I've pretty much seen every interview, tech talk, and magazine article. I know what Sean said and didn't say.
You can be a trader (you can buy/sell goods), a pirate (you can attack trading ships and steal their cargo), an explorer (discover stuff), or blow everything up (kill everything). You may not be satisfied with the gameplay or depth of those roles, but they are there. Sean never promised you could join a faction, only that your actions would have affects on your friend or foe status. In any case, the factions really only barely exist from the original concept. The economy was rarely mentioned by Sean, but it is there and it is "living" in that prices fluctuate and respond to you buying and selling within a system. Multiplayer is not in the game, but it was never billed as a "MP game", and was always couched in terms of a small Journey-like experience.
This OT is focused on talking about the game. There are plenty of other threads for you to rail against Sean Murray in. This one is for those who actually play it.
I bought this game 2 weeks in, so I was far too late to catch the gist of the arguments, but there should be more posts like this. HG may have screwed up, but I see far more misrepresentation from fans and most media.
Everyday I check "No Man's Sky" on Google, and everyday I see the same article on the Express website click baiting, with the same "facts". They are a semi reputable paper, but still claim there were promised multiplayer features and that HG are being investigated by trading standards. When in reality the only feature promised was the ability to see other players...if you were in the same region of a galaxy...in the same system...on the same planet...in the same place on the planet. In all the hours I've played, I've never come across another system discovered by anyone else, let alone come close to meeting anyone. So that's not a feature...it's a slight nod to another player, and only marginally more than discovering a system already discovered. And Steam were being investigated by trading standards, not HG.
There are countless others. Planet rotation adds nothing but aesthetics (aesthetics, I might add, that nearly stopped me from buying it). Yet it's claimed to have wide reaching implications across the game...using non existent evidence. Sean Murray said ships would be "slightly different". And for the most part that is correct. There may not be stats that change from ship to ship, but the number of slots and the shape they are in, have more than just a "slight" impact on the ship. He actually undersold the difference there.
A lot of stuff ADDED (in the name of accessibility) to the game hurts it more than the missing stuff. If even a 48 slot ship had their slots arranged differently, it would make them more unique, rather than literally the same as any other 48 slot ship. If NPCs weren't everywhere (they weren't even in the game until 4 months before release) and the game forced you to move about, there would actually be a reason to explore. And above all else, make it harder.
When it was fans that pushed the premature release of this game with death threats, should they really be completely off the hook? Even Geoff Keighley is now questioning his own role in the events that lead up to release. Everyone is culpable in someway, but not everyone is being held to account.
