No Man's Sky is NOT a Multiplayer game.

I've been a part of several fan pages for No Man's Sky, and there are endless discussions of people saying they'll meet up with their friends to form a fleet and play together since the game is online all the time and all players are, in theory, playing together. But people have tried to explain that that wont be an option in the game just because of the sheer scale of it, and yet people don't seem to understand. They don't get the concept of the game's scale and still try and think of it like a WoW map. Just tell me where you are and I'll meet you there, is that so hard? Well...yes...yes in fact it's almost impossible. Why? Well...

I've discovered a much better example of what exploring the Universe and the multiplayer aspect of the game will feel like. The internet. The internet is endless, with pages upon pages upon pages to explore. Some are created by huge companies and work seamlessly, some are made by a crazy person who knows as much about coding as he does fitting into normal society, which is to say zero amount, but god bless him for not letting that stop him from creating his page dedicated to skinning roadkill to make his anatomically correct my little pony figurines. What I'm saying is some planets will be awesome and some will possibly be a big ball of floating grass filled with creatures with feet growing out of their teeth, and we'll all start at a totally random one.

Now, here's the thing about finding other people in this endless sea of spontaneous web-like traversal that will be No Man's Sky (we'll get back to the web analogy in a second). Unlike the real internet, we wont be able to just type in an address and go to there. Instead we seen an endless mural of white dots and to get to any one of those dots, the only option is point...and click. Sure you can highlight it and see the name before jumping, but you still have to find it and put your little pupils on it for a good moment, before moving on to the next. And it doesn't stop there, you can ONLY travel to dots near enough to your starting dot that your warp drive can reach. At the beginning, with the "warp 1" capability when you get it, this means only traveling to the next nearest star. Eventually you can upgrade, but where will that end? Can the max only jump 5-20 stars in a single bound, or will you eventually be able to look at the wall of dots and pick any one on the board? (Not to mention how many months of gameplay will you go through before you have that ability?) If you can do that fine, you might have a chance to find your friend, but you have to go back to the previous point and realize, you still have to figure out WHICH star is his in a GIANT copy of War And Peace in braille with billions upon billions of identical looking dots. You can't even see ALL the dots in one go, you'll start only looking at the dots around you and you'll have to move around and search different areas full of dots (think, turning the pages of above mentioned novel). Sean talks about people getting lost on planets all the time, imagine navigating that place and making sure you don't search the same area twice.

So, how is finding a friend like the web? Now imagine you're on one completely random website, and he's on another. You both want to get to your hulu page so you can both binge watch Breaking Bad together, so you can research for your co-written fan fiction. Now, try and get there by never typing in an address because your browser doesn't have an option to. Instead you have to both get to the same website by ONLY clicking links on every page, hoping eventually you'll land on a site with a link to hulu. Every time you click a link, you have no idea where you'll end up, and what links it will contain to keep your forward momentum, and tho you'll save the site to Hello Game's collection of bookmarks, no one else will be able to enter it into their browser either. Both you and your friend will endlessly be clicking links, unsure if they're getting closer, or further away. There's no north, south, east, or west in space. You and your friend may also have different warps, and while you click 5 sun jumps to catch up, he's going the opposite direction with 20 jump clicks. Then you have the whole server issue, where too many people on one site at a time can crash the server, so to alleviate that they limit how many people on the server at once, and dump the remainder to another server and so on and so on. Your friend may be on the same site, but in not the same server (think, parallel universe theory).

But lets say planet E3 and planet Achaia have aligned in the great conjunction, statistics are meaningless and you both do end up in the same website (solar system) together, now find the actual sub-page (planet) they're on and now find what word on the page they're looking at (where the f*** on a to-scale planet is my tiny little human-sized friend standing?). It'll be a little like being on Amazon, and THEN trying to figure out which product page they're looking at, and exactly what word they're reading at the time, and only if you both end up on the same word, will you finally see each other. It CAN be done, but imagine how much work and time it will take that you both COULD be spending on having fun with little ewok critters (hopefully shooting them) on some alien world that no one else will ever see.

I'm basically saying, DON'T buy this game FOR multiplayer. I'm not a complete multiplayer hater, I've had lots fun with friends online with certain games (GTAV!), and when this game was announced I talked to my friends about creating a fleet together. But as we read more, learned more, and heard the words of our great leader Sean Murray, we realized that the entire concept of that was going to be so frustrating, it won't even be worth attempting. At least in the current build. It's not what the game is about. You're better off not trying to play the game with your friends, but ENJOY the game with your friends. Have your own adventures, and then meet up at your local Earth-based cantina to share your stories (hopefully they allow droids). And if you do happen across another player, a stranger, perhaps you can try to make a new friend to raid some freighters with, but I will most certainly hope they won't be like 99.97% of other online gamers out there, and immediately try to kill you with all the death, just to see what happens or for a laugh.

Note: I'm honestly trying to keep this short, but I have to cover all my bases. Let's say for instance the center of the galaxy is google. The central hub and finally you can just enter in a search for the website your friend is on. You still have to get THERE first, and how long with that take you? You may be pretty much done with the game at that point. It may be a nice pay-off to beat the game and finally get to meet up with some friends to play together, but it's not gonna be an out-of-the-box option. But this is speculative and we have NO idea what's at the center or what will happen when everyone gets there, so to jump to that conclusion, or plan for that, is just as pointless at this time. We'll see when the game comes out, it could go many ways and change drastically before release, but it still means you shouldn't be so intent on playing with your friends before buying this game. Just enjoy a single player game, and if you can't play a game without your friends, at the current design of the game, this one might not be for you.

I did not even know No man's sky had a mutliplayer. You pretend that the multiplayer won't have a way to find other players and friends? I doubt that especially when I know the planet system is almost infinite; It will have for sure a way to find friends and other players.

There might be a form of co-op, but Shaun has said it'll work more like Journey or Dark Souls than anything else.

@gmak2442: Sean, the creator, has already said in interviews that there won't be. At least not at roll out. MAYBE later down the line like in a DLC but the game is a single player game. Other players will be in the same universe as you but mostly for the shared data collection. One article even stated that when you get close to another player it will put you in the same server, but only 3 people max (tho no idea how valid that is). But there's also NO info on what it will be like to run into another player, if they'll even be able to see or interact with you, and there's no way to find them...only stumble across them. Even if you know what planet he's on, you cant just go that planet, but that's what this blog is explaining.

Regardless, I'm crazy excited about this game. Whether with friends or alone.

The developers have already said before that it will be almost impossible to find and play with friends. I kinda feel like there will be a lot of disappointed gamers when they find that out after buying it because they didn't do their research.

@JayQproductions: me too man. There's a lot of kids in these groups who will fight me tooth and nail that they WILL find a way to meet up with friends, and I try to explain that they shouldnt plan to do that because they'll be disappointed and then this game will get slammed on metacritic for the wrong reasons. Many times I post articles and videos where he's backed and said these exact points, and like a religion or something, they only hear what they want to hear and twist it around in their favor.

And unless they make a way to have your friends play with you in fleets of at least 16 then this games community will die out very very fast. I'm personally interested in the game because I like space games and they seem to be taking procedural generation to the next level so I'll support the hell out of this team, as I'd like to see what they pull of next.

Everyone in this thread seems to be on point so far, Sean Murry made it clear from the start!

@MarcRecon: yeah. I'm not gonna lie, I'm shocked actually. I wrote this for a No Man's Sky fan page where there was some confusion on how the online aspect of the game would work, and people fighting HEAVILY over it, and I wanted to drive it home how it would be so people would stop fighting. And it's been just about NOTHING but hate on me and people disagreeing whole heartedly. And I posted on here because, hey I already wrote it, why not? And everyone's like, "yep, totally agree." No offense to this forum, but I kinda thought it'd be the opposite, lIke most forums im used to. Pleasantly surprised. But there's a HUGE collection of fans out there, that STILL think this is an MMO and that they will have a fleet of friends to fly around with and raid other players together. All I was trying to do with this is not have people over hype a game with features that we know don't exist before a game even comes out, so that they arent disappointed and leaving bad reviews when it does finally come out.

@ribstaylor1: yeah this will be a casual game. Pick up and play for a few hours every now and then and play for a bit, not a hours on end grind game with everyone competing. I agree most will get turned off by it, but I wont. I'll find as good, relaxing, mellow fun. Plus I've always wanted to be a spaceship pilot, and this is the closest thing to a simulator out there...that I can play on my PS4 and not have to build a $2k computer to play. Heh.

That's a lot of assumptions for a game that we have very little information about.

Mostly still just concept at this point.

@foxhound_fox: there's more information than people realize about this game actually

@foxhound_fox: I've actually invented a word, (urban dictionaried it and all) based on the speculative hype-gasms they have created in that group. Many people post something along the line of, "Wouldn't it be cool if you could teleport out of your ship like in star trek?" and then later you see people in comments of other spots going, "I heard you can teleport out of your ship like in star trek." So I created this word for it called "Hypefully" as in, hopefully, but based on absolutely NOTHING we've seen so far and purely hype-fueled. "Hypefully I can cook and eat critters I kill on a planet." "Hypefully, the center of the galaxy is a giant wormhole that takes us to a whole new Universe with all new planets." A satirical way to say hopefully this game will have a feature I 120% know it won't have, as a way to have fun discussing it, without leading anyone astray. The group loved it, but then wave after wave of new fans joined in, and don't get it... That group, severely makes me give up on the internet sometimes.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hypeful&defid=8328585

@mastermetal777: Yeah but there's also a LOT of people pulling info out of their a** based on over-analytical speculations and breakdowns of trailers and misinterpreting things Sean has said in interviews, despite having no basis for their theories. For instance, someone commented on the above post on the other page with an article interview, trying to tell me that you CAN play with your friends. And in the article he says this...

"The universe is shared online with other players, so will it be possible for me to direct a friend to an awesome planet I find?
-No, but you can share what you've found. You can name it, you can upload it and you can share it through your console or PC. You can tell other people about it but the reality is, we created something really huge, and we want people to spread out and explore it. So every player starts on a different planet on the outside edge of the universe. The chances of you finding the same planet as your friend are very slim. Then even if you were to land on the same planet, these are planet-sized planets. So it'd be like two people landing at two random different places on Earth. It's not about multiplayer, it isn't an MMO. This is a game about being in this huge universe and going out and exploring it, surviving, trading, fighting. To come across another player, it would be incredibly rare for that to happen.

But not impossible?
-Not impossible."

So I said, "yeah, see, he makes my point. You won't be able to really meet up with people, but you may come across someone." His response? "No, he said it's NOT impossible. You CAN do it. So stop trying to tell everyone you can't. We'll be able to play with our friends if we put the work in." *facepalm*

Honestly. Local players should have a join option. Rather people on friends list should be able to join you via party and game invite. Say me and the wife want to play together, how annoyinf would that be being in the same home and never able to enjoy the vast content of the game together. Even a team of 5 at a time would be great. SOME human interaction will eventually be needed for majority to not lose interest relitivly soon. After a hundred hours or more alone, most begin to get bored alone and want to enjoy sights and adventures as a team...i know i love doing stupid things as a team making memerable moments within the game.

i don't even care atm, because the game is 8 months out

Don't care about MP. I wanna play this sooo badly but 8 damn months is a long time to wait.