It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing.
It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game
A big name in proc gen is Kate Compton who coined the term "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" to describe this phenomenon of technically unique but not different enough to matter - I googled "10000 bowls of oatmeal" to see if there was a good article and the second link was about it and nms
That's pretty much the perfect description of NMS. Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way. Oh look...this planet has 4 legged animals that are green and bumpy and the last one they were brown and spiky...but they move the same and act the same. Yawn.
It's not just NMS.. the "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" is a plight of all AAA games these days.
Ubisfot is a perfect example, look at their "Watch Dogs: Legion" for example. They decided to get creative and give you random characters generated by AI.. it turned out to be a disaster.
Another one is their Far cry games, where they copy and paste the same events but slightly different, all over the map and call it a day.
I think these efforts more have to do with bean counters taking over the industry than game designers being lazy. I'm sure there are plenty of talented people working at these studios, but they are held back by MBAs.
I really hated the fact that Fallout 4 doesn't communicate to you what missions are procedural and which ones are actually handcrafted. This is the most frustrating part of that game. The procedural missions lack narrative closure, so you keep playing for a payoff that never comes
I personally really enjoyed Watch Dogs: Legion. It wasn't so much that each individual was very unique. Moreso the concept of being able to become anyone.
FC3 is generally quite favorably reviewed. NMS could have been far more interesting if about 25% of the planets had relatively peaceful weather, wildlife, and sentinels, and had palatable color schemes, but near every single planet is either +200C, -200C, or radioactive, and the calm ones are lunar landscapes or barren.
The GTA franchise already broke away from this in the currently existing titles, but that's not a fair comparison given that GTA worlds are mostly handcrafted.
Idunno man I thought Far Cry 5 was brilliant. Sure there was a fair amount of copy pasting but it was such a blast that I didn't care and the game was over before I was ready for it. The whole psychedelic religious cult critique was a really interesting premise and I really liked the main antagonist and his sister. I just wish they had some way of concluding the story that allowed you to continue to get into all the ridiculous chaos it offers. Once everything is settled its just too peaceful.
A lot of criticism from no man's sky, like this one, comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what no man's sky is, i fear... No Man's Sky really is just a sandbox game. a sandbox game doesn't need infinitely complex mechanics, it just needs to give you a blank canvas to do what you want to do... minecraft has like what 40 biomes, no man's sky has practically infinite biomes, is that not enough? you can build a unique ship nobody else will ever have, you can make a unique base on a unique planet and even build cities with other players, you can decide to be a space pirate or a wanderer and just explore to your heart's content, is that not enough? what else do people want? people always say nms planets are boring but is it just because they are a single biome? sure it would be amazing to have real planets, like light no fire but for all 18 quintillion something planets, but that would mean having a 30gb folder for every planet! just because they're procedurally generated doesn't mean they don't use up storage when they are generated, and it would be, i think, completely unfeasible to offer what light no fire promises to do but for the entire universe. IMHO you should view the entire nms universe as your equivalent to a minecraft world, and every planet as a unique-ish (there is some repetition but really not a lot) biome in that world. at least it helped me contextualize what the game does, because you're really not meant to spend the entire game on one planet. it's no man's sky, not no man's land...
I've bounced off NMS several times, despite having tried quite hard to get into it. So, my take is based on ~20 hours of early game, from 2025ish. Probably the best parallel I can draw is to Elite: Dangerous, which I played for several hundred ours before getting bored of it. What I find lacking in both games is that there's no _meaningful_ emergent gameplay that spawns off the procgen. Everything is wildy different on each planet, yet very same-y, because none of the differences really play into each other. In both, one can discover random biomes and creatures, but it's not like they are inherently interesting, they are mostly just following the same scripts.
Contrast this with something like Dwarf Fortress, which takes a slightly more in-depth approach to procgen, one where things have history, and in many ways, things "make sense". Or Rimworld, where the game tries its hardest to conjure up a narrative for you, dynamically, but still in a sandbox. So, basically, NMS is a perfectly functional sandbox game, and I have huge respect for them for keeping on working at it for so many years. However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch, and so far I haven't been grabbed by any of its story generation. It just felt like a long series of fetch quests and "collect them all" games.
I feel like can also compare the difference to some rougelikes where the combos of random things can yield vastly different experiences but in NMS the randomness felt more like a skin - not affecting gameplay much.
I think the main difference in Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld is that the world happens to you, you have to respond to the events the game generates, while in No Man's Sky you happen to the world, you choose how to interact with it.
No Man's Sky is much more like Minecraft in that way, you have to make up your own goals, the game doesn't really prompt you in any way to do anything.
Yeah this is my experience as well. At first it felt empty, but then I sort of realized it’s not a quest game it’s a building game and it’s all about building bases and ships and what not, and they’re added progressively more ways to build and customize the world. And there are explorations - there are some truly bizarre biomes but they are rare. The variants that feel repetitive are falling along some average world characteristic - probably not too dissimilar to the universe at large. It takes time to find the weird ones.
If you’re looking for a scripted arc, wrong game by construction.
I think the multiplayer aspect is a bit weaker than it could be, maybe improved more recently, but it is a something that Minecraft has done well
I looked for a situational physics game- where what you build and automate becomes part of a larger world ala EVE, with simulated factions that rise and fall depending on the players actions over time. Basically procedural generated civilization as a background game played by others..
The difference is that Minecraft gives you much more granular access to manipulate the world, which enables a lot people to feel more connected to the world and become more invested in it.
A little bit of depth to go with all that breadth?
I'm not saying there aren't deep systems in NMS. Its just that they are sparse. You can tool around all day having only the most cursory interactions with most of the game's systems. They've added so many interesting things, yet last time I played it felt there wasn't much of anything to do with them. For example, the Pokemon clone they added a few updates ago -- fun for five minutes. Super simple battles. However many months of development for something that got old after 5 minutes.
I don't get the feeling that they're wrong. No Man's Sky is now more-or-less the game that was originally promised. Many people that bought it at-release are happy with the turnaround, myself included.
If the game doesn't appeal to you, then that's fine too. But overall the game fills an interesting and accessible niche beneath games like X4: Foundations and Elite Dangerous.
I played it about a year ago for the first significant time after having bought it some point a long time back.
It's... fine? It kept me engaged until it didn't. Part of the "didn't" came about because I was being paper-cut to death by bugs that googling showed me had been reported for a long time, if not since the very beginning.
I kept feeling like it was a game on the verge of happening throughout, and it never quite made it. Lots of things to go do to serve.. no purpose. Nothing was that unique or memorable, and I often had very little clue where I was in relation to anything. At one stage I was overseeing a town but that seemed to do nothing for me other than make me go back and make a snap decision for no discernible reason, occasionally fight hostile creatures, and also act as a sink for resources I was gathering.
I kept thinking "Why am I even doing this" until it really sunk in "Why am I even doing this?" and quit.
It also exasperated me that even though I was using a pretty fast gaming system, on a regular basis assets would take ages to appear, including buildings. "Fly to this place on the planet, land at this archaeological dig, wait 3 minutes for the dig to bother to appear before you can do anything." (saw identical behaviour on my steamdeck too, so doesn't seem "my machine" per se?)
It's even worse when you see the exact same animal asset but scaled differently with a different color hue on a completely different planet. Ruins the immersion immediately. Obviously, it has come a long, long way since the 2016 article, but still.
For me it's the asteroids. Having space being so densely populated with procedural asteroids is immediately, irreversibly immersion breaking for me. Like... space would be opaque and life on these plants would immediately cease in a cataclysm of bombardment.
This was also one of many gripes I had with Starfield.
I think you gotta set aside some of that to enjoy both as Sci-Fi games, not space sim games. In Sci-Fi, asteroids are close together and you can shoot them for resources or lose an enemy in them like a dark forest, because those things are fun. IRL, they are ridiculously far apart and not nearly as fun.
It's always a potential danger to one's enjoyment to know too much about something though. :)
I feel like my issue was that every "site" on different planet was the same. Maybe I just hit poor randomisation or something. But I felt that I found exactly same thing just on different coloured environment. Or then things like pirate ships were just the same. Every single time...
Isn't Mincecraft basically that? I've never played it, so would be curious to hear from someone who's played both. From the outside both look very dull/soulless and yet people spend hours playing Minecraft building things - just engaging with their imaginations
I think one thing that Minecraft does very well is that it does not push the player towards any of its game systems, which allows the player to make up their own fun. No Man's Sky on the other hand throws a lot of different game systems at you. Just having points of interests pushes the player into just going from one to the other instead of them exploring what might make the game fun for them.
Building in Minecraft is a very different beast than building in NMS though. The prebuilt cabins and machines of NMS aren't the rabbit hole of redstone engineering that Minecraft has.
Even vanilla minecraft is a far superior experience to NMS. Minecraft's approach to procedural generation poduces more meaningful exploration because its terrain, resources, structures, and building system interact far more deeply with the gameplay than NMS linear number-go-up grind.
Of course, introducing mods makes Minecraft the most compelling entry in the genre by a huge margin, but not necessarily a fair comparison since the combined human effort involved in the minecraft mod ecosystem vastly eclipses what the NMS team could do on their own.
> Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way.
This is also the problem with the procedurally generated planets and moons in Starfield. Yeah, there's a whole lot of them, but they're also all populated with the SAME points of interest. You can only see a cryo lab or abandoned radio station so many times before it completely loses any meaning. It's basically the antithesis of the hand crafted world of Skyrim.
It's done so badly that you get points of interest spawning with outdoor food and beverage, folding chairs, umbrellas in icy moons that have no atmosphere and -200C temperature.
The alien creatures in Starfield were at least all designed by hand, and are somehow 'assigned' to specific planets and biomes in a way that's hard coded into the game.
The procedurally generated planets and moons from Starfield are a bit like the radiant quests of Skyrim, they just pad the game time a bit with procedurally generated content. The main difference is that the radiant quests in Skyrim typically sent you to locations you hadn't visited yet within a hand-crafted world, while in Starfield the world around the locations isn't interesting and the locations themselves start repeating way too quickly.
>This is also the problem with the procedurally generated planets and moons in Starfield. Yeah, there's a whole lot of them, but they're also all populated with the SAME points of interest. You can only see a cryo lab or abandoned radio station so many times before it completely loses any meaning. It's basically the antithesis of the hand crafted world of Skyrim.
Eh with a planetary cluster of that scale they have little choice. And Proc Gen is also in Bethesdas history, its how they built Arena and Daggerfall IIRC.
My issue isnt that you can see the same base on every planet, my issue is largely that when you have reached a sufficiently high level, most planets will be absolutely plastered with pirate bases. The universe goes from empty to full of RNG pirates and mercenaries so damn quickly. They really needed to create more unique encounters, but less of each kind, and spread them out a lot further.
I haven't played Daggerfall, but Arena had hand-crafted main dungeons. There were side quests that took you to proc gen dungeons (that sucked) and a massive proc gen wilderness outside the cities that you never had any reason to go into. The towns were also proc gen, but that mostly amounted to just shuffling around the inns and shops, to give weight to the "ask NPCs for directions" mechanic.
It’s the simulation effect - From the perspective of a interstellar travler you too are not meaning different from any other two legged quasi intelligent naked ape. :)
Dwarf fortress or rim world solves that by generating personalities.
I still think it's a remarkable success story and they can and should be incredibly proud of what they've built. But this vision of what is meant by cosmic depth and expansiveness seems to tragically miss the point.
Compare it to even our own solar system where even so much as a new high-res photo of the hexagon storm on Saturn comes with stunning new and specific detail, or the "heart" on Pluto, we're practically ambushed with novel configurations of atmospheric dynamics and geology. It's frustratingly rare for games to truly activate that feeling of wonder.
I think NMS is still an unbeatable deal for what it is as a game but it's a frustrating near miss flyby of what I think people want a true space exploration game to feel like.
Outer Wilds is really an amazing game. I highly recommend playing it without looking at anything online: when I started I reached for google every time I was stuck, just to realise I could have found answers if I has searched just a little bit more. After a while I stuck to a rule to never look at answers online, and it was such a bliss to finally crack puzzles after trying lots of different things.
one of those games where i wish i could erase my memory just to play it again, still think about it, i think it's like a year ago i played it, maybe more. idk. great game.
I couldn't get into every day dialog etched in stone. It's one thing to find an old ruin that has some profound sounding thing like "All men are created equal". But it's beyond the pale for people to write tablets that are effectively mundane things like "Woke up and had breakfast".
I played it recently. Very good game (although mediocre ending if we're being honest). The thing they did really really well is that it's true exploration in the sense that you could complete the game very quickly if you've already played it, because the only thing you need to complete it is some knowledge that you discover by exploring.
For example there might be a wormhole that takes you to a different destination if you fly through it backwards. You're very unlikely to find that out by chance, but if you explore you'll find a thing that tells you (probably behind some other puzzle).
I think Elite Dangerous had this same issue, at least the years after it was released when I played it. You have this whole to-scale galaxy to explore, but the vast majority of them contain no story, no life, no space stations, no other players, and are just similar rocks and noble gas bags over and over. Once you've seen about 100 systems, you've seen them all. Which is likely what our real galaxy is like, too.
The game is 2 million light years wide, but a meter deep.
There's the Kerbal Space Program approach, where space exploration is tough and you need to learn a LOT to succeed at it. The tradeoff of this is a high sense of accomplishment, where simply landing and returning from another body feels like you did something incredible.
There's also the Outer Wilds approach, where the story carries it. Moving around isn't hard at all, but you have specific goals to accomplish that move you towards a final ending. Diversity in how you accomplish those goals makes it feel fresh.
Mass Effect is similar, where you have some freedom to explore, but it's again in the pursuit of this broader story. So exploration feels like a rich side quest more than the main point of the task.
Have you played Outer Wilds? It nails this feeling. If you haven't played it, don't read or watch a single thing about it and just play it with zero expectations.
100%. I installed and began playing Outer Wilds on gamepass thinking that I was playing Outer Worlds. After about 10 minutes I knew I was wrong, it didn't feel like an Obsidian game. One of the best mistakes I ever made when it came to gaming.
Spore had that but I kind of liked it. I guess that was 20 years ago almost, maybe my standards were lower. It felt charming seeing others' animals, some of them looked pretty cool.
There's a fundamental difference between procedurally generated worlds and how Spore actually works.
The creatures, vehicles, and buildings weren't generated -- they were created
by other players and exchanged asynchronously, then seeded into your
procedurally generated galaxy.
Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game: no real-time
multiplayer, but your galaxy fills with other people's content.
That's the opposite of the oatmeal problem. Procgen gives you infinite bowls
that all taste the same. Spore gave you a finite but large set of bowls, each made by
someone who cared about it. Different tradeoff, different failure mode -- but
not the one this thread is about.
>[...] Also I want to apologize for the title of this talk in the description, which I know was kind of hopelessly vague.
>What usually happens every year is GDC, they call me up, and they say "we want you to do a talk" and I say okay, and then a week later they say "what's your talk about" and so then I think about it for a while and oh, get a rough idea of what I'm going to talk about, and I give them some kind of generic title in that area.
>That's what usually happens. But this year was different. This year when they asked me what I was going to talk about, I just flat out lied.
>But, so I'm not really going to talk about the future of content. I'm really more in fact going to talk about a possible future of content you know.
>It seems like the theme that I'm coming away from this conference with so far is that the next generation titles are going to be incredibly expensive, we're going to have to build mountains of content, and it's going to drive most of the smaller players out of the market.
>And I'd like to offer potentially an alternate vision of that. You know I think that there is a way to deal with that more creatively. So maybe a more accurate title for this talk would be "What I learned about content from The Sims".
That was 21 years ago. The same argument is being made again right now, with a different machine offered as the answer, and Will's alternative is still the one nobody is trying.
Will's advice for game designers and creative humans in general, from my notes on the talk:
>If you have a weird idea that's so outside of the box, don't forget it. You should go back and revisit your weird ideas later, because you can never know where they might lead to.
In February 2007 PopSci, Will explains the whole design rationale:
>We thought about it. In fact, technically, based on all the stuff we've already done for it, it wouldn't be very hard at all. We've already solved all the hard problems we would need to do a persistent online world version of Spore. The hard part is, what happens when you come to a planet and the planet's offline? Which would be the case. In fact, one of the reasons why I kind of went down this path is that nobody has really explored the hybrid model. And this really is a hybrid, it's what we call a massively single-player game, where we try to get the benefits of an online game, which is all the people building the world collectively together, without the liabilities, which is that the 14-year-old can kill you or that you've invested all this time in your planet and somebody comes along and blows it up, and therefore you had to put everybody on the same level treadmill. And I hate these level treadmill games, and I wanted the players to feel really empowered.
>Here are my notes and summary of the GDC 2005 talk where Will Wright first revealed Spore, which I asked Will to review and check for accuracy. It's interesting to compare the design he described in the talk with what Maxis eventually shipped.
Video of the hour long talk:
>One of the essential problems with designing a Massively Multi Player Online Game like Spore is that players at different levels of the simulation run at different time scales.
>Maintaining time synchronization between players is also the reason The Sims Online doesn't have a "Pause" button or speed controls, or automatically pause in build and buy mode, like The Sims.
>So instead, Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game. Users don't interact with each other in real time, but instead users can create their own content, and it exchanges that content between users asynchronously.
>That's also how The Sims Exchange lets players asynchronously upload and download their Sims save files along with web pages describing their house, sims, and photo album.
>The Future of Content — Will Wright’s Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005
>What I learned about content from the Sims. …and why it’s driven me to procedural methods. …And what I now plan to do with them. Talk by Will Wright, Game Developers Conference, 3/11/2005.
>Based on notes taken by Don Hopkins at the talk, and other discussions and review by Will Wright. The title of the talk “The Future of Content” was purposefully vague, because Will wanted to show Spore in public for the first time, but he had to flat out lie about the title and send a fake set of slides for the EA executives to review, so they didn’t know what he was about to do. A more accurate title for the talk would be “What I Learned About Content from The Sims, and Why it’s Driven Me to Procedural Methods, and What I Now Plan to Do With Them”. [...]
>Wired asked for an illustration to print in the magazine, anything he wanted. So he made a diagram of Spore that Wired published, but he didn’t tell them what it was. The design docs for Spore have been out in Wired Magazine for a year now. (It’s in the Feb 2004 issue of Wired.)
>Will’s Secret Diagram of Spore published in February 2004 Wired:
>And that is the whole point, how you win the game: become involved with the content creation community!
>The powerful but easy to use direct manipulation editor tools, the automatic content sharing system, and the online community around user created content, were together the most innovative and successful things about Spore. (As contrasted with the not as well realized gameplay and storytelling design goals.) [...]
>Of course, these aren’t any old aliens we ask players to invest in — they’re your creation, your aliens. Once you start customizing, and design your creature, emotional investment is generated. It’s magic. Even the ugly ones are loved by their parents. Many games thrive on the interest generated by players’ creative investment. Console role playing games, for example, get this effect when players invest time in equipping and naming characters. I’ve always felt more attached to my characters as I fuss over their outfits and equipment. Creative interaction seems to always generate emotional involvement and attachment. Psychologically, it would seem that part of this stems from the sunk cost fallacy — we become attached to things we’ve invested time and energy into. Of course, it’s not just the hundreds of hours invested in a World of Warcraft character, their relationships, and possessions that generate attachment, it’s the sense that our fabrications are extensions of ourselves. As recipients of our attention and creative energy, our handiworks are reflections of who we are, tangible manifestations of our personalities. It’s no wonder we become attached to what we make, and take the success or failure of our own work and ideas very personally.
>Spore neatly solves the alien attachment problem by asking the player to design them. If a player makes a creature, and it’s appealing, they’ll be quite invested in it. Reflecting on the success of The Sims Exchange, where players shared stories, characters, houses, and objects for The Sims, Will realized that shared creativity would give Spore a broader appeal. Why not build creative exchange into the game, rather than as a website that orbits it? Player created assets are constantly being uploaded and downloaded by Spore, enough material to fill a galaxy. There’s nothing like taking home your latest finger painting, and having mom hang it on the fridge for everyone to see. Sharing not only fills up the galaxy with cool stuff, but allows the entire world to see your fridge, motivating you to continue creating.
>Of course, a lot of deep magic must work properly for something like Spore’s creature creator to function properly. It must be natural to use, easily producing satisfying results for anyone, from beginners to advanced users. And these aliens, lumps of polygons that no animator has ever seen before, must be brought to life. These are rather complicated endeavors, from a design, aesthetic, and technical point of view, but the player should never notice any of it. The game design implications are also challenging — the game must be playable and interesting, regardless of the creatures dropped into it.
But this doesn't look like it's making any new observations. Spore has some 3D modeling tools and abysmal gameplay that could never persuade anyone to start up a game of Spore.
But the models are fun, sure. And other people can find your models, and you can find theirs.
So if we recognize that the "gameplay" part of Spore never worked... we're left with Second Life, a much, much older thing. It hasn't been much of a success.
I haven't played it myself, but surely an article written one month after the game's release doesn't do it justice, considering there have been multiple major updates attempting to address the gripes players initially had with the game in the 10 years since then (And review trends on steam indicate that these attempts were successful)
They've added a lot of elements inspired by other games. One of the first things they added was base-building. Also a colony sim subgame, a pokemon-like subgame, fishing and cooking subgames, a roguelike subgame (exploring derelict dreadnought spaceships), as well as a lot more non-procedurally generated storyline/quests.
The worst thing I can say about it is that it tries to be everything for everyone, and is relentlessly friendly - all the new mechanics are very forgiving, very optional and (from what I've seen) rather easy. But there is sort of an in game story explanation for why it sometimes feels more like Stardew valley than a space exploration game.
The original massive controversy was the founder of the studio claiming it had multiplayer when it very clearly didn't which was such an odd thing to claim and easy to prove false.
That and the trailer was very different than the released game.
They apologized IIRC and then continued to work on it for like a decade - adding multiplayer and many large changes to the game
One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity.
It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.
I've thought about it a bunch over the years and my advice is to follow a few principles: procedural elements should almost always impact how the player plays, procedural elements should cross-interact with each other as much as possible, and procedural elements should be understandable to the player.
As an example in No Man's Sky the player immediately starts with a jetpack. It makes it so the terrain is approached the same way every time: you just jetpack over it. Very rarely something is tall enough to require you to walk around.
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a positive counter example. You have stamina so you're constantly thinking about the height of cliff faces, you can glide so you're thinking about height points and straight lines through the world, cliff faces cannot be climbed in rain so you think about the weather, slopes can be slid down on a shield, etc. There are a bunch of systems that may you think about the topology of the terrain, so even just varying the height map becomes interesting.
Similarly in No Man's Sky there are different resources but they work the same way on each planet and the player interacts with them pretty much the same way everywhere.
When I say elements should be "understandable" what I mean is that a trap, which Dwarf Fortress falls into, is to add a vast simulation which the player feels they can never really grasp. Simulations should not be a black box because then they begin to feel like a random number generator.
The aim shouldn't be to make an "infinite" game but to make a very interesting system for the player to slowly understand and master. The developer shouldn't just add stuff, but they should think about the long journey (and eventual mastery) a player might take as they spend significant time with the systems.
Procedural generation is not gameplay. Procedural generation makes your already fun game more interesting via more variety.
If you don’t already have a fun game, then pro gen won’t make it any more fun than it already is. It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game.
If every single Minecraft player loaded into only a single Minecraft world, it would still be as fun as it is. Would No Man’s Sky really be that much different if it just shipped with a handful of pre-defined planets? It might have less replay value but the gameplay wouldn’t be any different.
Good proc gen changes things in your game such that the player is given interesting reasons to make different choices each time they play.
> It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game.
First procgen game I ever played was Starflight 2. (Pre-Internet era, so I couldn't get hold of Starflight 1. SF 2 spoils you, hard, on the major spoiler in SF 1, so if you're playing them from GOG or other sources then you should definitely play 1 before 2).
My ten-year-old mind was boggled. Hundreds of star systems, each one with several planets (usually), and you could land on each one? And explore the whole planet (in a very limited top-down 2D view, because this was the 1980's), harvesting minerals, and the map was quite a bit larger than what would fit on one screen? And it all fit onto one 720K floppy disk?!??!?
Now, of course, I know how they did it. But there was an actual game there. There were half-a-dozen alien races you could interact with (talk or shoot, as required), and there was an actual story. With a twist at the end that 40-year-old me would see coming, but 10-year-old me was shocked and amazed by. (And the twist in SF 2 wasn't even as good as the one in SF 1). And you progressed that story by following the gameplay loop:
- Fly around looking for planets with valuable minerals
- Land, scoop up what you can carry, fly home to sell them
- Gradually increase your ship's capabilities
Then eventually you would be able to make your way to planets with plot on them, at which the loop changes to:
- Collect plot-important artifacts, fly home to get them researched
- Research tells you "go talk to these aliens".
- Do a fetch quest so they like you, then talk to them.
- They tell you where to go to kick off the next plot point.
After only a few runs through that loop, it's on to:
- Find out where the Big Bad's home base is
- Find out where the MacGuffin is that lets you access that location
- Take MacGuffin to right place, fight Big Bad, save the day.
Crucially, once you had gone to talk to those plot-important aliens, you probably had enough resources that you didn't need to do much mining anymore. You might land when you spotted a target of opportunity — "Oh look, scanners say big pile of platinum just sitting there on a nearby planet, let's make a small detour" — but that was just to keep the bank account topped off. You could afford enough fuel to fly all the way across the map and back, so you could focus on the story.
And they timed it well: the core harvest-resources-and-upgrade-the-ship loop didn't have time to get boring before you were off to collect plot coupons. And there weren't too many plot coupons before it was time to find the MacGuffin, use it to beat the Big Bad, and save the day.
Star Control 2 did it really, really well, with better graphics since it was released a few years later. BTW, if you haven't played SC 2, search for "The Ur-Quan Masters" to download and play a totally free, legitimate, open-source version of the game, with full original assets since the copyright reverted back to the original creators who released it into the public domain for the UQM project to port to modern machines. I wish that had happened to all the old classics, but Star Control 2 is truly a good game. Definitely seek out The Ur-Quan Masters.
But before you do that, I would strongly recommend to play Starflight 1 and Starflight 2, to get a feel for the origins of the procgen-with-good-story genre that Star Control 2 did so very well.
P.S. Edited the "core gameplay loop" paragraph to better make it clear there were two or three loops, and you progressed forward through them, rarely having to go backwards.
The advice I've heard is 1) have as many different dimensions of variation as you can manage, and try to have them matter, 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation, since this just reduces variety, and 3) allow your parameters to become extreme occasionally, so that some parts of your generation are notably different, and special because they're rare.
1) is the really hard part, I think: it's a challenge to come up with enough meaningful variations that also work from a gameplay point of view.
> 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation
I think the opposite. The more dimensions you have, the more "invalid space" there should be. Otherwise you end up with giant dinosaurs with tiny feet and fairy wings. You end up with a yellow kitchen with a barrel full of arrows next to a blue dungeon with a giant dresser. You end up with nothing making sense, and everything feeling random in the same way. Trying to spot the differences between 100100111101011110110001001011101 and 1101101110111010000100111001011101 is exactly the "bowl of oatmeal" problem. The vast majority of possible combinations of values should be invalid and impossible, otherwise the choices actually don't matter.
Yes, and it's a problem procedural space games have in particular. Because the planets usually don't interact at all in any meaningful way - what's on one planet (or indeed in one zone on a planet) has no impact outside it. Maybe you can get random quests on planet A to find some landmark on planet B, but it doesn't feel like that was because anything on planet A had anything to do with what was on planet B. For all its improvements over the years (and they are many, and OK in their own way) this is a thing which has not changed in No Man's Sky.
This I think is a core challenge with procedural generation. You can have procgen countries with procgen cities with procgen citizens, but if none of those citizens have an aunt in another city - who you can actually visit, in a new world from the same seed, and learn that she has a nephew in the first city - then it feels empty, fake.
Hierarchial procgen is easy. But you need cross-interactions like that to make it feel alive, and that's hard.
Agreed. Elsewhere in this conversation people mention simple games that procgen well: Spelunky, Terraria, Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
These are games painting with a 16 color palette while the technology exists for any shade in RGB. The more variations, the less likely things will be coherent (let alone brilliant)
I mean, almost no games have that many meaningful dimensions in the first place. It's more likely that the correlations you add just reduce the potential for interesting combinations to arise in the first place.
Spelunky uses handcrafted chunks that are connected together like a puzzle. Each generation feels interesting because each chunk is interesting and they are just strung together into a unique maze.
Terraria does a similar thing, where all the things that matter are hand-crafted. Bosses, items, layer details, progression. The map and cave system is generated but the caves tend to string together hand-crafted experiences and hand-crafted monsters. Many areas are generated, but in a unique style for variety. And there was still a fixed progression in the background (ore and boss progression). I think its in a big contrast to a similar game like Starbound, where all the weapons and creatures and maps were procgen at first, and it felt very '10000 bowls of oatmeal'. Terraria vs Starbound is the most like-for-like comparison I've seen for "procgen done right vs wrong"
IMO, Dwarf Fortress benefits greatly from the player seeing relatively few samples of the world gen, and the geography actually mattering to gameplay.
The actual geography doesn't vary that wildly most of the time ( if you've seen one lightly forested river valley, you've seen them all), but players generate a relatively low number of worlds, and in each world probably only see a handful of sites, where dwarf-scale world gen actually matters. Unlike NMS, though, the details of world gen matter to gameplay a lot. Trade caravans and invading armies can't traverse mountain ranges and ocean, so a mountainous peninsula can be extremely isolated. At the site level, you'll probably want to design your fortress to take advantage of local geography to help fortify your fortress and provide resources, so terrain and features like rivers, volcanoes, etc. placement matters a lot.
In contrast, No Man's Sky world gen feels pretty tangent to the actual gameplay. The game does a good enough job incentivizing you to explore lots of planets, but in terms of the survival/base-building aspects, there's a pretty short list of resources that matter to deciding where to setup, and geography hardly matters in terms of how you build.
If your proceduralism doesn't generate easy to hard solvable problems (ie from geometry constraints etc), its not really adding to the gameplay, only the visual experience.
I'm thinking of the generated history and legends too - NMS only seems to gesture at this with wrecks of ships but I don't think it actually gives each planet a history.
Roguelikes are the ultimate in procgen technology, and should be the basis of any design. (DF is the ultimate simulation but uses procgen as a tool to achieve it; a different vein than NMS trying to explore the procgen and its direct outcomes itself)
1. Any imaginary world needs to be internally consistent to be interesting. Procgen does not void this rule; randomization needs to be gated to that internal consistency.
2. A world can be composed of multiple environments, and each environment can a different definition of internal consistency. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup does this very openly and to fairly good effect, but pretty much any decent procgen game will inevitably end up with the same choice, because it's what enables you to play with various procgen systems/rules while still having a coherent overall game.
3. Generalizing 2, procgen systems generally do not start from nothing; You embed reasonably well-defined bases (races, weapon forms, etc) and then apply randomization on top of those bases to form the final element. Meaningful fundamental variation in those bases leads to guaranteed meaningful variation in the end result.
4. Games are fundamentally interactive systems. Generating a thousand variations without actually changing interaction is equivalent to generating exactly one variation. A blue orc vs a red orc is a not real variant, unless you make it so by attaching effects / statuses / capabilities. The color distinction is then a signal into the more abstracted changes that have occurred. This is where NMS falls over -- the images have changed, but the interaction has not.
5. A corollary to point 4, changing numbers without changing interaction is equivalent to doing nothing. If a meaningful damage threshold is functionally every 10 points of damage, then generating numbers 0-9, 11-19, etc is equivalent to generating just the numbers 0 and 10. This is where borderlands falls over -- a million variations in guns, but the vast majority of those variations are just numeric differences that don't change anything in practice.
6. If the procgen applies to equipment/builds, you pretty much need permadeath as a driver for exploring a procgen game and its systems, because you need players to explore for a local optima. Exploring the space for a global optima in a procgen game inevitably devolves into a gambling simulator, because players optimize out the fun, and the optimal play is to the kill unit XYZ repeatedly for the 0.5% drop. Games like Terraria fall into this trap (though Terraria resolves it mostly by making unit XYZ be trivially summon-able bosses)
7. Procgen can never guarantee interesting results; You inevitably need a system of vaults/artifacts -- hardcoded quality items -- to guarantee periodic interesting locations/items. Ideally more notable than average generation, but less than strictly optimal so as to not overpower the other systems -- an issue I've had with games like Diablo 3, where finding an item-set was vastly more powerful than anything else that I acquired for the next 5+ hours, eliminating the entire looting system (and even character skill system, since it forced my build too)
8. Decent Procgen is inevitably rule-based, with possibly multiple chained-rules each doing their own rolls, to ensure coherency. Ideally the rule-chain is roughly discoverable from the end results (by virtue of following internally consistent and apparent rules) -- an end-result that cannot be explained is indistinguishable from pure-random, and pure-random in incoherent. See any Tabletop RPG generation tables.
9. Hell, just start any procgen design from tabletop RPG tables.
10. The number of variations that can be produced is meaningless. This is only for marketing.
11. A procedural system that generates exactly once is fairly pointless. Permadeath.
12. A procedural system is inherently unfair, because you cannot guarantee difficulty, proper placement, unit composition, etc without removing the procedural systems outright. Embrace the unfairness, and design around it. Permadeath.
13. A procedural system is inherently unfair; you need to give some guaranteed items with guaranteed results to navigate an uncertain world (e.g. escape tools).
14. It's always good to enable some control by the player over the procedural generation. Choice of environments, chances at additional loot, etc. You want the player to engage with procgen rules, because they're interesting (and if they're not, what are you doing?), and the easiest way is to give them tools to manipulate it to their advantage. Also permadeath.
You can work around 12. with constraint satisfaction solvers.
After generating the level structure, emplace an entrance and exit such that they are maximally apart. And emplace a strong monster in one of the rooms around the exit. And emplace a health potion in one room before the strong monster. And emplace treasure in the exit room.
That sort of stuff and be specialized and coded towards your particular games structures fairly easily.
Scale is much harder though. In something like NMS it’d be intensive doing such a constraint solver on the whole galaxy. Might work in chunks or regions though.
The problem is setups like in slay the spire, if we imagine there was no path selection, you can run into scenarios that are functionally unwinnable (I recall someone finding a seed in StS that was literally unwinnable, but ignoring that). Eg Act1 elites that counter your build, but too early for you to consistently have secondary options/workarounds.
Obviously people have high consistent wins in StS1/2 so it’s not like they’re guaranteed unwinnable, but for the average human (mostly just boils down to “path to do act1 elites until after you probably have a counter to all of them)
Your options are:
1. All scenarios are easy enough that you can get away with just about anything sensible
2. You don’t have any counter mechanics, which is basically the same as 1, and is difficult to do anything interesting with
3. You announce up-front what you’re going to deal with, so the onus is now on the player to find a solution in the meantime
4. You give the player a NOPE utility
In a roguelike, I think 4 is the better design, but 3 is also reasonable. 1 & 2 just makes things less interesting.
I vaguely recall an episode of the Triple Click podcast around 2023 where they had a serious AI fanboy who was rah rah-ing about future procedural generation in games. It might have been Casey Anthony, but I'm unable to re-listen while at work.
The fanboy started saying how they could have endless different levels in Destiny 2... which is absurdly off-base since the entire game is just running through the same 9 sandboxes and 12 raids over and over and over again
He then went on to talk about AI creating an album as perfect as OK Computer on-demand, which was gently putdown by Kirk (who is an exceptional musician but also chill enough to suffer fools)
I'm listening to OK Computer right now. Came upon this reply half way through "Let Down". Hmm.
In my own procedural explorations, the solution to the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem is to manually curate them and give the user only the exceptionally good ones. It's a tedious lot of work.
This is something I realized about game design: if you have a procedurally generated world like XCOM, almost every playthrough (or "dungeon") has to produce something new to the player. Something like 10% of each run should actually have something new and unique. That's what makes games like Enter the Gungeon and XCOM 2 work and games like early No Man's Sky fail.
I think because the Minecraft world is like a giant tub of Lego. You go out into the procedural world to collect your pieces and then you create from that. It's actually your creations that are interesting and without them Minecraft would equally purposeless and bland.
That's exactly what No Man's Sky is though. There are entire communities centered around colonizing entire regions of the procedurally generated space. People build some seriously intricate bases and it really makes the worlds feel lived in.
I think biggest issue is that you are not constrained to single world. But instead directed to be mostly directionless... Some players just feel no reason to comeback. Where as with Minecraft being in single world you are more forced to comeback to various locations you build things in.
The last time I tried Minecraft, from the point I dropped into the world, I could start punching dirt and trees and placing stuff around and building things.
In No Man's Sky I got dropped in some world that felt empty with tutorial on how to collect some stuff and how to get to the ship.
The first impressions weren't the same between these 2 games.
I made this point earlier in the comments, but I think the main difference between Minecraft and No Man's Sky is that Minecraft does not push the players towards specific gameplay systems, while No Man's Sky does, making No Man's Sky feel much less like a box of legos and more like a collection of specific tasks/activities.
Multiplayer, demographic, community, and probably because it mainstreamed the genre. I'm pretty sure people, especially early teens, like to socialize on Minecraft with their friends. There is also the pseudo campaign of defeating the ender dragon. Minecraft is a juggernaut.
even as someone who enjoyed NMS as a nightly bowl of oatmeal, a second screen game while I listened to a podcast or a documentary, I can't dispute the accuracy of this metaphor. After a while it became brain off semitainment, and when paired with hands off semitainment I ended up with a full experience, but years later it still costs $70 to become nearly entertained and its become obvious that there are limits to how much you can make procedural generation not such as the core, heart and soul of a gaming experience.
The best things about the game (and it is a good game at this point, they continued to add to it at a steady pace since launch) are the human written stories.
But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast. But also, the worst thing about the human-written stories is that they're often transparently designed around getting you to visit more abandoned malls. The procgen infinity of space is almost a negative, even though it's the game's whole schtick.
I guess now that I think of it like that, it's really impressive they made a fun game despite having to make it fit a boring repetitive universe.
There really are a lot of things that they could do it with it, but they've already done a lot of things over the years; you can't say they haven't tried things, though I can't say they've always delivered a fun experience with the various experiments. They did pets and pet battles (boring to me), various building ideas (freighters and corvettes, bases, moderately more interesting), trading (I don't care for the implementation, feels detached), salvage, colonization (you become the governor of existing towns and make them run more efficiently and build stuff), etc. And, the worlds and critters got more varied several times over the years since release.
In short, I found it a very fun game until it wasn't, and then I had no reason to log back in. There are things you can do to make your own fun outside the story line; grind for a better freighter, find an build on interesting/valuable planets, find the coolest ships.
Once the story ran out, I was pretty much done, but even if you just play the story and then quit, it's still an excellent value! I got many hours of enjoyment out of a game I paid maybe $20 for. It's a hell of an entertainment deal. I recommend it to anyone who hasn't played it all the way through in recent-ish times. Even if you only play the story out one time and don't find any of the other stuff fun, it's still a very enjoyable game with hours of fun play at a good price that runs well on any decent system.
If I were a designer on the game, I'd find more reasons for human players to be in the same places at the same time and have their actions have a lasting impact in the universe. Riding in someone else's ship (which is what corvettes added) aint it, though. Projects to colonize specific worlds where anyone can stake a claim in a landrush type thing and maybe you setup competitive trade networks or battle for terrain or strategic resources or whatever, would be super fun, I think.
And, I wish space battles were more skill-based, as well. I've never played Eve, but I assume the space battles require skill and strategy and not just the biggest/baddest ship? So, if NMS got really good space battle mechanics, they could implement crazy cool space wars. But, they've got to shrink the game world for that to work (not literally delete the billions of planets, just give players a reason to all fight over one planet or system). Maybe competing for unique resources, like the spice on Dune.
I'll definitely try to find time to log back in and check out the new stuff. Whether it keeps me coming back after I try out all the new stuff and run whatever new missions/stories they've introduced remains to be seen. But, I don't think anyone plays it for the "billions of worlds" thing, because they're all the same after you see the first couple dozen.
> But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast.
Ironically, that’s how I always imagined actual space exploration to turn out once the initial wonders are exhausted.
Space is huge, yes, and everything is kinda unique, but also not in a meaningful sense. Most of the continued amazement we associate with the idea of space exploration comes from human-written stories that fill space with a human variety that just isn’t there.
On that last point, when I first played Dyson Sphere Program (DSP), I left the starting planet without enough resources and didn't understand the inter-planetary warp drive system .. I just drifted out into space and couldn't get back with the fuel I had left. It was almost scary; the vastness of the space was so apparent, it was very immersive to me.
Early game you don't have enough resources to travel quickly through the solar system you start in, nevermind between systems, it takes time. It gives a real impression of scale and wonder imo. You have to plan taking the scale into account - and it's nowhere near realistic. They got a good balance there.
True realism is often interesting though, which provides more long term engagement than fleeting shallow fun. Look at some of the hard core 3rd party addons for flight sims, for instance, which are so realistic they actually ship licensed versions of the real aircraft training manuals and checklists - because every switch and procedure works.
Fly out of SeaTac or Chicago O'Hare in most flight sims at sunrise, and you'll get a richly detailed airport, realistic traffic, realistic surrounding terrain, etc. with hopefully jaw-dropping views.
Pick a random airport at a random time with an obscure name or location in the US Midwest, and they all start to look the same (even with detailed, realistic geography): a mostly flat expanse with some hills, and either just the local city lights (if that) or a dull mid-day sun.
To be fair, those checklists are also largely there for so many pilots and those in training whom want to get the experience.
You haven’t seen either of the last two MSFS releases have you? They’re using high res satellite imagery of the entire globe. Even small towns are shockingly detailed.
There are levels to this. The NMS day/night cycle is geocentric.
It's a sandbox game yet when it comes to its "space" premise everything is thrown out the window. Dogfights carry no difficulty or skill. Flying around a system is pretty much pointless other than to stumble upon quests
(100% RNG). Most of the fun you'll get at planet surface.
I don't think that simulating the vastness of the universe is ever going to be fun, but approximating a theme park ride that evokes the vastness of the universe can be breathtaking, like Outer Wilds was. (The gameplay is confined to a single solar system, but it certainly makes you feel both the a sense of adventure, and the vastness of space-time.)
I think the first major issue I had with Elite Dangerous is that there’s, I think, three orders of magnitude of flying around. Which really disconnects me from the feel of it all.
I found a barren planet in a black hole system where the vibe was all dark and shadowy with the light being tinted purple, and just some crystals or something on the surface, alongside a damaged robot that you could interact with.
There was also a world that had high Sentinel activity where I founded a settlement (well, more like took over managing it), however as it turns out it’d have those gravity storms often during which you could soar through the air.
There was also a world where the surface was toxic and you couldn’t stay on it for long, so I excavated a base underground, like something out of Red Faction.
For what it’s worth, a lot of it can feel samey (most of the scanning) and kinda boring, but while there aren’t that many insanely huge and cinematic moments, sometimes RNG hits just right and you get something nice.
That sounds cool, but it's either a handcrafted world (if NMS has those) or pure luck. If it's the latter, then it can't have any depth. At best it can have some procedurally generated content that's going to be something you've seen before. Looks cool, but no substance.
Are you sure that you've played it recently? They added an actual story, a huge quest hub, unique items, tons of stuff to do really. I'm quite overwhelmed with the amount of things to do and I don't typically enjoy sandboxes.
Not OP, but my main issue is that after visiting a few systems and a bunch of planets, you kinda saw everything the procedural generation has to offer, and visiting planets becomes boring quickly, at least for me. There are differences, and as someone mentioned there are some unique planets for sure, but for the most part they all look samey. Wildlife is also just walking/flying around doing nothing.
This takes away the incentive to go and explore, which is supposed to be the main attraction to the game
It becomes boring very quickly for me too, the planets are the same, the stations are exactly the same, every alien you meet is the same as the previous ones. You build a base on one planet, then another base on another planet, and it's just the same.
The game is also too unrealistic for me: the planets are too close, you shoot asteroids just like you could 47 years ago, you can't dig very deep at all, your ship follow you wherever you jump to.
The trailer was beautiful, the actual game is really nice for a short while, but it's too simplistic and repetitive.
Visiting planets is just a very small part of the overall game. That was more the first NMS.
Wildlife for example you can train as pets, mounts or milk/harvest.
Once you get access to the Space anomaly the game opens up more and if you are social you will find outposts, pet arenas, race tracks and dog fighting/pvp zones. Ship building and freighters.
The latest update appears to allow groups to control areas of space.
All games eventually get boring but there is plenty in now.
> Once you get access to the Space anomaly the game opens up more and if you are social you will find outposts, pet arenas, race tracks and dog fighting/pvp zones. Ship building and freighters.
Outposts sound cool. I assume they aren’t just all the same thing. What do they offer? I’m sure it won’t be something I look at for 5 minutes and think ‘yeah this is neat’ and then realise there’s nothing deeper than that, right?
Ship building and freighters sound cool. I’m sure I’ll be motivated to do that because my stock ship is really holding me back. Oh wait, combat is a joke and I can perma farm max bounties playing with my toes with my default shop I bought on max difficulty/permadeath.
I agree; I stopped playing years ago after completing what was the main quest of the time (uncovering the nature of the universe and getting to the center). I even setup a decent sized farm for one of the more rare materials to make a billion or so credits (until they nerfed the economy for that).
The planet variety is disappointing. And the prefab 'locations of interest' get really, really boring.
But, I admit I may have to fire it up if what I get to explore is player generated now. And if they're actually making some locations more lucrative for either the resources or what's available to actually process them, I would at least want to check it out.
I've bounced off NMS several times, but each time I come back, I reason that they've added so many systems now that the procedural generation must finally feel genuinely deep and interesting.
And maybe it has, but the first 60 minutes of the game still feel like enough of a slog that I have yet to get to any of the good stuff.
The first 60 minutes are definitely a slog, but once you open up access to the quest hub and get access to larger ships that function as bases, the game really opens up. I play it as a "get away" from more competitive/stressful games. The exploration of planets never really appealed to me and doesn't feel like a huge component of the game as much as maybe it did in the early days unless you're hunting for particular resource nodes.
The first 50 hours of NMS are really great but then you start to learn the patterns, even though it is a randomized/procedural, at some point it becomes predictable and boring. The other problem is that the battles are boring, they lack something and building big ships and bases feels pointless.
I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse". A thought that comes to me as I type this is what if you try to co-evolve the ecosystems so it doesn't feel like it's just a mix of the same base components in different quantities.
I think a procedural generated space opera is a bit difficult to do.
Space operas are closer to fantasy than hard science fiction: they are about extraordinary people and their extraordinary interactions, you aren't supposed to think hard about the physics.
Procedural generation, on the other hand, is all about emergent behavior, which is closer to hard science fiction: tweak the rules and see what happens. You have to build some deep core physics that are robust, make all the other systems interact in sensible ways over a wide range of conditions, and not worry when balance goes completely off the rails in some cases (in fact, that's the fun part).
No man's sky is a space opera. You could imagine it being hard science fiction: digging into the ground could be deadly (as opposed to a reliable shelter), water / atmosphere mechanics could change (as opposed to just... water and air), gravity could have a much greater range, resource concentrations could vary more, etc. You'd need some mechanics updates to avoid making this frustrating, but maybe not so many as you need to keep the space-opera plot moving.
I don't know that it's possible. Once you see 5-10 of "new thing" you sorta understand the base layer + different modifiers. We're pretty good at recognizing patterns. It's cool the first 3 times, but then you catch on and it feels fundamentally the same as all the other things you've seen.
All procedural games feel like this to me at least. I've been playing Diablo / POE recently. Same deal, once you're at the endgame - the goal just becomes bigger numbers. The maps have different themes, the monsters are different, but you sorta just look past that part as you're gathering generated gear with bigger numbers. It's why I typically get about 10% into the endgame and eventually stop playing.
Minecraft is also a decent example, at some point you stop exploring, build a base and focus on the progression rather than seeing what the system generates in the next biome.
I think Minecraft gets it right by using procedural generation to add depth to the existing content rather than making different content.
There's a fixed set of biomes and notable geographical features designed by the devs, so there's no incentive to keep finding unseen ones, but each world gets its own layout and landmarks, so you get to explore the details of that specific generation for days without carrying over your knowledge of the previous one.
In the long term it might get repetitive too, but it does at the same rate as one gets tired of any other game I think.
I agree a lot with your point on Minecraft. The farther you explore and the more you see, the higher the bar feels for what's worth your interest.
When you first start playing the game, a medium sized mountain is exciting. Then the bar raises towards more interesting features (a deep canyon or a village), and then towards really interesting features of land. Finally, you look for obscure biomes (e.g. badlands or ice spikes). By the end, you can go thousands of blocks without seeing something that feels worth exploring.
Luckily Minecraft has other aspects beyond just the exploration.
I am but an armchair expert here, but I do think most of what's missing is the complexity of real-life ecosystems and "connections". Having biomes that are substantially large on a given planet and diversity among them, animals unique to each, and some kind of connections between the sparse settlements (even just like 3-5 actual cities per planet would be a start) would be a big difference. It would be a bit less about the 'wonder' and more about understanding the interplay.
For now, all I can see is "optimization" and "system limits on numbers of unique objects for things to work at 60+ FPS".
> even just like 3-5 actual cities per planet would be a start
This often takes me out of immersion in reading sci fi books. Every planet has one culture, one ruler, one major city. I know it's usually just a convenience but has the author never seen earth? Why would future human colonized planets not have hundreds of thousands of cities and competing factions?
Finding only one village on each planet is kind of laughable in the same way. The stage of human evolution where there was one village is such a tiny slice of time (if it ever even existed at all).
> I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse"
A good start is not to try and build an entire galaxy. Procgen that focuses on the fine detail of a relatively small world have a big leg up over these "everything generators" (i.e. think of something more on the scale of Tiny Glade or Bad North)
The best proc gen experience I have had is with minecraft modpack called hexxit.
The world is procedural generated, but then there is a library of ~200+ hand built structures/features that are scattered throughout the generated terrain. So you wander through a forest and find a cave into a volcano full of diamongs but guarded by angry dwarves, then head over into the desert and find a castle with a witch king, etc etc
There are enough hand built things that you don't quickly start running into repeats, and they are just melded into the generated terrain.
This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept
>This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept
This sounds like it would be a great mod for Factorio. Adds other players factories but in a dilapidated and decayed state.
I was going to say, NetHack doesn't feel sparse to me, but maybe I just have not played enough NetHack.
I think it's due to the fact that there is a fair bit of content, but the interface drip-feeds them very slowly, combined with the difficulty of the game itself that prevents users from finding all possible ways to interact with all content.
Nethack does procedural generation pretty well, and indeed roguelikes are a pretty good framework for it, because the game design tends to revolve around giving the player different options to solve a given problem and they're also not too afraid to have the difficulty vary a lot between runs.
I love this, because decay implies a story, evidence of somebody else's specific failure, which procgen can't fake. It's not just clever, it's brilliant!
Minecraft's procgen villages and mines are oatmeal by comparison. Oxygen Not Included generates ruined stuff, but it isn't from other players, and I've never found it interesting -- just a way of handing you some advanced objects you don't have yet. Ruins with no provenance are a loot table with extra steps.
NetHack bones files, The Sims Exchange in 2000, Spore's pollination, Drivatars, and this mod are all the same mechanism, reinvented every few years by people who don't know it has a history or a name.
It has a name. Maxis called it the Pollinated Content System, and Caryl Shaw's job title was Pollinated Content Producer. GDC 2006, "Building Community Around Pollinated Content in Spore":
"Massively single player" names the shape of the game. "Pollination" names the mechanism, and it's the better word, because pollen goes where it's needed, carried by something that isn't the plant.
Chaim Gingold wrote: "Why not build creative exchange into the game, rather than as a website that orbits it?" The Sims made you visit a website. Spore made it invisible and automatic. That difference is most of the value, and it's the part every mod-based version of this still hasn't got.
Placement is the hard part, and it's the part nobody proposing these mods has thought about yet. Spore's server pulled content in as needed to keep the ecosystem balanced, and the game built a model of your taste to decide what to ask for. Will, in the February 2007 PopSci interview:
>We're basically building a model of the player's aesthetic. So if you keep picking things from the shopping catalog that are like super-cute, Disney-like, then it will start offering you and downloading more stuff that matches your aesthetic... And when it makes a request to the server it's taking that into account, so the world will slowly start to represent your aesthetic choices.
>I have a team that works on the server like the database schema who figure out the algorithms to do the matching so that the content that you get make sense for your game and you don't have to download hundreds and thousands of mega bytes of content. You only get the kind of stuff that makes sense for your game.
That one mechanism answers Avicebron's "co-evolve the ecosystems", ratelimitsteve's "geography never affects the animals", and analog8374's curation problem, all at once.
Curation comes free. Download counts rank quality better than a designer can, because thousands of people are each picking for their own taste instead of one person guessing at everyone's. The "tedious lot of work" analog8374 describes is work the community does unpaid, and does better!
Payload size is why any of this is possible. Spore creatures compressed to about 3KB; 1KB of source expanded to 5MB of content, a 5000:1 ratio. Better than that: every piece of pollinated content was a "card" -- a 30KB PNG with the game data embedded inside the image file. You could email a creature. You could post one on a forum and somebody could drag it straight into their game. The picture was the data. A decayed Factorio base or Minecraft settlement is a small diff, not a 30GB folder.
Why it keeps dying: the mechanism is cheap to build and expensive to maintain, and it generates no recurring revenue, so it's always first on the chopping block.
Drivatars rotted. The Sims Exchange is gone (but I'm working on solving that problem). Spore's servers are somehow still up, which I always assumed was because there's nobody left at EA who knows how to log in and turn them off.
Now that EA belongs to the Saudi Public Investment Fund (93.4%) and Jared Kushner, the failure mode I worry about isn't a forgotten password.
The PIF's chairman is Mohammed bin Salman. In 2018 his people met the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul with a bone saw and a forensic pathologist who had explained the plan on tape twelve minutes before Khashoggi walked in: "After I dismember it, you will wrap the parts into plastic bags, put them in suitcases and take them out." He left the building in five suitcases and his remains have never been found. Three days later they sent the consulate car to a car wash. The Saudi government's account changed five times in three weeks; the New York Times ran it under the headline "Khashoggi's Death Is Explained by the Saudis in Five Acts (and Counting)". In 2021 the US declassified its assessment that bin Salman approved the operation. Every word of that is one search away, and reality is worse than any joke I can make about it.
So the thing I actually worry about is not Spore. Nobody is going to convene a meeting about Spore. It's The Sims. Saudi Arabia's media regulator banned Final Fantasy XVI from the kingdom in 2023 over Square Enix's "complete refusal to modify the content to suit the region", and made Roblox switch off voice and text chat and delete over 300,000 games. The Sims 4 has shipped gender-independent clothing since 2016, sexual orientation as a character setting since July 2022, and since patch 140 in January 2023, chest binders under Tops > Tanks and top surgery scars under Body > Body Scars. Go look, it's in the base game. A regime that could not tolerate one man writing newspaper columns is not going to tolerate two little cartoon women getting married in a suburban house you built for them. That content is a rounding error in EA's revenue and an existential affront to the people who now sign EA's checks, cutting it costs nothing and buys goodwill in Riyadh, and the $700 million a year in cost reductions gives them a reason to say it was about money. I am writing this down with dates and menu paths so that when it happens, nobody gets to say it wasn't foreseeable.
But I digress...
"The knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode" is the symptom. Nobody being paid to own it is the cause.
And generative models are trained to produce the conditional average, so pointing one at the oatmeal problem gets you oatmeal faster and in greater volume. The only fix anyone has ever demonstrated is a person who cares about one specific creature.
Kate Compton says 10,000 bowls of oatmeal. Phil Hartman on SNL got there in 1989, and it was a lot more than 30,000.
Stop settling for oatmeal. There's fiber, and then there's high fiber!
I don't know why but it made me think of the original premise of Drivatars in Forza games - Microsoft selling it as an "AI" learning how you drive, then your individual driveatar would be submitted to Xbox Live and would randomly appear for other players in their offline games, but it would drive just like you drive. Really cool concept, of that "footprint" of your play appearing in other people's games.
Shame that it just languished to a point where I think Microsoft completely lost both interest and control over that feature, where in Horizon 6 it just gives you the exact same few driveatars every race, and somehow no one at Playground Games is interested in fixing this. At this point I strongly suspect that they literally don't know how to, the knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode.
I actually created a Minecraft server plugin a long time ago which did this. It allowed server owners to create their own dungeons/buildings/etc and they would generate randomly in the world. It even supported custom procedural generated dungeons and structures.
Mine was a procedurally generated FPS I've forgotten the name of, it used a seed key to generate the map and then you could fight on it, if it was a cool map you could just keep or share the key so was replayable.
Iirc it used a voxel engine so would have been late 90's.
I play Tekxit for the same reason. The world feels genuinely alive and surprising. I just love automation as well, and Tekxit hits that sweet spot of "building complex resources extraction and refinement chains" but also "a big world full of adventure where you can actually use those resources for something other than making bigger machines to implement bigger processes to build more complex extraction and refinement chains".
I think it has to be hand crafted with some mix of procedural generation. I worked on the Division Underground DLC, and the way we did it is we had artists create dozens of various room variations, describing how they could connect each other, then I wrote an algorithm to populate the map with these "dungeons" and their rooms in a semi-random order. In the end I think the map had about ~200 unique dungeons, but rooms could repeat between them, so you'd sometimes go "oh hang on I've seen this metro station before" but the entire dungeon would be different almost every time, unless you played hundreds of hours of it(the game kept track and wouldn't give you the same dungeon again until you played them all, iirc)
I think you're on to something here. The problem with procgen is hard because the various things in an environment have to interface with one another and in NMS they don't really meaningfully interface. The geography is generated, and the animals are generated, and the mineral deposits are generated, but the geography never affects the animals or the mineral deposits. You don't see, as an example, vast highland regions with animals adapted for living in the cold and huge mineral veins exposed in cliffs at high altitudes. You also don't see older mountains where the average mineral deposit would sit lower in altitude but be smaller due to erosion, with more cave systems and more critters evolved specifically for caves (colorless, blind, chemautotrophic, specializations like that). There's a range of ways the landscape can be, there's a range of ways animals can be, there's a range of ways resource distribution can be, but they don't affect one another and it makes it feel bland and same-y.
I like to tinker with making games now and then, and I have learned that there are lots of game ideas I have that are more fun to make than play. A lot of those look like No Mans Sky. I feel like the devs fell in love with procedural generation and never thought about what kind of experience they want to have.
I say this because I feel the same thing as you when I go back, and I really want to like it.
Because most of the new feature are not connected to each other.
Take a gravition coil. It's like in Half Life - but You can only use with very limited set of objects, that were added in same update as gravition coil. Make it useless and not fun...
Same. Every time i re-download it and start a new game I never get past the tutorial because i was so incredibly bored so soon, i always wanted to like this game and i love how much effort they keep making but... sandboxes games are just so boring.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I have tried coming back to the game multiple times and every time I just feel bored and underwhelmed by the whole experience.
Yeah...I played it for probably a couple of hundred hours...and it wasn't that fun. In fact, it's boring. And I've come back a too many times because someone (like some of the commenters here) said "no, man...get the new update! It's a Totally Different Game!". So I jump back in, and it's different to varying degrees...and still boring. Just because there's "lots to do! new quests! rare items to find!", doesn't mean doing them is fun.
What made you play a game for a couple of hundred hours to then conclude that it is boring? I played the first release and put in roughly 100 hours. The first 90 hours were wonderful. Eventually I realized that I wasn't enjoying it as much so I put it down. But I would never call those 90 hours boring.
I felt like I got a lot of value out of it, and have fond memories of discovering interesting planets. I really view NMS as an artistic experience. I don't care for the gameplay loops. I played this game like an curious explorer. There are infinite planets, many feel the same but occasionally you land on something so special that no one else has ever seen.
If you are interested in the sandbox element, and space, and building - but want character - Satisfactory pulled me in for roughly 1200 hours over three years. I"ve got the scenery, and new discovery's burned in to my brain - elements of the landscape are more vivid in my memory than a lot of real places I've visited.
What's interesting is that there is zero procedural generation - single world with about 20 Biome, each one with all sorts of character. Monsters are incredibly well balanced, and the sheer terror I got from the spiders (which I think are a tad OP - especially the ones that launch)_ triggered my fight-flight reflex (mostly flight) more than any other game I can recall.
The game can be played in so many different ways too - you can take the factorio/big factory build out approach and speed run that, or just spend your time exploring, or, perhaps best of all - watch hundreds of hours of Youtube Videos to get a sense of the architect aesthetic that some of the top players bring to it. Epic Tech Tree. Cute back story.
I consider it the greatest Sandbox/space game ever - I don't know if we'll ever see anything like it again.
Agreed. I want to like this game _so bad_ but I think the problem is that I'm looking for a feeling of fulfilling progression when in reality this game is just a bunch of disjointed sandboxes which is certainly not my type of game.
NMS's art-style is low-detail, but highly aesthetic. It can look amazing at times, but only when you're looking at grand cinematic vistas. It rarely looks good in closeups. This parallels the game's systems in many ways.
NMS is a technically impressive game. You can build a custom-spaceship, either with the in-game editor or by importing one from outside the game, dogfight in it, land on alien worlds, etc. and that's just one of the loops. However, the spaceships you build aren't simulated physical objects. They don't even feel as substantial as styrofoam fins tacked onto a model train. There's no real challenge to flying them. They all just float through space like nothing.
The game has dozens of ways to progress, finding resources and earning cash. They're all so easy to break that you have to consciously resist doing so. Craft a few donuts and you're rich. You don't have to worry about finding buyers for your obscenely high-end pastries. The market board will buy anything at the listed price. Game breaking bugs that trivialize finding resources have been left in the game forever because the developers were afraid that some people might be upset if they actually had to grind for resources. Why what is, ostensibly, a single player game with multiplayer support tacked on even has grind mechanics is another valid question.
I log into NMS occasionally, but my big problem with it is that it's gameplay devolves into a sequence of grinds that are all optional. The things that should offer a challenge (e.g. ship combat) don't. Every play session becomes a case of, "Where do I find this stupid mineral I need to build an upgrade that will make what's already too easy even easier?".
The technology on display in NMS is absolutely impressive, but the gameplay isn't. I'd love to see a fork of this game where they focus on more challenging gameplay with less focus on grinding and sandbox elements. I see the expeditions as an attempt at this, but they don't go far enough.
It's been years since I last played it, but when I did I finally did so for a while until I finally found myself at a space station with other players and whatnot. And some random dude just gives me something like tens and tens of millions in cash. And my friend. And a bunch of other people in the same station.
At that point I was still rather new to the game. I had little money, few resources, understood little - which was the whole game for me. Discovering new stuff and trying to make money. And being given all that money sort of just .. ruined the game for me. What was left was the very meh storyline and maybe exploration, neither of which had any appeal to me.
If its any consolation you would have otherwise gone from where you were to pretty much end game resources/money/ran out of stuff to do in like 2 weeks anyhow.
I recently tried star citizen and it's kind of trying to be something like that but it's way too half baked with lots of game breaking bugs like you'll just lose the entire cargo of your ship which can completely bankrupt you after days of saving up. Also they keep releasing bigger and fancier pay to win ships at ridiculous price points like hundreds and even thousands of dollars instead of fixing the game. I tried it during a free week and I legitimately enjoyed it a lot but I was also extremely frustrated a lot by the bugs and the pay to win crap really rubs me the wrong way so I didn't buy it after the free trial ended.
It's a weird mix of amazingly well done and absolute garbage. And pay to win. Don't forget about the pay to win bullshit.
I don't know about the PTW aspect. What's there to win in a broken sandbox? In my view, they mostly just keep ripping off delusional "collectors" to keep the gravy train going. It's not like these solo players then take off in their huge multi-crew ships and are able to "win" in any meaningful sense.
A few years ago, I had a couple dozen hours of good fun with my starter pack just zooming around all those moons and planets, stepping out of my tiny ship and holding my breath, not knowing much about what awaits me outside - scorching heat, a blizzard, hostile or friendly players... it felt like I got my money's worth if space immersion.
If you don't expect much in the way of an actual game, but are content with a few game loops held together by string and duct tape, you can find a vast and pretty universe to explore.
Reeaallyyy gotta manage your expectations, though. It's very much an alpha, and you better not think it's gonna release, like, ever. Disclaimer: I have no idea how it's evolved in the past years.
Well there is pvp and the ship also helps with PvE progression. So I don't know how you figure it isn't p2w. Buy better ship, have advantage over others. It's not just a cosmetic upgrade. That makes it p2w.
When it first released I correctly predicted that the game was overhyped and destined to flop, making fun of friends who bought the game and ending up being disappointed.
The internet historian video made me buy it, thinking it was maybe worth it now.
I think I got like 5 hours in before feeling like I was just doing an endless grind. I felt like I had fallen for the hype, which I think was deserved ;)
Maybe the game doesn't get good until you grind past the first N hours, but I just don't have the time any more.
considering the company still exist and servers are still up I assume not everyone shares your opinion. its a pretty good milestone for an online game.
I remember first hearing about NMS' concept and wishing that they would take the general idea but downsize it by at least 10 orders of magnitude. A universe with 1-100 millions of planets would still feel absolutely massive and way more than individual players would be able to exhaust, yet it would allow the creators to do a bit better curation, allow players to actually meet, maybe add more hand-crafted experiences. Basically, give up on technical purity in favor of fun.
They added real multiplayer several years ago. If you go to the same system another player is in, they'll be there. (As well as everything anybody has ever built there).
But you are pretty much guaranteed never to meet anyone while roaming around randomly. Only if you go to a galaxy center, the Anomaly, an expedition, or matchmake into someone else's game (is that still a thing?)
I bought it on day one in 2016, and like everyone else, I was wowed by the planet hopping experience for about an hour or so. Then I put it down and didn't think about it again.
Then I picked it up a few years later, and discovered base building. Had more fun than the first playthrough, but it didn't click. Eventually I hear about something called the Galactic Hub, which is a star system marked by players as a central spot to build their bases. Kind of like a human home in the vast empty universe of NMS.
I get curious about it, and look up instructions on how to get there. I did some quick napkin math and realized it would take literally dozens of hours of grinding - nonstop travel - to get there. However, as it turns out, there's a loophole with black holes. When you enter a black hole, it spits you out into a totally different place in the galaxy. From the players perspective its random, but players got together and figured out that each unique black hole always sends you to the same spot in the galaxy. So they constructed a black hole "highway", along with an app that let you input your desired coordinates, and it would give you the list of black holes that would most optimally get you near your destination.
So I spend an evening playing the game, switching back and forth from the game to my laptop, inputting coordinates and slowly making my way closer and closer to the hub. Eventually I find it, and what was amazing was that it was the first time I'd seen any evidence of another player in the game.
That moment felt utterly magical, because while I was playing a game, I had an actual, real objective that I formed entirely on my own.
So yes, the game is an odd duck, but it can really open up with the right mindset.
Yeah, that is exactly my issue with the game - they crammed so many mechanics into the game, but all of them are incredibly shallow & even unfinished.
The RNG space is part of the problem - planets and biomes kinda start to repeat after while and it is not really important any more on which weird planet or station you are.
It is actually interesting how many games with much smaller RNG generated world maps work just fine because you don't travel so much like in NMS & kinda learn to know the landscape and also shape it yourself or with your friends. Like you know there is a lake next to you base and that deserted town, then there is that forested mountain where you got ambushed by zombies once & built a secondary mining base later, etc.
In NMS you land on a random planet, build a base on it and - like, what is it good for, if there are millions of similar planets & coop multiplayer is almost non-existent.
Every time these epic announcements go out, I try co-op multiplayer again, realize it's still miserable, then close it and wait for the next release. I'd love to play it with my wife but completing our own objectives, building our own bases, not being able to directly interact like in other games this decade, progressing forward separately, fixing our own ships, etc. etc. etc. is just a non-starter. Good luck to them though!
I tried it a few years ago, following all the "It's actually good now!" stories.
But a few hours into the tutorial, at a point of yet another "go gather 20 wolf Pel^H^H Ores from that other planet and bring it back", and I lost interest.
The inner gameplay loop didn't work for me, and I need that hook.
Have there since been improvements to that inner loop?
In contrast, Destiny 2 keeps hooking me back in because its inner loop, the gunplay and abilities, and variety of builds, really works for me.
Disney found this out the hard way with Infinity. On v3.0 a large chunk of their IP was staged into a fully customizable and open universe.. and it was so unremarkable that they shutdown the servers and killed all development a few years later.
Starfield is IMO worse. NMS at least has sandboxes that can entertain you and expeditions can be fun. NMS just doesn't have "goal" to work towards, so unless you can create your own goals its boring. Starfield, bugs aside, had the most boring base-building/operations I've seen in my life.
Weird take cause the game is definetely there and it has tons of content. Admitedly it is not for me because I just do not like the way resource gathering works. Does not tickle my fancy. But saying there is nothing substantial is an odd take, there is base building, space battles (fighter and corvette), expeditions. You can even do a little automatisation if you are into it.
I kinda feel the same way. I loved slowly going through the main story and probably put 50hr into the game, but the sandbox alone (amazing as it is) just doesn't do it for me.
i played it day 1 back then and even bought a PS4 only to play it and played it over the years repeatedly after every larger update for about 1000 hours in total. The fundamental promise they made was never shipped, which was originally a large variety of procedural flora, fauna, and planet. It is still the same uninspired boring stale core that it was day 1 with minimal extensions which produce absolutely boring world that immediately repeat. The game was always Waiting for Godot, waiting for a game that was originally announced with an interesting procedural feature but never shipped. Meanwhile I discovered the history of procedural games, which is a story of fails.
I still sometimes hope that the actually rewrote the entire procedural variety system but it cant happen because people built persistent shit on those planets. They probably have to launch a new game.
This is why a cool tech solution (procedural generation of "levels") by itself isn't good enough. The core gameplay loop is fundamentally the same on every planet. The graphics and descriptions may change but once you've played it for a bit, it gets boring.
I think video games are art, so take my opinion in context of if this is right up your alley and you really love it, then keep on keepin on!
Every year social media hits me hard with "No Man's Sky is good now!" — and I bit and dove in with a few buddies.
To say everything in this game is half baked is giving it too much credit. It's 10% baked at best. This isn't a game; it's an underwhelming tech demo. The only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.
Everything else is baaaad: the quests have less logic than entry MMO quests, and are mainly fetch missions. The planets are randomly generated slop. The economy of building up your ship/fleet isn't fun (you just sell your ships over and over again). Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that are clearly just trying to trick folks into buying an elaborate space game tech demo. Can we move on from this "game"?
> Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1.
IIRC, back in the v1 days you'd give an NPC a species-specific valuable trinket and they'd teach you a randomly-selected word of their race's language. Learning words was useful for when you'd encounter a historical relic that presented an important scene from history, and when you encountered an NPC that was requesting assistance. In both cases, they'd make their speech or request in their native language, you'd be given a few context clues in the form of dialog describing gestures, NPC attitude, etc, and then you'd have to guess what action you needed to perform or resource of yours they needed. If you get it right, you get something nice.
Like many other systems in the game, this got reworked several times into what it is now: "Find an NPC, ask for language assistance, select a category of word to learn, and Bob's your uncle.". I won't claim that either the v1 or current methods of learning language are fun, but the v1 method did consume a resource that was often difficult to come by... so it made learning the language much more difficult. They could have cooked up three whole-ass conlangs and built in gradual language tutorials for each... but that'd be a surprising choice for a game whose most difficult puzzles are "Can you do basic arithmetic?" and "Can you understand which direction this list of numbers is rotating?".
There's never been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both got what they were being told by the story and weren't enraged by the implications gets why. The game's first story (such as it is) is why I'm always amused by people who don't dislike it, but also take it very seriously and want there to be a ton of stuff to do in it.
Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of stuff [0] over the years. I'm amazed that they're making enough money on the game to still be working on it a decade later, but here we are.
> It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that...
Eh. As someone who pops back in for a few hours when there's a major change, I don't mind at all the detailed patch notes.
> Can we move on from this "game"?
Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it.
[0] ...some of which is clearly playtesting for things planned for Light No Fire...
bout 5 months ago i gave it 2 hours of my life and asked for a refund once i realized i had basically seen the whole game in that first like 30 minutes of playing.
the only game that seems to hit the mark of what im actually itching for is star citizen that is in a perpetual state of never-finished but i can't even quite put a finger on what it is i'm after. beauty, art, real weather, being able to fly up through the atmosphere and just let me escape into a sci fi movie. i can acknowledge star citizen has actually come a long ways and i think they do deliver that, though i haven't played it myself just going off vids ive seen.
NMS somehow feels like a visual and playable interpretation of depression to me with a Dr. Seuss world backdrop lol. Like it reminds me of times in my life where I've just been stuck in the motions, unhappy, resigning myself to the fate of doing absolutely nothing of inspiration because I felt like I had no other options and gave up.
Shout outs to steam for refunding when my reason was "This game is actually depressing"
Agreed. And this tech demo was a day 1 purchase for me back in the day. While it has gotten better since then it just doesn't hold my interest. I do like using it whenever every few months I feel inclined to get my PC VR headset out (I'm using an old HO Reverb G2 with the Oasis driver) I think it's a great VR title.
I remember when it first came out, there was so much hype but I immediately wondered, “where exactly is the game loop?” I also remember how aggressively defensive fans were about it.
I feel the same. I want Rust in space, where there are constant stakes. NMS either takes too long to get to a part of the game where stakes become relevant, or doesn't have any.
If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.
Agreed. It's incredibly boring. It lacks an interesting and interactive story with good pacing. What they have done is cool, don't get me wrong, but I think they got carried away by the tech coolness without enough attention to what makes a game fun or interesting.
I think this kind of game needs another innovation to make it interesting. I don't think adding more generative or LLM generated content is the solution.
I felt this way for a while until I decided to sit down, start a new game, and engage with it.
It's a completely different game, it just doesn't look like it if you picked back up where you left off. Without the right context, you have a tendency to just repeat what you were doing before, and it feels like nothing changed.
But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.
they add feature after feature. but never a good drive for the player. 'why should i go to this planet?'
i have an idea for it,
Let users populate the universe with custom quests. Scriptable quests with dialog and multipart structure. You need a custom script language and some limitations on it. Example quests:
- "Bandits have occupied our town", but actually bandits are tax collectors. You instead may help them document the goods.
- "Our star is dying", instead a huge starhip is recharging and refusing to move without some condition.
also add a rumor system to lead players to quests.
you can use my idea Hello Games, you have my permission.
How people interact with LEGO varies. Some people like to buy specific sets and make them. That's fine. Some people see a random pile of bricks and build a massive city [1]. There are also competition events for what people can build from a random pile of bricks. There was a TV show about this too (ie Lego Masters).
Some games are problem solving, others are competitive, yet others are elimination but an awful lot of games have a component that requires you to inject imagination. The Sims and even Minecraft (despite it having a survival mode too) spring to mind.
That's what NMS is. Some people like to find the perfect looking ship. Others build bases to look a certain way. Others just explore. Yet others make money.
If that's not for you, that's OK. But NMS can't be dismissed as being repetitive or boring.
>but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay.
to me that has become a big positive aspect of the game. The non-teleology of it, that you just run around and immersive yourself in it is pleasant in its own right. Especially modern games to me seem to have substituted games as an experience with reward system driven busy work. Everything is always instrumental.
I started to notice this when games like Journey came out, or Death Stranding during the stress of the pandemic. No Man's Sky is obviously not as artistically strong as either one but the exploration only for explorations sake has me come back to it very regularly. It genuinely is a game about nothing (so is Seinfeld, never hurt the show) but to me that boredom is a genuinely good thing.
NMS seems to epitomize the excesses of the Agile development philosophy with most of their release updates -- small targeted tack-ons to the game engine that provide something tangible yet shallow for users to explore, usually disconnected from narrative. The same cargo drop configurations, how damaged containers always require removing the same rusted metal or goop, and how shelters have the same exact configuration, never ever evolve or change. It has such a strangely repetitive ghost town character. They could easily target their "agile" deliverables around diversifying and breathing more life into the worlds if they could span more "sprints". Unfortuntately, the tack-ons feel hollow, empty, and often ship incredibly buggy. They used procedural modeling to create an impressive array of planets, but never modeled the planet drops with the same care and diversity.
That's because there were no idea behind it in the first place. It was an ambitious overpromising project that hasn't delivered almost anything they promised. They didn't have any story or interesting gameplay in mind too. Pity.
It's a great game to play with friends. Explore, find cool animals, and most of all - build your fantasy space home. It's relaxing, fun, and can be a great shared experience. I imagine it wouldn't be quite as engaging completely by yourself.
It's kind of like ARK, they spent so much time on all the "cool" stuff that looks great in trailers without focusing on what actually would make a game like this incredible, which is a real persistent singular world with consequences and meaningful group based PVP or PVE that works at scale. What you end up with is just a simulacra of multiplayer that basically boils down to a visually represented Xbox Live lobby.
This game just doesn't scale well from mid game on - it's way too easy, even on permadeath + hardest difficulty. Like, making money is way too easy, combat is way too easy, everything is too forgiving. And the entire loop is centered on like, 3 things to do that are all variants of the same exact thing. Really hope they do a much better job in Light No Fire.
To the guy who replied to me: Our genius overlord moderators rate limited my responses so I'll post here.
> I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding
You and I have very different ideas of what forgiving means. A reasonably intelligent 7 year old that enjoys and has experience playing video games could play this game on max difficulty settings and not have any issues. And while I never had an issue finding anything (shit is literally everywhere), resource scarcity doesn't equally an unforgiving game mechanic unless it's gated by some sort of difficult fight or something, which this game doesn't have. Combat is laughably easy and repetitive. I've got a couple hundred hours in the game, and at one point I was running the same bounty missions over and over again for some outrageous amount of money - the mission took 7 minutes round trip, the combat encounter was literally the exact same every time, same number of enemies just with different names. And that was the most efficient way I could make money in late game on the permadeath server on max settings. If that's the best economy loop a game can come up with, a 100% brainless combat encounter, then the developer has done something very wrong.
it's because it's a sandbox farming game, it's not meant to be difficult
you spend most of your time finding/farming resources and unlocking builds
most of your time is traveling between planets/systems/galaxies for different resources
I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding, which is the core gameplay, you can easily miss it if you don't play for 40+ hours but there are entire varieties of star systems you can't access initially, an entire race you literally can't see without completing some strings of missions, etc
> I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
A lot of people simply aren't as enamored with the shallow gameplay, even in the current version. I'm not surprised that they've sold a lot over the years since they've been putting out free content updates year after year to lure people into reinstalling it every six months or so.
As someone who played this game on start I want to share that I enjoyed it. This game was and still is a chill exploration experience at the core. There’s a lot of stuff bolted on top, but it’s just a busywork. If you enjoy that kind of games you’ll love it.
Another thing to point out: technical patching is top notch. I’m talking about how fast they come around to support new console, new VR helmet etc.
Somewhat of an aside but, personally, I also found GTA V and Red dead redemption 2 to be boring because these games didn't respect my time. I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".
> I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".
Two hours is like three or twelve story missions, depending on where in the story you are. Did you spend most of that time farting around doing stuff that wasn't main story [0], or are you just not really into the stories being told? IME, Rockstar's 3D games have always been not-all-that-great third-person shooters, but made up for it with the storytelling and world-building.
> ...because these games didn't respect my time.
If I were Global Overlord for a month, I'd permanently banish the sentiment "This video game doesn't respect my time". It's fine to say "This game bored me." or "I just didn't enjoy this game.". Unless we're talking about predatory "free" to "play" games [1] that survive by deliberately reaching deep into the wallets of whales, mixing pride into the discussion and claiming the injury of disrespect is very silly.
[0] ...of which Red Dead 2 has an absolute assload -most of which will bore folks to tears who don't really dig the "late 1800's outlaw going on about his day" thing-, and GTA V has a fair bit...
[1] Games that you have to pay up front to play can also belong in this category.
RDR2's intro absolutely did not respect my time. I sat down with an hour free to play it, and in that time, I did not reach a save point. There was some story, but it was very slow, and I had precisely zero interest in repeating it. I ran out of time, turned it off and never came back.
Almost all of the story missions are:
1) walk/drive/ride to this place
2) Talk to NPC
3) Do an extremely boring task (follow someone, drive somewhere, etc)
4) Walk somewhere else
5) Talk to someone else.
6) Collect XP or another reward.
Yeah. Like, the train heist and other cool gameplay segments were fun. But the missions to go to some random town and talk to someone and escort them back? Horrible.
That’s fine, it has a sustained concurrent players online of > 7k every day for the last 6 months [0]. Few games on Steam achieve that.
While several people are complaining about a one-time-cost game with an absurd amount of updates that had a rough launch, thousands of people are continuously happy, the subreddit expresses joy. It’s okay to “not get it”; but at some level, this much hate and dogpiling over a game that’s not harmful and not fostering a toxic community is … embarrassing for those participating in the hate.
What hate? What dogpiling? People are simply talking about how they aren't into the game and find it shallow.
I sense a lot of unwarranted defensiveness from certain fans of the game. Having sustained concurrent players on Steam isn't going to transform the game into something it's not for the people who just aren't into it.
I've relaunched it multiple times over the years when a new content update comes out, and I get the same feeling of shallow blandness every time and move on. The core gameplay simply does not do it for me.
Eh. As a Mac user, my AAA choices are limited. I mostly play Borderlands 2 & 3, and NMS. I’m not a huge gamer, and these have been enough for me. I just play in bursts, when I’m taking breaks from coding.
I don’t like playing with others, as the experience of being fragged by a 15-year-old, shouting biologically impossible suggestions to me, is not really on my bucket list.
I’ll play it. It won’t be super exciting, but, if I was serious about gaming, I’d get a dedicated Windows rig.
> I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
It's the sandbox concept. Some people load into Minecraft and think, "AWESOME! I'M GOING TO BUILD A MALL!" Some people load into Minecraft and think, "WTF is this? Why is there no story? What the hell am I meant to do?"
I'm not going to cast judgement. It's a preference. The people who bounce off NMS are the latter. NMS is a very fun sandbox. The story is secondary to making your own fun.
What are people on about, there is tons to do in NMS, tons of missions, expeditions, build bases, build a corvet, hunt rate parts, ships, rifles, creatures, manage a settlement, automate crafting chains, find a lucrative trading route, and this new update apps even more things. I'd never consider NMS anything close to empty, there is so much variety in the content
The game has so much stuff to do its actually overwhelming. The game is definitely a sandbox though and I think for some reason a lot of people don't like going out and doing the different things you can do in the game if the game doesn't force you to or if there's not heavy progression.
I feel like the same thing happens to other sandbox games too. Minecraft is one of my favorite games of all time and I could easily spend a thousand hours in a vanilla world and still find things to do, however the game gets constantly shit on by the community no matter what it does. They speedrun through the progression and then lack any creativity to do anything else in the game.
I personally love building bases and customizing and collecting things, which is a large part of the gameplay in NMS. I could spend hundreds of hours doing that but I guess some people just need a constant sense of progression and the game telling you what to do because they aren't capable of setting their own goals. Anyone who says NMS lacks content or things to do has barely touched the game.
I think what most of the commentary is on is the initial gameplay loop which has to do with planetary exploration and learning words. After that there's a multitude of new gameplay loops that become intertwined. I don't think most players get that far unless they have a very old account.
I think it comes from a difference in what people want. Some people want to achieve goals, while others want to be given tools to be creative. There's a whole spectrum in between, plus other motivations as well.
I enjoy being creative to an extent, but I like to solve problems, so I naturally gravitate to something with a long-term goal to achieve like Factorio (I rapidly lose interest after launching a rocket though).
Saying the game is a space sandbox and then implying that the inability to find fun falls onto the player's inability is what every online NMS fan says in discussions about not enjoying NMS. Calling a game a sandbox doesn't spawn game mechanics into existence, the game is still limited by what the devs put into the game. Your goals are still limited by what the game provides to you.
But a game can have 1000 hours of collectables content and still not be an enjoyable game to people. For example, I don't really enjoy collectables purely for the sake of collecting or building without having some sort of meaningful functionality. Every time I've tried to get into NMS (and when I ask others about what you can do in the game), I get the impression that 99% of the game is just flying/walking around, scanning things, collecting some random doodads, base building, and hoping to find a "cool" ship in a station to buy. Which is to say, the same things every base building survival game has, but in space.
I don't necessarily need forced goals, but I need things to work toward that aren't just collectables. For example, in certain other space sandbox games I can build up or destroy political factions. The universe around me dynamically updates in ways that actually affect me meaningfully. I can build up industry to harvest resources, refine them, and produce various goods either to use or to sale. I can have a goal of building all of the infrastructure needed to produce ships, or colonies, or what have you. With a larger industry, maybe some of the political factions try to attack me, so I then need to defend against them. I could build up a fleet of ships that handle defense and transportation of resources. I want to feel like the universe actually responds to my input.
I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development - the game of the last few years is absolutely nothing like the early one and I agree, there is a surprising amount of stuff to do.
FWIW, I was there from the beginning, and stopped fairly quickly (maybe 20 or so hours in).
I hopped back in a couple years later after a few updates, and agree that the quantity of content was pretty big. But the quality was not -- it still felt "empty", and never held my interest long.
Last year, the same thing happened. I hopped back on after a few big updates, probably spent another 10 or so hours on it (I think I started over), and felt like I had explored all there was.
I feel like all the criticisms it gets are valid. I agree that the effort of maintaining a game after 10 years is incredibly admirable, especially since ever update has been free. That's amazing. And the devs should be acknowledged for that.
But the game itself still feels largely empty. The progression feels mostly repetitive without feeling like you're really moving forward in a meaningful way. And, as others have said, the proc gen still feels "vanilla".
I probably won't hop back in after this update. I've learned, by now, that while many praise the new content, it'll probably just feel like more of the same to me.
I have never played, but I watched all the drama unfold on reddit. It makes me wonder, is this what happens when you have an underwhelming launch? "You only make a first impression once" - and there is a huge price to pay for that?
In SaaS and YC, it's ship early and ship often, right? Is that absolutely not the case in games? Also, how true is it in SaaS? Genuinely curious here.
Yes, I believe this is a thing. I'm not sure why, but I think for game releases, especially hyped AAA games, your highest player counts are almost definitely going to be the highest in the first weeks of release, so that's the strongest impression. Almost all games see a steep drop off of concurrent players later on, then it stabilizes. Improvements later are thus much less visible, and all the players that got the bad first impression have little reason to go back. I think NMS particularly made a bad mistake compounding this by hyping up the game beyond what it could actually do when it was released - that's an unforgiveable sin to a gamer.
Stuff like this, it's why I often avoid big releases for the first year or two then go play it when it's on sale.
For another perfect game example - Star Wars Outlaws. Terrible, buggy release with obnoxious gameplay loops. They fixed it, now it's one of the better games I've played recently. You can go look up gameplay reviews from the last year to see people shocked at its reputation, it's a very good game now and arguably would have been a candidate for GOTY if it had released in its current form.
In general that’s correct and you can generally estimate sales over the life of the game before the the end of release day. But there are also early access games, which are completely the opposite. Not very much in between those two extremes though.
NMS really is an exception, that they sold well enough at launch that they can keep providing free major updates for 10 years.
No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 are actually proof you can have an awful launch and still pivot into a large player base and continued sales via updates.
Reception for both games is largely positive despite their poor initial response.
Cyberpunk 2077 is in a worse state, though. CDPR axed multiplayer from the roadmap after launch, and the updates it got (eg. working police cars, outfit transmog) should have been there at release.
NMS is no crown jewel, but Hello Games did add multiplayer and held pretty close to the original vision that was offered. It's much more "fixed" than current Cyberpunk 2077 is, at least IMO.
As someone who played it for the very first time just last year, those 10 year old takes ring absolutely true to my experience in the game. It was fun for a little while, but it became repetitive and shallow quickly.
Oh, I don't think so. The systems in the game are very shallow, and overall, everything is too easy, which makes the game feel bland. There are almost no stakes. That leads to a feeling of nothing to do because none of it feels worth doing.
I think maybe you're discounting that people have agency and can decide that a game they are playing actively doesn't tick their boxes. I reinstalled it last week and put in about two hours before uninstalling again. Mile wide and inch deep is exactly the way to describe it.
> I think maybe you're discounting that people have agency and can decide that a game they are playing actively doesn't tick their boxes.
> Mile wide and inch deep is exactly the way to describe it.
Aren't you doing the same thing you're saying? Plenty of comments in this thread disagree with your assessment. If the game isn't for you, that's one thing, but it's a factually untrue thing to say "there's nothing to do, game is sparse after a few hours and novelty wears off" like many comments say. This suggests the person did not actually see a lot of the game, which is fine, but it's still not a trustworthy evaluation to me.
> If the game isn't for you, that's one thing, but it's a factually untrue thing to say "there's nothing to do, game is sparse after a few hours and novelty wears off" like many comments say.
Every time I come back to the game and try a new update, the game is indeed sparse after a few hours, and the novelty wears off...
> I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development...
Some are, sure. But -I say as someone who enjoys the game for what it is and still pops in every now and again to mess around with it- there's not much game in the game. Like BoBaitlyn said, it's a sandbox game. It has always been a sandbox game, and there are some folks who spend a few minutes fucking around with the sand in the box, go "WTF, this is boring as shit. I'm out!" and are boggled at the folks who enjoy playing with all the sand.
There's nothing wrong with being boggled or talking about how much you hated the sandbox. Specific sandboxes tend to appeal to specific sorts of people... each one often has its own gimmick that will pull in different sorts of folks. Suggesting that most complainers are complaining from a position of ignorance when they're complaining about a lack of things to do in a game that doesn't have much game in it kinda sucks. I've been playing off and on since v1, and have played for about half of the major patches. Hello Games has added a lot of stuff, but they haven't really added in much game to the game, if you see what I'm saying?
I can see your viewpoint. Some people don’t like sandbox games. that’s fine, I actually hate them, but this game’s additions led me into it gently in a way I’d never interact with say, a minecraft game. However, this is like, a sandbox game on steroids. There’s a strong mmo component of grouping, more being added (per this topic), and playing however you want to is entirely possible. In that regard I consider it one of the better sandboxes I’ve played lately, and I have played hundreds of hours of games like star citizen. I’d wish star citizen approached the game loop similarly.
I think some people don't understand what a procgen survival-craft game is. They're not wrong about it being an open sandbox, that's kinda the point. People talking about taking too long getting to space might not know about the limited time expeditions you can just start in for a different take, or turning the game to creative mode so they don't need to spend time resource farming to get their ship working so they can go fly around if that's all they want from the game.
The story and those quests will be rooted in building something. The space exploration will be rooted in finding a cool place loosely intended for your next base. The space battles and encounters will be part of the same core procgen survival craft cycle.
I won't deny there's probably only 20-40 hours of "real content" in the game. Most of what is there is shallower, or easilly missable, without the expedition(limited-time event) that launched it. A lot of things do seem like "grind X yourself, order team to do Y every few hours, fly to Z and talk to someone" which will get repetitive if/when you keep getting the same ones.
When it first released, the criticism that it's mostly empty procedural generation what what got currency and stuck to the no man sky name.
That still sticks around as people who've never played it comment & upvote the same things.
I've never played it. Just witnessing the cargo culting. If I were wanting to give an opinion on this post without actual information, the 'empty procedural generation' critique is exactly what I'd say, since that's all I associate with this game from the briefest commentary when it was released.
There are lots of things to do, but the actual mechanics are for doing them are shallow. The best example of this is the trading system; the way trading works is there are 7 economy types a star system can have, which determines which goods they produce (can buy in large quantities) and demand (can sell for a higher price than at normal systems). Thus the best way to make money from trading is to simply find a loop of systems which chain together the production -> demand goods. For instance, the economy types trading -> advanced materials -> scientific -> trading each produce the goods demanded by the next economy type in the chain.
So the system is fairly shallow, since what you end up doing is just jump from system to system and buy and sell everything.
Different people find different things fun. I've never been grabbed by multiplayer FPS (I never git gud) - or souls-likes (same). I do sometimes get sucked into some Bethesda games but I need to get over the initial hump. I had a serious Minecraft problem (solo play - not groups) and had a big Beat Saber phase. I still play OG Doom but never liked Quake. I usually hate games with narratives except when I don't. Journey nearly made me weep with joy and sadness but I don't tend to go for slow, arty games in general... And - in general I want to like games, find them fascinating as a medium - but find most of them tedious when I sit down to play.
The comment you're linking actually says that the game "feels like nothing" and that there's nothing substantial to the gameplay. It doesn't even use the word "empty."
And all of it is like, run around, press x. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. oh your crops are ready. pres x, x, x, x, x, x, x. go to sales terminal, sell crops, go to processor, take stuff out of processor load in processor again. oh hey crops are ready again, x, x, x, x.....
Missions: fly to randomly chosen planet in solar system and to same generated structure and find the object in the same spot as it always is in this generated structure. fly back. your crops are ready again for harvest, press x, x, x, x, x, x...
My hot take on why these games get popular (including some like PowerWash Simulator that are 'press x, then x again' type games): it gives people satisfaction of completing something in a world that it is increasingly harder to accomplish what the prior generation did.
I find incremental (clicker) games fascinating because they are like crack for certain brains (myself included if I let them).
There's something interesting going on with certain kinds of activity - exponential progression and incessant busy-ness. It tickles something that shouldn't be tickled.
I had this exact thought today, having recently been on a nostalgic Minecraft binge.
Incidentally, I can't place it, but Minecraft is an infinitely more enjoyable hangout and break/build stuff game than NMS. NMS is just very sterile to me.
I feel like for some of them they are almost like tarpits for some gamers. Think of some gamers in mmorpgs with like thousands of hours under their belt in some game, content with grinding, learned complicated meta, have some working understanding of the in game economy. Or these other sort of "logistics simulator" games where they are making spreadsheets to min max various in game phenomenon and scaling out and compounding their efforts.
It is like what if they were putting that undiagnosed hyperfocus into the local lawncare industry instead. Start off with a $50 mower at Level 1. Grind all summer gaining xp and unlocking more quests. Get enough for a riding mower with better DPS so you can do more lawns in a day and improve xp rate. Get enough to unlock a helper. Get two helpers. You stop mowing and its the helpers going out with your name on the side of the truck. Now you are a successful small business owner.
Same sort of mind that optimizes the in game meta could play the real life meta too. No one tells you about this when you are 14 years old though. None of your friends are doing this. There aren't forums and discords talking about this. Everyone's gaming though.
And it can be even a tar pit for smaller stuff than one's career. It is a big meme for someone to have say a beautiful base built in some game, really carefully done and really ornate, and the room they play in is an absolute disgusting disaster of trash and unclean clothes tossed everywhere. All in game chores done to a T of course.
People who didn't follow up their post-launch recovery still have the impression made at the launch (first impressions matter a lot). I didn't play the game (yet) but I have followed their recovery path. It is an incredible story and it seems that the game has evolved a lot.
I wonder if they won't add generative AI to create infinite stories/missions inside it, that would get rid of the 10K bowls effect.
I discovered NMS only recently (100 hours in, 2nd save now), and it has become one of my favorite games. It reminds me of the old TES (Morrowind, Oblivion), but the world is truly limitless, and possibilities are huge. I enjoy finding rare things, and 100 hours in NMS keeps delivering me those. I get why people complain about challenges being no biggie, but to me it is an advantage: I pick NMS when I want to chill and feel lost in the endless world, and when I want challenge I play other games. My other favorite game is Dota, it is very hard, challenging and demanding game, but one cant chill in Dota at all like you do in NMS.
As someone who bounced off Morrowind in favor of Gothic (II) because there weren't enough guardrails in place for my old self, how much of the old "here are some breadcrumbs and here's the game's final goal, but the way in between is up to you to find" design intent is in No Mans Sky? I love finding little niche stories, but they have to be crafted with intent, (procedural) environmental storytelling does not scratch that itch. Is NMS worth trying out?
at the time of posting, i think every top-level comment except one is negative. so, i'd like to balance it by saying that i have never seen a better executed turnaround than what the no man's sky team did. they cratered their reputation on launch, worked hard and long to restore it, and then continued to offer free updates long after they needed to. lots of respect there. (i will reward the effort by purchasing their next game on day 1, sight unseen.)
no matter what, that always happens with this game. Any news about it causes the people who played for 10 minutes at launch however long ago come back to tell you how much they didn't like it.
I have 65 hours logged on Steam, am I allowed to say that I have also bounced off of several updates and find the game empty and lacking meaningful goals?
It's simultaneously an amazing achievement, worth the money I paid, a redemption story for Hello Games, and yet disappointing in a way that e.g. BOTW is not.
One of these years I plan to dive back in again, hoping to find that the sum of all the updates has provided some new story progression I will find meaningful and give me a reason to exercise all the new game mechanics. I'm hopeful!
I have over 3500 hours logged on Steam for NMS, and at 65 hours you have barely scratched the surface. Like many open world sandbox games, you have to make yourself goals. If you want a nice guided "start here" to "finish there" type game NMS is not for you.
NMS actually does ship "start here, finish here" content, but my main issue is that the game is terribly easy. All that extra content you're implying is there, I find to be very shallow, unchallenging, and unrewarding. In the end, I'm simply not interested in LARPing around on procedurally generated planets and going through the motions.
It appears that the go-to response from certain fans is to accuse anyone critical of having only played it at launch. I assure you that's not the case. I find the game just as shallow today every time I try a new content update. What do you want me to do? Convince myself I don't feel that way about it? I can't make myself like something.
My perspective on this is that it’s fine to not like things and bounce off them. I also bounced off NMS, no big deal. It just isn’t for me and that’s fine.
All I know is that they worked hard on this game and found plenty of people who enjoy playing it a lot and that’s that. Doesn’t mean they are wrong, doesn’t mean I’m wrong in bouncing off. I do think it is interesting to explore why I bounced off and others might not – I can identify with many of the negative comments here, especially the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal one regarding the procedural generation which probably was the one thing I was most fascinated by when I decided to install the game – but there are so many other systems and elements in this game that if you more into those I can easily see why the game works much better for you.
That is a predictable consequence of their decision to launch before the game was ready. The game as it is now may not deserve that kind of contempt, but it's the price they chose to pay forever at launch.
I don't really enjoy the game for more than 10-20 hours after picking it up (gets boring fast for me), and have problems with it, but kudos to the dev team. I agree, huge turnaround
For sure. Even as someone who bounced off the game several times, the scope of their post-launch additions are truly impressive, even matching up against a lot of the subscription games (whose whole deal is regular content drops)
There is no such thing as a turnaround. People wait for a game to be released. When you give a release date, you must give one that shows the almost complete state of your game. Not something that is half done, not something that will feel completely different 1 year later. When you buy a thing you get an experience. If your game is a different experience 1 year later, well, I couldn't care less about it. I'm not gonna sink another 10+ hours into it, just to see what you have done in one year's time. Imagine you go to the matrix and you get a half movie, bad coloring and the like. Just ridiculous.
Early access, early release, beta, whatever is just an euphemism of becoming a backer. You thought you buy something final, and in the end you become a financier. You lend your money upfront. All this because a group of pampered kids can't keep a deadline. And think that the world is a playground and they can keep their game 5 years in early access. Get a grip.
Sorry. You release your shit, it gets evaluated, end of story. Nobody cares the rest. Gaming space is already half dead because people think that sitting at a game company means you get to have knitting lessons during workhours, and you can daydream and chitchat all day long. Ridiculous.
They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.
I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.
I suppose because you still bought the game, after all, and on some level it was about catching up to expectations for what you would have paid for out of the box.
That said, I don't agree with their take at all. Hello Games offered a mountain of content that's right in the bullseye center of game's core vibe and identity; and continuing to hold the original critique against them based on the "not procedural enough" argument is increasingly equivocating between two different things. You've been given a game that's more than worth the cost of admission, and you'll see dozens, hundreds, of slop space games come and go with less than one tenth the value proposition of NMS. That should be more than enough to quell 99% of the criticism.
The fact that it's not procedural enough amounts to, say, feeling that The Odyssey was good, not great. For however true that is, it's not a scandal.
You pay for a game——if the game is not good, and patches are provided "for free" that doesn't mean much.
Here, NMS launched with abysmal content and atrocious systems. Now at least it doesn't have abysmal content. A bad game is a bad game (yes, my opinion).
Content updates for a paid game aren't free. They're adding to a package that, more often than not, was incomplete to begin with. And they'll often result in more sales, which is how they pay for themselves.
Not that they're bad, but wording them like they're some huge act of generosity from the studio instead of a reasonable expectation pushes the baseline away from where it should be.
i bought a game that contained X with no expectations of more content.
the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates. i did not pay for those updates. so it seems completely reasonable to consider those updates to be free.
wording it as something i paid for when i didn't pushes the baseline towards dishonesty.
Many people bought it expecting more, because the studio promised a lot more. You can say that's on the people for not checking before buying, but that doesn't invalidate the dishonesty on their part.
Were it an early access game, you would in fact be purchasing expecting updates. Not guaranteed updates, but certainly expecting them. This game was an amazing early access release in all but name.
I'm not saying you should word it as updates you paid for, you just don't word them as if they're an act of generosity. Just call them "updates", not "free updates" like you did right before the reply that put "free updates" in quotes.
> the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates.
Yeah. Back in the day, those would almost always be paid expansions... if not whole-ass sequels.
There's a subset of video game players these days who expect years and years of substantial changes to a game. Why, back in my day you had to pay for anything more than a game-breaking bug fix... and you counted yourself lucky if you even got those!
There's a difference between DLC and providing "the base game content" – which No Man's Sky was doing. It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now. They could have cut their losses but it would've ended the studio.
Now they're being touted as a paragon of scrappy game dev. Which is wrong.
> It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now.
I'd argue that it was barely a game at launch, and it's still barely a game today... it has always been a sandbox with very little game in it, and that's fine. [0] But that's neither here nor there.
They released a "game" ten years ago. They've updated that "game" many times and never charged for updates.
That makes those updates free. You can justifiably be angry about the circumstances of the launch, and justifiably be angry that anyone's saying anything good about the devs. That doesn't change the fact that this [3]
And the features they've bolted on "for free"...
is an asinine use of scare quotes. The updates were delivered free of charge, and the price of the base game hasn't been increased to account for them. This makes them free updates.
[0] See the fourth paragraph of [1] as well as most of [2] for a little more commentary on this.
Back in the day, they had to ship complete working games, because the cost to fix it later was too high.
Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time, but the punishment for messing up was severe.
And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves. Those are a lot of value, and there's nothing wrong with them. They even still exist today, though rarer.
Maybe the NMS's updates did amount to one or two expansions throughout the 10 years of updates, but they were done piecemeal. Were it not a game that massively under delivered on release, they could've gone that route.
Sounds like being required to ship a "complete working game" didn't matter much. Weird.
> And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves.
And many were not. Plus, if we ignore shovelware -both past and present- most games these days are way larger than they were back in the day.
Have you ever gone back and played those old games you fuzzily remember through a haze of nostalgia? Many of them [0] would be derided as low-effort asset flips [1] these days. Many of the NMS updates (and tragically many updates to other games) definitely would qualify as "expansion pack"-sized. Some updates are big enough to be whole-ass overhauls. It's _nuts_ how much work some industrious indie game devs put into their games.
It's fine to be angry at how the circumstances of NMS's launch, and be sore that Hello Games is getting any praise after all that. But it's dishonest to refuse to recognize both that a very vocal subset of gamers expects that games will come with months and years of substantial post-release changes provided free-of-charge and that many devs -for better or worse- provide what these folks are demanding.
[0] ...but definitely not all of them...
[1] Granted, all sorts of things get called "asset flips", so the "low-effort" part is the important bit here.
Always having some instance of someone messing up is still substantially different from more instances than not being messed up. So it did actually matter quite a lot.
Now, as someone who is an avid retro gamer, I play plenty of those old games you're talking about. In the very old days, games were definitely shorter, but by the 5th and 6th gen, the gap isn't quite as big. If anything, they're often too large now, but that's neither here nor there. Budgets are bigger, teams are bigger, and most importantly, the consumer base is bigger. So size of games and expansions needs to be looked at relatively.
Regardless, for non-early access (of which NMS is an example of in all but name) and non-live service games, there mostly isn't an expectation that content will be added, only that updates will be made that improve and fix what's there. The exceptions are mostly when there's a pattern of content uodates happening before, or when something is clearly incomplete compared to what's usual for a series. See the Monster Hunter series as an example for both the latter ones.
Overall, it's natural for customers to want things that are at least as good or better than before when technology improves. It's the opposite that should not be happening.
I think it looks like a variety of game that it's not, and there's a dissonance there... it's not an action/adventure game, it's a sandbox of procedural generated worlds where you gather resources to unlock new builds.
You can build bases, manage settlements, maintain a fleet, build ships and exocraft, build multi-tools, have pets battle each other, cook food, manage the economy... but there's only a thin relationship/lore system and not much of a difficulty ramp at any point.
You're space farming, if you expect anything else you won't like it.
While I love the game I still think they are overhyping the game in the trailers.
The game always looks far more dramatic in the trailers than it actually is in practice.
One example that struck me is how they show players flying in formation while in practice that's almost impossible to do : your ship always flies faster or slower and it's really hard to follow someone else, even the NPC ships.
They also often show in trailers situations with 3-4 players doing all kind of cool stuff but the game never is that busy and multiplayer is still very janky you often dont see quite the same things as other players.
So I am excited about Light No Fire, but also not expecting something mindblowing. Unless they only port engine improvements, but no gameplay improvements from LNF and one hopes with LNF they really improved the combat mechanics which is the weakest element of NMS.
I recently tried out the multiplayer with two friends and must say, while I like the games vibe, the multiplayer is deeply disappointing. You don't really play together, you just happen to be roughly in the same area at the same time. Nothing is shared really, every quest you need to do for yourself, and the sync is broken to the point where two players standing next to each other have completely different weather and see different enemies.
If they fixed that I would come back, but I don't really feel like doing everything by myself.
NMS is an amazing game with no soul. A metaverse. A monument to technology without the depth or people or narrative (prewritten or emergent) that makes it interesting.
I'm certain there are some people whose brain is wired exactly right to love it.
But I have more fun playing the n100th Call of Duty clone hearing real voices on the headset in a tight, fun game loop.
But the company behind it deserves to be applauded. Might be the best value for money / care / support of any game, especially one so poorly received initially...
I think you have it in reverse, it's pure soul but very little game. It's just like Noctis IV, an interactive piece of art. This one has more pretense to looking like a game with its crafting system and survival mechanics that you can thankfully disable. It also has a narrative, several well-executed threads of them. It's a very introspective game with things to say about itself and the experience of living. You might not like it, you might have found it unengaging, but to deny it lacks humanity, artistic substance and a story to tell is crazy.
There's also not very much I would say is technically impressive about it at all, and definitely not anything people normally reach for. The bandwidth of the asset streaming they accomplished on the PS4, with such a small team that still had to build the rest of the game, is the only thing that makes me raise an eyebrow. In fact, that may as well have been the real gain of crunching down how planets are described rather than the huge number of planets themselves. Even that's not particularly groundbreaking if you take away the context of the small team. And at that point we have to ask ourselves if it's groundbreaking, or just very intelligent and clever pragmatism. Impressive in a labor lens, not a technical one.
I have hundreds of hours with my son in creative mode just building bases, fishing, battling our animals and hanging out. We’ve explored hundreds of systems just cataloguing all the animals and flora. We’ve learned all the languages. We basically have infinite money.
It’s all very shallow but it’s also “cozy”. This game is much more Animal Crossing than Minecraft. Other than the planets with extremely dangerous atmospheres and storms (and only in survival mode) it’s all pretty chill. If you like making your own fun and just like doing stuff like using photo mode and chatting with friends this is a great game.
My son was really excited to see the new customizable base station any space station updates. It’s like they made this update just for us.
Really looking forward to see what they’re cooking up for Light No Fire.
This game came out before my son was even born and it’s his favourite game and it’s a constant source of bonding for us. Thank you Hello Games.
I really like this game and have played it for years but I think it's popularity outgrew it's niche. It's a very niche game, the devs have made the ultimate space Lego kit, but I see lots of people complain about it being boring because there are no stakes, no challenge. I think they are trying to play the game they want it to be not the game it is. The overwhelming scale of the meme this game has become I think is the cause of that.
I like playing the game in abandoned mode in single player, just me, my ship, a lot of dead space stations and planets and some fauna here and there. I explore every planet (except aggressive sentinel ones) and make short hops to nearby systems. If I run across too many systems that have already been explored I made a large hop in a random direction and try there. There's something about playing this way that keeps bringing me back. I tend to nope out of the main game as soon as I get a freighter, I'm not that into a lot of game mechanics, but I love exploring planets, even if they are ultimately not that different from one another. I like going on hikes even though it's just the same trees with some variety in real life.
I'll echo a sister comment saying that NMS still feels like a tech demo. However, I'll also use the occasion to mention slash shill Noctis IV, a game that NMS more than likely owes a lot to.
Noctis IV is an old DOS game, or perhaps more of an art project about flying through a galaxy and exploring (sections of) planets on foot. Notably, you can name stars, planets, and place markers with notes on planetary coordinates, and then you can share those with other players via an "INBOX" system. While it technically has even less gameplay than NMS ever did, its primitive but custom 3D engine produces absolutely striking landscapes to explore [0]
While the author's webpage seems to have died at some point in the recent years, the project lives on through two community made mods, Noctis IV Plus [1] and Noctis IV Community Edition (NICE) [2].
NMS is one of the best comeback stories in gaming, but I'll keep dying on this hill: the game is an ocean wide and a puddle deep. I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours. Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials. It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content. The UI isn't intuitive and badly needs modernizing. It feels so clunky after all these updates.
> I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours.
Yep, me too. It's a decent sandbox to spend a bit of time in, and it's fine that that's all it is.
> Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials.
They have spent substantial amounts of time on UI, UX, and tutorials... several times. Unless you're proposing they convert everything into a brain-dead "mobile" game UI (which would be a significant downgrade), it'd be very difficult to do much better than they already have with the inventory management and conversation UIs.
> It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content.
I mean, it's a sandbox. If they did all of the UI overhauling and tutorial creation you wanted from them -and nothing else- would that keep your interest for weeks and months... or would you play for a few hours and get bored? There's not much _game_ in the game and it's been that way since the beginning.
I do not have high hopes. It's been 10 years of constant NMS updates but the game still has nothing that keeps me hooked. Everything feels insignificant to me, every interaction is like the one before and the one that comes next. They added stuff to the game, but it just feels like more of the same. Light No Fire will surely be just more of the same.
Part of me is secretly hoping / assuming they’re releasing new features as a testing bed for the changes in Light No Fire. I’m also very hopeful for Light No Fire. *VERY* hopeful, but I have to assume all these updates are for their broader engine. I hope..
I belive no Mans Sky is a great game but I could realy never get through to the newer stuff because the base resource gathering gathering does not grip me. The lasering of resources is just not satisfying to me. I love resource gathering but it needs to be satisfying like mining ores in minecraft (or Hytyale).
Additionaly I do not like flying Fighters I enjoy larger Ships. Put it as me enjoying space combat like Star Trek more than Star Wars.
If a Star Trek game similar to NMS came out, that would be my JAM imagine flying a smaller explorer vessel beaming down on procedural worlds and interacting with flora and fauna there. That would be up my jam.
But I still have to stress what Hello Games did is probably the best Redemption Story in Gaming. And they deserve all the good for it. Also please finall get me light no fire.
A huge vastness of nothing. The game has no soul at all. Worlds are ugly, animals are ugly, plants are ugly. With the first trailer I thought it could've been the game of my life, but it's just horrible, besides the feeling of moving around in the vastness of the universe, but once you get to a planet, it's just a turn off
I have at least 100 hours in the game, and I have to disagree with you. There's a surprising amount of variety in the creatures and the world generation.
I spend a lot of time building / designing my base. In that aspect, the enjoyment of the game is limited only by my creativity. I've definitely got $25 worth of entertainment from it. I will say, though, it is more fun if you have others to join your squad.
It's vastly better, imo, than Starfield. That was a game which really let me down -- I wanted Skyrim in Space, but I got 1,000 planets with the same cookie cutter quests on each. Or a team member saying something like "I can't believe we're the first ones to set foot on this temple" when there is a randomly generated outpost plopped down right next door.
It did well commercially looking just at steam stats, not to mention the other platforms.
It seems like alot of that was used to turn it around to save their reputation to keep going not only with one game, but to make sure the next isn't "stay away" labeled even it is "wait and see" for many.
AFAIK, there is no in-game microtransactions or anything, so basically retail sales I suppose? The studio is relatively small (indie-scale) last time I checked, and the launch was pretty big and I'm sure they pulled in a ton of money, even though as always on the "vocal internet" the launch was a huge failure, they still sold a lot of copies. "Just" 1-2 million copies would go a long way to fund a small passionate team. The all-time peak for simultaneous players on Steam (PC only) was 200K, so I don't think 1-2 million copies sold is far off as a minimum.
Small studio, don't have to generate a lot of sales to keep them afloat. Updates push visibility and generate new sales. Obviously, they need new projects to keep them afloat in the future.
The enhancements they're making to NMS appear to be backports from the Light No Fire engine, so my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort while the actual technical work is predominantly on the next game.
> ...my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort...
Given that they don't (often? ever?) advertise Light No Fire alongside the NMS updates, I'd say that the updates into NMS are large-scale playtests of LNF engine updates, game systems, or both, rather than marketing.
I'm not so sure about that, but otherwise agree with your comment.
I'll gently point back to my hunch that many (most?) of the NMS updates are large-scale tests for things they're thinking about having in LNF. Given that it seems likely that both games are using the same engine, it'd make a lot of sense to use a preexisting playerbase for large-scale, no-cost testing of new changes.
Yes, I think we agree... I think they're using it for both marketing and to test the viability of it and get player feedback, but I do expect LNF to have at least some substantially similar mechanics to NMS for this reason.
Without your typical tech/startup/vc/corporate bloat those sales will carry reasonable sized team very far. And it is really about what is reasonably sized team and what is not.
I’m one of those weird people that liked the game from the very beginning, and I’ve bought it at least twice for myself (different systems). I played it like 50 hours at the start. I always wanted a simple, procedurally generated space exploration game.
They’ve done an incredible job fleshing out the universe, giving us new things we can build, simple city management for people that want that, and the same exploration system for those that wanted that.
It was sold as, is, and will always be a sandbox game with some simple, procedurally generated “missions” to get you going to the next point of interest or having the next, relatively low-stakes fight.
And that’s okay. People play Animal Crossing and Minecraft. People can play this. Some of us are happy to. Some of us see a $50 game and say “yeah, 50-100 hours of time in this is my money’s worth”. And some of us spend 3000 hours in the game because we love the creating and sandbox feel of it.
Some people like Farming Simulator 2020 - I’ll never understand it and it’s not for me, but plenty of people do. Some people like Powerwash Simulator.
It’s okay if No Man’s Sky wasn’t the *specific* game you were hoping for and if it hasn’t become it; but that doesn’t make it a bad game, it just makes it “not for you”.
I wish these threads weren’t always filled with people complaining about a game that wasn’t made for them. It’s been a decade. It’s time to move on.
I feel like NMS is definitely catered to people who prefer to define their own way of having fun. There’s practically zero hand-holding. There isn’t much emphasis on narrative either, and the story is almost completely optional. It’s more about finding your own game within the game, where simply existing and exploring such a vast universe can be the whole point.
In that sense, I’d argue it’s almost more of an environment simulator than a traditional game. I can totally see why someone coming into it expecting a strong narrative, memorable characters, and lots of character development might end up disappointed.
For me, though, this is the game I keep coming back to. There’s just nothing quite like heading into a world that nobody has ever visited, with a pretty good chance that nobody else will ever visit it, and still leaving your little mark there.
NMS gameplay is just too lonely and when i used to play it, it would reinforce my sense of extreme loneliness (I was single, and a foreigner in the Far East).
Minecraft is another game that made me feel utterly depressed due to the loneliness factor.
At least in Fallout 4, there are companions, a robot, a dog, etc. and a lot of conversation and decision-making. I can't justify wasting time on NMS ever again.
Looks great. I just hope these alliances won't turn into the sort of thing like EVE Online Corporations but I guess this game is too different for that. Eve online makes me sick, its corporations are everything I hate in the real world :) I like games to be better than the real world.
What's also great about NMS is its all running on a custom bespoke engine they've built for the game and properly invested in. Wish they'd do more talks and deep dives into how it has all progressed, and how much it paid off for them. Things are getting far too homogenised around UE5 in game dev.
I need to revisit this game. I played at launch briefly then tabled it, but it's wholesome to see the creator stick with something, adding new features, and really see it evolve into something else. I wonder how wildly different it will be from my launch day experience?
The first time flying a ship in the game in VR was a pretty cool feeling. If you have a headset and this game (and you're not prone to motion sickness) it's worth the trip.
Outer Wilds (not The Other Worlds) gives you a very similar feeling on that first flight. It's not a VR game, but I made a VR mod for it a few years ago.
I still haven't got around to playing Outer Wilds despite knowing enough to know I should. Because I keep thinking "I can only play it once - I should play it in VR" and then never getting around to it.
My Legion Go came with a free Game Pass trial. I spent 20 minutes playing No Man's Sky in VR and liked it, bought it on Steam, but haven't actually played it yet.
Maybe this is the nudge to move it higher in my queue.
I think the multiplayer is very smartly implemented. The big "Anomaly" space stations can feel very busy. I don't feel very alone playing tbh, unless I want to be. MMO raid-like expeditions are right there if I wanna join up with people.
in a roguelike game, my incentive for playing is the discovery of weird new stuff. this might be the opposite of procedural. because procedural is just the same old stuff in new combinations. right?
how would we get a procedural thing or an AI thing to spit out truly new weird cool stuff? connect it to a good random number generator?
Sadly NMS could get 1000 years of updates and it still wouldn't be even 1% as complicated or deep as Eve - and I'm not an Eve fanboy, I stopped playing that more than 10 years ago at this point.
It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing.
It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game
A big name in proc gen is Kate Compton who coined the term "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" to describe this phenomenon of technically unique but not different enough to matter - I googled "10000 bowls of oatmeal" to see if there was a good article and the second link was about it and nms
https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...
That's pretty much the perfect description of NMS. Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way. Oh look...this planet has 4 legged animals that are green and bumpy and the last one they were brown and spiky...but they move the same and act the same. Yawn.
It's not just NMS.. the "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" is a plight of all AAA games these days.
Ubisfot is a perfect example, look at their "Watch Dogs: Legion" for example. They decided to get creative and give you random characters generated by AI.. it turned out to be a disaster.
Another one is their Far cry games, where they copy and paste the same events but slightly different, all over the map and call it a day.
I think these efforts more have to do with bean counters taking over the industry than game designers being lazy. I'm sure there are plenty of talented people working at these studios, but they are held back by MBAs.
The quote "vastness of an ocean with the depth of a puddle" describes what the AAA-hollywood games complex aspire to be.
Fallout 4's endgame with the autogenerated "quests" of defending settlements get boring extremely fast.
I really hated the fact that Fallout 4 doesn't communicate to you what missions are procedural and which ones are actually handcrafted. This is the most frustrating part of that game. The procedural missions lack narrative closure, so you keep playing for a payoff that never comes
This was awful in Fallout 4, but a lot of fun with friends in Fallout 76
I personally really enjoyed Watch Dogs: Legion. It wasn't so much that each individual was very unique. Moreso the concept of being able to become anyone.
Far cry 3 and its consequences have been a disaster for the gaming industry.
FC3 is generally quite favorably reviewed. NMS could have been far more interesting if about 25% of the planets had relatively peaceful weather, wildlife, and sentinels, and had palatable color schemes, but near every single planet is either +200C, -200C, or radioactive, and the calm ones are lunar landscapes or barren.
Let's see if GTA 6 breaks away from this
The GTA franchise already broke away from this in the currently existing titles, but that's not a fair comparison given that GTA worlds are mostly handcrafted.
Isn’t it a fair comparison?
That purposefully designed settings and properly gated procedures can make procedurally generated realities…better? More fun?
The far cry games should be good but just aren't because of the repetitive bullshit.
Clutch Nixon is the only thing good thing about the last few games.
Idunno man I thought Far Cry 5 was brilliant. Sure there was a fair amount of copy pasting but it was such a blast that I didn't care and the game was over before I was ready for it. The whole psychedelic religious cult critique was a really interesting premise and I really liked the main antagonist and his sister. I just wish they had some way of concluding the story that allowed you to continue to get into all the ridiculous chaos it offers. Once everything is settled its just too peaceful.
A lot of criticism from no man's sky, like this one, comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what no man's sky is, i fear... No Man's Sky really is just a sandbox game. a sandbox game doesn't need infinitely complex mechanics, it just needs to give you a blank canvas to do what you want to do... minecraft has like what 40 biomes, no man's sky has practically infinite biomes, is that not enough? you can build a unique ship nobody else will ever have, you can make a unique base on a unique planet and even build cities with other players, you can decide to be a space pirate or a wanderer and just explore to your heart's content, is that not enough? what else do people want? people always say nms planets are boring but is it just because they are a single biome? sure it would be amazing to have real planets, like light no fire but for all 18 quintillion something planets, but that would mean having a 30gb folder for every planet! just because they're procedurally generated doesn't mean they don't use up storage when they are generated, and it would be, i think, completely unfeasible to offer what light no fire promises to do but for the entire universe. IMHO you should view the entire nms universe as your equivalent to a minecraft world, and every planet as a unique-ish (there is some repetition but really not a lot) biome in that world. at least it helped me contextualize what the game does, because you're really not meant to spend the entire game on one planet. it's no man's sky, not no man's land...
> is that not enough? what else do people want?
I've bounced off NMS several times, despite having tried quite hard to get into it. So, my take is based on ~20 hours of early game, from 2025ish. Probably the best parallel I can draw is to Elite: Dangerous, which I played for several hundred ours before getting bored of it. What I find lacking in both games is that there's no _meaningful_ emergent gameplay that spawns off the procgen. Everything is wildy different on each planet, yet very same-y, because none of the differences really play into each other. In both, one can discover random biomes and creatures, but it's not like they are inherently interesting, they are mostly just following the same scripts.
Contrast this with something like Dwarf Fortress, which takes a slightly more in-depth approach to procgen, one where things have history, and in many ways, things "make sense". Or Rimworld, where the game tries its hardest to conjure up a narrative for you, dynamically, but still in a sandbox. So, basically, NMS is a perfectly functional sandbox game, and I have huge respect for them for keeping on working at it for so many years. However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch, and so far I haven't been grabbed by any of its story generation. It just felt like a long series of fetch quests and "collect them all" games.
I feel like can also compare the difference to some rougelikes where the combos of random things can yield vastly different experiences but in NMS the randomness felt more like a skin - not affecting gameplay much.
> However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch, and so far I haven't been grabbed by any of its story generation.
That's basically it. It's not a simulation. So if you want simulation, then NMS isn't your game. Maybe X4 might be better suited. Or maybe not.
Sometimes people forget that not everybody has to like every game :D
I think the main difference in Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld is that the world happens to you, you have to respond to the events the game generates, while in No Man's Sky you happen to the world, you choose how to interact with it.
No Man's Sky is much more like Minecraft in that way, you have to make up your own goals, the game doesn't really prompt you in any way to do anything.
Yeah this is my experience as well. At first it felt empty, but then I sort of realized it’s not a quest game it’s a building game and it’s all about building bases and ships and what not, and they’re added progressively more ways to build and customize the world. And there are explorations - there are some truly bizarre biomes but they are rare. The variants that feel repetitive are falling along some average world characteristic - probably not too dissimilar to the universe at large. It takes time to find the weird ones.
If you’re looking for a scripted arc, wrong game by construction.
I think the multiplayer aspect is a bit weaker than it could be, maybe improved more recently, but it is a something that Minecraft has done well
I looked for a situational physics game- where what you build and automate becomes part of a larger world ala EVE, with simulated factions that rise and fall depending on the players actions over time. Basically procedural generated civilization as a background game played by others..
The difference is that Minecraft gives you much more granular access to manipulate the world, which enables a lot people to feel more connected to the world and become more invested in it.
Its notable that you dichotomise using the promises of another unreleased game from the same people. Depth was part of the original NMS promise.
Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.
> what else do people want?
A little bit of depth to go with all that breadth?
I'm not saying there aren't deep systems in NMS. Its just that they are sparse. You can tool around all day having only the most cursory interactions with most of the game's systems. They've added so many interesting things, yet last time I played it felt there wasn't much of anything to do with them. For example, the Pokemon clone they added a few updates ago -- fun for five minutes. Super simple battles. However many months of development for something that got old after 5 minutes.
Oh, my mistake, now that you've explained it like this it is magically fun for me now.
Oh, everyone else's mistake; we didn't realize all of human output had to satisfy you...of all people!
I don't get the feeling that they're wrong. No Man's Sky is now more-or-less the game that was originally promised. Many people that bought it at-release are happy with the turnaround, myself included.
If the game doesn't appeal to you, then that's fine too. But overall the game fills an interesting and accessible niche beneath games like X4: Foundations and Elite Dangerous.
I played it about a year ago for the first significant time after having bought it some point a long time back.
It's... fine? It kept me engaged until it didn't. Part of the "didn't" came about because I was being paper-cut to death by bugs that googling showed me had been reported for a long time, if not since the very beginning.
I kept feeling like it was a game on the verge of happening throughout, and it never quite made it. Lots of things to go do to serve.. no purpose. Nothing was that unique or memorable, and I often had very little clue where I was in relation to anything. At one stage I was overseeing a town but that seemed to do nothing for me other than make me go back and make a snap decision for no discernible reason, occasionally fight hostile creatures, and also act as a sink for resources I was gathering.
I kept thinking "Why am I even doing this" until it really sunk in "Why am I even doing this?" and quit.
It also exasperated me that even though I was using a pretty fast gaming system, on a regular basis assets would take ages to appear, including buildings. "Fly to this place on the planet, land at this archaeological dig, wait 3 minutes for the dig to bother to appear before you can do anything." (saw identical behaviour on my steamdeck too, so doesn't seem "my machine" per se?)
It's even worse when you see the exact same animal asset but scaled differently with a different color hue on a completely different planet. Ruins the immersion immediately. Obviously, it has come a long, long way since the 2016 article, but still.
For me it's the asteroids. Having space being so densely populated with procedural asteroids is immediately, irreversibly immersion breaking for me. Like... space would be opaque and life on these plants would immediately cease in a cataclysm of bombardment.
This was also one of many gripes I had with Starfield.
I think you gotta set aside some of that to enjoy both as Sci-Fi games, not space sim games. In Sci-Fi, asteroids are close together and you can shoot them for resources or lose an enemy in them like a dark forest, because those things are fun. IRL, they are ridiculously far apart and not nearly as fun.
It's always a potential danger to one's enjoyment to know too much about something though. :)
Well this update fixes your asteroid complaint then
Adds persistent asteroid belts, asteroid mining, and base building on asteroids
Go wild
I feel like my issue was that every "site" on different planet was the same. Maybe I just hit poor randomisation or something. But I felt that I found exactly same thing just on different coloured environment. Or then things like pirate ships were just the same. Every single time...
Isn't Mincecraft basically that? I've never played it, so would be curious to hear from someone who's played both. From the outside both look very dull/soulless and yet people spend hours playing Minecraft building things - just engaging with their imaginations
I think one thing that Minecraft does very well is that it does not push the player towards any of its game systems, which allows the player to make up their own fun. No Man's Sky on the other hand throws a lot of different game systems at you. Just having points of interests pushes the player into just going from one to the other instead of them exploring what might make the game fun for them.
Building in Minecraft is a very different beast than building in NMS though. The prebuilt cabins and machines of NMS aren't the rabbit hole of redstone engineering that Minecraft has.
Basic Minecraft is basically that imo
Modded Minecraft is a very different beast, depending on the mods
It's pretty cool to see what modders have done with it over the years. I genuinely think Minecraft + Create is the best factory game.
Even vanilla minecraft is a far superior experience to NMS. Minecraft's approach to procedural generation poduces more meaningful exploration because its terrain, resources, structures, and building system interact far more deeply with the gameplay than NMS linear number-go-up grind.
Of course, introducing mods makes Minecraft the most compelling entry in the genre by a huge margin, but not necessarily a fair comparison since the combined human effort involved in the minecraft mod ecosystem vastly eclipses what the NMS team could do on their own.
> Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way.
This is also the problem with the procedurally generated planets and moons in Starfield. Yeah, there's a whole lot of them, but they're also all populated with the SAME points of interest. You can only see a cryo lab or abandoned radio station so many times before it completely loses any meaning. It's basically the antithesis of the hand crafted world of Skyrim.
It's done so badly that you get points of interest spawning with outdoor food and beverage, folding chairs, umbrellas in icy moons that have no atmosphere and -200C temperature.
The alien creatures in Starfield were at least all designed by hand, and are somehow 'assigned' to specific planets and biomes in a way that's hard coded into the game.
The procedurally generated planets and moons from Starfield are a bit like the radiant quests of Skyrim, they just pad the game time a bit with procedurally generated content. The main difference is that the radiant quests in Skyrim typically sent you to locations you hadn't visited yet within a hand-crafted world, while in Starfield the world around the locations isn't interesting and the locations themselves start repeating way too quickly.
>This is also the problem with the procedurally generated planets and moons in Starfield. Yeah, there's a whole lot of them, but they're also all populated with the SAME points of interest. You can only see a cryo lab or abandoned radio station so many times before it completely loses any meaning. It's basically the antithesis of the hand crafted world of Skyrim.
Eh with a planetary cluster of that scale they have little choice. And Proc Gen is also in Bethesdas history, its how they built Arena and Daggerfall IIRC.
My issue isnt that you can see the same base on every planet, my issue is largely that when you have reached a sufficiently high level, most planets will be absolutely plastered with pirate bases. The universe goes from empty to full of RNG pirates and mercenaries so damn quickly. They really needed to create more unique encounters, but less of each kind, and spread them out a lot further.
I haven't played Daggerfall, but Arena had hand-crafted main dungeons. There were side quests that took you to proc gen dungeons (that sucked) and a massive proc gen wilderness outside the cities that you never had any reason to go into. The towns were also proc gen, but that mostly amounted to just shuffling around the inns and shops, to give weight to the "ask NPCs for directions" mechanic.
It’s the simulation effect - From the perspective of a interstellar travler you too are not meaning different from any other two legged quasi intelligent naked ape. :)
Dwarf fortress or rim world solves that by generating personalities.
I still think it's a remarkable success story and they can and should be incredibly proud of what they've built. But this vision of what is meant by cosmic depth and expansiveness seems to tragically miss the point.
Compare it to even our own solar system where even so much as a new high-res photo of the hexagon storm on Saturn comes with stunning new and specific detail, or the "heart" on Pluto, we're practically ambushed with novel configurations of atmospheric dynamics and geology. It's frustratingly rare for games to truly activate that feeling of wonder.
I think NMS is still an unbeatable deal for what it is as a game but it's a frustrating near miss flyby of what I think people want a true space exploration game to feel like.
The best space exploration game I've played is Outer Wilds (https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/), but instead of the NMS sandbox there are puzzles.
Outer Wilds is really an amazing game. I highly recommend playing it without looking at anything online: when I started I reached for google every time I was stuck, just to realise I could have found answers if I has searched just a little bit more. After a while I stuck to a rule to never look at answers online, and it was such a bliss to finally crack puzzles after trying lots of different things.
Unpopular opinion, but for me, no amount of puzzles/story can offset the utter obnoxious frustration of the time loop.
one of those games where i wish i could erase my memory just to play it again, still think about it, i think it's like a year ago i played it, maybe more. idk. great game.
I couldn't get into every day dialog etched in stone. It's one thing to find an old ruin that has some profound sounding thing like "All men are created equal". But it's beyond the pale for people to write tablets that are effectively mundane things like "Woke up and had breakfast".
I played it recently. Very good game (although mediocre ending if we're being honest). The thing they did really really well is that it's true exploration in the sense that you could complete the game very quickly if you've already played it, because the only thing you need to complete it is some knowledge that you discover by exploring.
For example there might be a wormhole that takes you to a different destination if you fly through it backwards. You're very unlikely to find that out by chance, but if you explore you'll find a thing that tells you (probably behind some other puzzle).
Great game.
> although mediocre ending if we're being honest
I'm not saying ending was perfect, but I can't think of a better way of ending it.
I think Elite Dangerous had this same issue, at least the years after it was released when I played it. You have this whole to-scale galaxy to explore, but the vast majority of them contain no story, no life, no space stations, no other players, and are just similar rocks and noble gas bags over and over. Once you've seen about 100 systems, you've seen them all. Which is likely what our real galaxy is like, too.
The game is 2 million light years wide, but a meter deep.
What do you think people want a true space exploration game to feel like?
There are different ways to take it.
There's the Kerbal Space Program approach, where space exploration is tough and you need to learn a LOT to succeed at it. The tradeoff of this is a high sense of accomplishment, where simply landing and returning from another body feels like you did something incredible.
There's also the Outer Wilds approach, where the story carries it. Moving around isn't hard at all, but you have specific goals to accomplish that move you towards a final ending. Diversity in how you accomplish those goals makes it feel fresh.
Mass Effect is similar, where you have some freedom to explore, but it's again in the pursuit of this broader story. So exploration feels like a rich side quest more than the main point of the task.
Depends on which they want more. True space or true game.
Rick and Morty. Procgen surfaces but a human story under every furniture-aliens-sit-on-humans multiverse.
Or alternatively Scavengers Reign
Personally I want spelljammer. Baldurs Gate meets Sea of Thieves in space with 80s killer clowns
There is so much drama that can happen there and the scale is the least of it.
Have you played Outer Wilds? It nails this feeling. If you haven't played it, don't read or watch a single thing about it and just play it with zero expectations.
100%. I installed and began playing Outer Wilds on gamepass thinking that I was playing Outer Worlds. After about 10 minutes I knew I was wrong, it didn't feel like an Obsidian game. One of the best mistakes I ever made when it came to gaming.
I wonder how many other people have had that same delightfully lucky misfortune. :)
Spore had that but I kind of liked it. I guess that was 20 years ago almost, maybe my standards were lower. It felt charming seeing others' animals, some of them looked pretty cool.
There's a fundamental difference between procedurally generated worlds and how Spore actually works.
The creatures, vehicles, and buildings weren't generated -- they were created by other players and exchanged asynchronously, then seeded into your procedurally generated galaxy.
Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game: no real-time multiplayer, but your galaxy fills with other people's content.
That's the opposite of the oatmeal problem. Procgen gives you infinite bowls that all taste the same. Spore gave you a finite but large set of bowls, each made by someone who cared about it. Different tradeoff, different failure mode -- but not the one this thread is about.
GDC 2005, Will Wright, The Future Of Content:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw
>[...] Also I want to apologize for the title of this talk in the description, which I know was kind of hopelessly vague.
>What usually happens every year is GDC, they call me up, and they say "we want you to do a talk" and I say okay, and then a week later they say "what's your talk about" and so then I think about it for a while and oh, get a rough idea of what I'm going to talk about, and I give them some kind of generic title in that area.
>That's what usually happens. But this year was different. This year when they asked me what I was going to talk about, I just flat out lied.
>But, so I'm not really going to talk about the future of content. I'm really more in fact going to talk about a possible future of content you know.
>It seems like the theme that I'm coming away from this conference with so far is that the next generation titles are going to be incredibly expensive, we're going to have to build mountains of content, and it's going to drive most of the smaller players out of the market.
>And I'd like to offer potentially an alternate vision of that. You know I think that there is a way to deal with that more creatively. So maybe a more accurate title for this talk would be "What I learned about content from The Sims".
That was 21 years ago. The same argument is being made again right now, with a different machine offered as the answer, and Will's alternative is still the one nobody is trying.
Will's advice for game designers and creative humans in general, from my notes on the talk:
>If you have a weird idea that's so outside of the box, don't forget it. You should go back and revisit your weird ideas later, because you can never know where they might lead to.
In February 2007 PopSci, Will explains the whole design rationale:
https://www.popsci.com/entertainment-gaming/article/2007-02/...
>We thought about it. In fact, technically, based on all the stuff we've already done for it, it wouldn't be very hard at all. We've already solved all the hard problems we would need to do a persistent online world version of Spore. The hard part is, what happens when you come to a planet and the planet's offline? Which would be the case. In fact, one of the reasons why I kind of went down this path is that nobody has really explored the hybrid model. And this really is a hybrid, it's what we call a massively single-player game, where we try to get the benefits of an online game, which is all the people building the world collectively together, without the liabilities, which is that the 14-year-old can kill you or that you've invested all this time in your planet and somebody comes along and blows it up, and therefore you had to put everybody on the same level treadmill. And I hate these level treadmill games, and I wanted the players to feel really empowered.
GDC 2005 Report: The Future of Content
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/gdc-2005-report-the-fut...
I posted more details on the Spore Stats discussion in 2023:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280275
>Here are my notes and summary of the GDC 2005 talk where Will Wright first revealed Spore, which I asked Will to review and check for accuracy. It's interesting to compare the design he described in the talk with what Maxis eventually shipped. Video of the hour long talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw
>One of the essential problems with designing a Massively Multi Player Online Game like Spore is that players at different levels of the simulation run at different time scales.
>Maintaining time synchronization between players is also the reason The Sims Online doesn't have a "Pause" button or speed controls, or automatically pause in build and buy mode, like The Sims.
>So instead, Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game. Users don't interact with each other in real time, but instead users can create their own content, and it exchanges that content between users asynchronously.
>That's also how The Sims Exchange lets players asynchronously upload and download their Sims save files along with web pages describing their house, sims, and photo album.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-content-will-wri...
>The Future of Content — Will Wright’s Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005
>What I learned about content from the Sims. …and why it’s driven me to procedural methods. …And what I now plan to do with them. Talk by Will Wright, Game Developers Conference, 3/11/2005.
>Based on notes taken by Don Hopkins at the talk, and other discussions and review by Will Wright. The title of the talk “The Future of Content” was purposefully vague, because Will wanted to show Spore in public for the first time, but he had to flat out lie about the title and send a fake set of slides for the EA executives to review, so they didn’t know what he was about to do. A more accurate title for the talk would be “What I Learned About Content from The Sims, and Why it’s Driven Me to Procedural Methods, and What I Now Plan to Do With Them”. [...]
>Wired asked for an illustration to print in the magazine, anything he wanted. So he made a diagram of Spore that Wired published, but he didn’t tell them what it was. The design docs for Spore have been out in Wired Magazine for a year now. (It’s in the Feb 2004 issue of Wired.)
>Will’s Secret Diagram of Spore published in February 2004 Wired:
https://donhopkins.com/home/WiredSporeDiagram.jpg
[...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280831
>And that is the whole point, how you win the game: become involved with the content creation community!
>The powerful but easy to use direct manipulation editor tools, the automatic content sharing system, and the online community around user created content, were together the most innovative and successful things about Spore. (As contrasted with the not as well realized gameplay and storytelling design goals.) [...]
>Chaim Gingold, A Brief History of Spore:
http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...
>Creativity
>Of course, these aren’t any old aliens we ask players to invest in — they’re your creation, your aliens. Once you start customizing, and design your creature, emotional investment is generated. It’s magic. Even the ugly ones are loved by their parents. Many games thrive on the interest generated by players’ creative investment. Console role playing games, for example, get this effect when players invest time in equipping and naming characters. I’ve always felt more attached to my characters as I fuss over their outfits and equipment. Creative interaction seems to always generate emotional involvement and attachment. Psychologically, it would seem that part of this stems from the sunk cost fallacy — we become attached to things we’ve invested time and energy into. Of course, it’s not just the hundreds of hours invested in a World of Warcraft character, their relationships, and possessions that generate attachment, it’s the sense that our fabrications are extensions of ourselves. As recipients of our attention and creative energy, our handiworks are reflections of who we are, tangible manifestations of our personalities. It’s no wonder we become attached to what we make, and take the success or failure of our own work and ideas very personally.
>Spore neatly solves the alien attachment problem by asking the player to design them. If a player makes a creature, and it’s appealing, they’ll be quite invested in it. Reflecting on the success of The Sims Exchange, where players shared stories, characters, houses, and objects for The Sims, Will realized that shared creativity would give Spore a broader appeal. Why not build creative exchange into the game, rather than as a website that orbits it? Player created assets are constantly being uploaded and downloaded by Spore, enough material to fill a galaxy. There’s nothing like taking home your latest finger painting, and having mom hang it on the fridge for everyone to see. Sharing not only fills up the galaxy with cool stuff, but allows the entire world to see your fridge, motivating you to continue creating.
>Of course, a lot of deep magic must work properly for something like Spore’s creature creator to function properly. It must be natural to use, easily producing satisfying results for anyone, from beginners to advanced users. And these aliens, lumps of polygons that no animator has ever seen before, must be brought to life. These are rather complicated endeavors, from a design, aesthetic, and technical point of view, but the player should never notice any of it. The game design implications are also challenging — the game must be playable and interesting, regardless of the creatures dropped into it.
But this doesn't look like it's making any new observations. Spore has some 3D modeling tools and abysmal gameplay that could never persuade anyone to start up a game of Spore.
But the models are fun, sure. And other people can find your models, and you can find theirs.
So if we recognize that the "gameplay" part of Spore never worked... we're left with Second Life, a much, much older thing. It hasn't been much of a success.
See my other comment here -- I even made a prediction!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636721
That's funny because that's exactly what I feel when I travel IRL.
I haven't played it myself, but surely an article written one month after the game's release doesn't do it justice, considering there have been multiple major updates attempting to address the gripes players initially had with the game in the 10 years since then (And review trends on steam indicate that these attempts were successful)
I played it in VR and it still does.
No Man's Sky suffers from planets being "deserts", they have different attributes but it's still a fairly lifeless empty world.
Ironically this is realistic but also not terribly fun as a player.
They've added a lot of elements inspired by other games. One of the first things they added was base-building. Also a colony sim subgame, a pokemon-like subgame, fishing and cooking subgames, a roguelike subgame (exploring derelict dreadnought spaceships), as well as a lot more non-procedurally generated storyline/quests.
The worst thing I can say about it is that it tries to be everything for everyone, and is relentlessly friendly - all the new mechanics are very forgiving, very optional and (from what I've seen) rather easy. But there is sort of an in game story explanation for why it sometimes feels more like Stardew valley than a space exploration game.
Indeed, I remember it being pilloried after release but the Steam reviews now are generally quite positive from players who've logged tons of hours.
The original massive controversy was the founder of the studio claiming it had multiplayer when it very clearly didn't which was such an odd thing to claim and easy to prove false.
That and the trailer was very different than the released game.
They apologized IIRC and then continued to work on it for like a decade - adding multiplayer and many large changes to the game
One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity.
It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.
I've thought about it a bunch over the years and my advice is to follow a few principles: procedural elements should almost always impact how the player plays, procedural elements should cross-interact with each other as much as possible, and procedural elements should be understandable to the player.
As an example in No Man's Sky the player immediately starts with a jetpack. It makes it so the terrain is approached the same way every time: you just jetpack over it. Very rarely something is tall enough to require you to walk around.
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a positive counter example. You have stamina so you're constantly thinking about the height of cliff faces, you can glide so you're thinking about height points and straight lines through the world, cliff faces cannot be climbed in rain so you think about the weather, slopes can be slid down on a shield, etc. There are a bunch of systems that may you think about the topology of the terrain, so even just varying the height map becomes interesting.
Similarly in No Man's Sky there are different resources but they work the same way on each planet and the player interacts with them pretty much the same way everywhere.
When I say elements should be "understandable" what I mean is that a trap, which Dwarf Fortress falls into, is to add a vast simulation which the player feels they can never really grasp. Simulations should not be a black box because then they begin to feel like a random number generator.
The aim shouldn't be to make an "infinite" game but to make a very interesting system for the player to slowly understand and master. The developer shouldn't just add stuff, but they should think about the long journey (and eventual mastery) a player might take as they spend significant time with the systems.
Very good points.
Weird question: do you have any tips on how one might apply these principles to a semi-stochastic synth plugin for musicians?
(I have several ideas, but I'd be curious to hear yours, independently.)
Procedural generation is not gameplay. Procedural generation makes your already fun game more interesting via more variety.
If you don’t already have a fun game, then pro gen won’t make it any more fun than it already is. It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game.
If every single Minecraft player loaded into only a single Minecraft world, it would still be as fun as it is. Would No Man’s Sky really be that much different if it just shipped with a handful of pre-defined planets? It might have less replay value but the gameplay wouldn’t be any different.
Good proc gen changes things in your game such that the player is given interesting reasons to make different choices each time they play.
> It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game.
First procgen game I ever played was Starflight 2. (Pre-Internet era, so I couldn't get hold of Starflight 1. SF 2 spoils you, hard, on the major spoiler in SF 1, so if you're playing them from GOG or other sources then you should definitely play 1 before 2).
My ten-year-old mind was boggled. Hundreds of star systems, each one with several planets (usually), and you could land on each one? And explore the whole planet (in a very limited top-down 2D view, because this was the 1980's), harvesting minerals, and the map was quite a bit larger than what would fit on one screen? And it all fit onto one 720K floppy disk?!??!?
Now, of course, I know how they did it. But there was an actual game there. There were half-a-dozen alien races you could interact with (talk or shoot, as required), and there was an actual story. With a twist at the end that 40-year-old me would see coming, but 10-year-old me was shocked and amazed by. (And the twist in SF 2 wasn't even as good as the one in SF 1). And you progressed that story by following the gameplay loop:
Then eventually you would be able to make your way to planets with plot on them, at which the loop changes to: After only a few runs through that loop, it's on to: Crucially, once you had gone to talk to those plot-important aliens, you probably had enough resources that you didn't need to do much mining anymore. You might land when you spotted a target of opportunity — "Oh look, scanners say big pile of platinum just sitting there on a nearby planet, let's make a small detour" — but that was just to keep the bank account topped off. You could afford enough fuel to fly all the way across the map and back, so you could focus on the story.And they timed it well: the core harvest-resources-and-upgrade-the-ship loop didn't have time to get boring before you were off to collect plot coupons. And there weren't too many plot coupons before it was time to find the MacGuffin, use it to beat the Big Bad, and save the day.
Star Control 2 did it really, really well, with better graphics since it was released a few years later. BTW, if you haven't played SC 2, search for "The Ur-Quan Masters" to download and play a totally free, legitimate, open-source version of the game, with full original assets since the copyright reverted back to the original creators who released it into the public domain for the UQM project to port to modern machines. I wish that had happened to all the old classics, but Star Control 2 is truly a good game. Definitely seek out The Ur-Quan Masters.
But before you do that, I would strongly recommend to play Starflight 1 and Starflight 2, to get a feel for the origins of the procgen-with-good-story genre that Star Control 2 did so very well.
P.S. Edited the "core gameplay loop" paragraph to better make it clear there were two or three loops, and you progressed forward through them, rarely having to go backwards.
The advice I've heard is 1) have as many different dimensions of variation as you can manage, and try to have them matter, 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation, since this just reduces variety, and 3) allow your parameters to become extreme occasionally, so that some parts of your generation are notably different, and special because they're rare.
1) is the really hard part, I think: it's a challenge to come up with enough meaningful variations that also work from a gameplay point of view.
> 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation
I think the opposite. The more dimensions you have, the more "invalid space" there should be. Otherwise you end up with giant dinosaurs with tiny feet and fairy wings. You end up with a yellow kitchen with a barrel full of arrows next to a blue dungeon with a giant dresser. You end up with nothing making sense, and everything feeling random in the same way. Trying to spot the differences between 100100111101011110110001001011101 and 1101101110111010000100111001011101 is exactly the "bowl of oatmeal" problem. The vast majority of possible combinations of values should be invalid and impossible, otherwise the choices actually don't matter.
Yes, and it's a problem procedural space games have in particular. Because the planets usually don't interact at all in any meaningful way - what's on one planet (or indeed in one zone on a planet) has no impact outside it. Maybe you can get random quests on planet A to find some landmark on planet B, but it doesn't feel like that was because anything on planet A had anything to do with what was on planet B. For all its improvements over the years (and they are many, and OK in their own way) this is a thing which has not changed in No Man's Sky.
This I think is a core challenge with procedural generation. You can have procgen countries with procgen cities with procgen citizens, but if none of those citizens have an aunt in another city - who you can actually visit, in a new world from the same seed, and learn that she has a nephew in the first city - then it feels empty, fake.
Hierarchial procgen is easy. But you need cross-interactions like that to make it feel alive, and that's hard.
Agreed. Elsewhere in this conversation people mention simple games that procgen well: Spelunky, Terraria, Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
These are games painting with a 16 color palette while the technology exists for any shade in RGB. The more variations, the less likely things will be coherent (let alone brilliant)
I mean, almost no games have that many meaningful dimensions in the first place. It's more likely that the correlations you add just reduce the potential for interesting combinations to arise in the first place.
Spelunky and Terraria do a good job with Procgen.
Spelunky uses handcrafted chunks that are connected together like a puzzle. Each generation feels interesting because each chunk is interesting and they are just strung together into a unique maze.
Terraria does a similar thing, where all the things that matter are hand-crafted. Bosses, items, layer details, progression. The map and cave system is generated but the caves tend to string together hand-crafted experiences and hand-crafted monsters. Many areas are generated, but in a unique style for variety. And there was still a fixed progression in the background (ore and boss progression). I think its in a big contrast to a similar game like Starbound, where all the weapons and creatures and maps were procgen at first, and it felt very '10000 bowls of oatmeal'. Terraria vs Starbound is the most like-for-like comparison I've seen for "procgen done right vs wrong"
You want to look at dwarf fortress talks for that, I think?
IMO, Dwarf Fortress benefits greatly from the player seeing relatively few samples of the world gen, and the geography actually mattering to gameplay.
The actual geography doesn't vary that wildly most of the time ( if you've seen one lightly forested river valley, you've seen them all), but players generate a relatively low number of worlds, and in each world probably only see a handful of sites, where dwarf-scale world gen actually matters. Unlike NMS, though, the details of world gen matter to gameplay a lot. Trade caravans and invading armies can't traverse mountain ranges and ocean, so a mountainous peninsula can be extremely isolated. At the site level, you'll probably want to design your fortress to take advantage of local geography to help fortify your fortress and provide resources, so terrain and features like rivers, volcanoes, etc. placement matters a lot.
In contrast, No Man's Sky world gen feels pretty tangent to the actual gameplay. The game does a good enough job incentivizing you to explore lots of planets, but in terms of the survival/base-building aspects, there's a pretty short list of resources that matter to deciding where to setup, and geography hardly matters in terms of how you build.
If your proceduralism doesn't generate easy to hard solvable problems (ie from geometry constraints etc), its not really adding to the gameplay, only the visual experience.
I'm thinking of the generated history and legends too - NMS only seems to gesture at this with wrecks of ships but I don't think it actually gives each planet a history.
Roguelikes are the ultimate in procgen technology, and should be the basis of any design. (DF is the ultimate simulation but uses procgen as a tool to achieve it; a different vein than NMS trying to explore the procgen and its direct outcomes itself)
1. Any imaginary world needs to be internally consistent to be interesting. Procgen does not void this rule; randomization needs to be gated to that internal consistency.
2. A world can be composed of multiple environments, and each environment can a different definition of internal consistency. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup does this very openly and to fairly good effect, but pretty much any decent procgen game will inevitably end up with the same choice, because it's what enables you to play with various procgen systems/rules while still having a coherent overall game.
3. Generalizing 2, procgen systems generally do not start from nothing; You embed reasonably well-defined bases (races, weapon forms, etc) and then apply randomization on top of those bases to form the final element. Meaningful fundamental variation in those bases leads to guaranteed meaningful variation in the end result.
4. Games are fundamentally interactive systems. Generating a thousand variations without actually changing interaction is equivalent to generating exactly one variation. A blue orc vs a red orc is a not real variant, unless you make it so by attaching effects / statuses / capabilities. The color distinction is then a signal into the more abstracted changes that have occurred. This is where NMS falls over -- the images have changed, but the interaction has not.
5. A corollary to point 4, changing numbers without changing interaction is equivalent to doing nothing. If a meaningful damage threshold is functionally every 10 points of damage, then generating numbers 0-9, 11-19, etc is equivalent to generating just the numbers 0 and 10. This is where borderlands falls over -- a million variations in guns, but the vast majority of those variations are just numeric differences that don't change anything in practice.
6. If the procgen applies to equipment/builds, you pretty much need permadeath as a driver for exploring a procgen game and its systems, because you need players to explore for a local optima. Exploring the space for a global optima in a procgen game inevitably devolves into a gambling simulator, because players optimize out the fun, and the optimal play is to the kill unit XYZ repeatedly for the 0.5% drop. Games like Terraria fall into this trap (though Terraria resolves it mostly by making unit XYZ be trivially summon-able bosses)
7. Procgen can never guarantee interesting results; You inevitably need a system of vaults/artifacts -- hardcoded quality items -- to guarantee periodic interesting locations/items. Ideally more notable than average generation, but less than strictly optimal so as to not overpower the other systems -- an issue I've had with games like Diablo 3, where finding an item-set was vastly more powerful than anything else that I acquired for the next 5+ hours, eliminating the entire looting system (and even character skill system, since it forced my build too)
8. Decent Procgen is inevitably rule-based, with possibly multiple chained-rules each doing their own rolls, to ensure coherency. Ideally the rule-chain is roughly discoverable from the end results (by virtue of following internally consistent and apparent rules) -- an end-result that cannot be explained is indistinguishable from pure-random, and pure-random in incoherent. See any Tabletop RPG generation tables.
9. Hell, just start any procgen design from tabletop RPG tables.
10. The number of variations that can be produced is meaningless. This is only for marketing.
11. A procedural system that generates exactly once is fairly pointless. Permadeath.
12. A procedural system is inherently unfair, because you cannot guarantee difficulty, proper placement, unit composition, etc without removing the procedural systems outright. Embrace the unfairness, and design around it. Permadeath.
13. A procedural system is inherently unfair; you need to give some guaranteed items with guaranteed results to navigate an uncertain world (e.g. escape tools).
14. It's always good to enable some control by the player over the procedural generation. Choice of environments, chances at additional loot, etc. You want the player to engage with procgen rules, because they're interesting (and if they're not, what are you doing?), and the easiest way is to give them tools to manipulate it to their advantage. Also permadeath.
You can work around 12. with constraint satisfaction solvers.
After generating the level structure, emplace an entrance and exit such that they are maximally apart. And emplace a strong monster in one of the rooms around the exit. And emplace a health potion in one room before the strong monster. And emplace treasure in the exit room.
That sort of stuff and be specialized and coded towards your particular games structures fairly easily.
Scale is much harder though. In something like NMS it’d be intensive doing such a constraint solver on the whole galaxy. Might work in chunks or regions though.
The problem is setups like in slay the spire, if we imagine there was no path selection, you can run into scenarios that are functionally unwinnable (I recall someone finding a seed in StS that was literally unwinnable, but ignoring that). Eg Act1 elites that counter your build, but too early for you to consistently have secondary options/workarounds.
Obviously people have high consistent wins in StS1/2 so it’s not like they’re guaranteed unwinnable, but for the average human (mostly just boils down to “path to do act1 elites until after you probably have a counter to all of them)
Your options are:
1. All scenarios are easy enough that you can get away with just about anything sensible
2. You don’t have any counter mechanics, which is basically the same as 1, and is difficult to do anything interesting with
3. You announce up-front what you’re going to deal with, so the onus is now on the player to find a solution in the meantime
4. You give the player a NOPE utility
In a roguelike, I think 4 is the better design, but 3 is also reasonable. 1 & 2 just makes things less interesting.
I vaguely recall an episode of the Triple Click podcast around 2023 where they had a serious AI fanboy who was rah rah-ing about future procedural generation in games. It might have been Casey Anthony, but I'm unable to re-listen while at work.
The fanboy started saying how they could have endless different levels in Destiny 2... which is absurdly off-base since the entire game is just running through the same 9 sandboxes and 12 raids over and over and over again
He then went on to talk about AI creating an album as perfect as OK Computer on-demand, which was gently putdown by Kirk (who is an exceptional musician but also chill enough to suffer fools)
I'm listening to OK Computer right now. Came upon this reply half way through "Let Down". Hmm.
In my own procedural explorations, the solution to the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem is to manually curate them and give the user only the exceptionally good ones. It's a tedious lot of work.
This is something I realized about game design: if you have a procedurally generated world like XCOM, almost every playthrough (or "dungeon") has to produce something new to the player. Something like 10% of each run should actually have something new and unique. That's what makes games like Enter the Gungeon and XCOM 2 work and games like early No Man's Sky fail.
> A procedural universe may be technically impressive but it is also bland, empty, purposeless.
Why doesn't this apply to Minecraft? People love Minecraft even though it's equally purposeless and arguably bland and empty.
I think because the Minecraft world is like a giant tub of Lego. You go out into the procedural world to collect your pieces and then you create from that. It's actually your creations that are interesting and without them Minecraft would equally purposeless and bland.
That's exactly what No Man's Sky is though. There are entire communities centered around colonizing entire regions of the procedurally generated space. People build some seriously intricate bases and it really makes the worlds feel lived in.
I think biggest issue is that you are not constrained to single world. But instead directed to be mostly directionless... Some players just feel no reason to comeback. Where as with Minecraft being in single world you are more forced to comeback to various locations you build things in.
The last time I tried Minecraft, from the point I dropped into the world, I could start punching dirt and trees and placing stuff around and building things.
In No Man's Sky I got dropped in some world that felt empty with tutorial on how to collect some stuff and how to get to the ship.
The first impressions weren't the same between these 2 games.
I made this point earlier in the comments, but I think the main difference between Minecraft and No Man's Sky is that Minecraft does not push the players towards specific gameplay systems, while No Man's Sky does, making No Man's Sky feel much less like a box of legos and more like a collection of specific tasks/activities.
Multiplayer, demographic, community, and probably because it mainstreamed the genre. I'm pretty sure people, especially early teens, like to socialize on Minecraft with their friends. There is also the pseudo campaign of defeating the ender dragon. Minecraft is a juggernaut.
I suspect it does apply to Minecraft too, however Minecraft also benefits from its multiplayer communities in modding scene.
That article is 10 years old. NMS then versus now are two very different games.
And yet it was posted as a reply to someone saying that it still feels like oatmeal.
even as someone who enjoyed NMS as a nightly bowl of oatmeal, a second screen game while I listened to a podcast or a documentary, I can't dispute the accuracy of this metaphor. After a while it became brain off semitainment, and when paired with hands off semitainment I ended up with a full experience, but years later it still costs $70 to become nearly entertained and its become obvious that there are limits to how much you can make procedural generation not such as the core, heart and soul of a gaming experience.
Totally agree. But I'm still wondering why was Escape Velocity so fun yet NMS is a nothing burger? They are very similar, except EV was goofier.
The best things about the game (and it is a good game at this point, they continued to add to it at a steady pace since launch) are the human written stories.
But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast. But also, the worst thing about the human-written stories is that they're often transparently designed around getting you to visit more abandoned malls. The procgen infinity of space is almost a negative, even though it's the game's whole schtick.
I guess now that I think of it like that, it's really impressive they made a fun game despite having to make it fit a boring repetitive universe.
The thing is they could probably have easily had the pvp and economy and soverignty of eve, and that would have been amazing
There really are a lot of things that they could do it with it, but they've already done a lot of things over the years; you can't say they haven't tried things, though I can't say they've always delivered a fun experience with the various experiments. They did pets and pet battles (boring to me), various building ideas (freighters and corvettes, bases, moderately more interesting), trading (I don't care for the implementation, feels detached), salvage, colonization (you become the governor of existing towns and make them run more efficiently and build stuff), etc. And, the worlds and critters got more varied several times over the years since release.
In short, I found it a very fun game until it wasn't, and then I had no reason to log back in. There are things you can do to make your own fun outside the story line; grind for a better freighter, find an build on interesting/valuable planets, find the coolest ships.
Once the story ran out, I was pretty much done, but even if you just play the story and then quit, it's still an excellent value! I got many hours of enjoyment out of a game I paid maybe $20 for. It's a hell of an entertainment deal. I recommend it to anyone who hasn't played it all the way through in recent-ish times. Even if you only play the story out one time and don't find any of the other stuff fun, it's still a very enjoyable game with hours of fun play at a good price that runs well on any decent system.
If I were a designer on the game, I'd find more reasons for human players to be in the same places at the same time and have their actions have a lasting impact in the universe. Riding in someone else's ship (which is what corvettes added) aint it, though. Projects to colonize specific worlds where anyone can stake a claim in a landrush type thing and maybe you setup competitive trade networks or battle for terrain or strategic resources or whatever, would be super fun, I think.
And, I wish space battles were more skill-based, as well. I've never played Eve, but I assume the space battles require skill and strategy and not just the biggest/baddest ship? So, if NMS got really good space battle mechanics, they could implement crazy cool space wars. But, they've got to shrink the game world for that to work (not literally delete the billions of planets, just give players a reason to all fight over one planet or system). Maybe competing for unique resources, like the spice on Dune.
I'll definitely try to find time to log back in and check out the new stuff. Whether it keeps me coming back after I try out all the new stuff and run whatever new missions/stories they've introduced remains to be seen. But, I don't think anyone plays it for the "billions of worlds" thing, because they're all the same after you see the first couple dozen.
> But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast.
Ironically, that’s how I always imagined actual space exploration to turn out once the initial wonders are exhausted.
Space is huge, yes, and everything is kinda unique, but also not in a meaningful sense. Most of the continued amazement we associate with the idea of space exploration comes from human-written stories that fill space with a human variety that just isn’t there.
It more or less reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode. They were playing an asteroid shooting.
> Morty: it's boring. crank up the realism slider to max
> Rick: why does it get even more empty? Wait, I got it... because the universe is empty.
At the end, I think there is little point in simulating the vastness of the universe in a video game (even just a fraction of it).
On that last point, when I first played Dyson Sphere Program (DSP), I left the starting planet without enough resources and didn't understand the inter-planetary warp drive system .. I just drifted out into space and couldn't get back with the fuel I had left. It was almost scary; the vastness of the space was so apparent, it was very immersive to me.
Early game you don't have enough resources to travel quickly through the solar system you start in, nevermind between systems, it takes time. It gives a real impression of scale and wonder imo. You have to plan taking the scale into account - and it's nowhere near realistic. They got a good balance there.
True realism is often interesting though, which provides more long term engagement than fleeting shallow fun. Look at some of the hard core 3rd party addons for flight sims, for instance, which are so realistic they actually ship licensed versions of the real aircraft training manuals and checklists - because every switch and procedure works.
True realism at the right place and time.
Fly out of SeaTac or Chicago O'Hare in most flight sims at sunrise, and you'll get a richly detailed airport, realistic traffic, realistic surrounding terrain, etc. with hopefully jaw-dropping views.
Pick a random airport at a random time with an obscure name or location in the US Midwest, and they all start to look the same (even with detailed, realistic geography): a mostly flat expanse with some hills, and either just the local city lights (if that) or a dull mid-day sun.
To be fair, those checklists are also largely there for so many pilots and those in training whom want to get the experience.
You haven’t seen either of the last two MSFS releases have you? They’re using high res satellite imagery of the entire globe. Even small towns are shockingly detailed.
It's interesting for a niche audience (and I'm one of them). But that's a small minority of gamers (and $$$).
There are levels to this. The NMS day/night cycle is geocentric.
It's a sandbox game yet when it comes to its "space" premise everything is thrown out the window. Dogfights carry no difficulty or skill. Flying around a system is pretty much pointless other than to stumble upon quests (100% RNG). Most of the fun you'll get at planet surface.
> Dogfights carry no difficulty or skill.
You've been hanging out with Claude too much :)
I don't think that simulating the vastness of the universe is ever going to be fun, but approximating a theme park ride that evokes the vastness of the universe can be breathtaking, like Outer Wilds was. (The gameplay is confined to a single solar system, but it certainly makes you feel both the a sense of adventure, and the vastness of space-time.)
That's the problem every Elite after the first one had.
The first one was dogfighting in space, all the others were so. much. space.
I think the first major issue I had with Elite Dangerous is that there’s, I think, three orders of magnitude of flying around. Which really disconnects me from the feel of it all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1uLHmxmcg
You do occasionally find some pretty cool stuff.
I found a barren planet in a black hole system where the vibe was all dark and shadowy with the light being tinted purple, and just some crystals or something on the surface, alongside a damaged robot that you could interact with.
There was also a world that had high Sentinel activity where I founded a settlement (well, more like took over managing it), however as it turns out it’d have those gravity storms often during which you could soar through the air.
There was also a world where the surface was toxic and you couldn’t stay on it for long, so I excavated a base underground, like something out of Red Faction.
For what it’s worth, a lot of it can feel samey (most of the scanning) and kinda boring, but while there aren’t that many insanely huge and cinematic moments, sometimes RNG hits just right and you get something nice.
That sounds cool, but it's either a handcrafted world (if NMS has those) or pure luck. If it's the latter, then it can't have any depth. At best it can have some procedurally generated content that's going to be something you've seen before. Looks cool, but no substance.
Are you sure that you've played it recently? They added an actual story, a huge quest hub, unique items, tons of stuff to do really. I'm quite overwhelmed with the amount of things to do and I don't typically enjoy sandboxes.
Not OP, but my main issue is that after visiting a few systems and a bunch of planets, you kinda saw everything the procedural generation has to offer, and visiting planets becomes boring quickly, at least for me. There are differences, and as someone mentioned there are some unique planets for sure, but for the most part they all look samey. Wildlife is also just walking/flying around doing nothing. This takes away the incentive to go and explore, which is supposed to be the main attraction to the game
It becomes boring very quickly for me too, the planets are the same, the stations are exactly the same, every alien you meet is the same as the previous ones. You build a base on one planet, then another base on another planet, and it's just the same.
The game is also too unrealistic for me: the planets are too close, you shoot asteroids just like you could 47 years ago, you can't dig very deep at all, your ship follow you wherever you jump to.
The trailer was beautiful, the actual game is really nice for a short while, but it's too simplistic and repetitive.
Visiting planets is just a very small part of the overall game. That was more the first NMS.
Wildlife for example you can train as pets, mounts or milk/harvest.
Once you get access to the Space anomaly the game opens up more and if you are social you will find outposts, pet arenas, race tracks and dog fighting/pvp zones. Ship building and freighters.
The latest update appears to allow groups to control areas of space.
All games eventually get boring but there is plenty in now.
> Once you get access to the Space anomaly the game opens up more and if you are social you will find outposts, pet arenas, race tracks and dog fighting/pvp zones. Ship building and freighters.
Outposts sound cool. I assume they aren’t just all the same thing. What do they offer? I’m sure it won’t be something I look at for 5 minutes and think ‘yeah this is neat’ and then realise there’s nothing deeper than that, right?
Ship building and freighters sound cool. I’m sure I’ll be motivated to do that because my stock ship is really holding me back. Oh wait, combat is a joke and I can perma farm max bounties playing with my toes with my default shop I bought on max difficulty/permadeath.
Pet fighting? What’s the point of that?
I agree; I stopped playing years ago after completing what was the main quest of the time (uncovering the nature of the universe and getting to the center). I even setup a decent sized farm for one of the more rare materials to make a billion or so credits (until they nerfed the economy for that).
The planet variety is disappointing. And the prefab 'locations of interest' get really, really boring.
But, I admit I may have to fire it up if what I get to explore is player generated now. And if they're actually making some locations more lucrative for either the resources or what's available to actually process them, I would at least want to check it out.
That, and I totally want a base on an asteroid.
I've bounced off NMS several times, but each time I come back, I reason that they've added so many systems now that the procedural generation must finally feel genuinely deep and interesting.
And maybe it has, but the first 60 minutes of the game still feel like enough of a slog that I have yet to get to any of the good stuff.
The first 60 minutes are definitely a slog, but once you open up access to the quest hub and get access to larger ships that function as bases, the game really opens up. I play it as a "get away" from more competitive/stressful games. The exploration of planets never really appealed to me and doesn't feel like a huge component of the game as much as maybe it did in the early days unless you're hunting for particular resource nodes.
Same, it's basically sci-fi Minecraft, it's just a chill game you can potter about doing whatever you want in.
I also recently came back to it and liked the story and progression system a lot more, especially on their "casual" mode.
The first 50 hours of NMS are really great but then you start to learn the patterns, even though it is a randomized/procedural, at some point it becomes predictable and boring. The other problem is that the battles are boring, they lack something and building big ships and bases feels pointless.
I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse". A thought that comes to me as I type this is what if you try to co-evolve the ecosystems so it doesn't feel like it's just a mix of the same base components in different quantities.
I think a procedural generated space opera is a bit difficult to do.
Space operas are closer to fantasy than hard science fiction: they are about extraordinary people and their extraordinary interactions, you aren't supposed to think hard about the physics.
Procedural generation, on the other hand, is all about emergent behavior, which is closer to hard science fiction: tweak the rules and see what happens. You have to build some deep core physics that are robust, make all the other systems interact in sensible ways over a wide range of conditions, and not worry when balance goes completely off the rails in some cases (in fact, that's the fun part).
No man's sky is a space opera. You could imagine it being hard science fiction: digging into the ground could be deadly (as opposed to a reliable shelter), water / atmosphere mechanics could change (as opposed to just... water and air), gravity could have a much greater range, resource concentrations could vary more, etc. You'd need some mechanics updates to avoid making this frustrating, but maybe not so many as you need to keep the space-opera plot moving.
I don't know that it's possible. Once you see 5-10 of "new thing" you sorta understand the base layer + different modifiers. We're pretty good at recognizing patterns. It's cool the first 3 times, but then you catch on and it feels fundamentally the same as all the other things you've seen.
All procedural games feel like this to me at least. I've been playing Diablo / POE recently. Same deal, once you're at the endgame - the goal just becomes bigger numbers. The maps have different themes, the monsters are different, but you sorta just look past that part as you're gathering generated gear with bigger numbers. It's why I typically get about 10% into the endgame and eventually stop playing.
Minecraft is also a decent example, at some point you stop exploring, build a base and focus on the progression rather than seeing what the system generates in the next biome.
I think Minecraft gets it right by using procedural generation to add depth to the existing content rather than making different content.
There's a fixed set of biomes and notable geographical features designed by the devs, so there's no incentive to keep finding unseen ones, but each world gets its own layout and landmarks, so you get to explore the details of that specific generation for days without carrying over your knowledge of the previous one.
In the long term it might get repetitive too, but it does at the same rate as one gets tired of any other game I think.
I agree a lot with your point on Minecraft. The farther you explore and the more you see, the higher the bar feels for what's worth your interest.
When you first start playing the game, a medium sized mountain is exciting. Then the bar raises towards more interesting features (a deep canyon or a village), and then towards really interesting features of land. Finally, you look for obscure biomes (e.g. badlands or ice spikes). By the end, you can go thousands of blocks without seeing something that feels worth exploring.
Luckily Minecraft has other aspects beyond just the exploration.
I am but an armchair expert here, but I do think most of what's missing is the complexity of real-life ecosystems and "connections". Having biomes that are substantially large on a given planet and diversity among them, animals unique to each, and some kind of connections between the sparse settlements (even just like 3-5 actual cities per planet would be a start) would be a big difference. It would be a bit less about the 'wonder' and more about understanding the interplay.
For now, all I can see is "optimization" and "system limits on numbers of unique objects for things to work at 60+ FPS".
> even just like 3-5 actual cities per planet would be a start
This often takes me out of immersion in reading sci fi books. Every planet has one culture, one ruler, one major city. I know it's usually just a convenience but has the author never seen earth? Why would future human colonized planets not have hundreds of thousands of cities and competing factions?
Finding only one village on each planet is kind of laughable in the same way. The stage of human evolution where there was one village is such a tiny slice of time (if it ever even existed at all).
> I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse"
A good start is not to try and build an entire galaxy. Procgen that focuses on the fine detail of a relatively small world have a big leg up over these "everything generators" (i.e. think of something more on the scale of Tiny Glade or Bad North)
The best proc gen experience I have had is with minecraft modpack called hexxit. The world is procedural generated, but then there is a library of ~200+ hand built structures/features that are scattered throughout the generated terrain. So you wander through a forest and find a cave into a volcano full of diamongs but guarded by angry dwarves, then head over into the desert and find a castle with a witch king, etc etc
There are enough hand built things that you don't quickly start running into repeats, and they are just melded into the generated terrain.
This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept
>This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept
This sounds like it would be a great mod for Factorio. Adds other players factories but in a dilapidated and decayed state.
Reminds me of bones files in nethack.
I was going to say, NetHack doesn't feel sparse to me, but maybe I just have not played enough NetHack.
I think it's due to the fact that there is a fair bit of content, but the interface drip-feeds them very slowly, combined with the difficulty of the game itself that prevents users from finding all possible ways to interact with all content.
Nethack does procedural generation pretty well, and indeed roguelikes are a pretty good framework for it, because the game design tends to revolve around giving the player different options to solve a given problem and they're also not too afraid to have the difficulty vary a lot between runs.
I love this, because decay implies a story, evidence of somebody else's specific failure, which procgen can't fake. It's not just clever, it's brilliant!
Minecraft's procgen villages and mines are oatmeal by comparison. Oxygen Not Included generates ruined stuff, but it isn't from other players, and I've never found it interesting -- just a way of handing you some advanced objects you don't have yet. Ruins with no provenance are a loot table with extra steps.
NetHack bones files, The Sims Exchange in 2000, Spore's pollination, Drivatars, and this mod are all the same mechanism, reinvented every few years by people who don't know it has a history or a name.
It has a name. Maxis called it the Pollinated Content System, and Caryl Shaw's job title was Pollinated Content Producer. GDC 2006, "Building Community Around Pollinated Content in Spore":
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013402/Building-Community-Aro...
"Massively single player" names the shape of the game. "Pollination" names the mechanism, and it's the better word, because pollen goes where it's needed, carried by something that isn't the plant.
Chaim Gingold wrote: "Why not build creative exchange into the game, rather than as a website that orbits it?" The Sims made you visit a website. Spore made it invisible and automatic. That difference is most of the value, and it's the part every mod-based version of this still hasn't got.
http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...
Placement is the hard part, and it's the part nobody proposing these mods has thought about yet. Spore's server pulled content in as needed to keep the ecosystem balanced, and the game built a model of your taste to decide what to ask for. Will, in the February 2007 PopSci interview:
>We're basically building a model of the player's aesthetic. So if you keep picking things from the shopping catalog that are like super-cute, Disney-like, then it will start offering you and downloading more stuff that matches your aesthetic... And when it makes a request to the server it's taking that into account, so the world will slowly start to represent your aesthetic choices.
https://www.popsci.com/entertainment-gaming/article/2007-02/...
Caryl Shaw, whose actual job this was:
>I have a team that works on the server like the database schema who figure out the algorithms to do the matching so that the content that you get make sense for your game and you don't have to download hundreds and thousands of mega bytes of content. You only get the kind of stuff that makes sense for your game.
https://www.animationxpress.com/interviews/exclusive-intervi...
That one mechanism answers Avicebron's "co-evolve the ecosystems", ratelimitsteve's "geography never affects the animals", and analog8374's curation problem, all at once.
Curation comes free. Download counts rank quality better than a designer can, because thousands of people are each picking for their own taste instead of one person guessing at everyone's. The "tedious lot of work" analog8374 describes is work the community does unpaid, and does better!
Payload size is why any of this is possible. Spore creatures compressed to about 3KB; 1KB of source expanded to 5MB of content, a 5000:1 ratio. Better than that: every piece of pollinated content was a "card" -- a 30KB PNG with the game data embedded inside the image file. You could email a creature. You could post one on a forum and somebody could drag it straight into their game. The picture was the data. A decayed Factorio base or Minecraft settlement is a small diff, not a 30GB folder.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/gdc-i-spore-i-p...
Why it keeps dying: the mechanism is cheap to build and expensive to maintain, and it generates no recurring revenue, so it's always first on the chopping block.
Drivatars rotted. The Sims Exchange is gone (but I'm working on solving that problem). Spore's servers are somehow still up, which I always assumed was because there's nobody left at EA who knows how to log in and turn them off.
Now that EA belongs to the Saudi Public Investment Fund (93.4%) and Jared Kushner, the failure mode I worry about isn't a forgotten password.
The PIF's chairman is Mohammed bin Salman. In 2018 his people met the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul with a bone saw and a forensic pathologist who had explained the plan on tape twelve minutes before Khashoggi walked in: "After I dismember it, you will wrap the parts into plastic bags, put them in suitcases and take them out." He left the building in five suitcases and his remains have never been found. Three days later they sent the consulate car to a car wash. The Saudi government's account changed five times in three weeks; the New York Times ran it under the headline "Khashoggi's Death Is Explained by the Saudis in Five Acts (and Counting)". In 2021 the US declassified its assessment that bin Salman approved the operation. Every word of that is one search away, and reality is worse than any joke I can make about it.
So the thing I actually worry about is not Spore. Nobody is going to convene a meeting about Spore. It's The Sims. Saudi Arabia's media regulator banned Final Fantasy XVI from the kingdom in 2023 over Square Enix's "complete refusal to modify the content to suit the region", and made Roblox switch off voice and text chat and delete over 300,000 games. The Sims 4 has shipped gender-independent clothing since 2016, sexual orientation as a character setting since July 2022, and since patch 140 in January 2023, chest binders under Tops > Tanks and top surgery scars under Body > Body Scars. Go look, it's in the base game. A regime that could not tolerate one man writing newspaper columns is not going to tolerate two little cartoon women getting married in a suburban house you built for them. That content is a rounding error in EA's revenue and an existential affront to the people who now sign EA's checks, cutting it costs nothing and buys goodwill in Riyadh, and the $700 million a year in cost reductions gives them a reason to say it was about money. I am writing this down with dates and menu paths so that when it happens, nobody gets to say it wasn't foreseeable.
But I digress...
"The knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode" is the symptom. Nobody being paid to own it is the cause.
And generative models are trained to produce the conditional average, so pointing one at the oatmeal problem gets you oatmeal faster and in greater volume. The only fix anyone has ever demonstrated is a person who cares about one specific creature.
Kate Compton says 10,000 bowls of oatmeal. Phil Hartman on SNL got there in 1989, and it was a lot more than 30,000.
Stop settling for oatmeal. There's fiber, and then there's high fiber!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku42Iszh9KM
I don't know why but it made me think of the original premise of Drivatars in Forza games - Microsoft selling it as an "AI" learning how you drive, then your individual driveatar would be submitted to Xbox Live and would randomly appear for other players in their offline games, but it would drive just like you drive. Really cool concept, of that "footprint" of your play appearing in other people's games.
Shame that it just languished to a point where I think Microsoft completely lost both interest and control over that feature, where in Horizon 6 it just gives you the exact same few driveatars every race, and somehow no one at Playground Games is interested in fixing this. At this point I strongly suspect that they literally don't know how to, the knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode.
That sounds a lot like that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup approach of randomly generated floors/levels with designed "vaults" emplaced within them
I actually created a Minecraft server plugin a long time ago which did this. It allowed server owners to create their own dungeons/buildings/etc and they would generate randomly in the world. It even supported custom procedural generated dungeons and structures.
Mine was a procedurally generated FPS I've forgotten the name of, it used a seed key to generate the map and then you could fight on it, if it was a cool map you could just keep or share the key so was replayable.
Iirc it used a voxel engine so would have been late 90's.
I play Tekxit for the same reason. The world feels genuinely alive and surprising. I just love automation as well, and Tekxit hits that sweet spot of "building complex resources extraction and refinement chains" but also "a big world full of adventure where you can actually use those resources for something other than making bigger machines to implement bigger processes to build more complex extraction and refinement chains".
I think it has to be hand crafted with some mix of procedural generation. I worked on the Division Underground DLC, and the way we did it is we had artists create dozens of various room variations, describing how they could connect each other, then I wrote an algorithm to populate the map with these "dungeons" and their rooms in a semi-random order. In the end I think the map had about ~200 unique dungeons, but rooms could repeat between them, so you'd sometimes go "oh hang on I've seen this metro station before" but the entire dungeon would be different almost every time, unless you played hundreds of hours of it(the game kept track and wouldn't give you the same dungeon again until you played them all, iirc)
I think you're on to something here. The problem with procgen is hard because the various things in an environment have to interface with one another and in NMS they don't really meaningfully interface. The geography is generated, and the animals are generated, and the mineral deposits are generated, but the geography never affects the animals or the mineral deposits. You don't see, as an example, vast highland regions with animals adapted for living in the cold and huge mineral veins exposed in cliffs at high altitudes. You also don't see older mountains where the average mineral deposit would sit lower in altitude but be smaller due to erosion, with more cave systems and more critters evolved specifically for caves (colorless, blind, chemautotrophic, specializations like that). There's a range of ways the landscape can be, there's a range of ways animals can be, there's a range of ways resource distribution can be, but they don't affect one another and it makes it feel bland and same-y.
I feel like this is where AI would come in handy. An AI can get a lot more 'creative' than a procedural generation algorithm.
I like to tinker with making games now and then, and I have learned that there are lots of game ideas I have that are more fun to make than play. A lot of those look like No Mans Sky. I feel like the devs fell in love with procedural generation and never thought about what kind of experience they want to have.
I say this because I feel the same thing as you when I go back, and I really want to like it.
Because most of the new feature are not connected to each other. Take a gravition coil. It's like in Half Life - but You can only use with very limited set of objects, that were added in same update as gravition coil. Make it useless and not fun...
Same. Every time i re-download it and start a new game I never get past the tutorial because i was so incredibly bored so soon, i always wanted to like this game and i love how much effort they keep making but... sandboxes games are just so boring.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I have tried coming back to the game multiple times and every time I just feel bored and underwhelmed by the whole experience.
Yeah...I played it for probably a couple of hundred hours...and it wasn't that fun. In fact, it's boring. And I've come back a too many times because someone (like some of the commenters here) said "no, man...get the new update! It's a Totally Different Game!". So I jump back in, and it's different to varying degrees...and still boring. Just because there's "lots to do! new quests! rare items to find!", doesn't mean doing them is fun.
What made you play a game for a couple of hundred hours to then conclude that it is boring? I played the first release and put in roughly 100 hours. The first 90 hours were wonderful. Eventually I realized that I wasn't enjoying it as much so I put it down. But I would never call those 90 hours boring.
I felt like I got a lot of value out of it, and have fond memories of discovering interesting planets. I really view NMS as an artistic experience. I don't care for the gameplay loops. I played this game like an curious explorer. There are infinite planets, many feel the same but occasionally you land on something so special that no one else has ever seen.
If you are interested in the sandbox element, and space, and building - but want character - Satisfactory pulled me in for roughly 1200 hours over three years. I"ve got the scenery, and new discovery's burned in to my brain - elements of the landscape are more vivid in my memory than a lot of real places I've visited.
What's interesting is that there is zero procedural generation - single world with about 20 Biome, each one with all sorts of character. Monsters are incredibly well balanced, and the sheer terror I got from the spiders (which I think are a tad OP - especially the ones that launch)_ triggered my fight-flight reflex (mostly flight) more than any other game I can recall.
The game can be played in so many different ways too - you can take the factorio/big factory build out approach and speed run that, or just spend your time exploring, or, perhaps best of all - watch hundreds of hours of Youtube Videos to get a sense of the architect aesthetic that some of the top players bring to it. Epic Tech Tree. Cute back story.
I consider it the greatest Sandbox/space game ever - I don't know if we'll ever see anything like it again.
Agreed. I want to like this game _so bad_ but I think the problem is that I'm looking for a feeling of fulfilling progression when in reality this game is just a bunch of disjointed sandboxes which is certainly not my type of game.
NMS's art-style is low-detail, but highly aesthetic. It can look amazing at times, but only when you're looking at grand cinematic vistas. It rarely looks good in closeups. This parallels the game's systems in many ways.
NMS is a technically impressive game. You can build a custom-spaceship, either with the in-game editor or by importing one from outside the game, dogfight in it, land on alien worlds, etc. and that's just one of the loops. However, the spaceships you build aren't simulated physical objects. They don't even feel as substantial as styrofoam fins tacked onto a model train. There's no real challenge to flying them. They all just float through space like nothing.
The game has dozens of ways to progress, finding resources and earning cash. They're all so easy to break that you have to consciously resist doing so. Craft a few donuts and you're rich. You don't have to worry about finding buyers for your obscenely high-end pastries. The market board will buy anything at the listed price. Game breaking bugs that trivialize finding resources have been left in the game forever because the developers were afraid that some people might be upset if they actually had to grind for resources. Why what is, ostensibly, a single player game with multiplayer support tacked on even has grind mechanics is another valid question.
I log into NMS occasionally, but my big problem with it is that it's gameplay devolves into a sequence of grinds that are all optional. The things that should offer a challenge (e.g. ship combat) don't. Every play session becomes a case of, "Where do I find this stupid mineral I need to build an upgrade that will make what's already too easy even easier?".
The technology on display in NMS is absolutely impressive, but the gameplay isn't. I'd love to see a fork of this game where they focus on more challenging gameplay with less focus on grinding and sandbox elements. I see the expeditions as an attempt at this, but they don't go far enough.
It's been years since I last played it, but when I did I finally did so for a while until I finally found myself at a space station with other players and whatnot. And some random dude just gives me something like tens and tens of millions in cash. And my friend. And a bunch of other people in the same station.
At that point I was still rather new to the game. I had little money, few resources, understood little - which was the whole game for me. Discovering new stuff and trying to make money. And being given all that money sort of just .. ruined the game for me. What was left was the very meh storyline and maybe exploration, neither of which had any appeal to me.
If its any consolation you would have otherwise gone from where you were to pretty much end game resources/money/ran out of stuff to do in like 2 weeks anyhow.
I was just about to say this. I have a lot of respect for the dev team but man is it so not my type of game.
I wish somehow the complexity of eve could meet a game like this. I would sell a kidney for that
It will be interesting to see if the new space station takeovers will be PVP or just chill feature. It seems to suggest they can be owned by groups.
The X games?
X4?
I recently tried star citizen and it's kind of trying to be something like that but it's way too half baked with lots of game breaking bugs like you'll just lose the entire cargo of your ship which can completely bankrupt you after days of saving up. Also they keep releasing bigger and fancier pay to win ships at ridiculous price points like hundreds and even thousands of dollars instead of fixing the game. I tried it during a free week and I legitimately enjoyed it a lot but I was also extremely frustrated a lot by the bugs and the pay to win crap really rubs me the wrong way so I didn't buy it after the free trial ended.
It's a weird mix of amazingly well done and absolute garbage. And pay to win. Don't forget about the pay to win bullshit.
I don't know about the PTW aspect. What's there to win in a broken sandbox? In my view, they mostly just keep ripping off delusional "collectors" to keep the gravy train going. It's not like these solo players then take off in their huge multi-crew ships and are able to "win" in any meaningful sense.
A few years ago, I had a couple dozen hours of good fun with my starter pack just zooming around all those moons and planets, stepping out of my tiny ship and holding my breath, not knowing much about what awaits me outside - scorching heat, a blizzard, hostile or friendly players... it felt like I got my money's worth if space immersion.
If you don't expect much in the way of an actual game, but are content with a few game loops held together by string and duct tape, you can find a vast and pretty universe to explore.
Reeaallyyy gotta manage your expectations, though. It's very much an alpha, and you better not think it's gonna release, like, ever. Disclaimer: I have no idea how it's evolved in the past years.
Well there is pvp and the ship also helps with PvE progression. So I don't know how you figure it isn't p2w. Buy better ship, have advantage over others. It's not just a cosmetic upgrade. That makes it p2w.
Yeah, I guess you're right. I didn't think it through, because my play style didn't involve much PvP or PvE.
When it first released I correctly predicted that the game was overhyped and destined to flop, making fun of friends who bought the game and ending up being disappointed.
The internet historian video made me buy it, thinking it was maybe worth it now.
I think I got like 5 hours in before feeling like I was just doing an endless grind. I felt like I had fallen for the hype, which I think was deserved ;)
Maybe the game doesn't get good until you grind past the first N hours, but I just don't have the time any more.
considering the company still exist and servers are still up I assume not everyone shares your opinion. its a pretty good milestone for an online game.
not everyone enjoys the same kind of gameplay.
I remember first hearing about NMS' concept and wishing that they would take the general idea but downsize it by at least 10 orders of magnitude. A universe with 1-100 millions of planets would still feel absolutely massive and way more than individual players would be able to exhaust, yet it would allow the creators to do a bit better curation, allow players to actually meet, maybe add more hand-crafted experiences. Basically, give up on technical purity in favor of fun.
They added real multiplayer several years ago. If you go to the same system another player is in, they'll be there. (As well as everything anybody has ever built there).
But you are pretty much guaranteed never to meet anyone while roaming around randomly. Only if you go to a galaxy center, the Anomaly, an expedition, or matchmake into someone else's game (is that still a thing?)
I had a different experience.
I bought it on day one in 2016, and like everyone else, I was wowed by the planet hopping experience for about an hour or so. Then I put it down and didn't think about it again.
Then I picked it up a few years later, and discovered base building. Had more fun than the first playthrough, but it didn't click. Eventually I hear about something called the Galactic Hub, which is a star system marked by players as a central spot to build their bases. Kind of like a human home in the vast empty universe of NMS.
I get curious about it, and look up instructions on how to get there. I did some quick napkin math and realized it would take literally dozens of hours of grinding - nonstop travel - to get there. However, as it turns out, there's a loophole with black holes. When you enter a black hole, it spits you out into a totally different place in the galaxy. From the players perspective its random, but players got together and figured out that each unique black hole always sends you to the same spot in the galaxy. So they constructed a black hole "highway", along with an app that let you input your desired coordinates, and it would give you the list of black holes that would most optimally get you near your destination.
So I spend an evening playing the game, switching back and forth from the game to my laptop, inputting coordinates and slowly making my way closer and closer to the hub. Eventually I find it, and what was amazing was that it was the first time I'd seen any evidence of another player in the game.
That moment felt utterly magical, because while I was playing a game, I had an actual, real objective that I formed entirely on my own.
So yes, the game is an odd duck, but it can really open up with the right mindset.
Exactly sums up my experience. Bought it day one. Still bores the hell out of me.
Exactly how I feel about this game. While its redemption arc is one for the history books, every time I come back to it, I feel nothing.
A mile wide, and an inch deep
Yeah, that is exactly my issue with the game - they crammed so many mechanics into the game, but all of them are incredibly shallow & even unfinished.
The RNG space is part of the problem - planets and biomes kinda start to repeat after while and it is not really important any more on which weird planet or station you are.
It is actually interesting how many games with much smaller RNG generated world maps work just fine because you don't travel so much like in NMS & kinda learn to know the landscape and also shape it yourself or with your friends. Like you know there is a lake next to you base and that deserted town, then there is that forested mountain where you got ambushed by zombies once & built a secondary mining base later, etc.
In NMS you land on a random planet, build a base on it and - like, what is it good for, if there are millions of similar planets & coop multiplayer is almost non-existent.
Also the existing mechanics are overly simplified. Like space combat...
Every time these epic announcements go out, I try co-op multiplayer again, realize it's still miserable, then close it and wait for the next release. I'd love to play it with my wife but completing our own objectives, building our own bases, not being able to directly interact like in other games this decade, progressing forward separately, fixing our own ships, etc. etc. etc. is just a non-starter. Good luck to them though!
I tried it a few years ago, following all the "It's actually good now!" stories.
But a few hours into the tutorial, at a point of yet another "go gather 20 wolf Pel^H^H Ores from that other planet and bring it back", and I lost interest.
The inner gameplay loop didn't work for me, and I need that hook.
Have there since been improvements to that inner loop?
In contrast, Destiny 2 keeps hooking me back in because its inner loop, the gunplay and abilities, and variety of builds, really works for me.
Disney found this out the hard way with Infinity. On v3.0 a large chunk of their IP was staged into a fully customizable and open universe.. and it was so unremarkable that they shutdown the servers and killed all development a few years later.
I feel the same way about Starfield. Just soulless projects instead of engaging video games.
Starfield is IMO worse. NMS at least has sandboxes that can entertain you and expeditions can be fun. NMS just doesn't have "goal" to work towards, so unless you can create your own goals its boring. Starfield, bugs aside, had the most boring base-building/operations I've seen in my life.
Weird take cause the game is definetely there and it has tons of content. Admitedly it is not for me because I just do not like the way resource gathering works. Does not tickle my fancy. But saying there is nothing substantial is an odd take, there is base building, space battles (fighter and corvette), expeditions. You can even do a little automatisation if you are into it.
A played it, got stuck in a giant crater with seemingly no way to get out of it. That was basically the extent of my experience.
When up against a wall you have infinite jetpack but the game doesn’t really tell you this.
I kinda feel the same way. I loved slowly going through the main story and probably put 50hr into the game, but the sandbox alone (amazing as it is) just doesn't do it for me.
i played it day 1 back then and even bought a PS4 only to play it and played it over the years repeatedly after every larger update for about 1000 hours in total. The fundamental promise they made was never shipped, which was originally a large variety of procedural flora, fauna, and planet. It is still the same uninspired boring stale core that it was day 1 with minimal extensions which produce absolutely boring world that immediately repeat. The game was always Waiting for Godot, waiting for a game that was originally announced with an interesting procedural feature but never shipped. Meanwhile I discovered the history of procedural games, which is a story of fails.
I still sometimes hope that the actually rewrote the entire procedural variety system but it cant happen because people built persistent shit on those planets. They probably have to launch a new game.
Video games have always been part tech demo
And the story aspects are played out no different than Hollywood
NMS has more in common with Minecraft. It's a virtual chat room that looks Star Wars-y
Also don't discount simply not being a kid anymore. Biology isn't static. Memory does not allow for that same initial burst of excitement.
This is why a cool tech solution (procedural generation of "levels") by itself isn't good enough. The core gameplay loop is fundamentally the same on every planet. The graphics and descriptions may change but once you've played it for a bit, it gets boring.
I think video games are art, so take my opinion in context of if this is right up your alley and you really love it, then keep on keepin on!
By 'coming back', do you mean actually firing it up and playing it?
Every year social media hits me hard with "No Man's Sky is good now!" — and I bit and dove in with a few buddies.
To say everything in this game is half baked is giving it too much credit. It's 10% baked at best. This isn't a game; it's an underwhelming tech demo. The only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.
Everything else is baaaad: the quests have less logic than entry MMO quests, and are mainly fetch missions. The planets are randomly generated slop. The economy of building up your ship/fleet isn't fun (you just sell your ships over and over again). Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that are clearly just trying to trick folks into buying an elaborate space game tech demo. Can we move on from this "game"?
> Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1.
IIRC, back in the v1 days you'd give an NPC a species-specific valuable trinket and they'd teach you a randomly-selected word of their race's language. Learning words was useful for when you'd encounter a historical relic that presented an important scene from history, and when you encountered an NPC that was requesting assistance. In both cases, they'd make their speech or request in their native language, you'd be given a few context clues in the form of dialog describing gestures, NPC attitude, etc, and then you'd have to guess what action you needed to perform or resource of yours they needed. If you get it right, you get something nice.
Like many other systems in the game, this got reworked several times into what it is now: "Find an NPC, ask for language assistance, select a category of word to learn, and Bob's your uncle.". I won't claim that either the v1 or current methods of learning language are fun, but the v1 method did consume a resource that was often difficult to come by... so it made learning the language much more difficult. They could have cooked up three whole-ass conlangs and built in gradual language tutorials for each... but that'd be a surprising choice for a game whose most difficult puzzles are "Can you do basic arithmetic?" and "Can you understand which direction this list of numbers is rotating?".
There's never been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both got what they were being told by the story and weren't enraged by the implications gets why. The game's first story (such as it is) is why I'm always amused by people who don't dislike it, but also take it very seriously and want there to be a ton of stuff to do in it.
Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of stuff [0] over the years. I'm amazed that they're making enough money on the game to still be working on it a decade later, but here we are.
> It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that...
Eh. As someone who pops back in for a few hours when there's a major change, I don't mind at all the detailed patch notes.
> Can we move on from this "game"?
Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it.
[0] ...some of which is clearly playtesting for things planned for Light No Fire...
I've heard it described as "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle"
bout 5 months ago i gave it 2 hours of my life and asked for a refund once i realized i had basically seen the whole game in that first like 30 minutes of playing.
the only game that seems to hit the mark of what im actually itching for is star citizen that is in a perpetual state of never-finished but i can't even quite put a finger on what it is i'm after. beauty, art, real weather, being able to fly up through the atmosphere and just let me escape into a sci fi movie. i can acknowledge star citizen has actually come a long ways and i think they do deliver that, though i haven't played it myself just going off vids ive seen.
NMS somehow feels like a visual and playable interpretation of depression to me with a Dr. Seuss world backdrop lol. Like it reminds me of times in my life where I've just been stuck in the motions, unhappy, resigning myself to the fate of doing absolutely nothing of inspiration because I felt like I had no other options and gave up.
Shout outs to steam for refunding when my reason was "This game is actually depressing"
To me it feels like what i actually want is Eve's economy, PVP/PVE strapped onto the noman gameplay, at least personaly
Agreed. And this tech demo was a day 1 purchase for me back in the day. While it has gotten better since then it just doesn't hold my interest. I do like using it whenever every few months I feel inclined to get my PC VR headset out (I'm using an old HO Reverb G2 with the Oasis driver) I think it's a great VR title.
I remember when it first came out, there was so much hype but I immediately wondered, “where exactly is the game loop?” I also remember how aggressively defensive fans were about it.
This is why you really need a good geologic, climate etc models. Like a full blown simulation.
I feel the same. I want Rust in space, where there are constant stakes. NMS either takes too long to get to a part of the game where stakes become relevant, or doesn't have any.
If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.
EVE online?
Agreed. It's incredibly boring. It lacks an interesting and interactive story with good pacing. What they have done is cool, don't get me wrong, but I think they got carried away by the tech coolness without enough attention to what makes a game fun or interesting.
Do you think the same of Minecraft?
I think this kind of game needs another innovation to make it interesting. I don't think adding more generative or LLM generated content is the solution.
I had some great moments in NMS. But, you're right, it needs a plot or storyline to follow.
This perfectly describes how this game makes me feel.
I felt this way for a while until I decided to sit down, start a new game, and engage with it.
It's a completely different game, it just doesn't look like it if you picked back up where you left off. Without the right context, you have a tendency to just repeat what you were doing before, and it feels like nothing changed.
But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.
they add feature after feature. but never a good drive for the player. 'why should i go to this planet?'
i have an idea for it,
Let users populate the universe with custom quests. Scriptable quests with dialog and multipart structure. You need a custom script language and some limitations on it. Example quests:
- "Bandits have occupied our town", but actually bandits are tax collectors. You instead may help them document the goods.
- "Our star is dying", instead a huge starhip is recharging and refusing to move without some condition.
also add a rumor system to lead players to quests.
you can use my idea Hello Games, you have my permission.
Yepp. Biggest buy misstake ever.
Right on the nail.
How people interact with LEGO varies. Some people like to buy specific sets and make them. That's fine. Some people see a random pile of bricks and build a massive city [1]. There are also competition events for what people can build from a random pile of bricks. There was a TV show about this too (ie Lego Masters).
Some games are problem solving, others are competitive, yet others are elimination but an awful lot of games have a component that requires you to inject imagination. The Sims and even Minecraft (despite it having a survival mode too) spring to mind.
That's what NMS is. Some people like to find the perfect looking ship. Others build bases to look a certain way. Others just explore. Yet others make money.
If that's not for you, that's OK. But NMS can't be dismissed as being repetitive or boring.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfVCmkexl2E
>but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay.
to me that has become a big positive aspect of the game. The non-teleology of it, that you just run around and immersive yourself in it is pleasant in its own right. Especially modern games to me seem to have substituted games as an experience with reward system driven busy work. Everything is always instrumental.
I started to notice this when games like Journey came out, or Death Stranding during the stress of the pandemic. No Man's Sky is obviously not as artistically strong as either one but the exploration only for explorations sake has me come back to it very regularly. It genuinely is a game about nothing (so is Seinfeld, never hurt the show) but to me that boredom is a genuinely good thing.
NMS seems to epitomize the excesses of the Agile development philosophy with most of their release updates -- small targeted tack-ons to the game engine that provide something tangible yet shallow for users to explore, usually disconnected from narrative. The same cargo drop configurations, how damaged containers always require removing the same rusted metal or goop, and how shelters have the same exact configuration, never ever evolve or change. It has such a strangely repetitive ghost town character. They could easily target their "agile" deliverables around diversifying and breathing more life into the worlds if they could span more "sprints". Unfortuntately, the tack-ons feel hollow, empty, and often ship incredibly buggy. They used procedural modeling to create an impressive array of planets, but never modeled the planet drops with the same care and diversity.
That's because there were no idea behind it in the first place. It was an ambitious overpromising project that hasn't delivered almost anything they promised. They didn't have any story or interesting gameplay in mind too. Pity.
It's a great game to play with friends. Explore, find cool animals, and most of all - build your fantasy space home. It's relaxing, fun, and can be a great shared experience. I imagine it wouldn't be quite as engaging completely by yourself.
It's kind of like ARK, they spent so much time on all the "cool" stuff that looks great in trailers without focusing on what actually would make a game like this incredible, which is a real persistent singular world with consequences and meaningful group based PVP or PVE that works at scale. What you end up with is just a simulacra of multiplayer that basically boils down to a visually represented Xbox Live lobby.
How I feel as well.
This game just doesn't scale well from mid game on - it's way too easy, even on permadeath + hardest difficulty. Like, making money is way too easy, combat is way too easy, everything is too forgiving. And the entire loop is centered on like, 3 things to do that are all variants of the same exact thing. Really hope they do a much better job in Light No Fire.
To the guy who replied to me: Our genius overlord moderators rate limited my responses so I'll post here.
> I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding
You and I have very different ideas of what forgiving means. A reasonably intelligent 7 year old that enjoys and has experience playing video games could play this game on max difficulty settings and not have any issues. And while I never had an issue finding anything (shit is literally everywhere), resource scarcity doesn't equally an unforgiving game mechanic unless it's gated by some sort of difficult fight or something, which this game doesn't have. Combat is laughably easy and repetitive. I've got a couple hundred hours in the game, and at one point I was running the same bounty missions over and over again for some outrageous amount of money - the mission took 7 minutes round trip, the combat encounter was literally the exact same every time, same number of enemies just with different names. And that was the most efficient way I could make money in late game on the permadeath server on max settings. If that's the best economy loop a game can come up with, a 100% brainless combat encounter, then the developer has done something very wrong.
it's because it's a sandbox farming game, it's not meant to be difficult
you spend most of your time finding/farming resources and unlocking builds
most of your time is traveling between planets/systems/galaxies for different resources
I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding, which is the core gameplay, you can easily miss it if you don't play for 40+ hours but there are entire varieties of star systems you can't access initially, an entire race you literally can't see without completing some strings of missions, etc
I opened the game.
Played 30 minutes. Found a start of game bug that blocks progression.
Looked online, everyone claims this exact bug had been squashed years before.
Started a new game. Bug returned. Left it for a few days. Bugs still there. No workaround.
Raised a thread somewhere. Got yelled at for "Pretending" to have the bug.
Uninstalled the game.
My 2 cents is that it looked like a really shitty MMO with nothing on top, but I cant really say because it never let me leave the tutorial.
I think facts would be helpful for this discussion:
1. Total Revenue - ~$500m-$700m
2. Copies Sold - ~15-20m
3. Steam Review Score: 84.36%
4. 40 Free Major Updates
I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
NMS is a great example of a developer who was devoted to their customer base, kept updating the game for free, and saw great market success in return.
This is a story to be celebrated.
> I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
A lot of people simply aren't as enamored with the shallow gameplay, even in the current version. I'm not surprised that they've sold a lot over the years since they've been putting out free content updates year after year to lure people into reinstalling it every six months or so.
As someone who played this game on start I want to share that I enjoyed it. This game was and still is a chill exploration experience at the core. There’s a lot of stuff bolted on top, but it’s just a busywork. If you enjoy that kind of games you’ll love it.
Another thing to point out: technical patching is top notch. I’m talking about how fast they come around to support new console, new VR helmet etc.
I don't think anyone disagrees and I don't really see negative comments about the devs or the studio.
The problem is the game itself, gameplay wise. It's just boring for many (including me)
Somewhat of an aside but, personally, I also found GTA V and Red dead redemption 2 to be boring because these games didn't respect my time. I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".
RDR2 feels to me like a game that would be awesome to play once I'm in retirement and have all the time in the world.
'I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world"'
Funny how this is exactly the same sentiment I feel about NMS. Go figure, different strokes, ya know?
> I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".
Two hours is like three or twelve story missions, depending on where in the story you are. Did you spend most of that time farting around doing stuff that wasn't main story [0], or are you just not really into the stories being told? IME, Rockstar's 3D games have always been not-all-that-great third-person shooters, but made up for it with the storytelling and world-building.
> ...because these games didn't respect my time.
If I were Global Overlord for a month, I'd permanently banish the sentiment "This video game doesn't respect my time". It's fine to say "This game bored me." or "I just didn't enjoy this game.". Unless we're talking about predatory "free" to "play" games [1] that survive by deliberately reaching deep into the wallets of whales, mixing pride into the discussion and claiming the injury of disrespect is very silly.
[0] ...of which Red Dead 2 has an absolute assload -most of which will bore folks to tears who don't really dig the "late 1800's outlaw going on about his day" thing-, and GTA V has a fair bit...
[1] Games that you have to pay up front to play can also belong in this category.
RDR2's intro absolutely did not respect my time. I sat down with an hour free to play it, and in that time, I did not reach a save point. There was some story, but it was very slow, and I had precisely zero interest in repeating it. I ran out of time, turned it off and never came back.
Same. I really want to play it but - I feel I need to skip the first hour to do so?
Almost all of the story missions are: 1) walk/drive/ride to this place 2) Talk to NPC 3) Do an extremely boring task (follow someone, drive somewhere, etc) 4) Walk somewhere else 5) Talk to someone else. 6) Collect XP or another reward.
Most of it is not enjoyable gameplay.
Yeah. Like, the train heist and other cool gameplay segments were fun. But the missions to go to some random town and talk to someone and escort them back? Horrible.
Don’t forget the top notch drawer rummaging simulator.
That’s fine, it has a sustained concurrent players online of > 7k every day for the last 6 months [0]. Few games on Steam achieve that.
While several people are complaining about a one-time-cost game with an absurd amount of updates that had a rough launch, thousands of people are continuously happy, the subreddit expresses joy. It’s okay to “not get it”; but at some level, this much hate and dogpiling over a game that’s not harmful and not fostering a toxic community is … embarrassing for those participating in the hate.
[0] https://steamcharts.com/app/275850#6m
What hate? What dogpiling? People are simply talking about how they aren't into the game and find it shallow.
I sense a lot of unwarranted defensiveness from certain fans of the game. Having sustained concurrent players on Steam isn't going to transform the game into something it's not for the people who just aren't into it.
I've relaunched it multiple times over the years when a new content update comes out, and I get the same feeling of shallow blandness every time and move on. The core gameplay simply does not do it for me.
That's another great point. And the general trend (ignoring the peaks of releases) is trending upward which is especially rare on Steam.
Do you enjoy similar games (vast open worlds, resource collection/management, crafting)?
Eh. As a Mac user, my AAA choices are limited. I mostly play Borderlands 2 & 3, and NMS. I’m not a huge gamer, and these have been enough for me. I just play in bursts, when I’m taking breaks from coding.
I don’t like playing with others, as the experience of being fragged by a 15-year-old, shouting biologically impossible suggestions to me, is not really on my bucket list.
I’ll play it. It won’t be super exciting, but, if I was serious about gaming, I’d get a dedicated Windows rig.
> I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
It's the sandbox concept. Some people load into Minecraft and think, "AWESOME! I'M GOING TO BUILD A MALL!" Some people load into Minecraft and think, "WTF is this? Why is there no story? What the hell am I meant to do?"
I'm not going to cast judgement. It's a preference. The people who bounce off NMS are the latter. NMS is a very fun sandbox. The story is secondary to making your own fun.
The developer is great. The game isn't.
I enjoy games based on content and gameplay, not volume.
Also no layoffs, ever. Who would've thought that providing your people stability would lead to a better product.
What are people on about, there is tons to do in NMS, tons of missions, expeditions, build bases, build a corvet, hunt rate parts, ships, rifles, creatures, manage a settlement, automate crafting chains, find a lucrative trading route, and this new update apps even more things. I'd never consider NMS anything close to empty, there is so much variety in the content
The game has so much stuff to do its actually overwhelming. The game is definitely a sandbox though and I think for some reason a lot of people don't like going out and doing the different things you can do in the game if the game doesn't force you to or if there's not heavy progression.
I feel like the same thing happens to other sandbox games too. Minecraft is one of my favorite games of all time and I could easily spend a thousand hours in a vanilla world and still find things to do, however the game gets constantly shit on by the community no matter what it does. They speedrun through the progression and then lack any creativity to do anything else in the game.
I personally love building bases and customizing and collecting things, which is a large part of the gameplay in NMS. I could spend hundreds of hours doing that but I guess some people just need a constant sense of progression and the game telling you what to do because they aren't capable of setting their own goals. Anyone who says NMS lacks content or things to do has barely touched the game.
I think what most of the commentary is on is the initial gameplay loop which has to do with planetary exploration and learning words. After that there's a multitude of new gameplay loops that become intertwined. I don't think most players get that far unless they have a very old account.
I think it comes from a difference in what people want. Some people want to achieve goals, while others want to be given tools to be creative. There's a whole spectrum in between, plus other motivations as well.
I enjoy being creative to an extent, but I like to solve problems, so I naturally gravitate to something with a long-term goal to achieve like Factorio (I rapidly lose interest after launching a rocket though).
Saying the game is a space sandbox and then implying that the inability to find fun falls onto the player's inability is what every online NMS fan says in discussions about not enjoying NMS. Calling a game a sandbox doesn't spawn game mechanics into existence, the game is still limited by what the devs put into the game. Your goals are still limited by what the game provides to you.
But a game can have 1000 hours of collectables content and still not be an enjoyable game to people. For example, I don't really enjoy collectables purely for the sake of collecting or building without having some sort of meaningful functionality. Every time I've tried to get into NMS (and when I ask others about what you can do in the game), I get the impression that 99% of the game is just flying/walking around, scanning things, collecting some random doodads, base building, and hoping to find a "cool" ship in a station to buy. Which is to say, the same things every base building survival game has, but in space.
I don't necessarily need forced goals, but I need things to work toward that aren't just collectables. For example, in certain other space sandbox games I can build up or destroy political factions. The universe around me dynamically updates in ways that actually affect me meaningfully. I can build up industry to harvest resources, refine them, and produce various goods either to use or to sale. I can have a goal of building all of the infrastructure needed to produce ships, or colonies, or what have you. With a larger industry, maybe some of the political factions try to attack me, so I then need to defend against them. I could build up a fleet of ships that handle defense and transportation of resources. I want to feel like the universe actually responds to my input.
I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development - the game of the last few years is absolutely nothing like the early one and I agree, there is a surprising amount of stuff to do.
FWIW, I was there from the beginning, and stopped fairly quickly (maybe 20 or so hours in).
I hopped back in a couple years later after a few updates, and agree that the quantity of content was pretty big. But the quality was not -- it still felt "empty", and never held my interest long.
Last year, the same thing happened. I hopped back on after a few big updates, probably spent another 10 or so hours on it (I think I started over), and felt like I had explored all there was.
I feel like all the criticisms it gets are valid. I agree that the effort of maintaining a game after 10 years is incredibly admirable, especially since ever update has been free. That's amazing. And the devs should be acknowledged for that.
But the game itself still feels largely empty. The progression feels mostly repetitive without feeling like you're really moving forward in a meaningful way. And, as others have said, the proc gen still feels "vanilla".
I probably won't hop back in after this update. I've learned, by now, that while many praise the new content, it'll probably just feel like more of the same to me.
>stuff to do
This is the whole problem in a nutshell. I want a Game™ and they're providing "stuff to do".
I have never played, but I watched all the drama unfold on reddit. It makes me wonder, is this what happens when you have an underwhelming launch? "You only make a first impression once" - and there is a huge price to pay for that?
In SaaS and YC, it's ship early and ship often, right? Is that absolutely not the case in games? Also, how true is it in SaaS? Genuinely curious here.
Yes, I believe this is a thing. I'm not sure why, but I think for game releases, especially hyped AAA games, your highest player counts are almost definitely going to be the highest in the first weeks of release, so that's the strongest impression. Almost all games see a steep drop off of concurrent players later on, then it stabilizes. Improvements later are thus much less visible, and all the players that got the bad first impression have little reason to go back. I think NMS particularly made a bad mistake compounding this by hyping up the game beyond what it could actually do when it was released - that's an unforgiveable sin to a gamer.
Stuff like this, it's why I often avoid big releases for the first year or two then go play it when it's on sale.
For another perfect game example - Star Wars Outlaws. Terrible, buggy release with obnoxious gameplay loops. They fixed it, now it's one of the better games I've played recently. You can go look up gameplay reviews from the last year to see people shocked at its reputation, it's a very good game now and arguably would have been a candidate for GOTY if it had released in its current form.
In general that’s correct and you can generally estimate sales over the life of the game before the the end of release day. But there are also early access games, which are completely the opposite. Not very much in between those two extremes though.
NMS really is an exception, that they sold well enough at launch that they can keep providing free major updates for 10 years.
No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 are actually proof you can have an awful launch and still pivot into a large player base and continued sales via updates.
Reception for both games is largely positive despite their poor initial response.
Cyberpunk 2077 is in a worse state, though. CDPR axed multiplayer from the roadmap after launch, and the updates it got (eg. working police cars, outfit transmog) should have been there at release.
NMS is no crown jewel, but Hello Games did add multiplayer and held pretty close to the original vision that was offered. It's much more "fixed" than current Cyberpunk 2077 is, at least IMO.
As someone who played it for the very first time just last year, those 10 year old takes ring absolutely true to my experience in the game. It was fun for a little while, but it became repetitive and shallow quickly.
Different strokes, I guess.
Oh, I don't think so. The systems in the game are very shallow, and overall, everything is too easy, which makes the game feel bland. There are almost no stakes. That leads to a feeling of nothing to do because none of it feels worth doing.
I think maybe you're discounting that people have agency and can decide that a game they are playing actively doesn't tick their boxes. I reinstalled it last week and put in about two hours before uninstalling again. Mile wide and inch deep is exactly the way to describe it.
> I think maybe you're discounting that people have agency and can decide that a game they are playing actively doesn't tick their boxes.
> Mile wide and inch deep is exactly the way to describe it.
Aren't you doing the same thing you're saying? Plenty of comments in this thread disagree with your assessment. If the game isn't for you, that's one thing, but it's a factually untrue thing to say "there's nothing to do, game is sparse after a few hours and novelty wears off" like many comments say. This suggests the person did not actually see a lot of the game, which is fine, but it's still not a trustworthy evaluation to me.
> If the game isn't for you, that's one thing, but it's a factually untrue thing to say "there's nothing to do, game is sparse after a few hours and novelty wears off" like many comments say.
Every time I come back to the game and try a new update, the game is indeed sparse after a few hours, and the novelty wears off...
"There's nothing to do" is a straw man. There are about 6 things to do over and over and over and over.
> I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development...
Some are, sure. But -I say as someone who enjoys the game for what it is and still pops in every now and again to mess around with it- there's not much game in the game. Like BoBaitlyn said, it's a sandbox game. It has always been a sandbox game, and there are some folks who spend a few minutes fucking around with the sand in the box, go "WTF, this is boring as shit. I'm out!" and are boggled at the folks who enjoy playing with all the sand.
There's nothing wrong with being boggled or talking about how much you hated the sandbox. Specific sandboxes tend to appeal to specific sorts of people... each one often has its own gimmick that will pull in different sorts of folks. Suggesting that most complainers are complaining from a position of ignorance when they're complaining about a lack of things to do in a game that doesn't have much game in it kinda sucks. I've been playing off and on since v1, and have played for about half of the major patches. Hello Games has added a lot of stuff, but they haven't really added in much game to the game, if you see what I'm saying?
I can see your viewpoint. Some people don’t like sandbox games. that’s fine, I actually hate them, but this game’s additions led me into it gently in a way I’d never interact with say, a minecraft game. However, this is like, a sandbox game on steroids. There’s a strong mmo component of grouping, more being added (per this topic), and playing however you want to is entirely possible. In that regard I consider it one of the better sandboxes I’ve played lately, and I have played hundreds of hours of games like star citizen. I’d wish star citizen approached the game loop similarly.
I think some people don't understand what a procgen survival-craft game is. They're not wrong about it being an open sandbox, that's kinda the point. People talking about taking too long getting to space might not know about the limited time expeditions you can just start in for a different take, or turning the game to creative mode so they don't need to spend time resource farming to get their ship working so they can go fly around if that's all they want from the game.
The story and those quests will be rooted in building something. The space exploration will be rooted in finding a cool place loosely intended for your next base. The space battles and encounters will be part of the same core procgen survival craft cycle.
I won't deny there's probably only 20-40 hours of "real content" in the game. Most of what is there is shallower, or easilly missable, without the expedition(limited-time event) that launched it. A lot of things do seem like "grind X yourself, order team to do Y every few hours, fly to Z and talk to someone" which will get repetitive if/when you keep getting the same ones.
I know what a procgen survival-craft game is. I just don't think it's a very fun one. It's actually too easy, in fact.
When it first released, the criticism that it's mostly empty procedural generation what what got currency and stuck to the no man sky name.
That still sticks around as people who've never played it comment & upvote the same things.
I've never played it. Just witnessing the cargo culting. If I were wanting to give an opinion on this post without actual information, the 'empty procedural generation' critique is exactly what I'd say, since that's all I associate with this game from the briefest commentary when it was released.
There are lots of things to do, but the actual mechanics are for doing them are shallow. The best example of this is the trading system; the way trading works is there are 7 economy types a star system can have, which determines which goods they produce (can buy in large quantities) and demand (can sell for a higher price than at normal systems). Thus the best way to make money from trading is to simply find a loop of systems which chain together the production -> demand goods. For instance, the economy types trading -> advanced materials -> scientific -> trading each produce the goods demanded by the next economy type in the chain.
So the system is fairly shallow, since what you end up doing is just jump from system to system and buy and sell everything.
Well there is piracy and smuggling now. The latter is easy way to make cash with minimal risk.
But if you want to get rich just find a few player farms and harvest. You will make millions in no time.
Noone said it was empty. Noone said there wasn't a lot of 'stuff' in NMS. What many of us are saying is that all that stuff doesn't make the game fun.
Different people find different things fun. I've never been grabbed by multiplayer FPS (I never git gud) - or souls-likes (same). I do sometimes get sucked into some Bethesda games but I need to get over the initial hump. I had a serious Minecraft problem (solo play - not groups) and had a big Beat Saber phase. I still play OG Doom but never liked Quake. I usually hate games with narratives except when I don't. Journey nearly made me weep with joy and sadness but I don't tend to go for slow, arty games in general... And - in general I want to like games, find them fascinating as a medium - but find most of them tedious when I sit down to play.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628715
top comment is all about the game being empty
The comment you're linking actually says that the game "feels like nothing" and that there's nothing substantial to the gameplay. It doesn't even use the word "empty."
And all of it is like, run around, press x. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. oh your crops are ready. pres x, x, x, x, x, x, x. go to sales terminal, sell crops, go to processor, take stuff out of processor load in processor again. oh hey crops are ready again, x, x, x, x.....
Missions: fly to randomly chosen planet in solar system and to same generated structure and find the object in the same spot as it always is in this generated structure. fly back. your crops are ready again for harvest, press x, x, x, x, x, x...
My hot take on why these games get popular (including some like PowerWash Simulator that are 'press x, then x again' type games): it gives people satisfaction of completing something in a world that it is increasingly harder to accomplish what the prior generation did.
I find incremental (clicker) games fascinating because they are like crack for certain brains (myself included if I let them).
There's something interesting going on with certain kinds of activity - exponential progression and incessant busy-ness. It tickles something that shouldn't be tickled.
I had this exact thought today, having recently been on a nostalgic Minecraft binge.
Incidentally, I can't place it, but Minecraft is an infinitely more enjoyable hangout and break/build stuff game than NMS. NMS is just very sterile to me.
I feel like for some of them they are almost like tarpits for some gamers. Think of some gamers in mmorpgs with like thousands of hours under their belt in some game, content with grinding, learned complicated meta, have some working understanding of the in game economy. Or these other sort of "logistics simulator" games where they are making spreadsheets to min max various in game phenomenon and scaling out and compounding their efforts.
It is like what if they were putting that undiagnosed hyperfocus into the local lawncare industry instead. Start off with a $50 mower at Level 1. Grind all summer gaining xp and unlocking more quests. Get enough for a riding mower with better DPS so you can do more lawns in a day and improve xp rate. Get enough to unlock a helper. Get two helpers. You stop mowing and its the helpers going out with your name on the side of the truck. Now you are a successful small business owner.
Same sort of mind that optimizes the in game meta could play the real life meta too. No one tells you about this when you are 14 years old though. None of your friends are doing this. There aren't forums and discords talking about this. Everyone's gaming though.
And it can be even a tar pit for smaller stuff than one's career. It is a big meme for someone to have say a beautiful base built in some game, really carefully done and really ornate, and the room they play in is an absolute disgusting disaster of trash and unclean clothes tossed everywhere. All in game chores done to a T of course.
People who didn't follow up their post-launch recovery still have the impression made at the launch (first impressions matter a lot). I didn't play the game (yet) but I have followed their recovery path. It is an incredible story and it seems that the game has evolved a lot.
I wonder if they won't add generative AI to create infinite stories/missions inside it, that would get rid of the 10K bowls effect.
stuff to do != fun stuff to do
I discovered NMS only recently (100 hours in, 2nd save now), and it has become one of my favorite games. It reminds me of the old TES (Morrowind, Oblivion), but the world is truly limitless, and possibilities are huge. I enjoy finding rare things, and 100 hours in NMS keeps delivering me those. I get why people complain about challenges being no biggie, but to me it is an advantage: I pick NMS when I want to chill and feel lost in the endless world, and when I want challenge I play other games. My other favorite game is Dota, it is very hard, challenging and demanding game, but one cant chill in Dota at all like you do in NMS.
As someone who bounced off Morrowind in favor of Gothic (II) because there weren't enough guardrails in place for my old self, how much of the old "here are some breadcrumbs and here's the game's final goal, but the way in between is up to you to find" design intent is in No Mans Sky? I love finding little niche stories, but they have to be crafted with intent, (procedural) environmental storytelling does not scratch that itch. Is NMS worth trying out?
at the time of posting, i think every top-level comment except one is negative. so, i'd like to balance it by saying that i have never seen a better executed turnaround than what the no man's sky team did. they cratered their reputation on launch, worked hard and long to restore it, and then continued to offer free updates long after they needed to. lots of respect there. (i will reward the effort by purchasing their next game on day 1, sight unseen.)
i also happen to enjoy the game itself.
no matter what, that always happens with this game. Any news about it causes the people who played for 10 minutes at launch however long ago come back to tell you how much they didn't like it.
I have 65 hours logged on Steam, am I allowed to say that I have also bounced off of several updates and find the game empty and lacking meaningful goals?
It's simultaneously an amazing achievement, worth the money I paid, a redemption story for Hello Games, and yet disappointing in a way that e.g. BOTW is not.
One of these years I plan to dive back in again, hoping to find that the sum of all the updates has provided some new story progression I will find meaningful and give me a reason to exercise all the new game mechanics. I'm hopeful!
I have over 3500 hours logged on Steam for NMS, and at 65 hours you have barely scratched the surface. Like many open world sandbox games, you have to make yourself goals. If you want a nice guided "start here" to "finish there" type game NMS is not for you.
NMS actually does ship "start here, finish here" content, but my main issue is that the game is terribly easy. All that extra content you're implying is there, I find to be very shallow, unchallenging, and unrewarding. In the end, I'm simply not interested in LARPing around on procedurally generated planets and going through the motions.
It appears that the go-to response from certain fans is to accuse anyone critical of having only played it at launch. I assure you that's not the case. I find the game just as shallow today every time I try a new content update. What do you want me to do? Convince myself I don't feel that way about it? I can't make myself like something.
My perspective on this is that it’s fine to not like things and bounce off them. I also bounced off NMS, no big deal. It just isn’t for me and that’s fine.
All I know is that they worked hard on this game and found plenty of people who enjoy playing it a lot and that’s that. Doesn’t mean they are wrong, doesn’t mean I’m wrong in bouncing off. I do think it is interesting to explore why I bounced off and others might not – I can identify with many of the negative comments here, especially the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal one regarding the procedural generation which probably was the one thing I was most fascinated by when I decided to install the game – but there are so many other systems and elements in this game that if you more into those I can easily see why the game works much better for you.
I am grateful that the devs and their commitment to continuously improving the game have long left those people behind.
The gameplay is completely engaging and this update looks like it fills in even more spaces than were hoped for.
Many of the day 1 game breaking bugs still exist and every time I play it every couple years, they’re still there.
That is a predictable consequence of their decision to launch before the game was ready. The game as it is now may not deserve that kind of contempt, but it's the price they chose to pay forever at launch.
There's a fair bit out there about their launch circumstances. From memory they weren't entirely in control of the timing.
I don't really enjoy the game for more than 10-20 hours after picking it up (gets boring fast for me), and have problems with it, but kudos to the dev team. I agree, huge turnaround
For sure. Even as someone who bounced off the game several times, the scope of their post-launch additions are truly impressive, even matching up against a lot of the subscription games (whose whole deal is regular content drops)
There is no such thing as a turnaround. People wait for a game to be released. When you give a release date, you must give one that shows the almost complete state of your game. Not something that is half done, not something that will feel completely different 1 year later. When you buy a thing you get an experience. If your game is a different experience 1 year later, well, I couldn't care less about it. I'm not gonna sink another 10+ hours into it, just to see what you have done in one year's time. Imagine you go to the matrix and you get a half movie, bad coloring and the like. Just ridiculous.
Early access, early release, beta, whatever is just an euphemism of becoming a backer. You thought you buy something final, and in the end you become a financier. You lend your money upfront. All this because a group of pampered kids can't keep a deadline. And think that the world is a playground and they can keep their game 5 years in early access. Get a grip.
Sorry. You release your shit, it gets evaluated, end of story. Nobody cares the rest. Gaming space is already half dead because people think that sitting at a game company means you get to have knitting lessons during workhours, and you can daydream and chitchat all day long. Ridiculous.
>There is no such thing as a turnaround.
this is very obviously untrue, as evidenced by no man's sky.
Doesn't matter, people move on. Those who stay, who funneled money into the endeavour want it to succeed. That's all.
It keeps selling well by all accounts. New people are buying it and playing it.
I agree with you in principle, but "nobody cares" clearly isn't true given the steam review history.
Yeah, imagine the reviews if it would've been what was promised from the get go.
It has a Steam Review Score of 84%. What are you talking about?
Yeah and Star Citizen has half a billion funding, and then WHAT?
Also what was it when the game released? It was waaay negative.
>Also what was it when the game released? It was waaay negative.
yeah, it was. and now it isn't.
this is known as a "turnaround".
Yeah, but who cares. Most of the people buy a game when it gets released.
One billion by May...
I disagree with this logic.
They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.
I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.
>And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't
why scare quotes around for free? they were free.
>haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it.
i went from hating it to really enjoying it. i am not the only one.
>based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
my comment comes from my opinion and my experience, not social media. i think its a good game, and i would say it's absolutely worth the money.
I suppose because you still bought the game, after all, and on some level it was about catching up to expectations for what you would have paid for out of the box.
That said, I don't agree with their take at all. Hello Games offered a mountain of content that's right in the bullseye center of game's core vibe and identity; and continuing to hold the original critique against them based on the "not procedural enough" argument is increasingly equivocating between two different things. You've been given a game that's more than worth the cost of admission, and you'll see dozens, hundreds, of slop space games come and go with less than one tenth the value proposition of NMS. That should be more than enough to quell 99% of the criticism.
The fact that it's not procedural enough amounts to, say, feeling that The Odyssey was good, not great. For however true that is, it's not a scandal.
You pay for a game——if the game is not good, and patches are provided "for free" that doesn't mean much.
Here, NMS launched with abysmal content and atrocious systems. Now at least it doesn't have abysmal content. A bad game is a bad game (yes, my opinion).
Content updates for a paid game aren't free. They're adding to a package that, more often than not, was incomplete to begin with. And they'll often result in more sales, which is how they pay for themselves.
Not that they're bad, but wording them like they're some huge act of generosity from the studio instead of a reasonable expectation pushes the baseline away from where it should be.
i bought a game that contained X with no expectations of more content.
the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates. i did not pay for those updates. so it seems completely reasonable to consider those updates to be free.
wording it as something i paid for when i didn't pushes the baseline towards dishonesty.
Many people bought it expecting more, because the studio promised a lot more. You can say that's on the people for not checking before buying, but that doesn't invalidate the dishonesty on their part.
Were it an early access game, you would in fact be purchasing expecting updates. Not guaranteed updates, but certainly expecting them. This game was an amazing early access release in all but name.
I'm not saying you should word it as updates you paid for, you just don't word them as if they're an act of generosity. Just call them "updates", not "free updates" like you did right before the reply that put "free updates" in quotes.
they are free updates. i do find them generous.
that sums it up.
Then don't complain because people disagree. If adding unnecessary qualifiers to make it sound better is fair, so is quoting them.
please point out specifically where i complained.
When you objected to quotes around the term you deliberately used to make them sound better than regular updates that any early access game gets.
> the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates.
Yeah. Back in the day, those would almost always be paid expansions... if not whole-ass sequels.
There's a subset of video game players these days who expect years and years of substantial changes to a game. Why, back in my day you had to pay for anything more than a game-breaking bug fix... and you counted yourself lucky if you even got those!
This isn't an arguement I'm making.
There's a difference between DLC and providing "the base game content" – which No Man's Sky was doing. It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now. They could have cut their losses but it would've ended the studio.
Now they're being touted as a paragon of scrappy game dev. Which is wrong.
> It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now.
I'd argue that it was barely a game at launch, and it's still barely a game today... it has always been a sandbox with very little game in it, and that's fine. [0] But that's neither here nor there.
They released a "game" ten years ago. They've updated that "game" many times and never charged for updates.
That makes those updates free. You can justifiably be angry about the circumstances of the launch, and justifiably be angry that anyone's saying anything good about the devs. That doesn't change the fact that this [3]
is an asinine use of scare quotes. The updates were delivered free of charge, and the price of the base game hasn't been increased to account for them. This makes them free updates.[0] See the fourth paragraph of [1] as well as most of [2] for a little more commentary on this.
[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630148>
[2] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630824>
[3] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629510>
Back in the day, they had to ship complete working games, because the cost to fix it later was too high.
Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time, but the punishment for messing up was severe.
And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves. Those are a lot of value, and there's nothing wrong with them. They even still exist today, though rarer.
Maybe the NMS's updates did amount to one or two expansions throughout the 10 years of updates, but they were done piecemeal. Were it not a game that massively under delivered on release, they could've gone that route.
> Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time...
Sounds like being required to ship a "complete working game" didn't matter much. Weird.
> And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves.
And many were not. Plus, if we ignore shovelware -both past and present- most games these days are way larger than they were back in the day.
Have you ever gone back and played those old games you fuzzily remember through a haze of nostalgia? Many of them [0] would be derided as low-effort asset flips [1] these days. Many of the NMS updates (and tragically many updates to other games) definitely would qualify as "expansion pack"-sized. Some updates are big enough to be whole-ass overhauls. It's _nuts_ how much work some industrious indie game devs put into their games.
It's fine to be angry at how the circumstances of NMS's launch, and be sore that Hello Games is getting any praise after all that. But it's dishonest to refuse to recognize both that a very vocal subset of gamers expects that games will come with months and years of substantial post-release changes provided free-of-charge and that many devs -for better or worse- provide what these folks are demanding.
[0] ...but definitely not all of them...
[1] Granted, all sorts of things get called "asset flips", so the "low-effort" part is the important bit here.
Always having some instance of someone messing up is still substantially different from more instances than not being messed up. So it did actually matter quite a lot.
Now, as someone who is an avid retro gamer, I play plenty of those old games you're talking about. In the very old days, games were definitely shorter, but by the 5th and 6th gen, the gap isn't quite as big. If anything, they're often too large now, but that's neither here nor there. Budgets are bigger, teams are bigger, and most importantly, the consumer base is bigger. So size of games and expansions needs to be looked at relatively.
Regardless, for non-early access (of which NMS is an example of in all but name) and non-live service games, there mostly isn't an expectation that content will be added, only that updates will be made that improve and fix what's there. The exceptions are mostly when there's a pattern of content uodates happening before, or when something is clearly incomplete compared to what's usual for a series. See the Monster Hunter series as an example for both the latter ones.
Overall, it's natural for customers to want things that are at least as good or better than before when technology improves. It's the opposite that should not be happening.
Bolted on? A lot of the core mechanics were rebuilt or added over the 10 years.
> based on them staggering a few nonsense releases
This has to be a troll. Or you haven’t touched the game in years.
What other game has had 10 years of free updates that has dramatically changed the game?
I think it looks like a variety of game that it's not, and there's a dissonance there... it's not an action/adventure game, it's a sandbox of procedural generated worlds where you gather resources to unlock new builds.
You can build bases, manage settlements, maintain a fleet, build ships and exocraft, build multi-tools, have pets battle each other, cook food, manage the economy... but there's only a thin relationship/lore system and not much of a difficulty ramp at any point.
You're space farming, if you expect anything else you won't like it.
While I love the game I still think they are overhyping the game in the trailers.
The game always looks far more dramatic in the trailers than it actually is in practice.
One example that struck me is how they show players flying in formation while in practice that's almost impossible to do : your ship always flies faster or slower and it's really hard to follow someone else, even the NPC ships.
They also often show in trailers situations with 3-4 players doing all kind of cool stuff but the game never is that busy and multiplayer is still very janky you often dont see quite the same things as other players.
So I am excited about Light No Fire, but also not expecting something mindblowing. Unless they only port engine improvements, but no gameplay improvements from LNF and one hopes with LNF they really improved the combat mechanics which is the weakest element of NMS.
I recently tried out the multiplayer with two friends and must say, while I like the games vibe, the multiplayer is deeply disappointing. You don't really play together, you just happen to be roughly in the same area at the same time. Nothing is shared really, every quest you need to do for yourself, and the sync is broken to the point where two players standing next to each other have completely different weather and see different enemies. If they fixed that I would come back, but I don't really feel like doing everything by myself.
NMS is an amazing game with no soul. A metaverse. A monument to technology without the depth or people or narrative (prewritten or emergent) that makes it interesting.
I'm certain there are some people whose brain is wired exactly right to love it.
But I have more fun playing the n100th Call of Duty clone hearing real voices on the headset in a tight, fun game loop.
But the company behind it deserves to be applauded. Might be the best value for money / care / support of any game, especially one so poorly received initially...
I think you have it in reverse, it's pure soul but very little game. It's just like Noctis IV, an interactive piece of art. This one has more pretense to looking like a game with its crafting system and survival mechanics that you can thankfully disable. It also has a narrative, several well-executed threads of them. It's a very introspective game with things to say about itself and the experience of living. You might not like it, you might have found it unengaging, but to deny it lacks humanity, artistic substance and a story to tell is crazy.
There's also not very much I would say is technically impressive about it at all, and definitely not anything people normally reach for. The bandwidth of the asset streaming they accomplished on the PS4, with such a small team that still had to build the rest of the game, is the only thing that makes me raise an eyebrow. In fact, that may as well have been the real gain of crunching down how planets are described rather than the huge number of planets themselves. Even that's not particularly groundbreaking if you take away the context of the small team. And at that point we have to ask ourselves if it's groundbreaking, or just very intelligent and clever pragmatism. Impressive in a labor lens, not a technical one.
In a way, it might reflect accurate space and our universe. We really might be alone.
Ironically less so as they've added more to do but:
> NMS is an amazing game with no soul.
I found the game in the early days to be incredibly soulful - it was almost an interactive poem. Full of emptiness and loss. I loved it back then.
I have hundreds of hours with my son in creative mode just building bases, fishing, battling our animals and hanging out. We’ve explored hundreds of systems just cataloguing all the animals and flora. We’ve learned all the languages. We basically have infinite money.
It’s all very shallow but it’s also “cozy”. This game is much more Animal Crossing than Minecraft. Other than the planets with extremely dangerous atmospheres and storms (and only in survival mode) it’s all pretty chill. If you like making your own fun and just like doing stuff like using photo mode and chatting with friends this is a great game.
My son was really excited to see the new customizable base station any space station updates. It’s like they made this update just for us.
Really looking forward to see what they’re cooking up for Light No Fire.
This game came out before my son was even born and it’s his favourite game and it’s a constant source of bonding for us. Thank you Hello Games.
I really like this game and have played it for years but I think it's popularity outgrew it's niche. It's a very niche game, the devs have made the ultimate space Lego kit, but I see lots of people complain about it being boring because there are no stakes, no challenge. I think they are trying to play the game they want it to be not the game it is. The overwhelming scale of the meme this game has become I think is the cause of that.
I like playing the game in abandoned mode in single player, just me, my ship, a lot of dead space stations and planets and some fauna here and there. I explore every planet (except aggressive sentinel ones) and make short hops to nearby systems. If I run across too many systems that have already been explored I made a large hop in a random direction and try there. There's something about playing this way that keeps bringing me back. I tend to nope out of the main game as soon as I get a freighter, I'm not that into a lot of game mechanics, but I love exploring planets, even if they are ultimately not that different from one another. I like going on hikes even though it's just the same trees with some variety in real life.
I'll echo a sister comment saying that NMS still feels like a tech demo. However, I'll also use the occasion to mention slash shill Noctis IV, a game that NMS more than likely owes a lot to.
Noctis IV is an old DOS game, or perhaps more of an art project about flying through a galaxy and exploring (sections of) planets on foot. Notably, you can name stars, planets, and place markers with notes on planetary coordinates, and then you can share those with other players via an "INBOX" system. While it technically has even less gameplay than NMS ever did, its primitive but custom 3D engine produces absolutely striking landscapes to explore [0]
While the author's webpage seems to have died at some point in the recent years, the project lives on through two community made mods, Noctis IV Plus [1] and Noctis IV Community Edition (NICE) [2].
[0] https://mooses.nl/nice/screenshots/city2.gif
[1] https://github.com/jorisvddonk/Noctis-IV-Plus
[2] https://mooses.nl/nice/releases/R11dot6a/
Was going through a rough patch in the early oughts. Noctis and ambient music were my solace.
NMS is one of the best comeback stories in gaming, but I'll keep dying on this hill: the game is an ocean wide and a puddle deep. I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours. Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials. It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content. The UI isn't intuitive and badly needs modernizing. It feels so clunky after all these updates.
> I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours.
Yep, me too. It's a decent sandbox to spend a bit of time in, and it's fine that that's all it is.
> Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials.
They have spent substantial amounts of time on UI, UX, and tutorials... several times. Unless you're proposing they convert everything into a brain-dead "mobile" game UI (which would be a significant downgrade), it'd be very difficult to do much better than they already have with the inventory management and conversation UIs.
> It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content.
I mean, it's a sandbox. If they did all of the UI overhauling and tutorial creation you wanted from them -and nothing else- would that keep your interest for weeks and months... or would you play for a few hours and get bored? There's not much _game_ in the game and it's been that way since the beginning.
Spent a lot of time in this game… The team is excellent and they ship incredible ambitious work.
I really wish they would just focus 100% on Light No Fire.
I do not have high hopes. It's been 10 years of constant NMS updates but the game still has nothing that keeps me hooked. Everything feels insignificant to me, every interaction is like the one before and the one that comes next. They added stuff to the game, but it just feels like more of the same. Light No Fire will surely be just more of the same.
Part of me is secretly hoping / assuming they’re releasing new features as a testing bed for the changes in Light No Fire. I’m also very hopeful for Light No Fire. *VERY* hopeful, but I have to assume all these updates are for their broader engine. I hope..
I assume as well. I’m concerned that it’s in development hell. Sean mentioned that they’ve been working on it for 7 years.
In hindsight I think the great thing about NMS was that it shipped in such a raw state and they continually improved it based on community feedback.
I have faith though —- they know a lot more from building NMS and managing the community. They absolutely know what a good game feels like.
Sean has said so explicitly in multiple videos, including the "deep dive" video for today's update.
I belive no Mans Sky is a great game but I could realy never get through to the newer stuff because the base resource gathering gathering does not grip me. The lasering of resources is just not satisfying to me. I love resource gathering but it needs to be satisfying like mining ores in minecraft (or Hytyale).
Additionaly I do not like flying Fighters I enjoy larger Ships. Put it as me enjoying space combat like Star Trek more than Star Wars.
If a Star Trek game similar to NMS came out, that would be my JAM imagine flying a smaller explorer vessel beaming down on procedural worlds and interacting with flora and fauna there. That would be up my jam.
But I still have to stress what Hello Games did is probably the best Redemption Story in Gaming. And they deserve all the good for it. Also please finall get me light no fire.
A huge vastness of nothing. The game has no soul at all. Worlds are ugly, animals are ugly, plants are ugly. With the first trailer I thought it could've been the game of my life, but it's just horrible, besides the feeling of moving around in the vastness of the universe, but once you get to a planet, it's just a turn off
I have at least 100 hours in the game, and I have to disagree with you. There's a surprising amount of variety in the creatures and the world generation.
I spend a lot of time building / designing my base. In that aspect, the enjoyment of the game is limited only by my creativity. I've definitely got $25 worth of entertainment from it. I will say, though, it is more fun if you have others to join your squad.
It's vastly better, imo, than Starfield. That was a game which really let me down -- I wanted Skyrim in Space, but I got 1,000 planets with the same cookie cutter quests on each. Or a team member saying something like "I can't believe we're the first ones to set foot on this temple" when there is a randomly generated outpost plopped down right next door.
I am just wondering where do they get the money to keep pushing out big content updates like this
It did well commercially looking just at steam stats, not to mention the other platforms. It seems like alot of that was used to turn it around to save their reputation to keep going not only with one game, but to make sure the next isn't "stay away" labeled even it is "wait and see" for many.
AFAIK, there is no in-game microtransactions or anything, so basically retail sales I suppose? The studio is relatively small (indie-scale) last time I checked, and the launch was pretty big and I'm sure they pulled in a ton of money, even though as always on the "vocal internet" the launch was a huge failure, they still sold a lot of copies. "Just" 1-2 million copies would go a long way to fund a small passionate team. The all-time peak for simultaneous players on Steam (PC only) was 200K, so I don't think 1-2 million copies sold is far off as a minimum.
Small studio, don't have to generate a lot of sales to keep them afloat. Updates push visibility and generate new sales. Obviously, they need new projects to keep them afloat in the future.
The enhancements they're making to NMS appear to be backports from the Light No Fire engine, so my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort while the actual technical work is predominantly on the next game.
> ...my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort...
Given that they don't (often? ever?) advertise Light No Fire alongside the NMS updates, I'd say that the updates into NMS are large-scale playtests of LNF engine updates, game systems, or both, rather than marketing.
Yeah, I meant the marketing effort for No Man's Sky since that's where the money is. They need to continually attract new players.
> They need to continually attract new players.
I'm not so sure about that, but otherwise agree with your comment.
I'll gently point back to my hunch that many (most?) of the NMS updates are large-scale tests for things they're thinking about having in LNF. Given that it seems likely that both games are using the same engine, it'd make a lot of sense to use a preexisting playerbase for large-scale, no-cost testing of new changes.
Yes, I think we agree... I think they're using it for both marketing and to test the viability of it and get player feedback, but I do expect LNF to have at least some substantially similar mechanics to NMS for this reason.
No Mans Sky has sold over 10 million copies. I'll let you do the math. They are still basically an indie company as well.
Without your typical tech/startup/vc/corporate bloat those sales will carry reasonable sized team very far. And it is really about what is reasonably sized team and what is not.
I’m one of those weird people that liked the game from the very beginning, and I’ve bought it at least twice for myself (different systems). I played it like 50 hours at the start. I always wanted a simple, procedurally generated space exploration game.
They’ve done an incredible job fleshing out the universe, giving us new things we can build, simple city management for people that want that, and the same exploration system for those that wanted that.
It was sold as, is, and will always be a sandbox game with some simple, procedurally generated “missions” to get you going to the next point of interest or having the next, relatively low-stakes fight.
And that’s okay. People play Animal Crossing and Minecraft. People can play this. Some of us are happy to. Some of us see a $50 game and say “yeah, 50-100 hours of time in this is my money’s worth”. And some of us spend 3000 hours in the game because we love the creating and sandbox feel of it.
Some people like Farming Simulator 2020 - I’ll never understand it and it’s not for me, but plenty of people do. Some people like Powerwash Simulator.
It’s okay if No Man’s Sky wasn’t the *specific* game you were hoping for and if it hasn’t become it; but that doesn’t make it a bad game, it just makes it “not for you”.
I wish these threads weren’t always filled with people complaining about a game that wasn’t made for them. It’s been a decade. It’s time to move on.
I feel like NMS is definitely catered to people who prefer to define their own way of having fun. There’s practically zero hand-holding. There isn’t much emphasis on narrative either, and the story is almost completely optional. It’s more about finding your own game within the game, where simply existing and exploring such a vast universe can be the whole point.
In that sense, I’d argue it’s almost more of an environment simulator than a traditional game. I can totally see why someone coming into it expecting a strong narrative, memorable characters, and lots of character development might end up disappointed.
For me, though, this is the game I keep coming back to. There’s just nothing quite like heading into a world that nobody has ever visited, with a pretty good chance that nobody else will ever visit it, and still leaving your little mark there.
It has strong sales so must assume the gameplay loop is enjoyable by a lot of players, but I don't think I'll ever understand
NMS gameplay is just too lonely and when i used to play it, it would reinforce my sense of extreme loneliness (I was single, and a foreigner in the Far East).
Minecraft is another game that made me feel utterly depressed due to the loneliness factor.
At least in Fallout 4, there are companions, a robot, a dog, etc. and a lot of conversation and decision-making. I can't justify wasting time on NMS ever again.
Not a single comment here about the actual Cosmos update content?
Looks great. I just hope these alliances won't turn into the sort of thing like EVE Online Corporations but I guess this game is too different for that. Eve online makes me sick, its corporations are everything I hate in the real world :) I like games to be better than the real world.
Love the game, insane work from devs. Can't play it for too long, have to make a pause from time to time, which is similar in feel to Minecraft.
10 years, i wonder what the codebase look like now !
Probably better than most given how quickly they're able to push out updates this big.
What's also great about NMS is its all running on a custom bespoke engine they've built for the game and properly invested in. Wish they'd do more talks and deep dives into how it has all progressed, and how much it paid off for them. Things are getting far too homogenised around UE5 in game dev.
I need to revisit this game. I played at launch briefly then tabled it, but it's wholesome to see the creator stick with something, adding new features, and really see it evolve into something else. I wonder how wildly different it will be from my launch day experience?
The first time flying a ship in the game in VR was a pretty cool feeling. If you have a headset and this game (and you're not prone to motion sickness) it's worth the trip.
Outer Wilds (not The Other Worlds) gives you a very similar feeling on that first flight. It's not a VR game, but I made a VR mod for it a few years ago.
I both love you and curse you for that mod.
I still haven't got around to playing Outer Wilds despite knowing enough to know I should. Because I keep thinking "I can only play it once - I should play it in VR" and then never getting around to it.
My Legion Go came with a free Game Pass trial. I spent 20 minutes playing No Man's Sky in VR and liked it, bought it on Steam, but haven't actually played it yet.
Maybe this is the nudge to move it higher in my queue.
Any word on if they will be fixing the flight model? Didn't see it in there but could have missed it.
Perlin Noise: The Video Game
i wish they considering making it multiplayer MMO, that would kill all its emptiness in one second (:
I think the multiplayer is very smartly implemented. The big "Anomaly" space stations can feel very busy. I don't feel very alone playing tbh, unless I want to be. MMO raid-like expeditions are right there if I wanna join up with people.
Give me Master of Orion II, please. Incredible gameplay. Never played this NMS, but based on the comments here, it seems the most boring thing ever.
If you haven't seen this video about no man's sky, it's really really good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ
Explore an empty cosmos.
Seems like some people are expecting it to be World of Warcraft or Elite
It's not
It's a chill sandbox and that's fine.
Props & respect to the devs for so many years of free updates!
Is it just me or am I more excited for the upcoming Light No Fire more than GTA6 in some ways.
Valheim had its 1.0 release today too
in a roguelike game, my incentive for playing is the discovery of weird new stuff. this might be the opposite of procedural. because procedural is just the same old stuff in new combinations. right?
how would we get a procedural thing or an AI thing to spit out truly new weird cool stuff? connect it to a good random number generator?
How the hell could that cookie consent form ever be legal? Fuck them.
Holy shit, they're charging $60 for a 10 year old game that only runs on windows.
Not even worth pirating if I have to set up a container with wine, I'd rather spend that time drinking wine.
It runs great on Linux and Steam Deck
https://www.protondb.com/app/275850
I don't pay for games that require using proton/wine. If a dev wants my money, they can add a Linux target to their makefile.
Not sure why this is flagged. It is not natively running on linux, it needs workarounds to run. He's right
> ... only runs on windows.
The version I bought on Steam runs fine on Linux (in Proton of course). I just click "Play" and it plays.
It's $23.99 on Steam right now.
I don't use steam, the price I saw was the GoG price.
https://www.gogdb.org/product/1446213994 It still goes on deep discount very frequently, even on GoG.
Are we EVE yet?
Sadly NMS could get 1000 years of updates and it still wouldn't be even 1% as complicated or deep as Eve - and I'm not an Eve fanboy, I stopped playing that more than 10 years ago at this point.