It's not illogical to think that they had multiplayer running on a separate branch of the game that, for whatever reason (bugs, crashed the game, unfinished, barely started) wasn't able to be merged into the main branch by release. It's not illogical in the least. Now, did that actually happen? Who knows. I have a feeling that because of the deal between Hello Games and Sony, unless someone leaks shit anonymously we might not ever find out for certain exactly what and how things went down. If that email was real then Sony clearly stepped in and forced the game out the door, which would support the idea that things were cut from the game hastily to hit their release date. One of those things could have been the branch of the game that had multiplayer being worked on. It's not unreasonable or illogical to believe that to have been the case. It doesn't excuse lying about it or talking about it so close to release that people believed it would be a feature, but it's still possible. Sean clearly had some really unreachable goals and if they had some people working on a branch of the game with multiplayer on it but they were having trouble merging it, maybe he felt they could figure it out before release or put it in the Day One patch so he just kept running his mouth up to release instead of being more open about the problems they were having.
Sums up my feelings pretty well. Though I'd say the literal act of merging the multiplayer in isn't necessarily what I think was the part that they couldn't get done (though merging can get tricky!), it's more that the multiplayer might have never reached a state that they felt was good enough for release, so they possibly never merged it in.
But more importantly, the point I want to make is that
Hello Games doesn't have to justify any of their internal development practices to any of us. And if your argument that they lied from the beginning hinges on large assumptions about their development practices, then it's not a very good argument.
What you're arguing is completely illogical, you seriously think they left evidence of a scripted e3 demonstration but somehow scrubbed EVERYTHING pertaining to MP, (news flash, they were still advertising it four months before release as having MP, so much so that the covers were literally printed with MP advertisements), from the game's code? Also, optimizing for PS4 is all well and good, but, the PC version has nothing like those trailers at all, and the PS4 version was what that build of ships was shown running on. I think you need to accept what happened at this point lo_fi, seriously man.
Genuine question, are you a game developer?
Also, see this post in this thread by a game developer who worked on multiplayer games:
Not at all. I've worked on games where the entirity of the networking code could be removed with conditional compilation. This was because the networking was pretty flakey at the start of the project and it was useful to be able to remove it.
Also, it's not that unreasonable to leave assets from an E3 demo on the disc. It was it's own separate thing (infamously so). The multiplayer would likely be linked with many many things, so it is possible that it would need to be completely removed, for optimization or organizational purposes. Or it's possible that it was never merged into the main branch. More importantly,
Hello Games doesn't have to justify any of their internal development practices to us.
Also also, game features are not a binary thing, where it's either not implemented at all or completely ready for shipping. It's entirely possible that the multiplayer was extremely close to being up to their standards, but they couldn't push it that last little bit and it had some game breaking aspect to it, so it had to get cut/not merged in at the last second. That would explain talking about it up until ship. Though that wouldn't explain why they didn't say that they had to cut it.
That said, if they did think they might have to cut it within those last four months, they probably should have communicated that. Or if it was already cut then they definitely should have communicated that.
I still can't believe the game got hyped up to such a high point that Sean Murray appeared on The Late Show to market it.
Then it released and he won't as much tweet..... whilst before he was happy to fly to another country and advertise it on national tv.
So many got absolutely swindled and the decent thing to do would be to address your consumers.
It is entirely possible that he is under contract with Sony to not talk about it, wants to not get death threats, or a combination of both. Not excusing it, but "he's a scam artist" isn't the only explanation.
Funny, the actual rants mostly come from people accusing Murray's critics of "unbridled hate", claiming we "want to see him hang" and shit like that. Except, no one ever said that except those that make these outragous claims that aim to discredit the critics and paint them as haters.
You're right, no one said those things in the thread. But plenty are painting him as a scam artist that has been trying to swindle people from the beginning. Especially the gifs.
Schadenfreude works better than either hate or curiosity. Well, what is it when people are clearly enjoying seeing what has happened with this game and its developer? Look at the numerous posts congratulating that Simpsons gif, for example. They are interested no doubt, but for the worst of reasons.
That doesn't apply to everyone commenting on this of course but it should be perfectly obvious that many are here just to see the train wreck.
Yup.
I'm certainly interested in the story, but so it's so that I can get better at communicating with players and just get a better sense of how to market a game while it's being developed - a fact that means you will probably cut something that you previously showed to the public.
No need to be joyous that a development team fucked up.
