for generating the appearance of the aliens, the flora/fauna, the starships, the weapons, etc is basically identical to the system Borderlands uses for its weapons. Space Engineers has procedural voxel-based planets.

About the only thing I will give them props for is putting all of this together and having it perform decently. Space Engineers is stupidly demanding (needs a strong processor, a strong graphics card, at least double digit memory, etc) and that's even without having built some voxel ships to fly around.

Once they patched out the instruction set requirements and the memory leak the performance on my aging Phenom II is very impressive (it's an eight year old product line at this point). Generation times between systems (which is what the hyperdrive screen is) is short too.

 

Why is it wrong to go the nine yards procedurally? It has nothing to do with their complete lack of gameplay and the lack of purpose in the game. Procedural systems are just a means to an end. You can have one procedural system or make them all procedural. It is up to the designers and developers. Some games lend themselves better to procedural systems then others the same way that some lend themselves better to handcrafted content with hand-painted shadows.

Minecraft as an example relies heavily on procedural systems but it is basically a survival game at first. You defend against monsters with your limited resources and some mods enhance this experience even further. It later turns into a Lego-ish experience that allow kids to construct and play in their dream worlds while older people can use it to express themselves through the objects and systems that they build. One person builds the classical Star Trek ship while another person builds a working, virtual calculator.

No Mans Sky only have the resource gathering and exploring but none of the deeper systems. Well, a story as well if you can even call it that. It is just a very poor MineCraft clone with prettier graphics.

 

I think a lot of it is that if you cut features don't sell it for $60 !

When I heard the price for what is essentially an indie game I was like: r u 'aving a larf?

I think it should have been $20. Then I think the reviews would have been more positive.

Because even with the bad press I STILL want to play it.

(Wasn't it made in Unity? Then probably the developers check out this forum! "Hello!")

 

It was the perfect game to wow the general public / gaming media. Sean Murray was even featured on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, what other indie game developer can ever hope to achieve something like that?

The sad thing is that I don't think many actual developers were fooled by all this, and I feel it's a shame that so many gamers were tricked by all the buzzwords, hype and lies surrounding the game. It's probably also part of the reason the game is getting so much hate, because so much of the praise, hype and media attention No Man's Sky received prior to launch was uncalled for. The game is nothing new. Procedural generation is nothing new. Even on this scale it's nothing new. But No Man's Sky had the right setting, the right aesthetics, the right buzzwords to peak the interest of nearly anyone interested in gaming. It sounded like the dream game for almost anyone if you yourself just sprinkled in some added hopes and dreams for what the finished game would be. And there was so much mystery surrounding the game because the actual gameplay was never revealed.

For me there was only one possible gameplay that fit in the mold they presented and that was some type of survival game and they are all the rage these days so it wasn't far fetched to think so. In the end that turned out to be true and in my opinion, and in the opinion of many others, this gameplay was implemented very poorly. It felt like they were so caught up in their own buzzwords that they completely forgot there should be a rewarding gameplay experience in there as well.

I think No Man's Sky would be a far better game if they either dropped the survival aspect of it completely and focused on the discovery of planets/species/the center of the universe, which is what they had been hyping all along. Or if they instead focused on the survival aspect of the game and actually made that engaging and about survival. I haven't played the game myself, but from what I've seen and heard it seems you have access to every resource on nearly every planet, nearly every planet has buildings, nearly every planet has alien life, nearly every planet has intelligent life, which in effect makes every planet feel the same and almost removes the incentive to actually travel in space, which should have been the focus of the game. If they instead made the game more realistic and made more planets barren or void of life, it would incentivize space tracel, it would make the game actually a survival game where you could die and had to restart because you ended up in a system without the resources you needed, it would make you treasure and remember resource rich planets, it would make it an actual event when you discovered signs of life or actual alien life, and it would make collecting enough fuel to travel to a moon or another planet an attempt to survive rather than just the next step on an endless grind. I feel like the gameplay they ended up with was a complete dud and I can't fathom how it's possible to be this good at hyping a game and creating the framework for a cool game and this bad at creating the actual game.

 

They built their own engine from scratch.

 

@Ryiah I think they did it far better than anyone else though, and even if they aren't the first it's still great to see. I haven't played space engineers but their planets look uncomfortably similar to Unity standard terrain, at least in the pics I saw. NMS is much more atmospheric.

In any case, I just like to see people doing that sort of stuff, and they did it well.

@Deon-Cadme what I mean by the whole nine yards, is to create the whole game procedurally. For all practical purposes I don't think it's possible to insert a meaningful amount of gameplay/level design into a game that's fully procedurally generated at runtime, the the latter relies too heavily on the former and you just get cookie-cut repetitive mechanics, which is what happened. So what I'm saying is that they should have made the tech more of an artistic tool for a level designer, rather than giving a self-absorbed algorithm a free hand. Proc gen is a huge asset but needs to be used with restraint at its current state, especially if you want to create a dramatic experience for the player.

@yoonitee I don't agree, I think they should even have sold it for even more. It's a niche game and should be priced high so that only people really interested in it actually buy it. That said, it's not worth the money imo, but that's because the game seems not very fun, rather than because of any lack of features.

@TwiiK you keep using all these 'buzzwords' like 'lies' and 'fooled' but I think that if people can't deal with a bit of ambiguity that's not anyone's problem but their own. OK, they f***ed up about 'multiplayer' (I hesitate to use the term) but apart from that it's precisely the game it was meant to be. Whether or not it's actually fun is a different story though.

 

One player managed to completely max out their exosuit, their ship, and their multi-tool on their starting planet. I've only spent a few hours on one planet myself but it became very obvious I could stay on it and eventually find all the upgrades.

http://gamerant.com/no-mans-sky-starting-planet-max-everything/

 

They definitely nailed some aspects of the game.

If it had the originally promised features (sans the hype) it would have definitely been worth more than $60 but it didn't even come close to that. It's very much a shell of what the original game was supposed to be.

I posted this back on the first page and I'll post it again. It's an extensive list of features that were promised during the early days of development that never actually made it into the game.

http://www.onemanslie.info/the-original-reddit-post/

 

@Billy4184 - Ah, but that is where you just lack experience in design, art, math and science etc. It is all about patterns and how to combine them in meaningful ways. In a simplified way, Scientist brake down the world into patterns, artists are mad scientists that randomly combine stuff in search of new patterns and designers are somewhere in the middle.
Programmers are the cursed souls that have to implement the mess xD

Ok, never wondered how your own brain works? It brakes everything into patterns, stores it and cataloges it. It doesn't matter if it is an image, sound, equation, feeling etc.

Never felt like you heard, saw, felt that "thing" before...

Now, procedural content and games are simply the art of identifying these patterns and applying them to the game. This is very difficult and that is why so many fail but modern science is also young and there is so many things that we haven't analyzed sufficiently yet. Variation is just an illusion based on our limited senses and changing details... watch enough movies and you will start predict the chain of events... why?

Games are the same thing, know enough about level design and you can begin to define a set of rules and patterns. Apply your knownledge about pacing and the difficulty will fall into place and you can use the same pacing + area theme + events to define the musical score that just happens to be procedurally generated as well based on...

Now restraints, that is an interesting topic All games, even life have restraints... that is what defines our boundaries and they are the second step of procedural systems. You define a min and max value for everything, often with an x-dimensional curve between these points of limitations to ensure reasonably similar results.

Procedural enemies will quickly get out of hands without limitations, baby elephant clowns that kill by injecting acid into their opponents and sucking their innards out through a straw? Or we define the first limitation as, all opponents have to be humanoid... good, no more motorcycle ants on the streets that always get in your way when they help old ladies over the street.... next limitation is...

Limitations is one of the pieces that create order and meaning in things.

ps. this area is a hobby of mine when I don't work with design, programming and art etc so I know it very well

 

I think this has to do mostly with the partnership with Sony. I could be wrong though.

 

I think the angry review @Deon-Cadme posted further up sums it up quite well.

I don't feel like it's a matter of hype getting out of control. For me hype is generated by the gamers themselves, the fans of the game, but here it was Hello Games actively advertising the game with features it didn't contain, and they're still doing that:
http://www.craveonline.com/entertainment/1022095-no-mans-skys-steam-page-guilty-false-advertising

Alien Colonial Marines did that as well and if I remember correctly there was a lawsuit filed against them for false advertisement. I don't feel like it's unthinkable that something like that could happen here as well.

 

@Ryiah I definitely agree that list should have been clarified well before development.

@Deon-Cadme I have quite a lot of experience in math and science, if university is anything to go by, and I've dabbled in terrain and sound generation myself. I think it's pretty clear that for all practical purposes, at the moment, fully procedural gameplay/level design is not up to scratch, since we don't know anywhere near enough about the rules that govern what makes it fun or not, or how to create the boundaries for an algorithm that could produce any sort of variety in this field while maintaining quality. We barely even know how to make a terrain that doesn't look like a perlin texture. It's one thing to expect things from the future, but it isn't here yet.

What we can do, and what interests me more than anything else at the moment, is to create smart tools that provide a game designer with a huge amount of content and structure, and control of important aspects of that content, for as little input as possible. In any case, it's a much more reasonable and useful target in my opinion.

 

Its not that procedural stuff is inherently flawed it's that the people who are doing it have not done it well enough. There are procedural games that don't have such flaws. You have to understand the algorithms and what all of their implications are and how that creates gameplay and problems and fun and so on. Procedural content does have the potential to be very powerful and efficient, but it needs to be in the right hands.

 

Every large developer uses procedural techniques artistically, from textures to terrain, and modifies it after the fact. I told everyone on the want to make AAA game thread months ago the same thing. Everyone ignored that and chased their own opinions.

Fast forward past NMS and people are realising that's the way after all. Even substance designer is procedural, and yet artist controlled. World machine. Etc etc.

As for actual content being procedural, in a highly successful game, I direct everyone to Diablo series. They do not mention the P word anywhere, and do not need to.

 

For me procedural has always been primarily about closing the gap between the artists mind and the game editor. About pushing the boundaries of what the computer can infer from limited but still substantial input. I don't want the computer to take design away from me, I want it to help me make what I want to make as fast as possible. And I think it's possible to go a long way beyond world machine and substance designer, although I love that software for taking a leap in the right direction.

@imaginaryhuman nobody is saying that procedural is 'flawed' - that would make no sense - it's simply not relevant yet to the human experience. One of the main issues in my view is that human emotion is not mathematically 'correct' - although a lot of it is a simplified version of something that's objectively logical, we bear a lot of circumstantial, and in some ways contradictory effects from our history that are not universal. So attempting to condense it into something as universal as a mathematical formula is only going to get us so far. Perhaps some form of set theory would do a better job, but due to its inconsistency, it's going to be hard to make it elegant imo.

But anyway, that's just speculation.

 

Yeah - just needs to be a time saving thing, such as painting erosion and detail on a basemesh terrain. Doesn't need to be full retard (anything full retard doesn't end well).

 

I'm glad this is a conversation being had here. And despite the fact that these kind of things have a tendency to really heat up and (for some reason) get personal, this one is relatively civilized and diplomatic!

No matter which side of the argument you're on, I think there's an important lesson to be learned that applies to us Regular Joes (and Janes!): creating your game is only a part of the work you have to do as an independent developer. And those other parts can be just as difficult, potentially even more dangerous.

 

Well, on a 100km x 100km terrain that's still a lot of work

One thing I think would be a useful approach would be to try to use statistical methods/neural networks to analyse work as it is being created and then have the computer continue it as soon as the artist determines that it has a good enough grasp on the 'rules'. For example an artist might paint a part of a model and as soon as the computer has 'learned' the style, it fills it in. It's a very general concept but it has worked for other fields where it was too difficult to manually determine the rules that govern something, such as control systems in robotics.

There's some sort of software someone posted on another thread that analyses and creates variations of a game asset, this sort of thing is very interesting to me.

 

Or a human curating the procgen output like it (afaik) already had been done on the first Populus game.

 

I think you're referring to this:

https://artomatix.com/

 

That's it. I can only find stuff about textures on their site, but if you google around you can find stuff about them creating variations of characters and so on, not sure what happened to that.

 

In my experience it usually means a bigger company has acquired the tech and keeps it under wraps while polishing it till they can release it as a product. That might take years though.

 

Re: Procedural Generation - I think it works fine, it's just not an "easy button" for content. If you want the game to be entertaining for X hours you need to put in roughly as much work on content as a non-procedural game that's entertaining for X hours. Maybe a little less, randomization can stretch things out a bit, but you still need to have interesting stuff for people to find, and not just the same stuff repeated.

Now what it does let you do is have 10 million planets instead of one, and that shouldn't be discounted. But if you try to create those 10 million with only a handful of content, it's going to get repetitive after a while.

Edit: Ok, there is a case where that's not true. If you manage to create a system with significant emergent behavior, and that emergent behavior is interesting, then you can get a lot more entertainment out than the amount of content you put in. Doing so is easier said than done however!


Re: Multiplayer - It's not that it's a big feature (the planets being too homogeneous is why I'm not getting it yet personally, I couldn't care less about multiplayer), but it is false advertising. If a restaurant says they'll sell me a burger with bacon on it, but it turns out they don't even have bacon in the kitchen, then they should have crossed it off the menu before taking orders for it! And definitely not make excuses like "No, the bacon is totally there, maybe a seagull stole yours when you weren't looking."

If they'd said any time before launch, even really close before, that multiplayer wasn't in yet, I doubt there would have been that much anger about it.

 

I would like to see "the making of NMS" the movie. It's like the sequel to "Indie Game the Movie". And what happens is that Phil Fish, flies in to save the day and the Sean Murray and Phil Fish have a fight. And it turns out that Sean Murray is Phil Fish's father. And then Sean Murray falls into a bottomless pit. Then Phil Fish rescues No Man's Sky and renames is Fez II. The End.

Also, it is not hard to make a game with a quintillion planets. Here is mine:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. 5 PRINT "No Mince Pie"
3. 15 PRINT "-----------------"
4. 10 LET CONSONANTS$ = "BCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ"
5. 20 LET VOWELS$ = "AEIOU"
6. 25 LET COLORS[5] = ["red", "pink", "rose", "off red", "light red", "dark red"];
7. 30 PRINT "You are in a ship flying through space. You crash land"
8. 40 PRINT "You land on a planet"
9. 50 PRINT "The name of the planet is "
10. 60 FOR X=1 TO 10
11. 70 PRINT CONSONANT$[ RAND(21) ]
12. 80 PRINT VOWEL$[ RAND(5) ]
13. 90 NEXT X
14. 100 PRINT "The planet has "+RAND(10)+" moons."
15. 105 PRINT "The sky is "+COLORS$[ RAND(6) ] +" and the grass is "+COLORS$[RAND(6)];
16. 110 INPUT "Would you like to go North, South, East or West?" ; A$
17. 120 PRINT "You go "+A$+"and fall into a wormhole."
18. 125 PRINT "When you come out the stars all look different."
19. 130 GOTO 30
20.  

 

I think the main reason people are complaining about the multiplayer issue is because that is a very clear cut example. The developer clearly talked about multiplayer, and yet the game is definitely a single player only game. Even on the 8th (right before launch), the developer was still being misleading about multiplayer.

August 8 comments from the developer:
"To be super clear - No Man's Sky is not a multiplayer game. Please don't go in looking for that experience."
"The chances of two players ever crossing paths in a universe this large is pretty much zero."
"We do have some online features and easter eggs so people can know they are playing in the same universe. It's about cool moments."

The first comment make sense, and he should have stopped with that comment. The second comment is the same one he said for the past three years regarding the game being multiplayer but expecting players to seldom meet due to the sheer size of the procedural universe. By saying "pretty much zero", the developer is still alluding to having multiplayer, even though he would know by the day prior to launch that there was no multiplayer. Saying "pretty much zero" chance of seeing another player due to the size of the universe is misleading, since there is literally no chance of seeing another player in game even if the players intentionally go to the same location in the game.

The developer really should have said something like "Players will never see other players because it is a single player game." Another acceptable statement could have been "We cut out the multiplayer experience for the initial launch so we could ship the game, but we are planning on adding that feature later." That statement would have made more sense.

Sane people understand that it would take a massive amount of effort to deliver the entire game the developer promised. If the developer had been completely honest about the state of certain features, a lot of people would have forgiven some of the shortcomings.

 

Late to the party commenting on this, but no, of course trailers are promises. That's literally their purpose - Promising people what they can get out of the final product. It's all cherrypicked of course, but the cherries should still actually be in the game. I shouldn't expect the product to be literally exactly like the trailer, but the things shown and mentioned should be reflected in the final product for the most part. Otherwise, it was simply embellishment, and that's a form of lying. Marketing tries to skirt the line of lies all the time, and often embellishes to some degree, but when a trailer blatantly shows things you won't get later without explanation or apologies, that's not okay. There are few things that will harm your customers' trust more than lying. Hyping up the most zealous, devout fans might shield you from initial backlash against your lies, but once the hype dies down, all that's left is disappointment. Don't lie.

 

I think it was more a case that the texture system was finally production ready, whereas previously they were showing off all their tech as work in progress, so they're de-emphasizing the stuff you can't actually use yet. Their timelines on some of that are still "years". They're pretty communicative with people who have signed up, they seem to listen to feedback on things like pricing (it has gone down a lot and it wasn't bad to start with).

Though it still seems likely they'll vanish in the maw of Adobe or some equally uninspiring fate.

 

Well I hope it's just that textures were a better warm-up for the learning algorithms. I can imagine that it'd be much easier than creating model variations.

 

You're evil. I've been feeling the urge lately to rewrite an old QuickBASIC game of mine. Now it's even stronger.

 

I think the biggest reason is because they lied. The lead dev was actually on Colbert and said straight out that other players would be the only way you knew what you looked like, other players can see you. In other interviews the lead dev also said that you could be killed by other players and they could take all your inventory. There would be multiplayer pvp, but it was unlikely to happen because the universe was so big.

Then it comes out and the server does not even track your position in the universe. There is no way other people playing could possibly know where you are, let alone see you, fight you, or take your stuff.

For me as a person, I knew the the game would suck so did not buy it. There are times were procedurally generated can be a good thing, but every time I listed to an interview, I knew NMS would end up just one boring world after another with just slightly different graphics and color pallets.

NMS is simply a $5 steam survival game that was priced at $60. The gameplay is very generic and can be found in dozens of other survival games. The overall cool part of the game ( billions of planets) is meaningless because you end up playing on just a few, which are all similar and involve the same boring gameplay. The Mr. Potato Head method they used to create different species is rediculious... oh look, on this planet the slightly-pink elephants are flying using butterfly wings, on the last planet, they were darker pink and had hummingbird wings.

Should have been a $5 steam survival game

 

He wasn´t vague. He was on Colbert and said directly that other players would be able to see your character.

What he did do was tried to lie to create a reason why players would not see each other. ´oh, the universe is so big´. But the fact is the game does not even communicate player information to other players.

Player ´hey, this is a multiplayer game but I never see other players´
Dev ´yeah, that is because the universe is so big´
Player ´wow, cool´..

What a great way to not have to actually code or deal with multiplayer into your game. Works great until slueths check their data streams.

 

The reason I found it odd is simply that it requires a huge amount of dev work to add multiplayer, pvp and looting. A small indie team making an already extensive game just cannot put resources into a ´feature´ that would almost never be used. But he said it, and repeated it.

 

This is a common problem with a lot of indie developers and why you see so many games end up generic. They do the easy stuff first while hyping the unique stuff. Then when it comes time to do the unique stuff, they can´t get it done and end up releasing with just the generic stuff.

I always think you do the hard stuff first, because not only are you then sure you can accomplish it, but also because it is much easier to estimate time on the easy stuff you have left to do.

 

When reading this thread yesterday I was thinking the same thing. What a beautiful solution to multiplayer. Basically every single player game could use this thinking... oh you're not seeing other people well remember there are a lot of levels. Other people must be on different levels/different areas then you are. Then throw in some bots occasionally running across screen MIKE674 etc to help seal the illusion. lol

As you said though only works til tech savvy folks check the code. Have to at least throw some multiplayer/client-server/socket code in there.

 

Lol, that was the thing that made it clear for me there would never be multiplayer in this game from the day it was announced. The single fact that the game would try to emulate the size of an actual galaxy and that we were told that the chances of two people meeting were slim to none. No developer would ever spend time on programming something that was likely never going to happen, especially when we're talking a feature that could easily double the scope of the project, like multiplayer would.

I like writing and I'm trying to become better at it so I'm currently writing two articles about No Man Sky at the moment. The first is about how I feel this is the biggest con game in gaming ever, easily worse than Alien: Colonial Marines or anything Ubisoft has published, and I personally hope it has repercussions for Hello Games and Sean Murray with how deceitful they've been from the start, and still are. The second is my take on how I feel the gameplay should have been, or at least what I think would have resulted in a game that was much more unique and true to their initial vision, because I think it's obvious that this game suffers from feature creep and if someone actually went in and removed a lot of features from it, like the entire survival aspect, and in turn tuned and polished the actual core exploration aspect of the game it would turn out a much better game.

Also, I found this comic which I absolutely love
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4xcam6/mean_surray_dodging_questions/

This was my favorite version of it because it shows Sean Murray how I envision him at the moment:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4xcam6/mean_surray_dodging_questions/d6f02ty

 

It would have been acceptable perhaps at an indie game price point rather than AAA pricing, but they charged full whack.

Now this isn't a debate over the economics of game development but like it or not at that price point people expect some basic milestones to be hit in terms of content. Those would be things like either having a compelling narrative, or having visually stunning and varied graphics, or having excellent game mechanics, or deeply satisfying interaction models.

In it's current state No Man's Sky fails to deliver a triple A experience in every case, this makes it a pretty average to poor game at any price point. Of course that might still be fine if that was what was originally put on offer. Instead the company presented a different game with far more content, so users feel that it's bait & switch.

On the plus side they do now have quite a bit of dough that could allow them to build a more substantial and experienced team and infrastructure capable of delivering either the updates required to get No mans Sky to where it should be, or maybe even making a new IP that's not as tarnished, it's risky though and I'm not sure gamers will give them the time to do either.

 

If i look on the steam page nowhere does it say multiplayer, its says: Online Interactions whatever that means
http://store.steampowered.com/app/275850

If you look at what hes saying he says there is no multiplayer, the chances of 2 people running into each is low. That they have some "online features", but he doesnt actually say its multiplayer

 

Things like this are great for folks like me. I can work some of it into marketing for my little games without coming right out and specifying exactly which case I am referring to. In a positive and / or humorous way of course.

 

Very interesting post and very good situation for learning. It even inspired a blog post for me. Thanks!