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

That's a big compiled list. I've quickly read over the whole thing and it's still a bit shocking.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.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.
Follow this Gaffers posts, he explains well his theory that the planets do not rotate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems about right except I feel most people easily forget.
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 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.
Seems about right except I feel most people easily forget.
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.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?
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'.
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.
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.
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.
Murray don't care. He got his gold and is laughing to the bank.
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".
god bless this man
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".
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.
What?
+1Yup! 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".
Pretty damning list, Hello Games could work for Ubisoft with all of that bs.
This is why you never over promise. Even if you did so with good intentions