Comment by kjs3
21 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
The quote "vastness of an ocean with the depth of a puddle" describes what the AAA-hollywood games complex aspire to be.
Fallout 4's endgame with the autogenerated "quests" of defending settlements get boring extremely fast.
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
This was awful in Fallout 4, but a lot of fun with friends in Fallout 76
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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.
FC3 is generally quite favorably reviewed. NMS could have been far more interesting if about 25% of the planets had relatively peaceful weather, wildlife, and sentinels, and had palatable color schemes, but near every single planet is either +200C, -200C, or radioactive, and the calm ones are lunar landscapes or barren.
Let's see if GTA 6 breaks away from this
The GTA franchise already broke away from this in the currently existing titles, but that's not a fair comparison given that GTA worlds are mostly handcrafted.
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The far cry games should be good but just aren't because of the repetitive bullshit.
Clutch Nixon is the only thing good thing about the last few games.
Idunno man I thought Far Cry 5 was brilliant. Sure there was a fair amount of copy pasting but it was such a blast that I didn't care and the game was over before I was ready for it. The whole psychedelic religious cult critique was a really interesting premise and I really liked the main antagonist and his sister. I just wish they had some way of concluding the story that allowed you to continue to get into all the ridiculous chaos it offers. Once everything is settled its just too peaceful.
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?
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.
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.
> However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch, and so far I haven't been grabbed by any of its story generation.
That's basically it. It's not a simulation. So if you want simulation, then NMS isn't your game. Maybe X4 might be better suited. Or maybe not.
Sometimes people forget that not everybody has to like every game :D
I feel like can also compare the difference to some rougelikes where the combos of random things can yield vastly different experiences but in NMS the randomness felt more like a skin - not affecting gameplay much.
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I think the main difference in Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld is that the world happens to you, you have to respond to the events the game generates, while in No Man's Sky you happen to the world, you choose how to interact with it.
No Man's Sky is much more like Minecraft in that way, you have to make up your own goals, the game doesn't really prompt you in any way to do anything.
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.
If you’re looking for a scripted arc, wrong game by construction.
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
I looked for a situational physics game- where what you build and automate becomes part of a larger world ala EVE, with simulated factions that rise and fall depending on the players actions over time. Basically procedural generated civilization as a background game played by others..
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.
> minecraft has like what 40 biomes, no man's sky has practically infinite biomes
Does it? I put about 80-ish hours into NMS last year. According to the wiki NMS has 13 biomes. In practice it has even fewer because the actual biome has little to no effect on gameplay. It's just a "look".
> minecraft has like what 40 biomes, no man's sky has practically infinite biomes, is that not enough?
Hah. Sorry but what kind of Minecraft do you play? In mine the biomes become unrecognizable because I build on top of them. What can you build in no man's sky? Nothing, judging by most reviews/comments.
Its notable that you dichotomise using the promises of another unreleased game from the same people. Depth was part of the original NMS promise.
Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.
"saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people" is pretty much the textbook definition of marketing in general. I'm not sure why one might expect the marketing for gaming generally or this game in particular to be any different.
> what else do people want?
A little bit of depth to go with all that breadth?
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.
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 X4: Foundations and Elite Dangerous.
I played it about a year ago for the first significant time after having bought it some point a long time back.
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.
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.
I kept thinking "Why am I even doing this" until it really sunk in "Why am I even doing this?" and quit.
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 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.
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.
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
Adds persistent asteroid belts, asteroid mining, and base building on asteroids
Go wild
I feel like my issue was that every "site" on different planet was the same. Maybe I just hit poor randomisation or something. But I felt that I found exactly same thing just on different coloured environment. Or then things like pirate ships were just the same. Every single time...
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
Minecraft is Lego without threats to your feet because the pieces are virtual not everywhere on the floor :)
And I mean the old freeform Lego, not the paint by numbers sets they're selling now.
I think one thing that Minecraft does very well is that it does not push the player towards any of its game systems, which allows the player to make up their own fun. No Man's Sky on the other hand throws a lot of different game systems at you. Just having points of interests pushes the player into just going from one to the other instead of them exploring what might make the game fun for them.
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
Modded Minecraft is a very different beast, depending on the mods
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.
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.
> Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way.
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.
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.
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.
The procedurally generated planets and moons from Starfield are a bit like the radiant quests of Skyrim, they just pad the game time a bit with procedurally generated content. The main difference is that the radiant quests in Skyrim typically sent you to locations you hadn't visited yet within a hand-crafted world, while in Starfield the world around the locations isn't interesting and the locations themselves start repeating way too quickly.
>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.
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.
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.
I haven't played Daggerfall, but Arena had hand-crafted main dungeons. There were side quests that took you to proc gen dungeons (that sucked) and a massive proc gen wilderness outside the cities that you never had any reason to go into. The towns were also proc gen, but that mostly amounted to just shuffling around the inns and shops, to give weight to the "ask NPCs for directions" mechanic.
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.
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.
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 (https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/), 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.
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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.
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).
Great game.
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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.
The game is 2 million light years wide, but a meter deep.
I always find it interesting to read takes like this. I get it, I also bounced multiple times off Elite Dangerous due to boredom.
But in the end it was always intended to be Euro Truck Simulator in Space.
The main problem was that (just like ETS2 interestingly) there was no real satisfying end-game money sink.
For me the colonialisation update fixed that. But I also find interesting that it seems to be very personal. For me it is motivating that eventually you will have one or multiple systems that you made "your own" (I loved playing X2 and X3 back in the day for the same reason). But lots of people played Elite for years and just hauling cargo and honking systems for the heck of it, and just watching the credit balance go up was motivating enough seemingly?
What do you think people want a true space exploration game to feel like?
There are different ways to take it.
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.
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.
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.
Or alternatively Scavengers Reign
Personally I want spelljammer. Baldurs Gate meets Sea of Thieves in space with 80s killer clowns
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.
100%. I installed and began playing Outer Wilds on gamepass thinking that I was playing Outer Worlds. After about 10 minutes I knew I was wrong, it didn't feel like an Obsidian game. One of the best mistakes I ever made when it came to gaming.
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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. :)
Dwarf fortress or rim world solves that by generating personalities.
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.
The creatures, vehicles, and buildings weren't generated -- they were created by other players and exchanged asynchronously, then seeded into your procedurally generated galaxy.
Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game: no real-time multiplayer, but your galaxy fills with other people's content.
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.
GDC 2005, Will Wright, The Future Of Content:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280275
>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:
>And that is the whole point, how you win the game: become involved with the content creation community!thaumasiotes
10 hours ago
>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.) [...]
>Chaim Gingold, A Brief History of Spore:
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.
But the models are fun, sure. And other people can find your models, and you can find theirs.
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.
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That's funny because that's exactly what I feel when I travel IRL.