A Reddit user yesterday posted a staggeringly large and comprehensive list of all the false promises Sean Murray made during the development of No Man’s Sky. The post became so popular that it is currently the first search result for No Man’s Sky on Google.
It’s not fair to call Murray a liar. With most of the features he promised, he probably intended to add them to the game or had to cut them in order not to further delay the launch. But the sheer volume of empty promises speaks to why the game was hyped up to such a level, and why most gamers were so severely disappointed by the final product, an incredibly boring space explorer/survival game that boasts 18 quintillion planets yet offers little to do in any of them.
If you like a good hate read I encourage you to check out the full post, which pairs each missing feature to a video of Murray saying it will be in the game.
The video below also encapsulates the colossal disappointment.
Ships with different play styles
Murray promised multiple times that you would be able to find ships in the game that would cater to different play styles. “This ship is more scientific,” Murray told IGN, referring to a Korvax ship. “This is more for someone who would be an explorer.”
Instead what we got in the final product were ships that while looking different, handled exactly the same. The only purpose of getting a new ship was to get more inventory slots. The entire depth of ship types were reduced to the number of squares to store your crap.
Warring factions of intelligent aliens
The four alien factions in No Man’s Sky were supposed to have much broader significance. Murray promised you would be able to come across large space battles between factions and take a side. He said deciding to align yourself with one faction could hurt your standing with another. Even the NPC’s dialogue was supposed to be more varied and useful.
“Having said that, being No Man’s Sky, there is a procedural element to your interactions. The AI you talk to will know the name of the planet you’re on and will reference it. They’ll reference wanting certain things based on the environment they’re in. They’ll know if it’s cold, or hot, or whatever. You’ll see a reasonable amount of variety—it’s not just pre-baked dialogue.”
In the final version the factions do not interact with each other or appear to be in contact in any way. You mindlessly make good with each group and have fairly meaningless interactions with them. And the dialogue is totally “pre-baked.”
Space Physics
Murray promised us that the planets would actually be orbiting the star, moon’s orbiting planets and resources displaced on planets based on their distance from the sun.
“The physics of every other game—it’s faked,” he told The Atlantic. “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 final version turned out to be a series of the very “skyboxes” Murray was mocking. The planets are static and do not orbit anything, neither do the moons. You cannot reach the sun in any solar system, as it is just window dressing on the skybox. You can’t even manually travel between solar systems in your ship.
Some more empty promises include: sand planets (with Dune-style sand worms), rivers, multiplayer, complex crafting and intergalactic portals. It makes you want to shed a tear for how good the game could have been.
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