So, let's take a moment to point a few things out shall we?

Please strike one of several complaints off your hate list since someone today posted pictures of a large dinosaur screen captured in NMS on PS4 (so no mods) that has the same kind of long neck and even similar neck detail as the one in the infamous E3 trailer. The only difference was in size, and all that is, is scaling. We also have confirmation that creatures as large as 9m are possible. So a large long necked dinosaur like creature really can appear in the game, it is just a very rare combination of factors in the game engine - which is what people have said many times before.

Makes me wonder how much other stuff that he hate crowde complains about not being there, is actually there.

However, we've already seen the angry people declaring that example void because it's not as big as the E3 one so it's not the one apparently...despite it being very similar in appearance, and the only difference being scaling.

What about Animal behaviors? I've seen herding, seen flocking of birds and schooling of fish, seen predators hunting/killing, I've seen attack postures, I've seen docile behavior after feeding creatures. So that bit about animals not behaving as they depicted is wrong.

I have seen lush worlds with tall trees and dense forests, seen worlds with grass and small plants so thick I could not reliably scan wild life. Seen barren worlds, hot worlds, toxic worlds, radioactive worlds, frozen worlds, dry worlds, signs of deserts and dust storms on arid planets, water planets with so little land that finding a standing building was a rarity, and large expanses of water as far as the horizon were frequent...So much for the whole lack of variety thing.

I've been in large space battles...hmmm, 32 pirates vs 10 Freighters with me in the middle and one stray shot brings in the Sentinels to add their numbers. Sounds like a large space battle, and felt like it too.

Shared universe....yep people discover things and I find them later.

Multi-player was never the focus, and as far as I can see was never intended to be a part of the game. In the months leading up, it was downplayed and contradicted by SM and HG - I will dig up the Interview and link it...

Here you go;

https://youtu.be/1ORFgfhj_hM

The bits you want to see are at 2:40-3:50 and 3:51-4:21. He's really kind of clear about it in the second question.

He's also asked about reaching the center and says a) most won't go that far, and b) many will get there and feel that they've played enough and put down the controller. He mentions unspecified reasons for people to continue playing after they reach the center, and to be honest I think it's likely he was alluding arriving in a fresh Galaxy after finding the center of the 1st.

What's incredibly sad is that that interview was badly mis-reported elsewhere, take a look at this article;

http://www.mnrdaily.com/article/no-mans-sky-multiplayer-news-fans-now-curious-as-to-how-the-multiplayer-aspect-works-for-the-open-universe-game/11678.htm

They use his answer to the 1st question and speculate upon it without mentioning the second bite at the cherry where Sean Murray directly says it's not multi-player. I can't help wondering whether that was done intentionally by the news site, to maintain an air of mystery and keep readers coming back for the next article to learn more (click-bait). I say that because the tone of the piece makes it sound like there might be multi-player, when in fact the interview they quote from makes it clear that there isn't.

Further more, here is a video from 18 April 2016 with Anthony Carboni, clearly showing the PS4 version;

https://youtu.be/qqmJ8k9uBB0

It looks very, very much like the game we got with the minor exceptions of the manual save point which is a bit different now, and the icons in the inventory/load out screens seem different. and it looks like the design of the alien monument he 'sleeps' in front of has clearly been changed - or at least we've never seen one like that in-game yet...The point is, it's the game we got, and he shows nothing there that we cannot do now.

This article from PlayStation Lifestyle (3 March 2016);

http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2016/03/03/no-mans-sky-hands-on-gameplay-and-talk-with-sean-murray/#/slide/1

...makes direct mention that there is no map, it's you, your scanner and it's 'binocular' feature. It also confirms 3 alien races of NPCs.

Love this quote; "while there’s a general goal of reaching the center of the universe, the team stressed that it’s not a game where you will be pushed into any one way of playing or doing things. "

...and this gem talking about one of the most often criticized features - inventory size;

"The best part of the tech upgrade system is that there is a limited inventory for new tech. You are free to fill out those slots however you want, but you can never reach a kind of god mode status where you are great at everything."

Single biomes - "Planets in No Man’s Sky will take the Star Wars approach, in that each planet has a singular environment. For right now, you aren’t going to be finding anything with icy caps at the poles and sunny beaches on the equator."

On the plus side for criticism is says this too;

"What will differ for each celestial orb is the day-night cycle, which is achieved through rotation and its literal position to the sun."

Although that is a conclusion drawn by the article, not a quote from anyone at HG...

Rock Paper Shotgun in July 2016 (talking about E3 2016; https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/07/07/no-mans-sky-interview/

From the first paragraph;

"The thing about No Man’s Sky which is most interesting to me right now is how Hello Games – Murray in particular – are trying to deal with audience expectations, shifting them from hype and projected desire to excited realism. "

Apparently their attempts to control the hype were completely ignored...

A few SM quotes from the article;

Talking about the E3 2016 demo... "“I could have made it so that every planet had a scary monster creature that would come out at the end we could fade to black and be like every other game. There were discussions like ‘Should we do something like that with a big bombastic end?’ Instead I flew down to a planet and that, to me, is really cool. Then I went over to the beacon and uploaded the information and that was cool. Then the demo peters out and I put the controller on the floor and, y’know… Every other demo had way more explosions. It was like explosion, explosion, explosion, monster jumps out and screams, fade to black before it does anything. What could possibly happen afterward? You’ll have to play the game to find out…”"

"Describing that on paper it sounds like nothing but there’s something about the world and the worlds that we’re making that seem a bit more real and a bit more like a real place and it’s also really cool and ambitious and a thing we’ve always wanted in games, to just be able to fly and not have a skybox, just fly into space. "

Note what he says. He's not saying that there is nothing like a skybox; he's saying that unlike other games in the past where you were on a planet which has a skybox, and when you fly to space there is a transition/load screen where you exit the skybox and the game loads you in space in a new skybox, NMS let's you fly to space without that transition - you don't hit the skybox flying up from a planet into space.

About multi-player; "No. We really try to play that down, I think. And you’ve said about us playing down the hype, right?” says Murray. “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."

So, that is a no on the multi-player, just to be clear...

The article finishes with heavy irony because Sean Murray mentions other procedurally generates games (not by name) that focus on being a sort of ambient experience and then describes how the core game loop of mining, exploring, finding new tech and upgrading is supposed to give players enough motivation to continue playing rather than it just being a walking simulator. It's ironic because once you upgrade everything in NMS, the game is in most senses a big walking simulator. Not that this is a bad thing, it's just ironic.

So, There you go. Do with it what you will. To me, we got the game that we were shown in the Spring, and anyone paying attention would have known everything they need to step off the hype train into realism. Then hate and anger is quite misplaced really.

Probably the biggest 'missing' thing that I can honestly see is planet rotation, and I'm still not convinced that it was never there. I've explained before that with the clump of planets actually orbiting the planets around the star is pointless, but having the planets themselves rotate would make sense since it gives you the day/night cycle. However based on the comments about play-testers finding that difficult, it seems to me that because they essentially did away with the rotation of planets, they were left with having to implement a day/night cycle by moving the lightsource - which is what in fact happens if you watch any timelapse of a planet day/night cycle in NMS.

But to be honest if the level of anger and hate shown by many here is based on planetary rotation, there are some really fragile people here. I suspect though that it's more that people just did not accept reality and preferred to stay with the hype train and click-bait journalism.