Hello Games' Sean Murray says co-op for No Man's Sky arrives this summer - Sensationalist Headlines

I figured that whatever he said was part of the marketing shit.

Except they were spouting bullshit from the beginning. You can't lay Sean Murray's lies at Sony's feet. They're not blameless in the mess of NMS, but they're not the devil who ruined an indie game either.

I bought the game for $20 not long ago. I think it was well worth it at that price.

If this was early access released I would have cared but no matter how good the game gets now, it isn't going to be worth it for me. To be honest though, I think I should be placing the real blame on Sony pushing its price. 20$ would be a good price.

I was kinda turned off NNS very early on when they talked about Earth sized planets, but when you zoomed out, it seemed way smaller.

I really want to know the inside story of those last several months when the game was suddenly delayed once again, right before release, because the game Sean Murray was showing off four months before release has some pretty big changes compared to the game that was pushed in the "IGN First" marketing blitz and was actually released. Planets were to rotate, for example. Planetary rotation was patched out with the release build, with the very minor comment from Hello Games that their beta testers were confused by the feature (and more to the point which they didn't mention, without a way to bookmark waypoints there was no way to get back to where you were if you left it to go into space, because the planet'll have rotated away by the time you're back). This points to beta test feedback involving changes being made to the game rules. And the game was delayed by three months on the verge of release, and I can only think of a few reasons for that, one being last-minute changes. Here's why this matters: I think Sony forced HG to make a bunch of changes right before release, and that is why NMS was delayed by three months and then released as a Fisher Price version of itself, with the retarded hand-holding flight model that just doesn't let you fly low enough to possibly collide with anything. I think Sony focus-tested the game, as HG's sugar daddy, and Sony are just the kind of corporate retards to sign off on whatever dumb shit the random people off the street who probably wouldn't be buying NMS anyway said to them. HG would not be in a position to say no, as Sony bailed them out when their studio flooding disaster hit and they needed Sony's cooperation to distribute the PS4 version. It's speculation, and everything can also be explained as just Sean Murray's lies and faked demos continuing to not match the game he was actually getting ready to release, but in the case of features being nerfed or heavily altered to make the game even more casual and shallow I'm pretty sure that Sony's sweaty hand was at work. Sony's meddling at work is evident by the fact that NMS was supposed to be a game for PC only. After Sony swooped in to bail them out, suddenly the only thing Sony wants anyone to say is that NMS is coming to PS4. For a year and a half, Sony didn't even want to acknowledge that NMS was coming out for PC, while not actually lying and definitively stating that it was exclusive to PS4. They wanted fake exclusivity by omission, which was something they were really into as a marketing strategy at the time. You bet Sony is going to have no qualms over messing around with NMS to make it more marketeable on release so they can recover more of that sugar-daddy investment cash, and the long-term effects are HG's problem.

Really exciting news!

I actually remember a now buried post on 4chan from "one of the Hello Games devs" who confirmed that Sony forced them to release the game in unfinished state just to gain some cheap sales. And the total silence for almost a year was forced by their contract, as they basically gave any rights of explaining and promoting to SOE, and it would lead to huge penalties if they said anything about the bad state of the game. Take it with a huge grain of salt, but it just looks obvious in retrospect.

Sounds pretty bullshit to me. Sean Murray was constantly doing interviews in the months up to the game's release and the game was delayed twice.

Well, I don't put any stock into what 4chan claims, but the alleged anon gets at what's probably a pretty logical point: Sony and HG's contact would definitely preclude HG talking shit about Sony. If it didn't include it in writing, it'd definitely be implied, in the sense of HG talks shit = Sony drops them like a hot potato to die. There's no reason to believe that Sony wouldn't put in very narrow and restrictive terms on what HG was allowed to say about itself and marketing the game, and I'm fairly confident that Sony arranged the IGN First exclusive previews of the (final-version) game. It's also pretty logical to expect a big faceless publisher like Sony to want to get a return on its investment back as fast as possible, which could involve pushing NMS out the door before Hello Games was ready to release after biting off more than they could chew. It's impossible to know from the outside just how much Sony dicked around with things, and how much is Sean Murray's Amazing Lie Train, but my personal opinion places lots of blame on both. However, I can also see HG's post-release silence for a simpler reason: Sean Murray knew how bad he fucked up, and HG agreed that they had to earn consumers' trust back by putting out content, not words. Sean's mouth had done all the talking up until release, and when the game went over like a shit brick, his mouth suddenly wasn't worth anything anymore. HG had to make their game speak for itself, and they knew that any amount of hyping of the first patches was going to be received very sourly by a disappointed public. I can legit see the long period of silence happening just because they were afraid of sticking their heads out and getting it bitten off.

IMO procedural generation is misleading. In this case, they said there's 2^64 possible words, animals, etc. but you can only do like 2 things on those worlds. More content != good content

Procedural generation is most often used by smaller teams as a means of producing more content with less effort (or producing more content than otherwise possible with the same effort, to be more generous). The problem is procedurally generated content is very noticable to a player and as such is worth far, far less. You could have 100 procedurally generated levels but most players would prefer 10 hand crafted level if it took the same amount of resources. I think procedural generation is a great technological tool which is used in entirely the wrong ways. It shouldn't be used to make levels or worlds cheaply, if a game relies on it for world creation I argue you require far, far more time and effort to make it meaningful than creating levels yourself, because you need to make the procedural generation matter, where most games just take premade chunks and slam them together or (in NMS's case) use Perlin noise to generate levels because they think its a magic bullet to solve their problems.

If you bought the game at the time, sure. Still, if you didn't hype yourself up for the game and kept a healthy distance from the drama unfolding and kinda forgot about the game in the meantime, if people say the game is genuinely worth buying it at a heavy discount NOW after two years of additional dev time I see no reason to not to buy it. If it's ACTUALLY any good of course and assuming they don't retroactively ruin the game in the future somehow such as making the game unplayable due to servers shutting down or something like that but AFAIK the game works fine offline.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't get No Man's Sky, the game is probably alot easier to stomach with a discount in comparison to the insane price that it was when it released. It's probably a ton more fun than release. What i'm trying to say is that anything that Hello Games tries to sell me especially if it's very ambitious, they are going to have a serious uphill battle and i'm certainly not getting it before release. I think how i feel is completely reasonable with how consumers were lied to about in game features, how am i expected to buy a product when i can't even trust that i'll have all of those features when the game/dlc comes out?

Didn't Sean Murray consistently say some ludicrously blatant lies for months about NMS, then go completely radio silent for months when people started calling him out about it?

I mean, sort of, but that's a very imprecise description of what happened. Early in No Man's Sky's development, Sean talked a lot while showing his groundbreaking early demo of NMS, with the development footage of procedurally-generated animals in the editor and all that shit. One of the things he talked about was HG's intentions for multiplayer. As NMS' release got closer, Sean kept talking and talking, and showing the same old demo on the same old planets. His answers about multiplayer became more vague over time. In the last six months before release, he stopped answering questions about multiplayer altogether except for the vaguest, weakest throwaway. The community at large was still bundled up in the hype train Sean had spent several years building up and largely didn't notice the lack of answers. Then the game came out and the total lack of multiplayer support (other than uploading the names of your discoveries to the cloud, but who cares) was conclusively proven by two people in under 24 hours. Hello Games put out a "wow! I'm so happy to see people enjoying and exploring our universe!" style tweet and then went completely quiet for three full months, saying nothing except releasing patch notes for bugfix patches. HG broke their silence to announce the first major patch, and then they went generally quiet again until the next patch. They then started an ARG that was largely inconsequential and ignored by everyone outside of the diehard fans. I feel that going silent was the best choice they had, once they were past the point of no return and NMS was released in its glorious fundamentally-unfinished state. If they'd tried to defend themselves it would've been that much worse for them. Instead, they put wanted features, like base-building, up where Sean's mouth formerly was. For a lot of people, it's already too late for NMS, but if Hello Games was to win back anyone's forgiveness, it was going to have to be by adding to the game and fixing it, not putting Sean on twitter or in front of a camera for more words words words.

Obviously this is late, but I definitely have respect for them to stick with it. After the entire community makes you the enemy, many other developers would have dropped it immediately.

As someone who never listened to the hype and basically expected space engine with limited gameplay, I bought the game at release for like 40 bucks with a discount and I really enjoyed it. I had like 30 hours I think into the original version of the game. I just recently picked it back up on the current version after all the updates, and yes, it is a very different game now. Especially on the survival mode, planets with anything valuable are extremely hostile and difficult to survive, and getting your base set up with a fully functioning farm for every type of plant takes a good deal of effort because of that. The vehicles are made actually useful by these tasks. The quest system they added gives you another reason to do stuff. The inventory system still sucks, but has also been made better by the base building. I mean overall the changes were for the better. I now have 75 hours in the game on my steam account and I still don't even have a decent multi-tool or ship. I'd say if you've never played it, it's worth checking out. It's not nearly as bad as people say. I'm on the fence about multiplayer, though. On one hand, I think that being alone in a procedurally generated world of randomized sameness populated by lifeless AI that either speaks a language I do not understand, tells me to do stuff whether I want to do it or not, or tries to kill me, fits in with the aesthetic of the game. Stylistically I think it works well as a single player game and I never missed multiplayer. I also don't really know anyone who would want to play walk across the universe simulator with me. On the other hand though, it'd be great if I could get someone to cover me while I collect these fucking dragonballs on this planet in my home system where you can't stand outside for more than 3 minutes because the air kills you, the animals one-hit kill you, the sentinels are maxed out, just everything kills you. And as soon as you leave the atmosphere with the balls, pirates lock on and try to kill you so it's a mad dash to the safety of the local station. Shit is ridiculous.

There's also this https://media.8ch.net/file_store/ad8d683418a6ab6e4f82d694e6544bc4705d0a318b1d7e323ef0ea5ecd774c37.png

I can't find the blog where somebody dissected the tech behind No Man's Sky. What it said was that the engine was very well capable of doing everything Murray showed off. Only problem was the extremely limited amount of assets to allow the engine to work with for procedural generation and quite possibly the limitations of the PS4.