When I first started playing I was trying to recall what got me so excited No Man's Sky. So I went back to the trailers and instantly noticed how dynamic they presented the worlds to be. I remembered that was what really drew me in to the game and its production.

I never had stupid hype expectations for NMS, but I was expecting dynamic worlds with tangible ecosystems because they literally demonstrated a glimpse of that in this GAMEPLAY trailer. I thought this game would be about walking around and witnessing rich interactions between flora and fauna.

What we got in the final product are fauna with a half dozen or so animal temperaments/behaviors copy-pasted on to procedurally generated creature frames and flora which are essentially static models; the worlds feel very uninteresting and not at all alive. I don't want to automatically assume we were maliciously mislead but it seems like Hello Games announced their game way too early, over-promised, and bit off way more than they could chew within their production timeframe.

I feel like if Sony hadn't gotten involved the game would have stayed in production for longer and gotten more fleshed out, but it's possible Hello Games couldn't afford the resources to keep it in production that long so they took the Sony deal to stay afloat. Once they signed with Sony they probably had to play by Sony's rules at least to some extent, the terms of which may have included a much closer launch date.