No Man's Sky: 6 Minutes of Exploration Gameplay – IGN First - General

I think they started showing this game a year too early, because what I'm seeing now is about the same as I saw last year, and I was really excited then, but now I'm not as much because it seems like nothing's changed. The demos are still banking on "Hey, guys, have you heard about the power of [I]procedural generation??!?[/I]" and look where that landed Minecraft--modded to fuck and back in order to add something to actually do once you've spent 10 hours getting bored of the base content. Infinite variety that is functionally the same from one place to another, just different, only gets you so far. In Elite: Dangerous, there are 400 million star systems, but after 10 hours you've seen pretty much everything. In Minecraft, not modding your game is almost seen as silly and dull, because you'll quickly hit limits. Borderlands' infinite variety of guns amounted to minmaxing and inventory management, leaving a long trail of never-used useless weaponry behind. I just want to know when I'll be able to play this game, since Sony must've paid a bunch to have everyone pretend this is a PS4 exclusive, and not a timed PS4 exclusive with a confirmed PC port to follow--that pisses me off, as well, but that's a Sony thing, not a NMS thing.

Disappointed in what they could have done, hopeful for things to change by the time of release.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;48273216]I think they started showing this game a year too early, because what I'm seeing now is about the same as I saw last year, and I was really excited then, but now I'm not as much because it seems like nothing's changed. The demos are still banking on "Hey, guys, have you heard about the power of [I]procedural generation??!?[/I]" and look where that landed Minecraft--modded to fuck and back in order to add something to actually do once you've spent 10 hours getting bored of the base content. Infinite variety that is functionally the same from one place to another, just different, only gets you so far. In Elite: Dangerous, there are 400 million star systems, but after 10 hours you've seen pretty much everything. In Minecraft, not modding your game is almost seen as silly and dull, because you'll quickly hit limits. Borderlands' infinite variety of guns amounted to minmaxing and inventory management, leaving a long trail of never-used useless weaponry behind. I just want to know when I'll be able to play this game, since Sony must've paid a bunch to have everyone pretend this is a PS4 exclusive, and not a timed PS4 exclusive with a confirmed PC port to follow--that pisses me off, as well, but that's a Sony thing, not a NMS thing.[/QUOTE] They've already said that it'll launch simultaneously on PC and PS4.

[QUOTE=reevezy67;48272856]The AI is randomized as well though. I thought the game looked dumb but I'm a little more interested now, could be a bit of fun. Sure it's not ground breaking but it looks interesting enough.[/QUOTE] But the variations aren't colour, you're being willfully ignorant on how the game actually works. [editline]23rd July 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=slayer20;48272860]If they have whale-sized creatures and stuff, then I'm sold. But I agree with Polf about the geographical regions. I hope all the planets don't have that "same-y" feel to them.[/QUOTE] There are. One of the trailers contains shots of a desert planet with armored worms and they are way bigger than whales. [editline]23rd July 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=elixwhitetail;48273216]I think they started showing this game a year too early, because what I'm seeing now is about the same as I saw last year, and I was really excited then, but now I'm not as much because it seems like nothing's changed. The demos are still banking on "Hey, guys, have you heard about the power of [I]procedural generation??!?[/I]" and look where that landed Minecraft--modded to fuck and back in order to add something to actually do once you've spent 10 hours getting bored of the base content. Infinite variety that is functionally the same from one place to another, just different, only gets you so far. In Elite: Dangerous, there are 400 million star systems, but after 10 hours you've seen pretty much everything. In Minecraft, not modding your game is almost seen as silly and dull, because you'll quickly hit limits. Borderlands' infinite variety of guns amounted to minmaxing and inventory management, leaving a long trail of never-used useless weaponry behind. I just want to know when I'll be able to play this game, since Sony must've paid a bunch to have everyone pretend this is a PS4 exclusive, and not a timed PS4 exclusive with a confirmed PC port to follow--that pisses me off, as well, but that's a Sony thing, not a NMS thing.[/QUOTE] I hate how people think Hello Game's method of generation is the same as like Minecraft or something. It isn't. When they say "all of this is generated on the fly", they are talking about the visual output, not the world itself. It's basically how some nutters would speculate our universe works, where if you aren't looking at it, it doesn't exist, but still does as equations. [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-kifCYToAU[/media] I don't know why this isn't the most popular NMS video

With those weird ass swordfish/sailfish type fish, I better be able to have a fishing rod in this game. I'll be a space fishermen, travelling to strange unknown worlds, just to go fishing.

[QUOTE=gudman;48270448]And again, in two videos in this thread the planets are of the same type - a bunch of islands, no ice caps, no different biomes, nothing. I'm very close to being convinced that their variety is as fake as anywhere else and they're getting into the same trap all games with procedurally generated environments got stuck in - randomly generated environment is not that interesting in and of itself, the pure variety is all it has to offer. Here we have a planet with snow, and that's it. Here we have a planet with caves, and that's it. Here we have a planet with forests and that's it. Look, an ocean planet! With underwater caves - and nothing else. So yeah, it might be more complex and on a bigger scale than anything before it, but in terms of an actual [b]game[/b]... not much to offer. Or there's another possibility, they have to learn to advertise. I'm far more interested in not-yet-shown space combat than their exploration stuff, that should say something. Wow, a slightly different fish. That flies. Just like any other flying fish, but looks different. Yay, I guess. I think I'll call it "hsifkcid" or "remmiwstnuc". So, what about those big spaceships, can I pilot one? Does it have big guns? Can I be a space pirate?[/QUOTE] Starbound? ;)

Some animations look awkward as fuck, and is it just me or do the graphics look really bad?

[QUOTE=Mr.Cthrobot;48274604]Starbound? ;)[/QUOTE] Yeah, right now it's Starbound in 3D. And even then, Starbound's planets have sub-biomes.

[QUOTE=Mingebox;48271211]The thing about exploration is that it isn't really exploration if there's nothing to see you haven't already seen.[/QUOTE] Good thing we can definitely jump to this conclusion from only seeing a very small slice of the universe through preview footage alone, and yet at the same time conveniently ignore the stuff that shows plenty of variation [t]http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/150518_r26517-1200.jpg[/t]

[QUOTE=KorJax;48275159]Good thing we can definitely jump to this conclusion from only seeing a very small slice of the universe through preview footage alone, and yet at the same time conveniently ignore the stuff that shows plenty of variation [t]http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/150518_r26517-1200.jpg[/t][/QUOTE] I can't blame them for being a bit worried or dissapointed, maybe those good looking planets pop up less often than the empty ones do. Either that or they don't want to ruin the big surprises.

One thing to note is that they said planets change in their wackyness as you get closer to the center. So far we keep seeing footage taken from the very outer part of the universe where everything is completely normal in its generation so i'm not surprised we haven't seen footage taken from cooler planets in the above pictures. The biggest complaint I am seeing is "I don't want to explore a universe of samey looking planets" and the assumption is being made off of the limited footage we have seen from outer universe planets. They need to put videos together of more planets from various parts of the universe. They might not want to go giving so much away but if this is a big as universe as they say with so much variety it wont matter showing us a few of the wackier planets out of the trillions. They need to work on how they are presenting this game much better if they want to dispel worries of a big universe of similar planets. I want to see them hiking up a big fucking mountain similar to mount Everest and swimming in a big ass ocean where I cannot see the bottom with giant sea monsters swimming bye. Some of their trailers have shown variety but they have yet to focus their footage on specific extremes to show they are there.

It feels as if the planets are really really small, i don't like this.

[QUOTE=HybridTheroy;48274353]But the variations aren't colour, you're being willfully ignorant on how the game actually works. [editline]23rd July 2015[/editline] There are. One of the trailers contains shots of a desert planet with armored worms and they are way bigger than whales. [editline]23rd July 2015[/editline] I hate how people think Hello Game's method of generation is the same as like Minecraft or something. It isn't. When they say "all of this is generated on the fly", they are talking about the visual output, not the world itself. It's basically how some nutters would speculate our universe works, where if you aren't looking at it, it doesn't exist, but still does as equations. [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-kifCYToAU[/media] I don't know why this isn't the most popular NMS video[/QUOTE] Yeah you guys can rate me dumb all you want but not one of you guys actually had the balls to try and debunk my point, what that does tell you?

[QUOTE=HybridTheroy;48274353]I hate how people think Hello Game's method of generation is the same as like Minecraft or something. It isn't. When they say "all of this is generated on the fly", they are talking about the visual output, not the world itself. It's basically how some nutters would speculate our universe works, where if you aren't looking at it, it doesn't exist, but still does as equations.[/QUOTE] I feel you don't understand the argument. I never said it is "the same" as Minecraft's. Procedural generation is procedural and cannot replace the deliberate hand-crafted precision of a designer manually constructing something together. NMS uses procedural generation to allow you to visit almost infinite variety--and this variety is as random in one place as another. Star Citizen, by contrast, is going to have ~100 star systems and ~400 locations you can land at for launch, instead of near-infinite locations, but each is going to be built with intention, rather than allowing pure mathematics to define the visuals. [IMG]https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2413894/Arc_Corp_In-Game_2.0.JPG[/IMG] [I]The funny thing is that the building pieces that make up this scene are modular construction parts, to be used semi-procedurally to generate different structures and parts. Only the ArcCorp gear ball and ArcCorp tower assets are unique to this zone. This modularity system is how all 400 landing zones will be made, rather than each being built from scratch individually.[/I] I will put it to you that Star Citizen's locations are going to be individually that much more meaningful and well-constructed than NMS. NMS is technically brilliant, but it's leaning heavily on procedural generation to carry it the whole way home, and this is a risky gamble. I want to like NMS, but if what they've been showing is representative, I haven't seen much improvement in the past year since they began showing it, and what was technical wizardry then is becoming ho-hum now. [QUOTE=HybridTheroy;48276173]Yeah you guys can rate me dumb all you want but not one of you guys actually had the balls to try and debunk my point, what that does tell you?[/QUOTE] It tells us you're impatient and emotionally involved in your argument. :fap:

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;48276191]I feel you don't understand the argument. I never said it is "the same" as Minecraft's. Procedural generation is procedural and cannot replace the deliberate hand-crafted precision of a designer manually constructing something together. NMS uses procedural generation to allow you to visit almost infinite variety--and this variety is as random in one place as another. Star Citizen, by contrast, is going to have ~100 star systems and ~400 locations you can land at for launch, instead of near-infinite locations, but each is going to be built with intention, rather than allowing pure mathematics to define the visuals. [IMG]https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2413894/Arc_Corp_In-Game_2.0.JPG[/IMG] [I]The funny thing is that the building pieces that make up this scene are modular construction parts, to be used semi-procedurally to generate different structures and parts. Only the ArcCorp gear ball and ArcCorp tower assets are unique to this zone. This modularity system is how all 400 landing zones will be made, rather than each being built from scratch individually.[/I] I will put it to you that Star Citizen's locations are going to be individually that much more meaningful and well-constructed than NMS. NMS is technically brilliant, but it's leaning heavily on procedural generation to carry it the whole way home, and this is a risky gamble. I want to like NMS, but if what they've been showing is representative, I haven't seen much improvement in the past year since they began showing it, and what was technical wizardry then is becoming ho-hum now.[/QUOTE] I never meant to directly be replying to your post, sorry about that. I don't know why you're trying to compare SC and NMS, though, that's like comparing something like Trove to The Witcher. Also it should be of note that it isn't like Starbound in the sense that the planets were generated and just left there. Hello Games has bots that fly through NMS and take snapshots, allowing them to be more selective about the process than straight up generation.

[QUOTE=HybridTheroy;48276173]Yeah you guys can rate me dumb all you want but not one of you guys actually had the balls to try and debunk my point, what that does tell you?[/QUOTE] It tells me your points aren't worth arguing because you act like everyone who is sceptical of NMS is an idiot. So far the planets they've shown off have been practically identical, they've posted a couple of pictures of more interesting vistas but until we see that in action we should assume it's manipulated to look better than will be found in the game. As for their method of generation; it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter a god damn to me how they do their generation when the end result always looks the fucking same. Why do all the planets have geography that looks like perlin noise rather than realistic or interesting landscapes? Why do all the animals we've seen just walk around slowly and barely react to the player? Will they do more in the full game, if so why not show that off? I couldn't give less of a shit for there being 50,000 different looking horse-like creatures if they all act the same, like brain dead automatons. Then you have the NPCs, which we have only seen ships flying around in brief snippets, and landing empty ships on landing pads before immediately taking off again. How will we interact with the civilisations of the galaxy? You don't seem to understand that most people are wary of this game because we have been burned on this idea before. Spore looked like it was going to be an amazing, in depth game where you rise from a microbe to conquer the stars, but it was a pile of shit. Starbound looked like it was going to be a really cool game like Terraria in space, but it is updated so slowly and has so little in it it's not worth looking at yet. "Oh but this won't be like Spore or Starbound! It'll be different!" I'm sure you'll claim, well we have no proof of that until the game comes out so there's no point in getting our hopes up again. Especially since for many of us the more they've shown off the less they've revealed, we've know you could land on planets and walk around scanning shit since last year, they've shown practically nothing new since then, just variations on the same.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;48276191]I feel you don't understand the argument. I never said it is "the same" as Minecraft's. Procedural generation is procedural and cannot replace the deliberate hand-crafted precision of a designer manually constructing something together. NMS uses procedural generation to allow you to visit almost infinite variety--and this variety is as random in one place as another. Star Citizen, by contrast, is going to have ~100 star systems and ~400 locations you can land at for launch, instead of near-infinite locations, but each is going to be built with intention, rather than allowing pure mathematics to define the visuals. [/QUOTE] I am really not sure why you are using Star Citizen as an example of "doing it right" when they haven't even released any real footage of said locations beyond concept art and in-engine concepts like in that picture you see. For all you know in the final game all locations will use the same base, which is highly likely as it saves massively on the art budget. Not to mention the two games don't even reach near close the same scale or are trying to do the same things. They have totally different goals in what they aim to do in their design despite having "space ships" as a theme. You don't even know if No Man's Sky generation is that bad because you've made this judgement call based purely on a small amount of preview footage that is only trying to give a glimpse at what the game is, not prove to someone who has already determined it can't work and is likely going to go into playing it already convinced it won't work (even if it hypothetically does). A classic case of [url=http://puu.sh/ja5RC/682f8e4ddb.png]Undistributed Middle,[/url] [url=http://puu.sh/ja5zA/b517887aa5.png]Biased Generalizing[/url] and [url=http://puu.sh/ja5EZ/7160574fee.png]Confirmation Bias[/url]

They're pretty different games in most respects, and ordinarily I wouldn't compare them, but they both use procedural generation in different ways. NMS is running everything off of pure mathematics. I've watched almost every video the devs have put out about the technology they use for procedurally creating everything as you fly into it, terrain, creatures, etc. Nothing is planned, everything is just thrown in for the math to spit out results. Sometimes you'll get an exciting planet with lots of cool stuff going on, but it's just as likely to get a boring sheet of gnarled little Perlin noise hills that you've seen before a billion times, just slightly different. Star Citizen, on the other hand, does not rely on procedural generation to arrange the content entirely. Instead, its use of procedural generation is for attaching defined units of building pieces together to construct visually-logical walls and buildings. To this end, the procgen is a shortcut to having to tediously build scenes by hand, but the units the procgen can build them into are tailored to look good. You replied directly to my post, and you began your reply to my post with "I hate how people think Hello Game's method of generation is the same as like Minecraft or something. It isn't." and I was the first to mention Minecraft after your previous reply: [QUOTE=elixwhitetail;48273216]The demos are still banking on "Hey, guys, have you heard about the power of [I]procedural generation??!?[/I]" and look where that landed Minecraft--modded to fuck and back in order to add something to actually do once you've spent 10 hours getting bored of the base content. Infinite variety that is functionally the same from one place to another, just different, only gets you so far. In Elite: Dangerous, there are 400 million star systems, but after 10 hours you've seen pretty much everything. In Minecraft, not modding your game is almost seen as silly and dull, because you'll quickly hit limits. Borderlands' infinite variety of guns amounted to minmaxing and inventory management, leaving a long trail of never-used useless weaponry behind.[/QUOTE] Let me say it again: Procedural generation is one way of doing things, but it results in an un-designed experience, because the designer is pure math. Elite uses it to generate a galaxy of stars that are mostly identical, Borderlands used it to generate a near-infinite variety of weapons of which most were vendor trash, and NMS uses it to generate [I]everything[/I] and the risk is that in generating everything they've left their procgen formulas to carry the weight of the whole game. Minecraft depended on this and quickly became a game people found too boring to play vanilla and started developing mods, so much so that the community eventually took over development of the game by making Mojang redundant except for supplying core stability patches. The concern is that NMS is not going to have any staying power when one planet is just as [B]zany[/B] and [B]weird[/B] as another, with seemingly no rhyme or reason to visit another except to have your name embedded in the discovery title in the unlikely event that someone else eventually stumbles across the same planet. I hope this doesn't happen, but so far, I'm not seeing any proof it's going to turn out otherwise--and I want NMS to be good.

[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;48276355]It tells me your points aren't worth arguing because you act like everyone who is sceptical of NMS is an idiot. So far the planets they've shown off have been practically identical, they've posted a couple of pictures of more interesting vistas but until we see that in action we should assume it's manipulated to look better than will be found in the game. As for their method of generation; it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter a god damn to me how they do their generation when the end result always looks the fucking same. Why do all the planets have geography that looks like perlin noise rather than realistic or interesting landscapes? Why do all the animals we've seen just walk around slowly and barely react to the player? Will they do more in the full game, if so why not show that off? I couldn't give less of a shit for there being 50,000 different looking horse-like creatures if they all act the same, like brain dead automatons. Then you have the NPCs, which we have only seen ships flying around in brief snippets, and landing empty ships on landing pads before immediately taking off again. How will we interact with the civilisations of the galaxy? You don't seem to understand that most people are wary of this game because we have been burned on this idea before. Spore looked like it was going to be an amazing, in depth game where you rise from a microbe to conquer the stars, but it was a pile of shit. Starbound looked like it was going to be a really cool game like Terraria in space, but it is updated so slowly and has so little in it it's not worth looking at yet. "Oh but this won't be like Spore or Starbound! It'll be different!" I'm sure you'll claim, well we have no proof of that until the game comes out so there's no point in getting our hopes up again. Especially since for many of us the more they've shown off the less they've revealed, we've know you could land on planets and walk around scanning shit since last year, they've shown practically nothing new since then, just variations on the same.[/QUOTE] Trusting the developers boils down to subjectivity anyway. I followed Starbound and Spore as well and was disappointed, but personally, Hello Games still hasn't given us a reason to not trust their word, so I'll believe what they say. If that makes me naive, so be it. But I can garauntee you I will have loads of fun in this game myself. Heck despite Starbound and Spore being total disappointments I still had loads of fun in both of them.

[QUOTE=KorJax;48276360]I am really not sure why you are using Star Citizen as an example of "doing it right" when they haven't even released any real footage of said locations beyond concept art and in-engine concepts like in that picture you see. For all you know in the final game all locations will use the same base, which is highly likely as it saves massively on the art budget.[/QUOTE] [video=youtube;DqGho_C62Mk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqGho_C62Mk[/video] Actually, I have walked around in the ArcCorp location and I've seen footage of Terra Prime; that ArcCorp screenshot is not an in-engine concept, it's live. The above video is from a leaked build that was not intended for public consumption and therefore has bugs and is incomplete, but ArcCorp very much exists and is not a "concept" piece. And, [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14640-Monthly-Report-March"]I know for a fact that there will be [I]at least[/I] seven different architectural styles[/URL] (Colonialism, Hennowism, Supermodernism, Monumentalism, Streamline, Counter-Culture for outlaw areas, and whatever the name the ArcCorp design set above is called), with the above building set being only one of them, because I follow development closely. I don't know that NMS's generation is bad, I have the concern that it will be too heavily relied upon and will become bland and samey. In your effort to pin me with logical fallacies you've overstepped yourself and made rash assumptions about my argument in order to turn this into a fight. :goodjob:

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;48276364]They're pretty different games in most respects, and ordinarily I wouldn't compare them, but they both use procedural generation in different ways. NMS is running everything off of pure mathematics. I've watched almost every video the devs have put out about the technology they use for procedurally creating everything as you fly into it, terrain, creatures, etc. Nothing is planned, everything is just thrown in for the math to spit out results. Sometimes you'll get an exciting planet with lots of cool stuff going on, but it's just as likely to get a boring sheet of gnarled little Perlin noise hills that you've seen before a billion times, just slightly different. Star Citizen, on the other hand, does not rely on procedural generation to arrange the content entirely. Instead, its use of procedural generation is for attaching defined units of building pieces together to construct visually-logical walls and buildings. To this end, the procgen is a shortcut to having to tediously build scenes by hand, but the units the procgen can build them into are tailored to look good. You replied directly to my post, and you began your reply to my post with "I hate how people think Hello Game's method of generation is the same as like Minecraft or something. It isn't." and I was the first to mention Minecraft after your previous reply: Let me say it again: Procedural generation is one way of doing things, but it results in an un-designed experience, because the designer is pure math. Elite uses it to generate a galaxy of stars that are mostly identical, Borderlands used it to generate a near-infinite variety of weapons of which most were vendor trash, and NMS uses it to generate [I]everything[/I] and the risk is that in generating everything they've left their procgen formulas to carry the weight of the whole game. Minecraft depended on this and quickly became a game people found too boring to play vanilla and started developing mods, so much so that the community eventually took over development of the game by making Mojang redundant except for supplying core stability patches. The concern is that NMS is not going to have any staying power when one planet is just as [B]zany[/B] and [B]weird[/B] as another, with seemingly no rhyme or reason to visit another except to have your name embedded in the discovery title in the unlikely event that someone else eventually stumbles across the same planet. I hope this doesn't happen, but so far, I'm not seeing any proof it's going to turn out otherwise--and I want NMS to be good.[/QUOTE] But they have laid down ground rules to how everything is generated, such as things being on the outside of the galaxy looking closer to earthlike flora and fauna and it gets gradually more "abstract" the closer you get to the center. And they are constantly analyzing the universe to make sure nothing just looks random and dumb, they explain this pretty clearly in their first or second batch of media releases.

At the end of the day, if you are relying on mathematical formulas to generate content nobody has ever seen before, you are dealing with the pros and cons of depending on that formula to be your designer. This may turn out fantastic, or it may quickly become boring as fuck, and I hope for Hello Games' sake they avoid shipping a game that gets boring after 10 hours. Nothing I've seen in the past three months has convinced me that they've made any progress on this particular challenge since they started showing the game off last year. [B]I could be wrong[/B], and I hope to be, because I still want to play NMS and I want to see it achieve what it deserves to be.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;48276573]At the end of the day, if you are relying on mathematical formulas to generate content nobody has ever seen before, you are dealing with the pros and cons of depending on that formula to be your designer. This may turn out fantastic, or it may quickly become boring as fuck, and I hope for Hello Games' sake they avoid shipping a game that gets boring after 10 hours. Nothing I've seen in the past three months has convinced me that they've made any progress on this particular challenge since they started showing the game off last year. [B]I could be wrong[/B], and I hope to be, because I still want to play NMS and I want to see it achieve what it deserves to be.[/QUOTE] To be fair, the coverage done in the past has been way more transparent, and IGN's coverage has been pretty shit, but also keep in mind Sean Murray has said he doesn't want to show anybody any of the crazy things because for some reason thinks it will turn people off due to lack of familiarity.

[QUOTE=HybridTheroy;48276647]To be fair, the coverage done in the past has been way more transparent, and IGN's coverage has been pretty shit, but also keep in mind Sean Murray has said he doesn't want to show anybody any of the crazy things because for some reason thinks it will turn people off due to lack of familiarity.[/QUOTE] Fair enough, I can understand not wanting to spoil the late-game goodies. However, and this was my position from the start, [I]from what's been shown[/I], I have concerns about the long-term sustainability of relying on the procedural gen, and like it or not, for good or bad, that [B]is[/B] the core element of the game. From day 1 of going public with the game, the story has always been "this game leverages the power of procgen content". As long as the devs take care not to drop the ball and release a game that gets boring after 10 hours, there is nothing wrong with this. And we won't know how this turns out until the game ships. Every game has its own challenges to overcome, and NMS's biggest challenge is tuning the generator for the entire universe such that there is always something fresh and new to discover, because discovering more of the same but different is what makes exploration in Elite: Dangerous boring after 10-20 hours, and Borderlands' millions of guns turned into a long line of more of the same guns that were only occasionally worth keeping. It's not impossible, and I really hope Hello Games nails this, but the latest media on the game isn't reassuring me that they have.

Even if it becomes Space Minecraft, I'll still play it for the visuals and vibe. Really digging this so far.

[QUOTE=HybridTheroy;48276173]Yeah you guys can rate me dumb all you want but not one of you guys actually had the balls to try and debunk my point, what that does tell you?[/QUOTE] fyi the "type of procedural generation" has no gameplay difference. It's just a tradeoff between hard drive space and cpu usage. Dont know why you think it makes a difference for the end user. procedural generation is good in games like haz where it serves to create a very malleable game world for multiplayer, preferably an mmo with extensive politics and where an infinite play space is a good idea. Somewhere other players can make the real content by nature of existing and building their own spaceships and cities.

[QUOTE=HybridTheroy;48276544]But they have laid down ground rules to how everything is generated, such as things being on the outside of the galaxy looking closer to earthlike flora and fauna and it gets gradually more "abstract" the closer you get to the center. And they are constantly analyzing the universe to make sure nothing just looks random and dumb, they explain this pretty clearly in their first or second batch of media releases.[/QUOTE] Where have I heard that before, oh that's right, starbound. Prime example of why tier-based procedurally generated environment doesn't work in terms of gameplay value. It's samey, and it's almost inevitable - procedural generation operates by patterns, and patterns start to stick out once you spend enough time (which isn't going to be measured in hundreds of hours, mind). It's not colour of the sky that makes environments unique, not shapes of the rock, not even the exact anatomy of creatures that you can call "lopsided boobs penguin". You've got to understand that extreme cynicism towards this game comes from the way they present it. Sure, they talked a lot. And many of the stuff they said were really interesting. But then they go on and insist on advertising their game with video snippets that don't do anything, while omitting potentially really strong gameplay features like space combat (which I, for one, am really interested in) and player interactions with the world. Instead we have "planet-sized planets" barely larger than moon and "earth-like" archipelago landmass. With purple sky and tall pink and yellow creatures.

Since I mentioned Star Citizen and Elite, I should also point something out: Of all the grandiose promises that Star Citizen has made, procedurally-generated planetside exploration, in the vein of NMS, is the biggest "maybe" of them all and the devs have been up-front about this. Backers want to be able to land in arbitrary spots on the planets that they fly by in space, and the devs have been hesitant to promise this as a feature. The closest I've seen (and this is only to my own knowledge, not the definitive answer) has been a response that TL;DR'd to "if we can figure out a way to make it not suck and have the procedural terrain meet the fidelity standards the rest of the game has, we'll do it...eventually", with the 'eventually' meaning that this would be something developed and released maybe three years after launch -- and leaving beta is probably two years out from [I]now[/I]. Say what you want about Star Citizen, but nobody can say that it doesn't dream big. And even its big dreams aren't ready to rubber-stamp procedural terrain generation, because it's a big problem that takes a hell of a lot of work to refine. Even Terragen looks fake when you know how it looks, as amazing as it is, and it's Matt Fairclough's life's work, essentially, by now. Across the three versions, it's basically a 20-year-old project, and even then it takes a lot of work and skill to generate pro-grade realistic terrain if you aren't importing geographic survey maps. [t]http://esdev.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/amazon_hannes.jpg[/t] NMS is tackling this problem head-on and making it the game's core feature. Those are some pretty big balls hanging off a studio with only two prior games under their belt. (In fairness to them, their offices being flooded on Christmas in 2013 likely didn't help development along at all.) I really want them to succeed, and I worry because, so far, they aren't showing any noticeable improvement on solving the core problems of procgen reliance.

This is the last video I'm watching of this. It's not the kind of game you should be watching anyways.

I'll probably still buy this because i'm a huge whore for just exploring stuff, but this definitely doesn't seem like a game you should preorder.