No Man’s Sky fans have long wondered whether it’s possible to see other players if they’re on the same planet. The answer, it appears, is no.
Player TheSadCactus noticed this afternoon that he had landed on a planet discovered by a different player, named Psytokat. SadCactus sent his new buddy a message, and before long the two players were both on Twitch, streaming their progress as they tried to meet up in the same place at the same time to see what might happen.
What happened was… nothing. As of post time they’re still experimenting, but it appears that different players are all located in different instances within the game (which is why you can pause). They haven’t been able to see each other on either planets or a neighbouring space station.
Observers had long believed that running into another player in No Man’s Sky, as unlikely as it may be, would allow you to see them. In a 2014 interview, designer Sean Murray made it seem as if players would run into one another while travelling. He has since discouraged people from focusing on multiplayer.
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47 responses to “Two No Man’s Sky Players Wound Up On The Same Planet (But Couldn’t See Each Other)”
Different time of day in those two doorway pics too.
Different instances > Different in game times
My understanding was that the game has small instances with no player control or preference system for which instance you’re in. So, yeah, different instances seem pretty likely 😛
I haven’t followed the game all that closely – but I did read some of those ridiculously oblique posts the creator made about multiplayer. Just say ‘no it doesn’t have multiplayer…’
Kind of assumed this. Manual labor simulator 2016
Ok, now I’m going to be one of those people shitting on the game for promising something and then not delivering!
I understand that expectations need to be managed, but telling people that they shouldn’t try to meet other players because it’s near-impossible and not telling them that it WON’T WORK because you aren’t even in the same gameworld are completely different things. I mean that’s kinda dishonest and to me ruins one of the things that I thought would make NMS really cool- the idea of being lost and isolated in a universe where there ARE other people but that you can find them.
Also it kinda makes me wonder about those numbers they were throwing around about planets. What are the chances of two people being on the same planet, in the same area, on LAUNCH day, both connected to twitch ect when theres a quadrillianzillion planets? I thought it would be a number a . and with so many zeroes it would be hard to imagine.
Between that coincidence and the idea that people COULD be on the same planet and you wouldn’t know….. whats to say there aren’t a much smaller number of planets and they’re just bullshitting. I mean even if it’s just a few hundred thousand nobody is ever going to could them.
I don’t want to be a coinspiracy nut here (although I’m sure there’ll be plenty on the net)…. Maybe this is the Milli Vanilli of video games.
Or maybe the system has some bugs and started some people close to each other rather than distributed around the outer rim. Can’t really say without evidence.
Their oblique talk about multiplayer is a bit annoying though. I took it to mean that if on the off chance you did meet someone or you flew to the centre where it’d be easier to co-ordinate then you’d be able to play with others.
Seems like it’s just a singleplayer game connected to a server for animal/planet names etc.
Any PS4 user can stream from Twitch, and being launch day both players were likely online so, it’s not that farfetched
18,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets.
The PlayStation 4 has an maximum player base of 40m and GTA V sold 12 million in its first day across the MUCH BIGGER PS3 and 360 install bases.
Even without factoring in time zones, being online, actually connecting with each other….. If you assume the entire install base was playing I can’t find a calculator that will tell me the chances of one person being on any individual planet because the numbers are so ridiculous. So you do the math and tell me how feasible is because “it’s launch day”.
It may have been a spawning glitch, but if it was working as advertised the chances that two of the (maybe 1 million?) players finding each other and matching up are unfathomably small.
I’m not saying they’re full of shit, but when you’re told NOT to look for other people and it seems like we were intentionally mislead about the possibility that you could find someone….. Its not a massive stretch to think they might be full of shit.
They’re full of shit, though.
If multiplayer worked, you should be able to manually enter the same multiplayer instance as your friend, then apply a marker to their location so that you can meet up and play together. If multiplayer worked as advertised, there would be absolutely no reason not to include this functionality and to advertise the hell out of it. Devs skirted around the truth so as not to hurt projected sales.
Bad form.
Uhhhh… you’re a little bit all over the place there.
They didn’t advertise multiplayer (in a traditional sense) at all, but they did imply that there’d be ways of finding other people that weren’t just Dark Souls style markers to show that someone else had been there.
To be fair, when you think of the logistics behind multiplayer in a universe that large, we really should have assumed that it wouldn’t work as well as we all hoped.
It’s all a bit of a downer really. The mystique of the universe that the game was trying to capture is all about possibility. When you have definitive answers that limit that possibility, it diminishes that sense tremendously.
Having no other humans takes the most dynamic possibilities all off the table, from that perspective I don’t blame them for being secretive about multiplayer, at the same time once you KNOW there’s nobody out there….. what a bummer.
As advertised: it is possible to cross paths with other players should you be in the same place as the same time.
Not advertised: two people playing together.
What I mean is that if it were a feature as it was described, there would have been a whole trailer devoted exclusively to multiplayer functionality, there would have been features implemented to help you find your friends and there wouldn’t have been any of this dancing around the question instead of just admitting that it didn’t work, wasn’t reliable and therefore wasn’t a feature. I feel like the devs have just been pretending that it’s a shared world while claiming that the odds of people finding each other were ‘basically zero.’
It’s always had that “SPORE” feeling about it for me…
Yeah this is a deal breaker for me.
But he’s done well so far for releasing a single-player game in multiplayer times.
Was this the stream where they tried to meet, couldn’t see each other, only to later realize that one of them not only didn’t have PSPlus, but didn’t even have their PS4 connected to the internet… I would say that may have had some baring and should be looked into more before spreading potentially false information about a game on launch day.
Check out the No Mans Sky subreddit. Looks like the two players were really trying to nut out a way to see each other. The guy without ps plus even bought a sub.
I bet it’s full of “But PC will be different which is why we have a different server”
Ok … So how are they streaming without being connected to the internet?
HDMI feeding into a PC, which was online and streaming from that. Pretty common.
If there was no net connection, how could they know they were on the same planet with the same name, considering how the planet was named by one of the two players?
This is disappointing to hear and close to deal breaking regarding a purchase.
I’m thinking the same to be honest. I like the exploration idea and will still probably get it for that. But I was really hoping via future updates that they would create reasons to have people interact with each other. As in, space stations in central, easily identifiable zones where trading could occur with others online as well as the game itself. Or create points where people go congregate for other reasons…..building an armada to take over other planets etc.
Having two players being randomly on the same planet unintentionally this early in the game’s life doesn’t bode well either.
My thought’s exactly. In a game where you have a play area as vast as has been created, a clear high point would be an early random encounter with another gamer. Clearly the centre of the No Man’s Sky Universe isn’t going o be a Coruscant style planetary system.
Same, I’ve been toying with the idea of picking it up all week but this kinda kills it a bit. I guess mainly because I kept thinking of it in terms of Minecraft, which I found terminally boring on my own but amazing with friends.
This isn’t new, Elite: Dangerous has been managing this for 2 years… 😉
You meet up with other players in Elite quite regularly. Sometime TOO regularly.
Is joke, about Elite’s instancing issues.
I read that with a Russian accent.
Like stupid big American car!
Only people you don’t want to meet. People you DO want to meet, in the same wing even, it’s a lottery… 🙂
Hahahaha!
It always sounded seemed like an alternative Elite. Guess they forgot to throttle down before making that jump, went and Icarus’d on us :p
I must be one of the few who doesn’t really want to see anyone else while I’m playing.
Me too. This is good news.
I agree , I will be really annoyed if i land in an area that someone else has been to.
I think the concept behind it has been a little lost on those expecting a multiplayer Star Citizen style experience. If nothing else, No Man’s Sky is a solo experience where you ‘might’ come across someone else, I like that as a concept because it explores more the possibilities of being alone.
Yeah exactly, i can now feel like Matt Damon in the Martian and less like Fry in futurama.
Except that doesn’t make any sense. You don’t spend hundreds of hours programming netcode that people might use.
Steam have it catergorised as single player
store.steampowered.com/app/275850/
Personally I’m a little pissed at this. Murray has said before that it was posible to meet up with another player. Just that it likely wouldn’t happen because the universe was so vast. Seems like that explanation was his way of avoiding having to tell everyone that multiplayer is in fact non-existent in this game. Which to a lot of people would make a difference in whether they purchased it or not.
It’s not non-existent, it’s random.
Which means what exactly? Two people can be on the same planet at the same time, but they won’t see each other unless some RNG spits out a number that makes it so?
And what’s your source on this?
Kinda obvious once you read up on what’s happened since the game launched. It seems the same as Destiny, different instances of the same place and you randomly might bump into someone you know.
So you’re just guessing. OK.
Thought about buying it, but now, “fuck buying that POS.”
fuck buying that POS
Considering you dont need PS plus its not surprising. This is a single player game.
Now people might understand why Star Citizen is taking so long – sure you can rush a game out but it’s going to be suffering for doing that.
Star Citizen has been working on the foundation of having people all able to play in the same environment and instance first then build the game out.
welp this made to my “fucking useless software” list like DS1,2 and 3.
The game was rather uninteresting to me anyway and was in my sub $40 list, now it’s in my if it’s on PSPlus I might download it list. There are too many good games to play to waste time being caught up by a hype train mediocre game.
same thing happened to me EXACTLY THE SAME just that i wasnt streaming, and mine was crashing in the same system. but what dumb founded me was we were both from the same city PERTH. like seriously i asked what time zone (city) he said Perth and i said Same. are the spawns Location based, so America spawns on one side, and Australia another. or are there 3/4 galaxies depending on PSN location. so all of australia are on EUCLID and USA on another. im confused. anyway we are trying tomorrow again at 8pm