Reddit Compiles Definitive List of All NMS Missing Features/False Marketing +Sources

That's a big compiled list. I've quickly read over the whole thing and it's still a bit shocking.

gabe-newell-valve-online-marketing.png
 
The WORST thing of all this mess is that game developers are reading this whole thing in two potentially catastrophic ways:

1- bullshots and fake trailers that build the hype sell an otherwise mediocre game (because of metacritic score), the large majority of players will buy the game based on what is shown, even if what is being shown is all fake.

2- Sean Murray has been TOO CANDID. Because the players' error was to "interpret suggestions and ideas as promises". Saying that all information on the game should be even more closed down and in the hands of marketing that knows better how to use it for maximum profits.

So NMS *commercial* success despite the mediocre reviews is being taken by the industry as a push to release more hype, more false information, because IT SELLS ANYWAY.

This couldn't have taken a worse bent.
 
I understand all this criticism, but at the same time people were expecting way too much from this tiny developer. They shouldn't have gone full price. Should have released at a lower cost, with subsequent expansions so that people would get that their vision was still being developed.

In regards to this list I have to say it's incredibly nitpicky, but I guess that's the point of it.

I think we ought to equate smaller indie developer with "cannot charge full price". There is a preconception of value that either way is wrong and not good for the return of A and AA gaming to the scene.
 
Also, Hello Games did not promise they would simulate the astrophysics of an entire solar system just like not everything in the planet itself is fully physics based.

The Atlantic said:
“The physics of every other game—it’s faked,” the chief architect Sean Murray explained. “When you’re on a planet, you’re surrounded by a skybox—a cube that someone has painted stars or clouds onto. If there is a day to night cycle, it happens because they are slowly transitioning between a series of different boxes.” The skybox is also a barrier beyond which the player can never pass. The stars are merely points of light. In No Man’s Sky however, every star is a place that you can go. The universe is infinite. The edges extend out into a lifeless abyss that you can plunge into forever.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/artificial-universe-no-mans-sky/463308/
 
I understand all this criticism, but at the same time people were expecting way too much from this tiny developer. They shouldn't have gone full price. Should have released at a lower cost, with subsequent expansions so that people would get that their vision was still being developed.

In regards to this list I have to say it's incredibly nitpicky, but I guess that's the point of it.

There's dozens of indie darling developers with 2-4 hour games liked by both critics and consumers alike, and it's not like wildly disproportional expectations is a serious problem for indie devs at large. You don't really see the "but they're a small team!" defense being trotted out for those 2-4 hour games either, because the complaints aren't there in the first place.

People just didn't wake up one day and decided in unison to start misrepresenting Hello Games and only Hello Games. Murray was the one talking up these features and setting the stage for the rest of the expectations.

With regards to the "nitpickiness" of the list, defenders countless times were pulling out the "prove it!!" card ever since the game launched and pretending like people were pulling these expectations out of their ass. This is a compilation with hard evidence to substantiate the claims. What's wrong with that?
 
In this very thread I just read a patch note saying planets rotation effects were reduced due to play testing, so they are still there and were stronger in the gold master version, as well as a poster citing examples of how he/she experience planet rotation in the game.
Also, Hello Games did not promise they would simulate the astrophysics of an entire solar system just like not everything in the planet itself is fully physics based.



...just like every developer/publisher?
I did not see Nintendo spending a lot of effort in dispelling the notion that Wii Sports and the Wiimote were not 1:1 mapping and why you could actually just as well if not better play by flicking your wrist (the "but it is just so much fun" defence can be used in that case successfully, but also here).

The planets don't rotate period. Reduced means off in this case.

As to simulating the phsics, there's this:

Atlantic article

“The physics of every other game—it’s faked,” the chief architect Sean Murray explained. “When you’re on a planet, you’re surrounded by a skybox—a cube that someone has painted stars or clouds onto. If there is a day to night cycle, it happens because they are slowly transitioning between a series of different boxes.” The skybox is also a barrier beyond which the player can never pass. The stars are merely points of light. In No Man’s Sky however, every star is a place that you can go. The universe is infinite. The edges extend out into a lifeless abyss that you can plunge into forever.

“With us,” Murray continued, “when you're on a planet, you can see as far as the curvature of that planet. If you walked for years, you could walk all the way around it, arriving back exactly where you started. Our day to night cycle is happening because the planet is rotating on its axis as it spins around the sun. There is real physics to that. We have people that will fly down from a space station onto a planet and when they fly back up, the station isn't there anymore; the planet has rotated. People have filed that as a bug.”
 
In this very thread I just read a patch note saying planets rotation effects were reduced due to play testing, so they are still there and were stronger in the gold master version, as well as a poster citing examples of how he/she experience planet rotation in the game.
Also, Hello Games did not promise they would simulate the astrophysics of an entire solar system just like not everything in the planet itself is fully physics based.

Follow this Gaffers posts, he explains well his theory that the planets do not rotate.

They do not rotate at all, nor they move in solar system.

My post regarding to that. I also tested it myself extensively ingame.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=213818301&postcount=229
 
Pretty damning list, Hello Games could work for Ubisoft with all of that bs.

It's nice to see the backlash and them being held accountable though. That wouldn't have happened a few years ago.
 

Your quote talks about the physics of a planet, day and night cycle being also based on planet rotation and real physics (see poster talking about the way the day and night cycles worked on a planet in its North Pole compared to everywhere else) mixed with being able to travel to stars and far away planets which does not imply this is a astrophysical simulation of an entire solar system or galaxy down to the smallest speck of sand.
I still think that we are blowing this way out of proportions.
 
Your quote talks about the physics of a planet, day and night cycle being also based on planet rotation and real physics (see poster talking about the way the day and night cycles worked on a planet in its North Pole compared to everywhere else) mixed with being able to travel to stars and far away planets which does not imply this is a astrophysical simulation of an entire solar system or galaxy down to the smallest speck of sand.
I still think that we are blowing this way out of proportions.

Again, see my comment above.
 
I understand all this criticism, but at the same time people were expecting way too much from this tiny developer. They shouldn't have gone full price. Should have released at a lower cost, with subsequent expansions so that people would get that their vision was still being developed.

In regards to this list I have to say it's incredibly nitpicky, but I guess that's the point of it.

You don't ridiculously promise what you can't deliver just becuase "Things in development change", "People don't understand game development" etc as your excuse. In how many interviews Sean said you can see other players?
 
In this very thread I just read a patch note saying planets rotation effects were reduced due to play testing, so they are still there and were stronger in the gold master version, as well as a poster citing examples of how he/she experience planet rotation in the game.

Patch notes from Hello Games? Sounds legit. There is no planet rotation. Play to find out.
 
Your quote talks about the physics of a planet, day and night cycle being also based on planet rotation and real physics (see poster talking about the way the day and night cycles worked on a planet in its North Pole compared to everywhere else) mixed with being able to travel to stars and far away planets which does not imply this is a astrophysical simulation of an entire solar system or galaxy down to the smallest speck of sand.
I still think that we are blowing this way out of proportions.
Stars don't even exist as objects in the game, they are part of the skybox which is what being rotated. You can't even fly to them.
Planets and moons are also fixed in place.

How important that is to your enjoyment of the game is subjective, but that's definitely not close to the picture he's painting in that Atlantic article.
 
Follow this Gaffers posts, he explains well his theory that the planets do not rotate.

Going back to this quote and the earlier one posted in the same post:

“With us,” Murray continued, “when you're on a planet, you can see as far as the curvature of that planet. If you walked for years, you could walk all the way around it, arriving back exactly where you started. Our day to night cycle is happening because the planet is rotating on its axis as it spins around the sun. There is real physics to that. We have people that will fly down from a space station onto a planet and when they fly back up, the station isn't there anymore; the planet has rotated. People have filed that as a bug.”

Although he does mix the talk of we use physics vs they just transition sky boxes to do the day to night cycle... if they are calculating, even in a simplified way, the planet rotation and use that to change the skyboxes dynamically they are still relatively ok in my book unless we took from those quotes that they were generating the sky of each planet using all the bodies/planets/stars you would have in those positions in space light years away. The interesting bit is the space station to planet and back and forth together with any form of planet rotation... if the rotation effect has been reduced it may take longer to test, but nothing impossible.
 
Day/night, revolution, physics etc.. maybe they don't directly impact the moment to moment game play but they do impact the experience and dare I say immersion. In a game that aimed to be so immersive, how are people arguing that something like that is not a big deal? We're not talking about an arcade game here. The things that make the universe feel real and have meaning suddenly make it feel a lot more shallow and meaningless when not present.
 
I don't want to be an apologist, I think there are a few instances where they have been less than clear about the exact elements within the game. However I think there are some things that were probably in the game at some point and were taken out for gameplay reasons, which I think is fair enough. Also a lot of these are the devs answering very loaded questions with a far from definitive statement that such functionality would actually be in the game, but merely that it would be their desire to have that in the game.

Very few of these statements are outright lies or true deceptions.
 
Stars don't even exist as objects in the game, they are part of the skybox which is what being rotated. You can't even fly to them.
Planets and moons are also fixed in place.

How important that is to your enjoyment of the game is subjective, but that's definitely not close to the picture he's painting in that Atlantic article.

He did explain about the moon being fixed in the sky before the game released. I take your point about stars as if he said star systems it would have matched what you can actually do as you do see the sun in a star system and you can travel to other star systems.

I can agree that wilfully or not his dreamy idealisation/prose about his game may have made the thoughts of people and this potential consumers fly beyond the 1.0x game that ended up being released, but 1. I am not convinced he was trying to wilfully mislead and oversell on a 1:1 physical simulation of the universe and 2. that I feel like this is being used to utterly rip the game apart as if smoke and mirrors used to give a good or bad illusion of realistic physics (where actual physics were not used) completely make the game unfun and worth of being put to the index.

What is the difference between this and how Wiimote 1.0 + Wii Sports were sold? The hype machine sold something that was also not the real 1:1 physics tracking setup people got. Wiimote was nowhere near the 1:1 lightsaber duel tracking capable device people were dreaming of up until to lunch and although wrist flicking was all you really needed to play Wii Sports it did not stop people making believe with the normal way of playing it and having fun. What is the difference?
 
Going back to this quote and the earlier one posted in the same post:



Although he does mix the talk of we use physics vs they just transition sky boxes to do the day to night cycle... if they are calculating, even in a simplified way, the planet rotation and use that to change the skyboxes dynamically they are still relatively ok in my book unless we took from those quotes that they were generating the sky of each planet using all the bodies/planets/stars you would have in those positions in space light years away. The interesting bit is the space station to planet and back and forth together with any form of planet rotation... if the rotation effect has been reduced it may take longer to test, but nothing impossible.

You've got to be kidding me. I would wager that even your average middle school graduate would be thinking that the planets act like normal planets in our solar system if someone told them that, "the planets rotate" in any given game let alone this one.

EDIT: I just want to make it clear that I normally wouldn't care what tricks are used to reach a goal as long as the end result is believable. But in this case, A, the advertised method to achieve the goal doesn't appear to be used and B, it's totally immersion killing and therefore unbelievable if a realistic like model is what you where expecting.
 
Your quote talks about the physics of a planet, day and night cycle being also based on planet rotation and real physics (see poster talking about the way the day and night cycles worked on a planet in its North Pole compared to everywhere else) mixed with being able to travel to stars and far away planets which does not imply this is a astrophysical simulation of an entire solar system or galaxy down to the smallest speck of sand.
I still think that we are blowing this way out of proportions.

Read the quote I copied. It absolutely implies that the galaxy/universe was not a collection of skyboxes, which it is. The entire point of the quote is railing against skyboxes and how the game has "real" representations of the star systems in game.
 
I really don't understand.

Take NMS, gaming and players away. Why it is that politicians overpromise because it's convenient for getting votes. And it's seen as legitimate if we get angry and expose their lies, even honorable for those journalists that try. But if it's about hype to sell a game then it's all tolerated and normal?

You talk when it's convenient to you, but then resent if people hold you accountable about what you said?
 
He did explain about the moon being fixed in the sky before the game released. I take your point about stars as if he said star systems it would have matched what you can actually do as you do see the sun in a star system and you can travel to other star systems.

I can agree that wilfully or not his dreamy idealisation/prose about his game may have made the thoughts of people and this potential consumers fly beyond the 1.0x game that ended up being released, but 1. I am not convinced he was trying to wilfully mislead and oversell on a 1:1 physical simulation of the universe and 2. that I feel like this is being used to utterly rip the game apart as if smoke and mirrors used to give a good or bad illusion of realistic physics (where actual physics were not used) completely make the game unfun and worth of being put to the index.

What is the difference between this and how Wiimote 1.0 + Wii Sports were sold? The hype machine sold something that was also not the real 1:1 physics tracking setup people got. Wiimote was nowhere near the 1:1 lightsaber duel tracking capable device people were dreaming of up until to lunch and although wrist flicking was all you really needed to play Wii Sports it did not stop people making believe with the normal way of playing it and having fun. What is the difference?

He literally called out games that use skyboxes to simulate the sky and hyped the fact that his game would not do so.

This is a fact. What are you doing right now? Holy shit dude.
 
I don't want to be an apologist, I think there are a few instances where they have been less than clear about the exact elements within the game. However I think there are some things that were probably in the game at some point and were taken out for gameplay reasons, which I think is fair enough. Also a lot of these are the devs answering very loaded questions with a far from definitive statement that such functionality would actually be in the game, but merely that it would be their desire to have that in the game.

Very few of these statements are outright lies or true deceptions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVrDaudzn64

I think this is pretty cut and dry. The question isn't loaded at all and requires a simple yes or no. I can buy for a dollar that there might have been features they wanted to get in there and not get in there, but being silent about it doesn't really help either.
 
Seems about right except I feel most people easily forget.

It's the goldfish syndrome of new and shiny. It's exactly what the majority of "business centric" instead of "consumer centric" companies want. It's also the reason why, as crappy as it is, I push as hard as I can when opportunities like this arise where the consumer has a chance to set the bar back a little higher.
 
He did explain about the moon being fixed in the sky before the game released. I take your point about stars as if he said star systems it would have matched what you can actually do as you do see the sun in a star system and you can travel to other star systems.

I can agree that wilfully or not his dreamy idealisation/prose about his game may have made the thoughts of people and this potential consumers fly beyond the 1.0x game that ended up being released, but 1. I am not convinced he was trying to wilfully mislead and oversell on a 1:1 physical simulation of the universe and 2. that I feel like this is being used to utterly rip the game apart as if smoke and mirrors used to give a good or bad illusion of realistic physics (where actual physics were not used) completely make the game unfun and worth of being put to the index.

What is the difference between this and how Wiimote 1.0 + Wii Sports were sold? The hype machine sold something that was also not the real 1:1 physics tracking setup people got. Wiimote was nowhere near the 1:1 lightsaber duel tracking capable device people were dreaming of up until to lunch and although wrist flicking was all you really needed to play Wii Sports it did not stop people making believe with the normal way of playing it and having fun. What is the difference?
I don't know what he was thinking, if I were to guess, I would say it's a combination of overpromising, stuff that they couldn't implement or ended up not being fun and a little bit of getting carried away by all the mainstream attention he got and trying to impress people.

Here's the thing though, plenty of people still got a pretty wrong impression about what's the game is and what it does and how. Now yeah, this is not the first time it happened and it certainly won't be the last, but as someone who generally think that such situations are bad for consumers and the industry as a whole, I feel perfectly fine with calling him (and Hello Games) on this stuff. He can easily clear it all up by the way with a simple blog post.

p.s.
He didn't really explain that planet rotation thing, in fact, he said they slowed it down, and considering that not only there doesn't seem a system that rotate planets in place but there's a completely different system to fake said rotation, I would say this is probably closer to bullshit than most of his promises that didn't end up in the game. I kinda doubt it that they ripped off the system that did a day/night cycle and replaced with a completely different system in a zero day patch.
 
With all this furor over a lot of benign stuff, this will probably be one of the last times a non-kickstarter smaller developer updates/openly discusses the evolution and production of their game over time. 'Great'.

Yup! Now, as an indie dev myself, half of me wants to never speak publicly about my games until it's like a month from release, the other half of me wants to livestream the next project's development all the time so that players understand that good games are made through iteration.

My hunch? If the NMS trailers were instead less flashy dev livestreams, it would have solved a lot of the problems. Then you wouldn't have people treating every little thing they see in a trailer as a "promise".
 
I don't know what he was thinking, if I were to guess, I would say it's a combination of overpromising, stuff that they couldn't implement or ended up not being fun and a little bit of getting carried away by all the mainstream attention he got and trying to impress people.

Here's the thing though, plenty of people still got a pretty wrong impression about what's the game is and what it does and how. Now yeah, this is not the first time it happened and it certainly won't be the last, but as someone who generally think that such situations are bad for consumers and the industry as a whole, I feel perfectly fine with calling him (and Hello Games) on this stuff. He can easily clear it all up by the way with a simple blog post.

p.s.
He didn't really explain that planet rotation thing, in fact, he said they slowed it down, and considering that not only there doesn't seem a system that rotate planets in place but there's a completely different system to fake said rotation, I would say this is probably closer to bullshit than most of his promises that didn't end up in the game. I kinda doubt it that they ripped off the system that did a day/night cycle and replaced with a completely different system in a zero day patch.

Yep. See, it's the p.s. part that is the problem. Not the overpromising, not the 'changes in development', but the refusal to own up to them when release hits. That's where the 'oh, he was an idealist whose dreams ran away with him' stops being relevant and 'this dude is putting lies in patches to try and hide prior lies, all to sell this game' becomes a more accurate reading of the situation.
 
Xander Cage is slapping away these fools with truth bombs. It'd amazing to watch lol.

There's no defending Sean Murray or Hello Games in this situation. Sorry.
 
Well there's at least one more point on that list that needs to be updated. Not sure if it's a bug or intended but I'm on a planet with frenzied sentinels and I've been in buildings for longer periods of time and the threat level did not go down. Hell, a sentinel even followed me into a building and just stared at me because it's probably also unable to shoot indoors.
It was quite amusing. :)
 
I understand all this criticism, but at the same time people were expecting way too much from this tiny developer. They shouldn't have gone full price. Should have released at a lower cost, with subsequent expansions so that people would get that their vision was still being developed.

In regards to this list I have to say it's incredibly nitpicky, but I guess that's the point of it.

I'm sorry but if they didn't promote the game with these features how are people expecting too much? It was shown to have these in. I don't get your logic here.
 
Read the quote I copied. It absolutely implies that the galaxy/universe was not a collection of skyboxes, which it is. The entire point of the quote is railing against skyboxes and how the game has "real" representations of the star systems in game.

Yes, it can certainly say that and be wilful lying or it could be a perhaps less believeable but still plausible "it is not like we do not use skyboxes but we do not use skyboxes in the faker way people normally use them to present day and night cycle based on just the game clock, we use a factor of planet rotation to achieve it".
 
Murray don't care. He got his gold and is laughing to the bank.

I am sorta disgusted by this release, but I really don't think this is some kind of evil plot by Sean. I think it more likely that he had a grandiose vision of the game that was unrealistic, and the team had to deal with that as they were able to do so. It's likely that he believed the crap he was peddling, but he didn't have a realistic frame of reference by which to balance the hyped game he was talking about vs the game that existed.
 
Yup! Now, as an indie dev myself, half of me wants to never speak publicly about my games until it's like a month from release, the other half of me wants to livestream the next project's development all the time so that players understand that good games are made through iteration.

My hunch? If the NMS trailers were instead less flashy dev livestreams, it would have solved a lot of the problems. Then you wouldn't have people treating every little thing they see in a trailer as a "promise".

I would watch that, no joke. Shoot me a link if you actually decide to do that.

Also, don't be afraid to talk about your game lol. That isn't the issue here. The problem people are having is that gigantic and far reaching platforms where used to advertise the game in a way that obviously wasn't representative of what the game became at launch. But most of all it's that nothing was said regarding missing features and such when all people wanted was info on them before the game launched. Now it's just getting worse every day that they stay silent in the face of literally 10s if not 100s of thousands of voices that want answers.

You really don't have much to worry about if you are capable of being more transparent than Sean, I really think that would be super easy. lol I would personally defend your game to my last breath if you where transparent and where still coming under fire. Just like I would have done for NMS.
 
Yes, it can certainly say that and be wilful lying or it could be a perhaps less believeable but still plausible "it is not like we do not use skyboxes but we do not use skyboxes in the faker way people normally use them to present day and night cycle based on just the game clock, we use a factor of planet rotation to achieve it".

What?
 
I don't know what he was thinking, if I were to guess, I would say it's a combination of overpromising, stuff that they couldn't implement or ended up not being fun and a little bit of getting carried away by all the mainstream attention he got and trying to impress people.

Here's the thing though, plenty of people still got a pretty wrong impression about what's the game is and what it does and how. Now yeah, this is not the first time it happened and it certainly won't be the last, but as someone who generally think that such situations are bad for consumers and the industry as a whole, I feel perfectly fine with calling him (and Hello Games) on this stuff. He can easily clear it all up by the way with a simple blog post.

p.s.
He didn't really explain that planet rotation thing, in fact, he said they slowed it down, and considering that not only there doesn't seem a system that rotate planets in place but there's a completely different system to fake said rotation, I would say this is probably closer to bullshit than most of his promises that didn't end up in the game. I kinda doubt it that they ripped off the system that did a day/night cycle and replaced with a completely different system in a zero day patch.

He can and should be called up on it, but there is a difference between calling someone il on something and tons and tons of vitriolic threads and posts ripping this game and its creators a new one so to speak.

Also, as I said before I remain puzzled at how the launch Wiimote / Wii Sports combo and a similar wink-wink-nudge-nudge 1:1 real controls furling dreams of lightsaber duels at Wii's launch differs so incredibly much from this. My guess? The amount of bullshit people tolerate is directly proportional at how much fun they aren't having and how many people are enjoying the product alongside them.
 
I really don't buy the excuse that they had every intention to implement all those features but just couldn't make it in time or because they're a so, so small team.
They knew the size of their team, they knew what they could reasonbly accomplish and promise. They just chose to lie to consumers or even themselves to generate more hype.
They're a small team but they're not hobby developers making their first project. These people made games before, they know what they can do and what they can't, no narrative of cheering for the small underdog changes that.

It's especially damning to see that there are not even traces of supposedly dropped features in the data mining thread.

All that does NOT mean the released product is garbage or whatever. If you enjoy the game for what it is that's great but if you can divorce your appreciation for the game from the bullshit way its developer sold it to peole for a minute you'll see why so many would be upset.
 
Yup! Now, as an indie dev myself, half of me wants to never speak publicly about my games until it's like a month from release, the other half of me wants to livestream the next project's development all the time so that players understand that good games are made through iteration.

My hunch? If the NMS trailers were instead less flashy dev livestreams, it would have solved a lot of the problems. Then you wouldn't have people treating every little thing they see in a trailer as a "promise".
+1
Most of the stuff in the list were just hinted(cant really say promised) in single sentence in some interview....
I also thing the fact their offices were flooded and they lost a lot of HW takes a part in this aswell

but would be nice to see some reaction from them to the list
 
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