I've said it since the game was announced; Procedural generated worlds don't necessarily mean anything.
I remember Besthesda touted that Oblivion was so vast and detailed it was impossible to do it by hand. But if you explore that world, you'd have to agree that something was lost. Yes, Oblivion looks like a realistic forest with realistic hills, rivers and everything, but it lacks the expert world building of Morrowind, or Ocarina of Time or World of Warcraft. Where every rock and tree has been created by designers.
I'm only saying this because I saw posters in the past arguing that the games vastness will never make it boring. Because it's endless. But terrain variety can still be unique constantly, yet still boring, if you figure out how the sausage is made.
And that goes for the creatures and everything too. Spore was a good example of how something can be unique every time, but still come up short.
But my own real concern has always been that there wasn't going to be any real meaningful or challenging combat.
No space flying or action shooting or platform jumping that lets you improve your skills. Nothing to get better at. If it's a estatic journey like Flower, Flow or Journey, that is fine. But I don't see that as something that can have as much replay value as what the hype has been lead to believe.
The mechanics seems more to be a excuse than something that has difficult enemies, or stuff like that, so it comes up to want to explore these procedural worlds. the worlds will change in tilesets, as will the creatures and fauna, and that is fine,
but how much. How many. And how unique will ever world and creature respond your standard laser beam weapon.
NMS is a game like Universim (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU9Yg1ZtFd0 ) in that the potential for endless worlds is immense, but execution is going to be very hard. I hope for the best.
I don't expect NMS to reinvent the wheel. I think fanboys damaged this game by hyping it up so much. It should be more seen as an experiment than this declaration of a new era of gaming with its never ending game. I feel the IGN previews really showed the limited scope of the game. It's a indie game made by a small team. It's not Star Citizen, yet people almost treat it as such.
Really appreciate that you came at this from a level-headed approach.
That said, you're still missing a couple of key facts about their procedural generation algorithms (and the game in general).
1. In No Man's Sky's code, the procedural generation isn't set in stone. It's not a one-formula-fits-all gig.
At the outer skirts of the galaxy, the base algorithm is in play. It takes a bunch of formulae, plonks a seed into them, lets the effects ripple through.
But the closer you get to the galaxy, the more these procedural algorithms blend together and
break their own rules in procedural ways. They customise themselves within layers and layers. For example, say near the galactic center the systems will procedurally generate a 6-legged dog animal's model. There's a body. Then it will procedurally generate a bat-animal's animation skeleton. There's a set of muscles.
Then it will gradually, bit by bit, tweak the body, and tweak the muscles, to fit each other, meshing both of the procedural algorithms (for a dog-model and bat-skeleton) so that you eventually get a twisted, freakish dog-thing which looks a bit like a dog but moves weirdly, horribly like a bat. Take a step back and look at how many potential models there are already and how many skeleton bases there are already and the possibilities start to become mind-boggling. The game creates its own animations procedurally.
It's little wonder in many hands-on previews the journalists mentioned devs being surprised by the players' findings. The devs literally haven't seen half the shit the game's super-complex systems can make.
The idea is that there are procedural systems working upon procedural systems, combining them, meshing them, merging them, so that just saying 'there are a few procedural algorithms' is disingenuous. The game makes its own. And results in weirder and weirder and increasingly unique as you proceed through the galaxy/game. This also works on their AI behaviours, on planet-creation rules, etc.
2. The comparison to Oblivion is a bit disingenuous because in NMS surviving the world itself is the main gameplay loop. TES's gameplay revolves around narratives. The thousands of hand-crafted narratives in the game world, as well as making your own narrative and the narrative of your character. NMS's gameplay loop revolves around survival gameplay, through which you build your own narrative. So it's clear that procedural content in a game like Oblivion wouldn't work: the DNA of the game is the hand-crafted lore. Procedural stuff didn't affect the gameplay at all, you still just float about whacking enemies with an RNG-invoking weapon. But in NMS, the procedural elements create an infinite amount of actual
gameplay situations for you to deal with - there's a storm happening, there are minerals underground i need, it's nighttime and certain creatures are coming out, there's a battle overhead and one of the factions hates me and will come attack me if they see me, etc.
3. There is a huge weapon upgrade tree and ship upgrade tree (basically tens of different kinds of weapon/ship) and on top of this there are hand-crafted space-faring factions who are at war with each other and have their own faction affiliations. Fight with one and they might reward you, but the other will then shoot on-sight. If you want the game to be harder, blow more shit up and aggro more people.
4. The team are also on-record saying they want the game to be challenging, and there are designers on board from classic '00s devs like Criterion working on the gameplay systems, so there's a decent reason to believe the mechanics will be good.
However, I'm not a fanboy. I'm not saying that the game will be great because of the reasons above. It might still be shit. I'd be disappointed but I think that's entirely possible and plausible.
Honestly at this point I think that people not knowing what the game is about, or comparing it to Minecraft or Spore are just trolling.
Not interested in exploration/ sandbox games to start with, they just want to let people who are very excited by the game know that -they- really don't see what the whole thing is about, or what's to be excited about. They almost find it offensive that so many others would be excited in fact.
Imo, if they can't be bothered to read any of the hundred pieces written on the game (assuming they are of good faith to begin with), why give them the attention they seek?
Honestly? I'm not really responding for those people's benefit.
I'm responding for the benefit of passers-by. People who are just skimming the thread and wondering more softly about how the game works. I'm basically trying to spread info about the game which people really don't know but is A) really cool and B) shows high potential for good gameplay.
And my rhetoric will be better if I'm arguing with someone
