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

..wait, the planets don't rotate?

Didn't they talk with the most recent patch that they dialed back the rotation because players got disoriented when finding back space stations and stuff?

I'm pretty confused. How the hell is there no planetary rotation in a space game?
 
Fair enough, I cannot blame you for that as that is a reasonable stance. I am going right now for not assuming malevolent intent but perhaps naivety and stupidity in presenting the argument when you are not at a pub, but talking to the press and thus requiring a bit more respect for the audience who will hear your words and cannot ask you follow up questions. Interesting how gaming press and the tons of hands on did not ever even ask or try to test those assumptions and we had to wait for the game to go live for people to actually check post purchase, but previews and hands on are generally meant to drive preorders in most cases I fear and the press is a bit afraid of losing pre release access if they do venture too far.

The gaming "press" is a joke. They are just fanboys disguised as "professionnals".
 
..wait, the planets don't rotate?

Didn't they talk with the most recent patch that they dialed back the rotation because players got disoriented when finding back space stations and stuff?

It's been proven in a number of time lapses, everything is static, and stars and sun moving are just shaders on a skybox.

I'm pretty confused. How the hell is there no planetary rotation in a space game?

Does the game have gravity?
 
I'm not sure we'll ever know, but there is obviously a reason why there is such a disparity between what we were 'sold' and what we actually got, did the team over-reach?, were they canjooled into bigging the title up by Sony?, and then there is the delay and the copyright claims regarding Superformula.

Yes, I know a lot of people are enjoying it, but that doesn't negate the fact that the developer was deliberately hazy on many of the aspects (and bare faced fabrication, or at the least exaggeration).

I guess this just reinforces the point that no one should pre-order, and everyone should take a developers claim with huge pinches of salt.
I don't get the Sony angle, if any of the big three give time and money and patience to a developer it's Sony, all Sony seemingly did was give them a stage and give them money, let's not forget this game was delayed multiple times already so that would fly against Sony being pushy surely?.
 
"Reduced" planetary rotation, lol.. I think I start to see a pattern in the Hello Games/Sean Murray rhetoric. The pr-speak, the use and choice of words, and not the least the narrative being used to make the audience fill in the blanks/holes with their own imagination. I'm starting to suspect that Hello Games know very well how to play the pr- game, and Murray isn't quite the shy introvert that some of us thought he was.
 
I don't get the Sony angle, if any of the big three give time and money and patience to a developer it's Sony, all Sony seemingly did was give them a stage and give them money, let's not forget this game was delayed multiple times already so that would fly against Sony being pushy surely?.

Wasn't there another (maybe more?) Indie dev who said that working with Sony was the worst thing and made them (want) to quit the industry?

Sure. Every planet and moon has the exact same gravity. Now that's Unity.

Exactly, how can you simulate a galaxy with moving and orbiting planetary bodies when gravity is uniform?
 
This is really the strangest player reaction I have ever witnessed after a game has launched..

it's like people actually seek out the "false" stuff.. like the Atlantic article or the old youtube videos.. but nobody cites articles like the one in The New Yorker (at least I haven't seen it mentioned).. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/world-without-end-raffi-khatchadourian

it is actually a well written piece.. and it points out some stuff.

“Maybe I should just go a little faster,” Murray said. Light-years of space unfolded at a terrific rate. It may not have been the universe as it actually was, but there was nonetheless an awesome reality on display: the system’s vast mathematics. Murray turned toward a phosphorescent glowing orb. “That’s the center,” he said. This version of the game allowed Murray to leap to any solar system he wanted, but, drawing out the suspense, he moved deeper into the galactic map’s three-dimensional space. “This build was brought together so I could do a demo onstage. I chickened out, because when I press this button, basically, I don’t know what we’re going to see—and it can be a really weird way to end a demo. Something might go terribly wrong. Or we might find a planet that is quite boring. But I can see now that I should have gone with it, because even when it is boring it still is something new.”

Sean admits that he made the demo from another build.

Initially, the system proved fantastically difficult to control. It was generating planetary terrain that was wild, alien-seeming, and also impossible to traverse. If Murray pushed the system in the other direction, the terrain became dull and repetitive. There were also specific natural features, such as rivers, that did not lend themselves easily to equations. To make a river in a conventional game, an artist creates a mountain, places a digital drop of water on it, and maps the water’s trajectory downward. “That is the correct way,” Murray told me. But the process involves laborious computation, and requires that the topography be known in advance. Because of No Man’s Sky’s algorithmic structure—with every pixel rendered on the fly—the topography would not be known until the moment of encounter. Theoretically, the game could quickly render a sample of the terrain before deciding that a particular pixel belonged to a river, but then it would also have to render a sample of the terrain surrounding that sample, and so on. “What would end up happening is what we call an intractable problem to which there is only a brute-force solution,” Murray said. “There’s no way to know without calculating everything.” After much trial and error, he devised a mathematical sleight of hand to resolve the problem. Otherwise, the computer would have become mired in building an entire world merely to determine the existence of a drop of water.

why rivers are like they are in the game..

In spite of the work’s semi-finished state, the world was absorbing. “I’m sorry there’s no game-play element on this planet yet,” Murray said. His mind turned from the screen in front of us—the six planets, tidily assembled for the demo—to the full version of No Man’s Sky on the operating table on the studio’s first floor, below us. Until many improvements were fully realized, the whole of it would inevitably look worse than what we were seeing. “You can lose sight that it once looked like this,” he said.

We were in a lounge on the second floor of the renovated studio; concept art hung beside a whiteboard covered with Post-its. The furniture was bright, simple, ikea. Sitting in front of a flat-screen TV the size of a Hummer windshield, Murray loaded up a demo of the game that he had created for E3: a solar system of six planets.

hmmm.... hmmmm...

There is more in the article..

just to show that there are so many different articles, videos and texts about every game prior to release out there. In this article he admits some stuff people now are saying he is lying about..

I know this game does not live up to what we (and Hello Games/Sony) hyped it to be, and I know there are some strange promises and gameplay elements that are not like described... but damn this game is getting a hard time .. I have never seen a game shit on so much after release.
 
Wasn't there another (maybe more?) Indie dev who said that working with Sony was the worst thing and made them (want) to quit the industry?



Exactly, how can you simulate a galaxy with moving and orbiting planetary bodies when gravity is uniform?
Wasn't that ms?, you just have to look at the type of games Sony have funded in the past few years to see how willing they seem to be to give devs chances. They have given studios crazy amounts of time even at the cost of missing specific sales Windows making there offerings look light.
 
Wasn't that ms?

I'm not sure, I am trying to find the media where I read / heard it, if I find it, I'll post it.

Edit : It was Jessica Curry from The Chinese room, but I may have misinterpreted the article, as it may allude to publisher(s) in general, rather than Sony exclusively.
 
What the fuck, the op Reddit account got deleted? he got so much gold from that post!

It's not surprising. Even a Gaf mod locked that crowbat thread. Fanboys will always be everywhere.

Despite there being many threads, i believe the more the merrier. Consumers need to be force fed the notion that they are stupid idiots so that they don't get(hopefully) fooled every time.
 
I know it's conspiracy, but all of this only makes sense from this standpoint:

These changes are what happened in the June to August delay. I would love to be able to get some word or something from hello games about it. Like, how is promotional and packaging materials so off from what shipped?

Like, QA or focus testing via Sony or whoever must have resulted in Sony or someone saying, "hey, we need to dial features back or water shit down because average joe ain't gettin' it."

I mean. What the fuck on planet rotation alone. If you're going to make a space exploration game the first fucking step is to have functioning solar systems. Like, fuck. It's the fucking backbone of the genre. I just don't get it and it's the most frustrating element in a long laundry list of grievances.
 
Seeing it all laid out like that is pretty damning, and I certainly see why people are upset. I have a feeling this is the beginning of this end of preview culture,which is a major bummer. I grew buying game magazines to get a glimpse of what was coming in the near to come.

I wish there were more documentaries about game dev. I wish "masters of doom" was a miniseries. It does a great job of explaining why game design can't always be the driving force behind a game, and some times game design has to adapt to technical challenges. Otherwise, we get games like daikatana.

It seems Nintendo has already taken steps to reveal games much closer look launch,and I wouldn't be surprised if other publishers started doing the same.

I'm love to read more post-mortems! I wish studios were more candid with reasons behind major changes.
 
Exactly, how can you simulate a galaxy with moving and orbiting planetary bodies when gravity is uniform?

You don't need to simulate gravity to have the planet rotate and revolve around other objects. And gravity on the planet is as simple as a single parameter (hell, some games even let the user mess with it with a single slider for fun; they said that the suit adjust for gravity, and while it's a clever "lore" explanation, it's even more of a missed opportunity. Have your system fail and you'll be left dealing with either smaller or grater gravity. It would have been such a fun mechanic).

And it's even easier since every system is essentially a closed box. I really don't get why planets don't move. User travel isn't an excuse either, since warping is instantaneous.
 
This is really the strangest player reaction I have ever witnessed after a game has launched..

it's like people actually seek out the "false" stuff.. like the Atlantic article or the old youtube videos.. but nobody cites articles like the one in The New Yorker (at least I haven't seen it mentioned)..

I think it's because Hello Games in an indie studio. People expect them to be able to do everything without really realizing that indie means lower budget or lower staff.
 
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.

See, this is kind of the kicker for me. You say that stuff like the day/night cycle and planet revolution features impact the experience and immersion. I'd argue that they truly don't and that simply faking those phenomenon with skyboxes and the like is a perfectly acceptable implementation that maybe <0.01% of the player base would take issue with. After all that's exactly how pretty much every other game works. It's not necessary to model the laws and physics that govern the real world in a video game. You simply need to simulate them.

So why is this suddenly a big deal now? I think the answer is in your post. People expected this type of really in-depth precise modelling of the natural world because that's the type of system that Sean Murray advertised from the very start. That's the entire hook. "This isn't just a simulation, this is a TRUE living and breathing universe." Let's ignore the actual merits of realizing that design philosophy in a consumer product and look at what was delivered. A game that kinda sorta achieves its game design principles and provides a reasonable facsimile of the experience of planet-hopping in a vast universe, but it turns out under the covers it's just as faked as any other game.

That's the crux of this idea that Hello Games deceived its audience. Deception isn't just directly stating falsehoods or withholding facts. You make insinuations, you steer the listener's thoughts into a certain frame of mind, a certain set of emotions. You make appealing statements that aren't strictly false but, combined with how the listener is currently conditioned, are meant to be interpreted in a specific fashion that embellishes the substance of what was said. That's how you get stuff like "Oh I didn't actually SAY this would be in the game, I just thought it would be a cool thing to do, sorry if I made it seem that way!" See how easy it is to deflect responsibility onto the listener? YOU didn't lie, they just didn't understand you. You don't even have to do it on purpose!

So in NMS's case, we have a game that was advertised from beginning to end as a vast functioning universe with all of its features and developments organically built from the ground up and which functioned as a universe would on a galactic scale. That is a massive undertaking and I would be quite impressed if it were actually pulled off even in a simplified form. But that's exactly what people were so hyped about, and why it received so much attention from not just the gaming community but mainstream media in general. The fact that the game we got is not even remotely close to that initial vision should incite discontent in people who were drawn to said vision and bought the game because that's what they wanted. The players didn't create the hype, HG did, and now some people have the gall to deflect responsibility away from them.

This also points to why it's so dangerous to be passive when things like this happen. Why would HG make such an ambitious design and make said design such a focal point of how they sold the games to their audience? Space exploration games aren't new, procedural generation of planets and the composition of such aren't new. Nothing about that is new. Creating an actual functioning universe governed by physical laws that mimic our own and which create the unique experience of exploring this universe and observing the way everything operates in a unified system? That's definitely new. I commend Sean Murray and co for having the balls to even attempt something like that, I'm sure the vast majority of capable developers would never even bother.

But there's no such thing as an "A for effort" in this industry. Not when $60 a copy is involved. When you sell your product as one thing and it turns out to not be that thing at all, that shouldn't just be glossed over with a "Well at least you tried."

And that's how you spend 6 paragraphs saying "I agree with your post"
 
You don't need to simulate gravity to have the planet rotate and revolve around other objects.

Surely orbits and rotations are defined by the differences in gravitational pull from planetary bodies?, otherwise it would all be 'faked', something Sean poured scorn on prior to the games release.

Elite adheres to Newtons Law, does NMS even attempt it?
 
I'm pissed about all the things that are missing but strangely enough I'm still enjoying the game.
At the moment the game is a solid 6.5 for me but can easily go to a 9/10 with some of those promised features
 
I think it's because Hello Games in an indie studio. People expect them to be able to do everything without really realizing that indie means lower budget or lower staff.

I think people expect Hello Games to live up to the promises made. I think the Gaf-servers would crash and burn, if a first-party title from Sony or Microsoft failed to deliver on so many promises.

You don't get a get-out-of-jail-for-free card, just for being an indie. Overselling your game like this is not something that deserves to be defended.
 
Exactly, how can you simulate a galaxy with moving and orbiting planetary bodies when gravity is uniform?

Actually simulating gravity is a huge waste of time because the effects the planets have on each other's orbits are very small (enough so that no one would ever notice), but doing a multi-body simulation is computationally expensive compared to using a simple geometric orbit.
 
Not even Space Engineers does that, i think.

I'm not familiar with said title, but a quick bit of googling say that it at least attempts to.

Actually simulating gravity is a huge waste of time because the effect the planets have on each other's orbits are very small (enough so that no one would ever notice), but doing a multi-body simulation is computationally expensive compared to using a simple geometric orbit.

Well, NMS isn't doing anything, uniform gravity, static planets, no orbits, faked or not, these things shouldn't be missing from a space simulation.
 
Surely orbits and rotations are defined by the differences in gravitational pull from planetary bodies?, otherwise it would all be 'faked', something Sean poured scorn on prior to the games release.

Elite adheres to Newtons Law, does NMS even attempt it?

from the New Yorker Article..

Throughout the day, other members of the team worked on shadows, on creature artificial intelligence, on imbuing objects with “collision,” or physicality. After a coder gave trees and rocks collision, they became destroyable; he shot at a hillside, causing rocks to tumble down, hitting one another in a cascade. Peculiar problems had emerged from the sphericality of planets; in conventional video games, digital spaces are perfectly flat. Until gravity was precisely calibrated, objects sometimes fell off planets. One of the programmers, Charlie Tangora, described a problem with cowlike creatures that kept walking on cave ceilings; it took some troubleshooting before he realized, “Oh, wow. You’re in the Southern Hemisphere. Everything is upside down.”
 
Surely orbits and rotations are defined by the differences in gravitational pull from planetary bodies?, otherwise it would all be 'faked', something Sean poured scorn on prior to the games release.

Elite adheres to Newtons Law, does NMS even attempt it?

Not only does it not attempt it, but it reduces literally everything about it being a sci-fi to a fantasy approximation where science means exactly as much as the names of the elements you have to gather.
 
Isn't this going down a pretty dangerous path though? To the point where a developer will have to remember everything they ever said about a game and when a feature doesn't make the cut, have to make a public announcement that said feature isn't in the game?

We're quite lucky in that we probably see more of a product development and have access to game developers (via social media) than other entertainment medium. We like the fact we can have this one to one interaction with them, but when they make mistakes we become.... furious with them?

This puts it better than I can.
 
from the New Yorker Article..

Throughout the day, other members of the team worked on shadows, on creature artificial intelligence, on imbuing objects with &#8220;collision,&#8221; or physicality. After a coder gave trees and rocks collision, they became destroyable; he shot at a hillside, causing rocks to tumble down, hitting one another in a cascade. Peculiar problems had emerged from the sphericality of planets; in conventional video games, digital spaces are perfectly flat. Until gravity was precisely calibrated, objects sometimes fell off planets. One of the programmers, Charlie Tangora, described a problem with cowlike creatures that kept walking on cave ceilings; it took some troubleshooting before he realized, &#8220;Oh, wow. You&#8217;re in the Southern Hemisphere. Everything is upside down.&#8221;

Rather than hanging in the air like they do now.

Are we saying it was all removed because it didn't work / couldn't make it work?
 
Isn't this going down a pretty dangerous path though? To the point where a developer will have to remember everything they ever said about a game and when a feature doesn't make the cut, have to make a public announcement that said feature isn't in the game?

We're quite lucky in that we probably see more of a product development and have access to game developers (via social media) than other entertainment medium. We like the fact we can have this one to one interaction with them, but when they make mistakes we become.... furious with them?

Or maybe it would keep developers from promising anything and everything before they have even one of those features designed and implemented, then remaining purposely vague when talking about existing game features and silent when discussing actual gameplay.

The market is a two way street. Developers don't get a free pass when pitching their game to customers. Customers should have reasonable expectation that what they're buying is what they've been pitched. Hence the anxiety whenever publishers refuse to send out early review copies, leading to customers having to buy on faith.
 
When you ask why would somebody bother to create that list and put in there even things that seems maybe not important in the overall picture, is because of hundreds of comments like this one (and all of Panjaev2001a in this thread) that will procedurally generate moving goalposts to the infinite and interpret even coward statement in a very fitting manner.

For all the "only this little thing might have been a bit wrongly stated, but every thing else is just your false interpretation".

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.
 
I think we all sort of know why it isn't there now: because it never was in the first place.

Bottomline, the game I got, wasn't the game I was sold on.

Whether that's my fault, the fault of the developer or the fault of the games media, I don't know.
 
Bottomline, the game I got, wasn't the game I was sold.

Whether that's my fault, the fault of the developer or the fault of the games media, I don't know.

You and me both, homie. I believed what Sean Murray said. That belief was my fault. What was said was not my fault. The blame should rest on the party who started the conversation.
 
I paid such little attention to NMS for the last 2 years (after the initial reveal) that I just cant find myself caring like some of these let down people are. The amount of time people are devoting to "calling out" this game is baffling to me.

To me NMS was always a wait and see game. It had so many moving parts you had to wait till release to see what it was/is.

I haven't played/bought it yet, as I want to give HG more time iron things out and make tweaks etc. But I have a feeling I will like the game simply because I haven't spent 2 years building HypeCastles on quicksand.
 
I think we all sort of know why it isn't there now: because it never was in the first place.

the article I quoted was made during development last year.. they talked to a programmer during development.. they never said it was in the game, they just told the reporter something that happened during development. They did not promise you anything there..
 
I don't get the Sony angle, if any of the big three give time and money and patience to a developer it's Sony, all Sony seemingly did was give them a stage and give them money, let's not forget this game was delayed multiple times already so that would fly against Sony being pushy surely?.

To believe it is Sony and an NDA is the reason, is to basically ignore the fact that Sony has never done this with anyone of their developers prior. They work with two of the most vocal people in the industry with Jaffe and now Kojima. They've never really stopped a developer or publisher from wanting to talk about their title. They have also show to be pretty supportive of their developers, hence why they have a strong working relationship with many.

Murphy is responding akin to a little kid who is getting called out on his bullshit and ignoring it.

There is also a possibility that this maybe closer to Pitchfork and Sega. He sold it to Sony and now they are just finding out too, all this shit is missing. Missing something small like planetary orbits can be forgiven easily, but online entirely is another nightmare.
 
You and me both, homie. I believed what Sean Murray said. That belief was my fault. What was said was not my fault. The blame should rest on the party who started the conversation.
It wasn't purely verbal though. There was footage paired with it. I mean Spore was the same, but alas that comparison is moot.


I feel bad that the team is continuing to try and patch broken aspects right now. It's too bad they could not relax and then focus in in their update 2 and beyond plans. I'm sure cut features are on the works to be implemented. At least my hype has turned to hope for that.
 
Bottomline, the game I got, wasn't the game I was sold.

Whether that's my fault, the fault of the developer or the fault of the games media, I don't know.

It's both.
The media side of it is hardly a new problem though. Outlets that don't simply regurgitate the info they're being fed without a critical thought ever entering their minds get shunned by publishers. There are a few exceptions (remember this?), but they tend to catch a lot of shit for daring to be critical.
 
I fear Sean Murray got caught up in his hopes/plans/lies about this game during all those interviews :/ Must have got worse every time. I wonder how his team felt at those times. Unless of course all these missing features were actually in the game and were only cut in the final phase. But I don't really believe that anymore.
 
One thing nobody is talking about much is the ship classes. There were supposed to be fighter class, trader class, explorer class and I believe science ships each with different amounts of space for cargo and different abilities in terms of speed, maneuverability, defense and armament. As the game stands now the large boat ships are exactly the same as the little fighter models of ships. That is basic space game mechanics taken out in my opinion. The only ship progression is getting more slots for cargo and upgrades.

A smaller extension of the ship talk is ships taking wear and tear and being able to be discovered and named.
 
No Idea.

Only way you seem to get deleted is by an Admin or the user itself. Perhaps it's a throw away account... Still those gold man lol
I would assume one of two things happened.

1) The user was getting massive amounts of threats and hateful messages from fanboys or 2) An over-zealous fanboy hacked his account.
 
One thing nobody is talking about much is the ship classes. There were supposed to be fighter class, trader class, explorer class and I believe science ships each with different amounts of space for cargo and different abilities in terms of speed, maneuverability, defense and armament. As the game stands now the large boat ships are exactly the same as the little fighter models of ships. That is basic space game mechanics taken out in my opinion.

It's in the reddit post.

On another note, I always thought something like 1% of the planets actually had life/creatures. It seems much, much more than that, but maybe I'm remembering the quote wrong.
 
This is really the strangest player reaction I have ever witnessed after a game has launched..

it's like people actually seek out the "false" stuff.. like the Atlantic article or the old youtube videos.. but nobody cites articles like the one in The New Yorker (at least I haven't seen it mentioned).. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/world-without-end-raffi-khatchadourian

it is actually a well written piece.. and it points out some stuff.



Sean admits that he made the demo from another build.



why rivers are like they are in the game..





hmmm.... hmmmm...

There is more in the article..

just to show that there are so many different articles, videos and texts about every game prior to release out there. In this article he admits some stuff people now are saying he is lying about..

I know this game does not live up to what we (and Hello Games/Sony) hyped it to be, and I know there are some strange promises and gameplay elements that are not like described... but damn this game is getting a hard time .. I have never seen a game shit on so much after release.

The article you quoted is from May 2015. Then in June 2015 he went again on E3 stage and lied again about how he just picks a random planet.
 
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