No Man's Sky

[justincz]

even the negative reviews keep talking about the "new and revolutionary" technology, but there isnt anything new or revolutionary about it, its been done before and any decent dev can make something like NMS, but they choose not to.

 

[Zarniwoop]

It uses a new version of Unity, doesn't it?

 

[Leechmonger]

It uses a new version of Unity, doesn't it?

That the technology will die here, without anyone iterating on it or hooking it up to proper gameplay mechanics.

We can only hope.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I'm tempted to buy NMS (eventually, steeply discounted) - not to play it, of course, but to repay all this entertainment value I've had!

Just wait until you spot Sean Murray tending the bar, then give him a generous tip.

 

[Matalarata]

Wut? The revolutionary technology, masterfully adopted by NMS, is procedural hype generation. No need to code actual "features" just answer:

Uh....aaah....yes...

to each and every question directed at you, the magic of teh intranetz will do the rest.

 

[Latelistener]

It uses a new version of Unity, doesn't it?

There is no confirmation of that. Someone on Reddit pulled it out of his ass, and I didn't find any proofs on Neogaf.

 

[Metro]

The more I read about it the more I'm convinced Peter Molyneaux was an unofficial adviser. The whole 'journey to the center' part and discovering unknown shit to share with friends in some social experiment is lulzy.

 

[Gerrard]

How long until Bethesda adopts this technology? I have stared into the abyss for far too long.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i never did something bad on purpose in my life, i always gave my best efforts, honest, humble, no lies, no bullshit. for a short while i stole magic the gathering's cards, but only because some were stolen from me in the first place. my loot should have amounted to no more than 50 euros. life punished me leaving me crippled and giving me cancer which i survived but left me several health deficiencies.
so, sean murray, sony: where's karma when you need it the most?
day after day, more and more i just want to watch the world burn.

 

[Drax]

 

[Balor]

so, sean murray, sony: where's karma when you need it the most?

'Karma' is a concept that is now known as a "Just world fallacy".

 

[Angthoron]

So is this game any good yet?

 

[praetor]

So is this game any good yet?

no

 

[Metro]

It will never be anything more than what it is in terms of content. I'm sure they'll add a bunch of pointless shitty fluff a la Starbound but don't expect the core game to improve. Also the great Shamus Young completely misses the mark: the game is bad BECAUSE of the procedural generation. It's nothing an exploration game should use or future games should iterate upon. Procedural generation is only useful for 'background' content. Like monsters and levels (tilesets) in an arpg where the main focus is on character builds and loot. In NMS there is no core content. Itemization is shallow. Character progression is shallow. You can't really customize your ship. If those elements had more depth then, sure, you could use procedural generation to create worlds to navigate through while you focus on building/developing those other things. Or you could keep those things relatively shallow but have a hand-crafted set of worlds to explore and find interesting things or a deeper narrative. Ideally you would have both deeper mechanics and a deeper, non-procedurally generated universe even if it only consists of a dozen worlds (limit it to a solar system).

All of that shallowness makes NMS little more than a crappy social media type game that, amazingly, the millennials have rejected.

 

[Theldaran]

That the technology will die here, without anyone iterating on it or hooking it up to proper gameplay mechanics.

Did they mean "prosper" gameplay mechanics?

 

[Burning Bridges]

It will never be anything more than what it is in terms of content. I'm sure they'll add a bunch of pointless shitty fluff a la Starbound but don't expect the core game to improve. Also the great Shamus Young completely misses the mark: the game is bad BECAUSE of the procedural generation. It's nothing an exploration game should use or future games should iterate upon. Procedural generation is only useful for 'background' content. Like monsters and levels (tilesets) in an arpg where the main focus is on character builds and loot. In NMS there is no core content. Itemization is shallow. Character progression is shallow. You can't really customize your ship. If those elements had more depth then, sure, you could use procedural generation to create worlds to navigate through while you focus on building/developing those other things. Or you could keep those things relatively shallow but have a hand-crafted set of worlds to explore and find interesting things or a deeper narrative. Ideally you would have both deeper mechanics and a deeper, non-procedurally generated universe even if it only consists of a dozen worlds (limit it to a solar system).

Procedural generation is very useful to fill a planet with forests and beaches with stones or skies with clouds. But it is not such a good idea to make an entire superset of your game that includes every possible level, because most of those levels would look shit. This shows just how little Sean Murray understand of making games, and it was funny to watch that he quickly used shortcuts (people itt have pointed out from the start that the same results (or better ones) could be achieved by a random property shuffling method)

Procedural is generation is a very powerful tool in the future if I want to fill the world with lots of stuff like plants but the real data can easily be provided from elsewhere. For example on Earth there is global resolution data down to centimetres.

All of that shallowness makes NMS little more than a crappy social media type game that, amazingly, the millennials have rejected.

That is in fact the most remarkable thing about this, that it was too dumb for the dumbest generation of all humankind. That could mean a lot of things actually, that the intelligence of the millenial is not infinitely low, and the next generation (for lack of a better word I call them "Generation bicycle helmet") could in fact be even dumber.

 

[Metro]

I guess that's the reason the game was so hyped, because a lot of the nu-generation never played stuff like Elite, Privateer, or Freelancer. The concept behind this game was hardly novel but people treated it as such. The amazing thing is no one has managed to improve upon those 20+ year old games (aside from the obvious graphics). Not even Braben or Chris Roberts who made the fucking things. It's like they're going in reverse.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

it was hyped because it promised 99% of the stuff it's not in the game. and probably was never meant to be in to begin with.
interacting herds, working and severely different ecosystems, factions, real crafting and building, real combat, customizations, fun...

 

[Cyberarmy]

Spore is %75 off now on Steam, such a coincidence.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

It's rare that there's a reason to link to Penny Arcade, but...

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

interacting herds, working and severely different ecosystems, factions, real crafting and building, real combat, customizations, fun...

you know what? there's a game with that stuff: wakfu.
it actually has interacting herds, working ecosystems (but not very different), real crafting and building, turn based combat and lots of customization.
if a multimillion product by sony can't compare in technology (when all its selling points were just that, "technology") with a flash game you know the fail flows strong.

 

[Theldaran]

Multimillion my ass. The game was probably made in the last few months, hurriedly (like somebody already pointed out; he mentioned they spent the rest of the dev time "jerking" )

Multimillion, maybe the advertising campaign.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

still there's been a multimillionary waste of money. it doesn't matter HOW it's wasted.

 

[Kuattro]

still there's been a multimillionary waste of money.

From all who bought this crap.

 

[Theldaran]

still there's been a multimillionary waste of money. it doesn't matter HOW it's wasted.

But you were talking about multimillion budget in relation to technology, and NMS' tech sucks balls and is lazy as fuck.