No Man's Sky

[Blaine]

The basic gameplay is to take photographs of randomized animals in order to make money, then roam around hoping to find good (read: highest rarity, nothing else matters) items and mods in random shop inventories. In the case of starships and freighters, you roam around hoping to find a good ship that you can buy off some NPC, and that you happen to have enough money at that moment to purchase it. The rest is grinding resources from planets in order to fill in the gaps.

The planets all look and feel basically the same, despite quite a lot of effort having been expended to disguise this fact. Some look radically different, but these are nothing more than specially-designed visual themes with a few unique landscape features, a unique creature or two, and one unique piece of base furniture to find per theme. All are about a shallow as a millimeter-deep puddle, the more so because the very few unique elements take the place of the usual random mash-up.

More dangerous planets are gated behind different-colored stars requiring more exotic propulsion systems to reach, and these contain the rarer minerals, but other than hazardous conditions and the presence of said minerals they're just like every other planet.

So basically the game is a huge nested slot machine in every respect, with the same "gameplay" as a slot machine, i.e. yanking a lever... and that is no exaggeration. As MadMaxHellfire has said, no amount of gussying up changes the fact that there's no real gameplay at the core.

 

[Blaine]

I might as well proselytize, as long as I'm here.

Procedural generation should only be used sparingly to complement real content designed by a real human being—as a condiment, if you will, rather than the meat and vegetables. If the condiment is used as the main course, the experience will be similar to spooning a jar of mustard down your gullet.

There is a specific seductive pitfall in game design: "Man, the idea of flying a ship around the stars and exploring various planets is compelling. That's a lot of work, though. If only I could create just the right set of scripts, the computer could generate thousands of planets for me, automatically!" Ultimately, though, you only get out of procedural generation what you put into it. It may be chopped and shredded and randomly arranged, but the human brain can readily make out the individual components of that salad, and very soon every successive salad will seem the same as the last.

 

[fork]

The textbook Age of Decline marketing and hype turned me off from the get go. Sell it as something new, stunning, and brave to the kids and consolefags who didn't know Elite existed long before and actually believe it. I was already beyond sick of this tactic by the time the project was revealed. It's the kind of thing why I'm on this forum in the first place, got tired of the historically ignorant and gullible in mainstream forums

Boy are you in the wrong place then

Yeah, the place he's looking for doesn't exist.

[...] It may be chopped and shredded and randomly arranged, but the human brain can readily make out the individual components of that salad, and very soon every successive salad will seem the same as the last.

Life in a nutshell.

 

[Blaine]

Life in a nutshell.

On the contrary, life is full of new things to see, learn, and do. That's truly quite a statement coming from one of the most cynical assholes to roost and grouch on this forum, but it's the truth.

Whether or not you have the motivation, means, available time, et al. to see, learn, and do those things is a separate issue entirely.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I might as well proselytize, as long as I'm here.

Procedural generation should only be used sparingly to complement real content designed by a real human being—as a condiment, if you will, rather than the meat and vegetables. If the condiment is used as the main course, the experience will be similar to spooning a jar of mustard down your gullet.

There is a specific seductive pitfall in game design: "Man, the idea of flying a ship around the stars and exploring various planets is compelling. That's a lot of work, though. If only I could create just the right set of scripts, the computer could generate thousands of planets for me, automatically!" Ultimately, though, you only get out of procedural generation what you put into it. It may be chopped and shredded and randomly arranged, but the human brain can readily make out the individual components of that salad, and very soon every successive salad will seem the same as the last.

the problem, at least here, is not in the procedural itself, it's in how it builds planets: they're all the same, they never lack resources, they all have the same buildings, ruins, shops, and they're all already explored and inhabitated, they're all so chock-full of stuff you don't care for the planet, you treat it as a random point-of-interest generator. for this you never ever have to make important, meaningful choices, there's plenty of everything everywhere, you can't get stranded (rebuilding the ship, the tutorial, is the only decent part of this game), you can't damage your ship, everything is so foolproof it had to be made just for fools.

 

[thesheeep]

I might as well proselytize, as long as I'm here.

Procedural generation should only be used sparingly to complement real content designed by a real human being—as a condiment, if you will, rather than the meat and vegetables. If the condiment is used as the main course, the experience will be similar to spooning a jar of mustard down your gullet.

There is a specific seductive pitfall in game design: "Man, the idea of flying a ship around the stars and exploring various planets is compelling. That's a lot of work, though. If only I could create just the right set of scripts, the computer could generate thousands of planets for me, automatically!" Ultimately, though, you only get out of procedural generation what you put into it. It may be chopped and shredded and randomly arranged, but the human brain can readily make out the individual components of that salad, and very soon every successive salad will seem the same as the last.

You just describe lacking procedural generation.
Or, well, lacking when it comes to actual gameplay generation - the visual variation is actually really good in NMS, good enough to fool a LOT of people into thinking that there is some great depth to be had in the game.

This is a similar problem many games with procgen have:
It lacks an additional layer of logic (either manually designed or procgen as well!) to guide the generation into creating something more meaningful that varies not only in visuals but also in gameplay, and that knows and applies context to its creations.

The game basically tells the algorithm "build me a house of a certain style".
What it should tell the algorithm is "build me a house of a certain style that fulfills a certain purpose", and that purpose has a significant impact on the end result.

Obviously, adding the thought of "purpose" increases algorithm complexity by a ton, which in would in turn increase performance cost by a lot, but it's not like they haven't been at it for many years.

In direct comparison, Empyrion does this A LOT better.
Sure, it looks worse, but the actual difference between planets (and between biomes within planets) in both visuals AND gameplay is very striking. It applies a much stricter layer of logic to its generation (almost everything still is procedurally generated).
Coincidentally (or not...), you can absolutely wreck your ship(s) in that game and/or run out of resources.

 

[Machocruz]

The textbook Age of Decline marketing and hype turned me off from the get go. Sell it as something new, stunning, and brave to the kids and consolefags who didn't know Elite existed long before and actually believe it. I was already beyond sick of this tactic by the time the project was revealed. It's the kind of thing why I'm on this forum in the first place, got tired of the historically ignorant and gullible in mainstream forums

Boy are you in the wrong place then

Yeah, the place he's looking for doesn't exist.

Nah. It's fine here. For a fact this place is generally more informed than any of the mainstream forums. But edge away.

 

[fork]

Life in a nutshell.

On the contrary, life is full of new things to see, learn, and do. That's truly quite a statement coming from one of the most cynical assholes to roost and grouch on this forum, but it's the truth.

While life may be somewhat better in that regard than NMS, more complex, the basic principle is still the same.

The textbook Age of Decline marketing and hype turned me off from the get go. Sell it as something new, stunning, and brave to the kids and consolefags who didn't know Elite existed long before and actually believe it. I was already beyond sick of this tactic by the time the project was revealed. It's the kind of thing why I'm on this forum in the first place, got tired of the historically ignorant and gullible in mainstream forums

Boy are you in the wrong place then

Yeah, the place he's looking for doesn't exist.

Nah. It's fine here. For a fact this place is generally more informed than any of the mainstream forums. But edge away.

That's one of the lowest bars I'v ever seen.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

Why add all this fluff? The actual problem is that exploring isn't fun because it's too easy. It really doesn't matter that every planet is the same - if you went into this game thinking every planet would be radically different then you're retarded. Obviously there's going to be a limited pool of tangible effects for different planets. But if the act of gathering resources and moving between planets was engaging in and of itself, the repetitive planets wouldn't be a problem. They could've done that by adding some actual resource scarcity and more involved repair, maintanence, and operation of your spaceship. Instead, it's a bunch of garbage. This retarded fluff doesn't add anything to the core loop - every update just adds a few more shitty things to spend your grinded cash on before fucking off and waiting for the next update to add another 15 minutes of content.

I thought this game was fun at first before I flew my ship directly into the fucking ground at full speed and nothing happened, besides a tiny little bit of damage. Then I really realized how fucking shallow and inane the whole thing is.

The MMO shit they added is a joke. When the game was advertised, they made it out like it'd be possible to find other players, but stressed that it'd be extremely lucky to do so due to the size of the universe (we now know in retrospect that this was them trying to lie about the game, but regardless) - in the current game, to progress the plot I have to press a button that makes a big gay space station appear where I fly in and see a bunch of fucking usernames pop up in the text box, and while I'm talking to NPCs, C0ck_Munch3r.2012 is inviting me to some retarded event for some super special currency. I join the mission and I have to collect 30 assholes scattered around the planet, and while I'm doing so the game is lagging to fuck because some cocksucker built a bunch of bullshit around the mission area, and all the flora and fauna are named after fucking MEMES, OR American political references. Then I complete the mission and I can spend my currency to buy a hat. And this is the game they tried to sell as some isolating, contemplative experience. What a fucking joke.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

And this is the game they tried to sell as some isolating, contemplative experience.

???

 

[Ranselknulf]

No Man's Sky has potential, but it felt incomplete to me the last time I played.

It's been a good while since I played it though, might have to hop in and give it a shot again soonish.

No Man's Sky seems like a game just made for modders.

There needs to be SOMETHING to do to make the game interesting, and the game developers themselves seem uninterested in addressing this.

If EvE was combined with the planetary graphics of No Man's Sky, that'd be a game I'd want to play.

Then the game would be more of a galactic focus, but if you were a poor fag you could still go around and sabotage the mining operations of the big corporations.

 

[Fedora Master]

Can't leave well enough alone can you.

 

[Ranselknulf]

Can't leave well enough alone can you.

I mean, No Man's Sky is missing out on the Eternals marketing play.

If they made a planet where the Eternals live, well that would attract lots of super hero fans.

 

[mkultra]

They do put a lot of time into fluff.. I mean they even added a fucking synth with sequencers to make beats.. even as a electronic musician, it's not something i want in NMS, it's not why i play it.

It's like they're just fucking around. If they would just adress the boring ground combat, put in some bandits and bandit camps, some more quest types. Then add more interesting loot. Look at Terraria and how much varied loot it has that adds to how you traverse or how you do combat or mining etc - stuff that just makes the player happy as he explores and find something new. But no, "let's add sequencers, because people who makes music probably wants to spend hours in NMS to create a song."

 

[Ranselknulf]

Infinitron

Should this thread be moved to the Space games section?

 

[Fedora Master]

This thread should be moved to Retardoland

 

[LarryTyphoid]

If every bad game got retardo'd then retardoland would be the only forum

 

[Ol' Willy]

There is a specific seductive pitfall in game design: "Man, the idea of flying a ship around the stars and exploring various planets is compelling. That's a lot of work, though. If only I could create just the right set of scripts, the computer could generate thousands of planets for me, automatically!" Ultimately, though, you only get out of procedural generation what you put into it. It may be chopped and shredded and randomly arranged, but the human brain can readily make out the individual components of that salad, and very soon every successive salad will seem the same as the last.

From what I hear it seems that PG in NMS is just tame - and lame as a result.
Imagine PG with minimal limitation. One planet has no landmass above water - ocean planet. Other has gravity five times more that on Earth. The third has almost no atmosphere and the fourth has atmosphere like on Venus... If you have equipment, you can explore, if no - you just fuck off. And if you miscalculated your resources you are screwed - as it should be.
Imagine going on the planet but having your ship damaged or going out of fuel, settling temporarily on the planet to gather resources to fuck off from there - space sim turning into a survival sim for a time.

And the thing is, I'm pretty sure that game resources will allow such kind of variation. Devs just won't do it

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS THIS IS A TOTAL SHIT TAKE

BUT BROS THIS GAME LOOKS FUCKIBG AWESOME INVR

 

[Hobknobling]

I am not sure if I am more disappointed by the actions of Hello Games or the Reddit-driven consensus surrounding this game. It got really bad after the Internet Historian video.

In the other hand, this game has become a great litmus test. If you run into someone who claims that Hello Games completely fixed the game and delivered on all or even most of their pre-launch promises, you 100% know you are talking to someone who is not worth talking to.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

It got really bad after the Internet Historian video.

The IH video got me and my brother to both buy the game (at full price) to play coop. In fact this game was one of the factors involved in me spending 400 dollars to upgrade my CPU (Kingdom Come Deliverance was another factor, to be fair). Now neither of us play it and whenever I play video games it's in DOSBox.

I'll never get hoodwinked like this again I fucking swear

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

So this game good? I decided to watch some vids like this:

 

[DDZ]

Nope, it's a boring casual game with an annoying resource grind.

 

[Talby]

All of the things that made the game shit on launch day are still present now, all they did was add bloat.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Well damn. Probably no super saiyans either.