Just going through a few of these...
Landing on asteroids
Shaun said you 'can at the moment' in his one line reply about a build over a year old. Presumably it was removed. If you could land on an asteroid however, what would you do? The only asteroids in the game are entirely barren.
Destroying space stations and fleets
"So if you try and destroy a whole space station or destroy a whole fleet"
He doesn't exactly speak of it as if it's actually in the game, just something you could potentially do. You can destroy 'entire fleets' (groups of space ships flying together).
Larger Freighters actually moving
This is very briefly shown in an older build of the game, not sure why it doesn't happen in-game, but I'm also not sure that it would alter the gameplay experience significantly at all. Frighters appear in-game, but they only seem to warp around.
I think Shauns lack of transparency regarding the multiplayer was wrong, but I think people are just splitting hairs attempting to isolate these relatively minute aspects of the game that do not feature. If we subjected every independent game developer to this with against what they have said in their development video logs then there would certainly be a large number of developers whose games failed to meet their pre-release expectations.
Big budget games tend to do far worse, completely miss representing their titles with inachievable levels of anti-aliasing and texturing, representing the release of a game across all platforms. When was the last time a driving game actually looked like its trailers? When was the last time an open world game truly featured the freedom represented in its developer videos?
I was actually talking to a friend last night, about how I can't remember the last time I've felt a trailer from EA truly represented the gameplay experience.
This Battlefield 4's trailer for instance, if you were to look at the gameplay exhibited there, you would think almost the entire game were destructible. The entire thing is shot like some crazy Micheal Bay movie, and it's at complete odds with the moment to moment gameplay any player is liable to experience.
We live in an industry where it's become perfectly common to show target renders and cinematic, stylised gameplay sequences (e.g. Watch Dogs E3 trailer) that do not represent actual gameplay, yet are used to with very clear intent to convey the actual gameplay experience. While No Man's Sky may not have lived up to everything Shaun had planned, do people truly believe that if the lifeless frighters were moving, it would be a better game? Landing on barren asteroids with nothing to do on them, would that make it a better game?
Consumers are disappointed because they looked on this experience with incredibly high anticipation, and for them, it hasn't delivered however very few of these 'missing features' were likely to change that experience. For the most part however, complaints regard the density of the game, the repetition of its gameplay, the fact that what you actually do in the game, isn't very interesting for people to do (not everyone, some enjoy it). Would the ability to name your ship make it any more enjoyable to fly? There are certainly some game changing features, like multiplayer (probably the best example) but we're talking about an interview from almost 2 years ago. Everyone was able to see before purchase that the game did not have MP registered on the box, Shaun certainly should have been more transparent, but if you ended up spending £50 on something that wasn't there, then that's on you.
If it hits launch day and you're still unsure if a feature your counting on is or isn't in the game, then why not just hold off? Why not wait a day or two and find out? I think a lot of NMS was sold on the mystery of space, and Shaun took that too far eluding to the details of some of the games mechanics, but ultimately it's not unrecognisable like some suggest.
