And that`s the point- Creating a successful illusion. People who say it`s `crap` because it`s not actually working like a real system are missing the point.

Also, I tend to land on the light side of a planet to avoid the nights!

No, nothing personal about that. I was just one of the unofficial testers a few times. Wasn't hired by Sony, so I just said what I thought. Felt that was fair compensation for being invited to play. And that if I helped them find bugs, that they'd accept some criticism in return. Got invited to another beta, etc. Ended up being put on a list of 10 people or something like that that one of the Sony devs wanted to help them sort out some of the feedback they'd get.

That's when I got to talk to the community team the dev kept mysteriously referring to when they justified some of the stranger changes to the games. And after talking a bit it comes up that they were more interested in using the focus groups and internet buzz for advertisement, and using their access to make changes to the game to butter up people with youtube channels and so on. Than actually finding ways to make the games play better.

Nothing deceptive about it in one sense - they were simply adjusting the game towards the expectation various different communities had, right? That would make sense on an abstract level.

But, being often critical of things, I pointed out that maybe fabricating consent for these changes based on ten ditto-posts on a forum, pretending it represented everyone who might be interested in the game, was perhaps a bit risky. That it basically amounted to justifying arbitrary changes to a game based on a very superficial impression people might have. That it was a very bad case of "editor's disease", or that it simply made changes to something because that's the editor's job. While actual feedback that was more geared into how the developer wanted the game to play was ignored.

Another serious problem, I thought, was that certain changes were made without understanding the technical implications - for example, if you wanted to have any psn-player be able to join any other psn-player (which was eventually enforced across the psn), this wasn't a question of removing region locks, but removing ping and throughput requirements for the matching. Which in turn would make the flow of the game from an aesthetic and mechanical point of view very bad. Read: people would lag a lot. Which isn't really that great in an online only game. If anyone played Little Big Planet, it was the difference between smooth 60fps and unplayable hash Perhaps some compromise might be acceptable, instead of patching out all limitations from the game's matching, I thought. That answering some short term "concerns" such as "I have to wait 10 seconds in a queue, it kills the game for me, I quit" with essentially breaking the game for everyone, including the ones with the original "issue" - may not have been a good idea to even consider a solution. Etc.

So that my attitude towards community feedback would have to be to go and ask people if they either wanted to wait 10 seconds in a queue, perhaps not be able to gather the entire clan in the same platoon, etc. - to accept some inconveniences in return for a guaranteed smooth gameplay experience. Or if they wanted to drop the ten second wait along with being able to join in a single platoon, and then accept the gameplay breakage that would cause. I.e., structured feedback. That didn't place some "game expert's opinion" over technical concerns. It's like "I want access to my internet bank without using that inconvenient password!".. right? I've heard people say they want that, but in reality they might actually not.

I may have used more swearwords when I said that, though.

And that's when things broke down, basically. Were several other people on that list that were treated much worse than me afterwards. By the "community loyalty project" staff folks. And the end of that entire spat was that the dev who quested for more involved feedback for their game was first restructured to start work on a different title with more traditional design (read: Sony's publishing folks took the negative community feedback to mean the game was bad, rather than badly handled after the beta ended). Then they were dissolved, and the game was dropped after a healf-hearted attempt to sell disc-versions of it to rekindle the community, etc. It was a very badly handled project, where the decision to push the game as a "AAA" high confidence title relied literally on some snotty relative of someone in marketing, or something like that.

Supposedly some of the tech and some of the programmers were pilfered over to do Planetside 2. To coincide with the launch of their new Sony Online Entertainment platform on PC, etc. Which obviously went fantastically. Why they had high confidence in relaunching an old brand in this case is anyone's guess. Or why they dropped a finished project. It literally seemed like someone high up had a brilliant idea, and couldn't be dissuaded. While any of the "experimental" projects launched with the ps3 were now suddenly old hat.

Long story short, they don't know what they're doing. And costing a lot of good developers their jobs by pushing remarkably petty and childish ideas into a process that a seasoned developer team completed on their own.

Zipper, for example, eventually covered themselves by saying they simply delivered a product to Sony, who then would tweak the program as they wanted. And, that they had no say in that process after they delivered the product. That's pretty remarkable coming from an in-house dev, no, even when it's an off the cuff remark?

So while the process during Q&A remained completely obscure, it is demonstrably the case that several developers independent of each other were pressured to make these weird superficial changes that created more problems than they fixed (if they fixed any at all). That then were marked off as "job well done" when implemented. After which the game was considered unsellable if it didn't produce the expected fawning feedback on Gaf and Reddit afterwards.

In other words, their community project is not about having an imaginative PR operation where they use the communtiy as an advertisement venue. But they were actually implementing suggestions from insta-feedback into the game, in the belief that this would make it sell better.

Like a TV show where they'd adjust what the main characters would do every episode based on the first internet comment. "I think Dexter should be more kind to women" - Hold up everyone, make Dexter a feminist firebrand!

Or not even that imaginative. We're talking about pretty remarkably dumb stuff, like adding damage to a weapon certain people associated with the "hero" faction. To the point where that alone unbalanced the game. Actual discussions were had about whether it would make the game unpopular if the "villains" won too much on average, or felt equally strong. Abilities in the game was boosted based on specific tester's preferences so they would get an edge in the game. Things like that really happened. And stayed in the final release.

Has been adding to a list since day one. So it's kind of "raw"

Have only idees of improvments for now:

Galileo = Max Milestone?? I need a carrot if I'm going to aim for visiting / clearing as many systems as possible. why should it end, when reaching to days End game?

#Access to Galactic Library;
So I can search and browse for other planets / systems discovered by other players.
See what other strange animals/ things there is in the game.
Can use my Galactic Map to lay out course to visit "known systems"

Yes, a lot of star-systems. But a lot of them should have only dead planets, so it should be possible to give the systems a percentage of success of life and / or minerals, and feed that to ship computer / Galactic Map.
And what's up with same gravity on all planets??

Should be possible to sort, and filter star-system in Galactic Map. Information are gathered from level of Ancient discoveries, Rumours system on billboard feed in Space station, rumours as part of a reward for helping alien ships in space, certain high-ranking NPC's on Planets, or other missions.

#Scanner
Scanner must be "tuned" in to scan for alien-made items/structure, minerals or natural phenomenon (unknown wildlife/fauna) (long press scan button to choose type of scan, short press execute scan?)
Need to identify fraction of pilot /craft / structure by symbol, when in flight. In Space you can scan area after a battle to find treasures / rescue pilots / find lost items.
In-flight on planet, scan shows "?" for 1-5 findings nearby. If mineral scan, it shows coloured area if large concentration is found.
Don't see any need for change in scan on the ground.

#Fractions
It must be harder to become allied, and much easier to loose a rank. Maybe has some "gossip" system in the Journal screen, so you get feedback of how you are doing with each fraction, and tips of what you did right / wrong.
When allied with one fraction, you can't be allied with others. You can be pirate on the behalf of fractions, but makes you open for increased attack from Pirates and no-friendly fractions.
Must be more clearer to see in Galactic Map what fractions control space / systems.
Turning a planet / system will get you some + points with fraction, and also some other small benefits (chance to learn 2 words talking to certain NPC's, better prices when trading?)
"new word" harvesting with NPC must stop. Need to at least leave the station / planet to be able to ask for new word from same NPC. Some ancient structures must give harsh punishment (damaging items in inventory, life power depletions, "loosing" new words, etc) but also gives greater bonuses.
Space station are still neutral, and could have "billboard" system for missions (aimed to push player further on paths; explorer, trader etc) Penalty for now completing mission within time frame, follow mission objectives, etc.
I find it strange that all systems has Space station, and all planets has a large number of "facilities". Maybe some part of this should arrive / expend over time?

#Planet discoveries#
Player gets a "heads up" if someone visits "their" planet / systems, and upload new findings.
Establish reward system for "teaming up" to discover a planet / system?
Flagging structures in the name of a fraction (even if build by others, tipping the scale, so the planet are controlled by this faction. Should NPC stay or switch place with new fraction?

Monoliths searching gives more then just new word, but after activating X% you gain level of knowledge, so you can find your way to centre of galaxy.
Searching on planet for bases, towers, stations etc, should be a puzzle game. You need 2-5 pieces to reveal a location of interest.

Planet "map": More like clearing a fog-of-war, where findings are plotted (if discovered by scan, Visor or up close) either by a "?" (if unknown) or a symbol of structure, mineral, ancient, etc. (not detailed symbols of sub-type, but must distinguish from visited, or not) Use a filter option to choose what to show on map, and what to show on compass HUD.

#Fright ship
Can be bought, found on planet / space or rewarded after missions.
Interior department:
1) Cockpit, fly it like a spacecraft. Have possibility for autopilot. Inventory for protection of ship, can use resources from Exo-suit and cargo-hold
2) Cargo-hold. Can sort out inventory Exo suit - cargo. Inventory for mining and items found in space.
3) Parking hold for fighter-craft. Inventory sorting for Fighter - Exo-suit and cargo-hold
4) Weapons platform. Inventory for armament of the ship, optional auto-pilot for combat. Can use resources from Exo-suit and cargo-hold.

Hire NPC to man this departments?
Fright ship gives bonuses to player, but cost a lot of resources to repair / get of the ground. Maybe need a special item form a certain NPC to get the craft of the ground? Need to do some favours / missions?
Level of freighter lets you jump further, gives you better accuracy of percentage of what can be found in nearby systems.
Cockpit run scan when searching for objects / signal from a battlefield in space. If any "?" in space, Cockpit can launch droids from Cargo, to retrieve them (if you have the upgrade) Or you can launch in your fighter, and retrieve it.

#Base
1 base pr star-system? Player must calculate what planet he/she builds on, up against the benefits and bonuses player will receive.

Take over certain bases on ground? Repair and expand?

Can fright ship be start module for base? Land ship and start expand?
If mother-ships gets large (like the once we see in game), maybe only Cargo module are send to ground for Base start-module? And to get it back to the mother-ship, you must upgrade x levels of Base, and build rockets and stuff. Then your Fright ship can move one to next system
Rooms:
1) Storage (Player can store resources from Exo Suit and Fighter (if on landing pad))
2) Radar, Search and Rescue. Collect information about other fractions on planet / system, ancients objects on planet / system, possible findings of other objects.
3) Vault (store valuables, Mission objects, etc.) Limited storage Extra protected against attack / raid.
4) Armoury (Defence capabilities) Defend items in Storage and Vault, and info in Radar room.

There must be bonuses for player (and supporting fraction) for building a base.
Base on planet and Radar-room, lets you piece together locations with less info, and with more accuracy.
Hire NPC to manpower the base?

#Both Fright ship and Base.
Milestone items (to finish building of department / rooms) are available to buy / obtain from certain NPC after for filling task / missions. No stockpiling this items. Must be used on the base mission is connected to.
Can both be attacked and you need to return within a time-frame to protect it. The longer it takes to fight the attacker off, the more they manager to steal and damage your base / fright ship.
Need a new range of blueprints for items, functions, objects, etc for Base and fright ship.

Yes. Gods, why does no one complain about that. (And where are the low gravity gas-jellyfish behemoths, things like that.) Like.

Thing is that at the center of any galaxy in the universe there's likely going to be a lot of sections with absolutely no reference points or anything. As well as very large collisions, breaking and forming stars that'd basically burn stretches of millions of kilometers. Some of the supernovas we've observed traces of would make our sun seem like a candle in comparison from just outside pluto. And then there's the "great attractor" that we really have no idea what is specifically (or if what's past the really busy belt outside the "near" center sphere is maybe a perfectly calm piece of very bored cold rock or something). So increasing the requirements for navigation and jump strength, and so on once you'd get closer would make sense. Game-mechanically as well. I'd go for some upgrade to the small white blips on the visor screen, at least. And maybe a simple function to mark off or retain existing waypoints (to get back to the trading spaceport, or disable a point of interest you don't care about - arrow up/key while locked to something..). And wonder why the observatory text insists on that you found a new location "within the cosmos" - and it's always a point of interest right next door on the same planet. Sort of wonder if at one point this was a way to draw you towards the other planets in the system, or maybe mark something in a nearby solar system.

Situation: exosuit fills up with 20 individual aquaspheres.
Expected: they stack in one spot.

Today, while i was playing, my expected happened and i was most surprised. However, after i sold that stack of 22/100, the next ones i picked up didn't stack at all.

Please, better flight controls. War Thunder flies a whole lot better, and that's a 'free' game.

3. non-gameplay things

"You have learned the korvax word for 'eheu'". Switched around ahem for eheu - ...actually, keep that one :p

---

Btw, if anyone from HG actually reads this some day: Do try to understand that the entire "flat-earther static universe with training wheels on" is going to be what you were known for producing. I don't doubt that Sony had a hand in it, but you're the ones who will be known for destroying your own game. Anyone can see that the engine can produce planet rotation, never mind infinitely more varied locations, more interesting flight controls, and down to better lighting setups. In fact, I think it had exactly that until very late in the development process. As well as that the game was clearly balanced for a completely different setup than "every planet has everything you need within 30 meters to avoid getting stranded". Just as "asteroids are always 1m away from you if you get stranded in space". In the same way as "maximum distance to nearest planet = 10 seconds". And "almost every planet has life, because otherwise impatient people will be disappointed".

So we know that you have taken an interesting game and blown it in an attempt to gear it to appeal to some imaginary primary buying audience of unintelligent moonies who believe in flat-earth, has no control over their fingers, and have zero visual abstraction capability. Frankly, you deserve the kind of insane shit you're getting in social media right now, and I don't want to lift a finger to stop it.

Sidenote: I will never buy another HelloGames game, unless you declare in public that you will extract your company from Sony, completely and in every way, from before and until long after the start and completion of your next project. And discuss openly what the actual fuck led to the design-direction changes between the gameplay demos and the final release version.

Great post nipsen. I just learned "eheu," and said to myself "that will be zero help." I pre-ordered the game based on the hype. The first time, and last time I will pre-order. Great Post.

This is an incredibly interesting and useful thread, and thank you nipsen for taking the time to make it. You sure you are good to 'reveal' some of these things? having been around AAA game dev in the past i know the love of the NDA stuff etc, so please be careful for yourself just in case that might apply?

But IF you are all good to go on these issues, we can look forward to a great thread going forward :)

I'm getting NMS pn PC (from GOG obviously!) at the end of the month and plan on modding it (adding made mods and maybe making a few myself) to add some of the complexity you say was removed, as in it's current state it is in terrible need of that kind of thing.

And i'm completely in the camp of understanding how a AAA company and a console focus can gut a game of all it's depth and interest if not handled well, and it seems clear in the case of NMS it was not handled as it could/should have been.

I really, really hope Sean forks the PC version away from the PS4 version and starts to add stuff back in, we shall see.

Simple little gameplay `decisions` really smack of last minute `panic-work`. For instance, just removing the ability to fly so can`t skim under floating boulders and drive through canyons as low as you want is one huge gameplay kill on their part.

The obvious attempt to limit things because they think people will get `bored` or are too stupid bugs me. That siad some people do get `bored`, because not every planet is teeming with life. I didn`t expect every planet to be teeming with life. You got millions of planets, making every one or nearly everyone teaming with life would kill exploring very, very quickly.

I`m not entirely certain it`s all Sony`s fault. We know that the game packaging had Multi-player capability on it, then it was hurriedly stickied over just before release. Why would Sony have the multi-player blurb all printed and ready to go if at the last second they had to cover it up? Did Sean even lie to Sony?

...um.. well. The last time I heard anything from Sony was after this review (which Sony "scandinavia", then Nordisk Film, helpfully supplied me a review copy for):
http://www.honestgamers.com/9451/playstation-3/white-knight-chronicles-ii/review.html

That was also the closest I have been to writing a formal contractual agreement with Sony, since I informed them on beforehand in writing that I would post the review regardless of server state, release date, or whatever, and only would consider any other restrictions as a courtesy..

Implicit NDAs on the other hand are the kind that Sony has perfected over the years. Basically, if you want a career in anything remotely connected to Sony, you will shut your goddamn mouth and plaster it to the floor while you put your hands down on the ground.

Thing is that you kind of understand why they have this attitude as well, even though it makes little sense to piss people off like this. Because 99% of the people they normally deal with are insane. I mean, really, how many normal people write to the toilet-roll factory to complain about a badly glued on first sheet? No one does that! But that's the kind of correspondencies Sony deals with 99% of the time.

Although I suppose things may perhaps have taken a bad turn at some point nearby where they suddenly decided 99% of their paying customers were like this as well.

That's a fair suspicion. And it makes sense because you assume that all parties involved are fairly reasonable people who obey some semblance of if not casual then at least narrative logic.

Sony doesn't do that. I was on a test where a developer had failed to.. how to put this.. oversell one of the major accomplishments of the title. And therefore ended up having that aspect of the game in the end not considered when the cuts started to turn up.

For example, and I know this sounds absolutely fuckwit insane. But from my experience with Sony, I would not have reacted with any kind of surprise if it turned out that they decided to cut out p2p multiplayer on the grounds that it would happen so very, very rarely. And that therefore an asynchronous server model that did not have to be current. So that they could save three pennies on online. Was the actual and real reason why 1. the feature wasn't promoted (read: it's not a major element of the game, we cannot sell this). And 2. we cannot even playtest this, we have no idea how this is supposed to work, so we can't include it in good conscience.

Now let us move on to seeing how we can make the game look like a traditional corridor shooter level-design! Etc.

Wouldn't bat an eye. And neither would the developers at HG - they are all eithe former Sony devs, or have worked with Sony before (some of them on Uncharted, where the community effort was probably close to including "Uncharted Karting" instead of multiplayer. Although that's probably just a rumour... So you're right it's HG's fault. But no matter whose fault it is.. good grief...

Hmm. Interesting.

Indeed. It is going to be even more interesting to see what Hello Games put out as free updates over the coming months (and i guess paid for DLC at some point?) and what modders are able to do with all this.

Will there be those mentioned official mod tools even? What can modding 'fix' in the long run, can the PC version branch (legally) from the PS4 version etc. As Sean mentioned in their last official message to us all, 'This is just the beginning.'

I hope so, i really hope so, it would be a tragic loss for gaming for it too end as it currently stands.

(as an aside PvP was NEVER in the official discussion at all, even way back when, all that was pure Kotaku/player invented wishful thinking)

Problem with Sean is one has to take everything he says with a pinch of salt. He was economical with the truth before and got away with it, expect himto be economical again. Best to wait and see what he actually does. Actions speak louder than words.

Not sure about that in truth. I'm more on the page that Sony changed stuff very late in the game (as nipsen goes into) and less the 'Sean Lies!' toxic hype stuff that seems to have swamped the debate. If these changes took place late in the release, then it makes sense.

Actions do speak louder than words, and in that Hello Games have been about as fast as i can remember in terms of a dev rolling out patches. I hope that is a pattern they continue and work to fix the PC version atleast (i.e. undo all the late game changing crap Sony forced, allegedly).