I don't think the hate Sean Murray is receiving over the lack of multiplayer is totally fair. It's highly unlikely he was lying about the multiplayer aspects of the game at the time of the interview, but rather decided later that realising those ambitions would massively delay the game again and he'd rather patch the feature in at a later date. His Twitter comments make me wonder if he actually thought no one would be able to locate each other in the time it would take to develop the multiplayer functionality. Pretty stupid if so.
Another aspect is that he is not to blame for the hype machine. The game was labelled as an almost infinite space exploration game, and that's exactly what it is. No doubt some features had to be sidelined, as is common with many games that lack certain features at launch. But bear in mind how difficult it is for an indie game to get the exposure that No Man's Sky has enjoyed. Sean Murray owes Sony a great deal for the massive marketing campaign they have funded. Murray has even appeared on several major talk shows. He had to be extremely tactful in how he tried to scale back the hype.
All things considered, I think NMS is an excellent achievement and I can't wait for my GOG copy to unlock.
In my opinion, all things considered it is an ambitious achievement, considering that this is a said indie developer which was actually backed by Sony as the publisher.
Yes, the game is an exploration survival simulator played in a virtual universe which is a procedurally generated deterministic open universe. Sean Murray had discussed the multiplayer aspect in March,
[video=youtube;1ORFgfhj_hM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ORFgfhj_hM[/video]
He made it clear that the game is no MMO, and have no deathmatch mechanics, but then hyped other multiplayer mechanics in other interviews as per the video I had posted with the interview snippets. Either the game has multiplayer or it does not have multiplayer, it simply cannot have both when taking the NMS netcode into the conundrum.
This is very similar to where small and independent breweries can do no wrong in their supporters pov, and that large and enterprising breweries are all the evil. A business is a business; this applies to every business, why the special leeway?
Murray simply had to stick with a single-player experience and that any other players in the virtual universe may leave markers behind to be experienced by other players, updated by the individual hosted instances. So simply put, the multiplayer aspect to the game is waymarking. Yet, I have seen no instance since the PS4 launch where this was experienced, this was also absent with the two players trying to meet up with each other… how did Murray reply?
https://twitter.com/NoMansSky/status/763270259080097792
Yeah… in summary,
at the end Murray has made it clear, when the above happened, that NMS is not a multiplayer game and that no one should go look into having that experience. Then to add, as he did, that the chance is pretty much zero, whether this applies to the said waymarking experience is unknown which Murray compared to Dark Souls or Terraria and even Journey.
We have all seen AAA titles being over-hyped, and developers have crossed swords with the public, it would be sad to learn that Sony had a sway in the NMS reviews, and in my opinion Murray did go with the hype as evident with the multiplayer mechanics he had mentioned, he only tried to scale back the hype when the two players tried to cross paths.
Yes, there are more than one server, serving more than one instance. This is the comment that Murray made on the topic,
http://www.pcgamesn.com/no-mans-sky-no-multiplayer
This could perhaps be down to instancing, which grabs players from nearby and puts you in the same lobby. Perhaps these two players were placed in a different instance, hence the different times of the day. Back to that GameInformer interview, Murray did expand on instancing a bit.
"The only answer that I can think of for this is a really technical one," Murray says. "If we were to make a game where we synchronised every player, what they were doing with every other player, then that would be impossible and no one has ever done that. What we can do is, like many games that you have at the moment, where you are flying around with an open lobby. People are coming into that lobby and leaving it - like if you play Watch Dogs or something like that.
"Effectively, we have players joining your discrete space. We're not trying to make an MMO where you can play with literally 60,000 people on screen. We handle the case like where other people can fly past in your game or that you can bump into other players in the game.
"But that's okay for us because it will never happen. I guess the whole of the entire community could organise to go to one specific spot and then they would find that they weren't all there at the same time. That would be ridiculous."
Continued here ->
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/featu...ng-of-no-man-s-sky-as-a-multiplayer-game.aspx (2014)
I cannot disagree that the game is an achievement, but Murray had continuingly suggested that multiplayer is a thing. This had obviously contributed hugely to the pre-order milestone and the day 1 player volume.
At this time, or since March, Steam lists No Man’s Sky as a single player game. I am not saying that it is a bad game, or that I would not try it out someday, but that there are discrepancies with how the multiplayer was marketed. It is a simple bad business practice, misrepresentation, the transparency.