That is not true. It was said that you could run into other players and interact with them in real time, but that it would be exceedingly rare due to the size of the galaxy. Well, happened on day 1 and, nope, not true.

Now it was never supposed to have a large focus on multiplayer, but they also mentioned things like a galactic economy, big space battles, a faction system... all BS.

>you could run into other players ... it would be exceedingly rare

This should've tripped everyone's BS detectors. Why would a studio do the huge work to add a multiplayer mode if it would be so rarely seen?

It _did_ trip a lot of BS detectors.

The sound was drowned out by the overwhelmingly non-technical consumers of the game's PR. It's the modern day version of selling snake oil.

Technology progresses, but human nature doesn't.

And much of the expectant player base didn't want to hear anything negative. Reddit was a complete echo chamber, praising the devs in every post. I suppose it's still an echo chamber, but the conversation has... drifted the other way.

yeah, i think this was a mistake made under obvious pressure.

you are right about a lot of the claims seeming to be straight up BS, but it was all understandable imo. people had unrealistic expectations because the devs didn't take care to manage them well.

there are space battles, and there are things you could call factions and economy, they are just woefully underpar compared to expectation and marketting material.

I think it was more than community hype. Sean, for whatever reason, made claims that turned out to be objectively false.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/Games/comments...

My game is just as vast, practically speaking, and it has 70 client multiplayer, worst case. (That is, all directly interacting in the same spot. If 1000 clients were in the same star-system instance, but not interacting, that would be fine.)