No Man’s Sky players are currently ticked off with its developers Hello Games, with it having been revealed yesterday that two players managed to find one another in the game’s massive universe, yet they were unable to see one another despite standing in exactly the same spot.
Though Hello Games founder Sean Murray said that the chances of two players meeting in the game were “less than zero,” he continued to insist that if such an event were to happen, they would effectively be able to play alongside one another. Despite him claiming that the odds were almost impossibly small, many took that as a challenge and were excited to see whether or not they could see their friends in the game.
However, yesterday a player on the No Man’s Sky subreddit revealed that in their first warp they managed to journey to a star system discovered by another player. After doing a little bit of research, they discovered the identity of the player and contacted them in order to meet up. With both players Twitch streaming the potential momentous occasion, they found a spot on a planet to meet up, and prepared for what they thought would be the first human interaction of the game.
Also See: No Man’s Sky is Emptier Than I Imagined
Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. Despite meeting one another in exactly the same spot on the same planet in the same star system, the players were unable to see one another, leading to many accusing Sean Murray of lying about the game’s multiplayer capabilities. YouTuber user Crowbcat has put together a video compiling the interviews in which Sean Murray discusses the game’s multiplayer component, from the VGX Awards through to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, pointing out how Murray had repeatedly claimed that multiplayer was possible in the game. During one interview he even agrees that players will be able to “grief” one another. Check out the video below:
Here are some other comments from Murray lifted from interviews in which he discusses the game’s multiplayer capabilities:
“I guess we’ve always downplayed multiplayer because it’s not really a multiplayer game. Actually, the experience is reasonably solitary. But we want you to feel like you’re playing in a shared universe, and I think it’s important to have those moments.
We’re trying to not say exactly what happens, but it’s not one … it’s a thing that very rarely occurs, so the chances of you landing on a planet that somebody’s actually been to before is pretty rare. It’s a nice thing when it happens. The chances of you being in the same space, the actual same planet at the same time as somebody, is something that might never happen. Certainly for an individual player, it might never happen, and it won’t be your friends for sure.
So when you do, we want you to be aware of it, and we want you to have a sense of it, and we want it to be a real moment. But it’s not like you go off and play deathmatch together, or call Julie, or start meleeing together and tea-bag each other. That is not what the game is about. It’s more of aJourney-esque experience, or Dark Souls-esque kind of thing.” – GameSpot, March 2016
“People keep saying to us, “Yeah, but what if I knew where [my friends] were? Would I go there?” And it’s like, yeah, but they are going to have to stay there for quite a while while you get over there. And then once you get over there you might land on the same planet and then you will say, “I’m on a planet the size of Earth and I am on a mountain. Where are you?” Which is, I know, a weird thing and it’s a daunting thing.” – Game Informer, 2014
“We could sell that aspect of it and it’s a very appealing thing – it’s a giant MMO! – but it’s not. Even if it is, it’s a terrible one. It’s a really terrible multiplayer game. If you want that experience, if you want deathmatch and that MMO progression there are so many more better games for that. For us what we’re after is a more Journey-esque experience. Even if you come across somebody you won’t even know if they were AI or if they were a player. We just want to create some moments but that’s all. The universe is so big it would be really rare.” – Rock Paper Shotgun, July 2015
Sean Murray bypassed the criticisms of his comments regarding No Man’s Sky multiplayer in a series of tweets, instead discussing how two players finding each other on a stream on the game’s launch day had “blown [his] mind.” Though Murray had been keen to state that the game wasn’t to be thought of as a multiplayer experience, many believe that he should have been more up-front about its multiplayer capabilities and, if players are unable to meet up with one another in-game, this should have been more openly addressed.
