Comment by swiftcoder

> Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.

I don't think they intentionally misled people. It's not that different to how Spore was marketed during development - a wildly-overconfident dev team promised a living breathing simulated universe, and at some point they had to actually ship the portion they had managed to get working, and most of the complex systems landed on the cutting floor to meet the final deadline.