It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing.<p>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<p><a href="https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowls-of-plain-oatmeal/" rel="nofollow">https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Fallout 4's endgame with the autogenerated "quests" of defending settlements get boring extremely fast.
This was awful in Fallout 4, but a lot of fun with friends in Fallout 76
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.
Far cry 3 and its consequences have been a disaster for the gaming industry.
Let's see if GTA 6 breaks away from this
The far cry games should be good but just aren't because of the repetitive bullshit.<p>Clutch Nixon is the only thing good thing about the last few games.
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?<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>If you’re looking for a scripted arc, wrong game by construction.<p>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
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.
> what else do people want?<p>A little bit of depth to go with all that breadth?<p>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.<p>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 <i>X4: Foundations</i> and <i>Elite Dangerous.</i>
I played it about a year ago for the first significant time after having bought it some point a long time back.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I kept thinking "Why am I even doing this" until it really sunk in "<i>Why</i> am I even doing this?" and quit.<p>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 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. :)<p>Dwarf fortress or rim world solves that by generating personalities.
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.<p>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.<p>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<p>Adds persistent asteroid belts, asteroid mining, and base building on asteroids<p>Go wild
> Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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
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<p>Modded Minecraft is a very different beast, depending on the mods<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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 (<a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/</a>), 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.
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.<p>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).<p>Great game.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Or alternatively Scavengers Reign<p>Personally I want spelljammer. Baldurs Gate meets Sea of Thieves in space with 80s killer clowns<p>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.
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.<p>The creatures, vehicles, and buildings weren't generated -- they were created
by other players and exchanged asynchronously, then seeded into your
procedurally generated galaxy.<p>Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game: no real-time
multiplayer, but your galaxy fills with other people's content.<p>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.<p>GDC 2005, Will Wright, The Future Of Content:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw</a><p>>[...] Also I want to apologize for the title of this talk in the description, which I know was kind of hopelessly vague.<p>>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.<p>>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.<p>>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.<p>>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.<p>>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".<p>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.<p>Will's advice for game designers and creative humans in general, from my notes on the talk:<p>>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.<p>In February 2007 PopSci, Will explains the whole design rationale:<p><a href="https://www.popsci.com/entertainment-gaming/article/2007-02/wright-stuff/" rel="nofollow">https://www.popsci.com/entertainment-gaming/article/2007-02/...</a><p>>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.<p>GDC 2005 Report: The Future of Content<p><a href="https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/gdc-2005-report-the-future-of-content" rel="nofollow">https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/gdc-2005-report-the-fut...</a><p>I posted more details on the Spore Stats discussion in 2023:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280275">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280275</a><p>>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:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw</a><p>>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.<p>>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.<p>>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.<p>>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.<p><a href="https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-content-will-wrights-spore-demo-at-gdc-3-11-2005-9eab0cedc583" rel="nofollow">https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-content-will-wri...</a><p>>The Future of Content — Will Wright’s Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005<p>>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.<p>>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”. [...]<p>>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.)<p>>Will’s Secret Diagram of Spore published in February 2004 Wired:<p><a href="https://donhopkins.com/home/WiredSporeDiagram.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://donhopkins.com/home/WiredSporeDiagram.jpg</a><p>[...]<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280831">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280831</a><p>>And that is the whole point, how you win the game: become involved with the content creation community!<p>>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.) [...]<p>>Chaim Gingold, A Brief History of Spore:<p><a href="http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore/" rel="nofollow">http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...</a><p>>Creativity<p>>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.<p>>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.<p>>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.<p>But the models are fun, sure. And other people can find your models, and you can find theirs.<p>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.
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)
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.<p>The worst thing I can say about it is that it tries to be everything for everyone, and is relentlessly <i>friendly</i> - 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.
I played it in VR and it still does.<p>No Man's Sky suffers from planets being "deserts", they have different attributes but it's still a fairly lifeless empty world.<p>Ironically this is realistic but also not terribly fun as a player.
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.
<p><pre><code> > you must ask yourself a single tough question:
> How much do you value technological wonder over everyday, solid, smart game design?
</code></pre>
This quote applies to so much more than just gaming
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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, <i>hard</i>, 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).<p>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 <i>was</i> 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 <i>one 720K floppy disk</i>?!??!?<p>Now, of course, I know how they did it. But there was an actual <i>game</i> 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:<p><pre><code> - 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
</code></pre>
Then eventually you would be able to make your way to planets with plot on them, at which the loop changes to:<p><pre><code> - 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.
</code></pre>
After only a few runs through that loop, it's on to:<p><pre><code> - 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.
</code></pre>
Crucially, once you had gone to talk to those plot-important aliens, you probably had enough resources that you didn't <i>need</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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>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.<p>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<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The actual geography doesn't vary <i>that</i> 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.<p>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)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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)<p>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)<p>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.<p>9. Hell, just start any procgen design from tabletop RPG tables.<p>10. The number of variations that can be produced is meaningless. This is only for marketing.<p>11. A procedural system that generates exactly once is fairly pointless. Permadeath.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>That sort of stuff and be specialized and coded towards your particular games structures fairly easily.<p>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.<p>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 <i>probably</i> have a counter to all of them)<p>Your options are:<p>1. All scenarios are easy enough that you can get away with just about anything sensible<p>2. You don’t have any counter mechanics, which is basically the same as 1, and is difficult to do anything interesting with<p>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<p>4. You give the player a NOPE utility<p>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.<p>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<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly sums up my experience. Bought it day one. Still bores the hell out of me.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Ironically, that’s how I always imagined <i>actual</i> space exploration to turn out once the initial wonders are exhausted.<p>Space is huge, yes, and everything is <i>kinda</i> 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 <i>human</i> variety that just isn’t there.
It more or less reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode. They were playing an asteroid shooting.<p>> Morty: it's boring. <i>crank up the realism slider to max</i><p>> Rick: why does it get even more empty? Wait, I got it... because the universe <i>is</i> empty.<p>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.<p>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.
<p><pre><code> "I have never thought to myself that realism is fun" - Gabe Newell</code></pre>
True realism is often <i>interesting</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>To be fair, those checklists are also largely there for so many pilots and those in training whom want to get the experience.
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 <i>geocentric</i>.<p>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 <i>feel</i> both the a sense of adventure, <i>and</i> the vastness of space-time.)
That's the problem every Elite after the first one had.<p>The first one was dogfighting in space, all the others were so. much. space.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1uLHmxmcg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1uLHmxmcg</a>
You do occasionally find some pretty cool stuff.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>I say this because I feel the same thing as you when I go back, and I really want to like it.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Wildlife for example you can train as pets, mounts or milk/harvest.<p>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.<p>The latest update appears to allow groups to control areas of space.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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).<p>The planet variety is disappointing. And the prefab 'locations of interest' get really, really boring.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I also recently came back to it and liked the story and progression system a lot more, especially on their "casual" mode.
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.<p>not everyone enjoys the same kind of gameplay.
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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>really interesting</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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?<p>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"<p>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<p>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<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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":<p><a href="https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013402/Building-Community-Around-Pollinated-Content" rel="nofollow">https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013402/Building-Community-Aro...</a><p>"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.<p>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.<p><a href="http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore/" rel="nofollow">http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...</a><p>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:<p>>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.<p><a href="https://www.popsci.com/entertainment-gaming/article/2007-02/wright-stuff/" rel="nofollow">https://www.popsci.com/entertainment-gaming/article/2007-02/...</a><p>Caryl Shaw, whose actual job this was:<p>>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.<p><a href="https://www.animationxpress.com/interviews/exclusive-interview-with-spores-pollinated-content-producer-caryl-shaw/" rel="nofollow">https://www.animationxpress.com/interviews/exclusive-intervi...</a><p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p><a href="https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/gdc-i-spore-i-producer-shaw-details-cross-pollination" rel="nofollow">https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/gdc-i-spore-i-p...</a><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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But I digress...<p>"The knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode" is the symptom. Nobody being paid to own it is the cause.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Stop settling for oatmeal. There's fiber, and then there's high fiber!<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku42Iszh9KM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku42Iszh9KM</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>The game can be played in <i>so</i> 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.<p>I consider it the greatest Sandbox/space game ever - I don't know if we'll ever see anything like it again.
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.<p>The internet historian video made me buy it, thinking it was maybe worth it now.<p>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 ;)<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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 <i>one</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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?".<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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 had a different experience.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So yes, the game is an odd duck, but it can really open up with the right mindset.
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.
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!
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
By 'coming back', do you mean actually firing it up and playing it?
I tried it a few years ago, following all the "It's actually good now!" stories.<p>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.<p>The inner gameplay loop didn't work for me, and I need that hook.<p>Have there since been improvements to that inner loop?<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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<p>And the story aspects are played out no different than Hollywood<p>NMS has more in common with Minecraft. It's a virtual chat room that looks Star Wars-y<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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!
To me it feels like what i actually want is Eve's economy, PVP/PVE strapped onto the noman gameplay, at least personaly
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.<p>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 <i>only cool feature</i> of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.<p>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?)<p>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?)<p>FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1.<p>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.<p>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 <i>fun</i>, 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 <i>could</i> 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?".<p>There's <i>never</i> been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both <i>got</i> 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 <i>very</i> seriously and want there to be a ton of <i>stuff to do</i> in it.<p>Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of <i>stuff</i> [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.<p>> It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that...<p>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.<p>> Can we move on from this "game"?<p>Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it.<p>[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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This is why you really need a good geologic, climate etc models. Like a full blown simulation.
Do you think the same of Minecraft?
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.<p>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 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.<p>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.<p>But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.
Yepp. Biggest buy misstake ever.
they add feature after feature. but never a good drive for the player. 'why should i go to this planet?'<p>i have an idea for it,<p>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:<p>- "Bandits have occupied our town", but actually bandits are tax collectors. You instead may help them document the goods.<p>- "Our star is dying", instead a huge starhip is recharging and refusing to move without some condition.<p>also add a rumor system to lead players to quests.<p>you can use my idea Hello Games, you have my permission.
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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>If that's not for you, that's OK. But NMS can't be dismissed as being repetitive or boring.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfVCmkexl2E" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfVCmkexl2E</a>
>but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>To the guy who replied to me: Our genius overlord moderators rate limited my responses so I'll post here.<p>> I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding<p>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<p>you spend most of your time finding/farming resources and unlocking builds<p>most of your time is traveling between planets/systems/galaxies for different resources<p>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.<p>Played 30 minutes. Found a start of game bug that blocks progression.<p>Looked online, everyone claims this exact bug had been squashed years before.<p>Started a new game. Bug returned. Left it for a few days. Bugs still there. No workaround.<p>Raised a thread somewhere. Got yelled at for "Pretending" to have the bug.<p>Uninstalled the game.<p>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.