What? What are you even talking about here
Well, I kinda agree with them there, but early access implies the game is in a much more unfinished state, while it looks like NMS is somewhere in between. These patch notes, to me at least, give me a very similar feel to how Elite: Dangerous has been planned from the start. The release version of E
didn't have half the stuff it has now, and many more things are planned for the future.
The difference is, E
was a kickstarted game with clear goals and timelines laid out in the pitch etc. while No Man's Sky is published by Sony on PS4 and has been, for the most part, marketed as a full retail game (with possible unspecified updates for the future) and priced as such. Yeah, Sean mentioned a few times that they'd like to freely update the game after release, but that's not really anything official or specific, it's more a comment on what the devs would like to do if possible, it's open to interpretation, not exactly a statement that things will go that way. If NMS was a PC only/first and started as an early access game, nobody would bat an eye, but I don't think Sean and the team would really like it that way since it would release a version of the game that was even more feature incomplete than what we seem to have now and would basically ruin the entire secretive approach.
So I'm not saying that NMS on release is feature incomplete, far from it, but it's likely that it will be a very different game a year from now, and that sounds a bit more like a kickstarted/early access development path that maybe isn't as common on consoles as it is on PC.
In any case I'm even more pumped after reading the patch notes, they are obviously very dedicated to expanding on the initial game and achieving a greater vision, and I can't wait to play the game.