Here’s what Sean Murray told Game Informer regarding multipleyer meet-ups.
[quote]
Game Informer: Will your friends show up on the map?
Sean Murray: Yeah, but they will be a long way away. People keep asking us about multiplayer and I think when people see this they are going to fully realize what it means to be that far away from somebody else who’s playing. And I know that that’s a bit weird for people, but it’s what’s different about our game. And we want to embrace that. We don’t want people just scouting off beside their friends. I actually want people to boot up the game and just think, “Isn’t the universe huge? Who are we? What are we all doing here?”
People keep saying to us, “Yeah, but what if I knew where they were? Would I go there?” And it’s like, yeah, but they are going to have to stay there for quite a while while you get over there. And then once you get over there you might land on the same planet and then you will say, “I’m on a planet the size of Earth and I am on a mountain. Where are you?” Which is, I know, a weird thing and it’s a daunting thing.
It seems like it’s a lot of work to incorporate multiplayer with a high chance that it won’t even happen.
The only answer that I can think of for this is a really technical one. If we were to make a game where we synchronized every player, what they were doing with every other player, then that would be impossible and no one has ever done that. What we can do is, like many games that you have at the moment, where you are flying around with an open lobby. People are coming into that lobby and leaving it – like if you play Watch Dogs or something like that. Effectively, we have players joining your discrete space. We’re not trying to make an MMO where you can play with literally 60,000 people on screen. We handle the case like where other people can fly past in your game or that you can bump into other players in the game.
But that’s okay for us because it will never happen. I guess the whole of the entire community could organize to go to one specific spot and then they would find that they weren’t all there at the same time. That would be ridiculous. [/quote]
Again, it’s the messaging issue. Instead of a straight-up “No. There is no multiplayer. You can never see another player. The server is just for database calls.” Murray instead made it sound like there’s a teeny-weeny-wink-wink-it-won’t-ever-happen chance, which makes the internet think there’s totally multiplayer if you just coordinate hard enough.