I've joined space battles with 30+ ships attacking freighters. Not "a couple".
The only huge difference with the old gameplay footage is that it is more of a status quo situation. If you do nothing, nothing really happens. Freighters indeed don't fly around (for now?) and pirates will just swarm them and attack, but nothing really comes out of it and freighters don't shoot back. I'm guessing this has more to do with a gameplay consideration rather than a technical limitation, considering that (some) freighters will definitely try to wipe you out if you attack them.
If you attack the pirates, they'll fight back and the freighters won't touch you (unless a loose photon bullet ends up hitting them, RIP my first ship). If you attack the freighters, the pirates will ignore you. Freighters may or may not fire back. Sentinels starships, and eventually sentinel cruisers, will be progressively called in.
So yes, it's not 100% what was shown once, BUT saying "there is no large battles where you can choose a side" (as many people have) is quite far from the final real gameplay possibilities too. Granted, I would like a bit more fleshed out outcomes/consequences of these battles. Like, you fail if you take too long to get rid of all the pirates, like a time trial of sorts.
Systems are indeed not quite as complex as they said they would be. That "oh, other stuff is fake" was a dumb statement to make, too. Presumably, part of it has to do with people getting thrown of by planet rotation etc during playtesting.
At the same time, I've been on permanently dark / lit sides of planets. So I'm not entirely sure how that can happen if it's merely a set skybox, unless, they "fake it" by changing the "skybox" depending on your position on the planet I guess. It's hard to use the term skybox too, when, if you see a planet or moon up in the sky, you can hop into your ship and get there seamlessly and without any "cheating". Or if there is, it's so well done that it's in practice identical to the "real thing".
People have come to conclude that (partly) because of that, the whole different resources thing is not in at all either, so it's another lie. Yet I know exactly where to look if I want a shitton of plutonium on a planet. I know which type of planets to look for if I want chrysonite, or to just walk for 5 minutes and fill my ship with gold. How could I do that, if there was no such system in place?
You can't guess craft recipes, true. I'm not sure anything more than "we kinda want to do it like minecraft" was ever said though, and Some of the more rare recipes (alloys) are not straightforward to get.
No "true" MP for now, for sure. Maybe they lied. Maybe they didn't make it in time. Maybe it didn't work, maybe the servers/netcode is fucked. I don't know and I'm not going to claim I do.
Portals are physically there, but presumably it's not possible to activate them. There is evidence of stuff related to that in the code. Maybe they were disabled at the last minute. Or just not finished yet.
I'm not sure what you mean by "not viable" to be a trader or a pirate either. You can absolutely play the game this way, unless I don't get your point fully.
There's also a large list of things that were supposedly not there at all, and the more time passes, the more you get evidence of all that stuff (yourself, or seeing footage from other people)f. That reddit list was made after a week (a couple of days for the PC release) by a guy who didn't even play himself. It's a list of quotes with statements that "X and Y are NOT in". People ran with it to conclude that they deliberately lied about pretty much everything. They basically ignored the old adage "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". This does not mean that "anything could be out there" either. It's still a game. Made by a team of 15. There will be limitations, and I think some people just forgot that. The press ceertainly didn't help with all their "OMG GUYZ WE VISITED HG GUYZ. NMS FTW. SO MANY POSSIBILITIES GUYZ. IT'S ALL LIKE INFINITE AND SHIT" (clickbait?) articles.
So yes, the game doesn't 100% matches the few bits of gameplay that were shown. some stuff is not there (yet?). Some stuff is "close enough". I'd wager you could put ANY game/dev under the spotlight for pretty much the whole duration of its development, and you could always find stuff that was shown/talked about 2 years prior that didn't make it in the end, without necessarily the devs putting a press release out to inform that the 2 secs footage they've shown 2 years ago to kewlgamez.com isn't in the game (like an NPC ship taking of from random ground, and not just from trading posts. Seriously what difference does it really make?). Yes, they definitely made some mistakes too.
I think there is enough of a good game (YMMV, it's certainly not for everyone, that was clear from Day 1) here to warrant a good discussion about what it is, what is due for improvements (like a lot of UI stuff), what kind of additions would be cool. But an insane amount of bandwidth is instead spent on just pure hate, often not factually justified (assuming hate is ever justified, at least when it comes to a fucking videogame), and discussions about what the game isn't or doesn't have, that is in several cases based on an absence of evidence fallacy made by people who have a limited experience (first hand or not) of the game, and also influenced by some people's imagination running wild (on both sides of the argument).
As far as I'm concerned, I'm enjoying the game, and it's pretty damn close to what I expected it would be. As it is for, I think, many people. Just read the summaries some made in these "what do you do?!" threads over the years, based on footage and interviews. Yes, some (important or not) details aren't there. Yet or not. For whatever reason, which doesn't have to be "OMG SCAM". It's difficult however to play the game for a decent amount of time, and not think that it is pretty damn close to what these summaries described.
I really appreciate the complete lack of handholding (rare these days, and no, it's not "bad videogames design, it's completely consistent with the premise), the fact that it's different, the freaking huge colour palette (something people have been complaining about for years), how fun it can be to dig your way around (again, something people often say they want), etc.
tl;dr. Yes, the game isn't 100% identical to what was shown, sometimes once, over a whole period of 3 years. Yes, there are stability/compatibility issues. They've been working on that a lot. Yes, some stuff is fucking irritating (please let me craft warp cells directly. For the love of my DS4). Yes, some of the reactions are insanely disproportionate to what is going on. The snowball effect is real.
Rant over, back to the game I go.
