It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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
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.
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.
IMO, Dwarf Fortress benefits greatly from the player seeing relatively few samples of the world gen, and the geography actually mattering to gameplay.
The actual geography doesn't vary that 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.
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 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.
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
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 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 feel both the a sense of adventure, and the vastness of space-time.)
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.
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.
The trailer was beautiful, the actual game is really nice for a short while, but it's too simplistic and repetitive.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse"
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
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
This sounds like it would be a great mod for Factorio. Adds other players factories but in a dilapidated and decayed state.
I was going to say, NetHack doesn't feel sparse to me, but maybe I just have not played enough NetHack.
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 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.
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.
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.
Iirc it used a voxel engine so would have been late 90's.
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)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.
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?)
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?)
FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1.
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.
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 fun, 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 could 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?".
There's never been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both got 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 very seriously and want there to be a ton of stuff to do in it.
Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of stuff [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.
> It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that...
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.
> Can we move on from this "game"?
Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it.
[0] ...some of which is clearly playtesting for things planned for Light No Fire...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
they add feature after feature. but never a good drive for the player. 'why should i go to this planet?'
i have an idea for it,
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:
- "Bandits have occupied our town", but actually bandits are tax collectors. You instead may help them document the goods.
- "Our star is dying", instead a huge starhip is recharging and refusing to move without some condition.
also add a rumor system to lead players to quests.
you can use my idea Hello Games, you have my permission.
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.
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.
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 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.
If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.
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.
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.
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.
I felt this way for a while until I decided to sit down, start a new game, and engage with it.
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.
But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.
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.
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.
To the guy who replied to me: Our genius overlord moderators rate limited my responses so I'll post here.
> I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding
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
you spend most of your time finding/farming resources and unlocking builds
most of your time is traveling between planets/systems/galaxies for different resources
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
What are people on about, there is tons to do in NMS, tons of missions, expeditions, build bases, build a corvet, hunt rate parts, ships, rifles, creatures, manage a settlement, automate crafting chains, find a lucrative trading route, and this new update apps even more things. I'd never consider NMS anything close to empty, there is so much variety in the content
I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development - the game of the last few years is absolutely nothing like the early one and I agree, there is a surprising amount of stuff to do.
I have never played, but I watched all the drama unfold on reddit. It makes me wonder, is this what happens when you have an underwhelming launch? "You only make a first impression once" - and there is a huge price to pay for that?
In SaaS and YC, it's ship early and ship often, right? Is that absolutely not the case in games? Also, how true is it in SaaS? Genuinely curious here.
Yes, I believe this is a thing. I'm not sure why, but I think for game releases, especially hyped AAA games, your highest player counts are almost definitely going to be the highest in the first weeks of release, so that's the strongest impression. Almost all games see a steep drop off of concurrent players later on, then it stabilizes. Improvements later are thus much less visible, and all the players that got the bad first impression have little reason to go back. I think NMS particularly made a bad mistake compounding this by hyping up the game beyond what it could actually do when it was released - that's an unforgiveable sin to a gamer.
Stuff like this, it's why I often avoid big releases for the first year or two then go play it when it's on sale.
For another perfect game example - Star Wars Outlaws. Terrible, buggy release with obnoxious gameplay loops. They fixed it, now it's one of the better games I've played recently. You can go look up gameplay reviews from the last year to see people shocked at its reputation, it's a very good game now and arguably would have been a candidate for GOTY if it had released in its current form.
The game has so much stuff to do its actually overwhelming. The game is definitely a sandbox though and I think for some reason a lot of people don't like going out and doing the different things you can do in the game if the game doesn't force you to or if there's not heavy progression.
I feel like the same thing happens to other sandbox games too. Minecraft is one of my favorite games of all time and I could easily spend a thousand hours in a vanilla world and still find things to do, however the game gets constantly shit on by the community no matter what it does. They speedrun through the progression and then lack any creativity to do anything else in the game.
I personally love building bases and customizing and collecting things, which is a large part of the gameplay in NMS. I could spend hundreds of hours doing that but I guess some people just need a constant sense of progression and the game telling you what to do because they aren't capable of setting their own goals. Anyone who says NMS lacks content or things to do has barely touched the game.
I think it comes from a difference in what people want. Some people want to achieve goals, while others want to be given tools to be creative. There's a whole spectrum in between, plus other motivations as well.
I enjoy being creative to an extent, but I like to solve problems, so I naturally gravitate to something with a long-term goal to achieve like Factorio (I rapidly lose interest after launching a rocket though).
There are lots of things to do, but the actual mechanics are for doing them are shallow. The best example of this is the trading system; the way trading works is there are 7 economy types a star system can have, which determines which goods they produce (can buy in large quantities) and demand (can sell for a higher price than at normal systems). Thus the best way to make money from trading is to simply find a loop of systems which chain together the production -> demand goods. For instance, the economy types trading -> advanced materials -> scientific -> trading each produce the goods demanded by the next economy type in the chain.
So the system is fairly shallow, since what you end up doing is just jump from system to system and buy and sell everything.
at the time of posting, i think every top-level comment except one is negative. so, i'd like to balance it by saying that i have never seen a better executed turnaround than what the no man's sky team did. they cratered their reputation on launch, worked hard and long to restore it, and then continued to offer free updates long after they needed to. lots of respect there. (i will reward the effort by purchasing their next game on day 1, sight unseen.)
They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.
I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.
I suppose because you still bought the game, after all, and on some level it was about catching up to expectations for what you would have paid for out of the box.
That said, I don't agree with their take at all. Hello Games offered a mountain of content that's right in the bullseye center of game's core vibe and identity; and continuing to hold the original critique against them based on the "not procedural enough" argument is increasingly equivocating between two different things. You've been given a game that's more than worth the cost of admission, and you'll see dozens, hundreds, of slop space games come and go with less than one tenth the value proposition of NMS. That should be more than enough to quell 99% of the criticism.
The fact that it's not procedural enough amounts to, say, feeling that The Odyssey was good, not great. For however true that is, it's not a scandal.
I think it looks like a variety of game that it's not, and there's a dissonance there... it's not an action/adventure game, it's a sandbox of procedural generated worlds where you gather resources to unlock new builds.
You can build bases, manage settlements, maintain a fleet, build ships and exocraft, build multi-tools, have pets battle each other, cook food, manage the economy... but there's only a thin relationship/lore system and not much of a difficulty ramp at any point.
You're space farming, if you expect anything else you won't like it.
I don't really enjoy the game for more than 10-20 hours after picking it up (gets boring fast for me), and have problems with it, but kudos to the dev team. I agree, huge turnaround
no matter what, that always happens with this game. Any news about it causes the people who played for 10 minutes at launch however long ago come back to tell you how much they didn't like it.
That is a predictable consequence of their decision to launch before the game was ready. The game as it is now may not deserve that kind of contempt, but it's the price they chose to pay forever at launch.
For sure. Even as someone who bounced off the game several times, the scope of their post-launch additions are truly impressive, even matching up against a lot of the subscription games (whose whole deal is regular content drops)
There is no such thing as a turnaround. People wait for a game to be released. When you give a release date, you must give one that shows the almost complete state of your game. Not something that is half done, not something that will feel completely different 1 year later. When you buy a thing you get an experience. If your game is a different experience 1 year later, well, I couldn't care less about it. I'm not gonna sink another 10+ hours into it, just to see what you have done in one year's time. Imagine you go to the matrix and you get a half movie, bad coloring and the like. Just ridiculous.
Early access, early release, beta, whatever is just an euphemism of becoming a backer. You thought you buy something final, and in the end you become a financier. You lend your money upfront. All this because a group of pampered kids can't keep a deadline. And think that the world is a playground and they can keep their game 5 years in early access. Get a grip.
Sorry. You release your shit, it gets evaluated, end of story. Nobody cares the rest. Gaming space is already half dead because people think that sitting at a game company means you get to have knitting lessons during workhours, and you can daydream and chitchat all day long. Ridiculous.
Somewhat of an aside but, personally, I also found GTA V and Red dead redemption 2 to be boring because these games didn't respect my time. I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".
That’s fine, it has a sustained concurrent players online of > 7k every day for the last 6 months [0]. Few games on Steam achieve that.
While several people are complaining about a one-time-cost game with an absurd amount of updates that had a rough launch, thousands of people are continuously happy, the subreddit expresses joy. It’s okay to “not get it”; but at some level, this much hate and dogpiling over a game that’s not harmful and not fostering a toxic community is … embarrassing for those participating in the hate.
I’m one of those weird people that liked the game from the very beginning, and I’ve bought it at least twice for myself (different systems). I played it like 50 hours at the start. I always wanted a simple, procedurally generated space exploration game.
They’ve done an incredible job fleshing out the universe, giving us new things we can build, simple city management for people that want that, and the same exploration system for those that wanted that.
It was sold as, is, and will always be a sandbox game with some simple, procedurally generated “missions” to get you going to the next point of interest or having the next, relatively low-stakes fight.
And that’s okay. People play Animal Crossing and Minecraft. People can play this. Some of us are happy to. Some of us see a $50 game and say “yeah, 50-100 hours of time in this is my money’s worth”. And some of us spend 3000 hours in the game because we love the creating and sandbox feel of it.
Some people like Farming Simulator 2020 - I’ll never understand it and it’s not for me, but plenty of people do. Some people like Powerwash Simulator.
It’s okay if No Man’s Sky wasn’t the *specific* game you were hoping for and if it hasn’t become it; but that doesn’t make it a bad game, it just makes it “not for you”.
I wish these threads weren’t always filled with people complaining about a game that wasn’t made for them. It’s been a decade. It’s time to move on.
What's also great about NMS is its all running on a custom bespoke engine they've built for the game and properly invested in. Wish they'd do more talks and deep dives into how it has all progressed, and how much it paid off for them. Things are getting far too homogenised around UE5 in game dev.
I really like this game and have played it for years but I think it's popularity outgrew it's niche. It's a very niche game, the devs have made the ultimate space Lego kit, but I see lots of people complain about it being boring because there are no stakes, no challenge. I think they are trying to play the game they want it to be not the game it is. The overwhelming scale of the meme this game has become I think is the cause of that.
Part of me is secretly hoping / assuming they’re releasing new features as a testing bed for the changes in Light No Fire. I’m also very hopeful for Light No Fire. *VERY* hopeful, but I have to assume all these updates are for their broader engine. I hope..
I like playing the game in abandoned mode in single player, just me, my ship, a lot of dead space stations and planets and some fauna here and there. I explore every planet (except aggressive sentinel ones) and make short hops to nearby systems. If I run across too many systems that have already been explored I made a large hop in a random direction and try there. There's something about playing this way that keeps bringing me back. I tend to nope out of the main game as soon as I get a freighter, I'm not that into a lot of game mechanics, but I love exploring planets, even if they are ultimately not that different from one another. I like going on hikes even though it's just the same trees with some variety in real life.
NMS is one of the best comeback stories in gaming, but I'll keep dying on this hill: the game is an ocean wide and a puddle deep. I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours. Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials. It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content. The UI isn't intuitive and badly needs modernizing. It feels so clunky after all these updates.
A huge vastness of nothing. The game has no soul at all. Worlds are ugly, animals are ugly, plants are ugly. With the first trailer I thought it could've been the game of my life, but it's just horrible, besides the feeling of moving around in the vastness of the universe, but once you get to a planet, it's just a turn off
My Legion Go came with a free Game Pass trial. I spent 20 minutes playing No Man's Sky in VR and liked it, bought it on Steam, but haven't actually played it yet.
Maybe this is the nudge to move it higher in my queue.
AFAIK, there is no in-game microtransactions or anything, so basically retail sales I suppose? The studio is relatively small (indie-scale) last time I checked, and the launch was pretty big and I'm sure they pulled in a ton of money, even though as always on the "vocal internet" the launch was a huge failure, they still sold a lot of copies. "Just" 1-2 million copies would go a long way to fund a small passionate team. The all-time peak for simultaneous players on Steam (PC only) was 200K, so I don't think 1-2 million copies sold is far off as a minimum.
It did well commercially looking just at steam stats, not to mention the other platforms.
It seems like alot of that was used to turn it around to save their reputation to keep going not only with one game, but to make sure the next isn't "stay away" labeled even it is "wait and see" for many.
Small studio, don't have to generate a lot of sales to keep them afloat. Updates push visibility and generate new sales. Obviously, they need new projects to keep them afloat in the future.
The enhancements they're making to NMS appear to be backports from the Light No Fire engine, so my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort while the actual technical work is predominantly on the next game.
Sadly NMS could get 1000 years of updates and it still wouldn't be even 1% as complicated or deep as Eve - and I'm not an Eve fanboy, I stopped playing that more than 10 years ago at this point.
It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing.
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
https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...
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.
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.
What do you think people want a true space exploration game to feel like?
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.
That article is 10 years old. NMS then versus now are two very different games.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Spelunky and Terraria do a good job with Procgen.
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.
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"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The actual geography doesn't vary that 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.
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 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.
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
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)
It more or less reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode. They were playing an asteroid shooting.
> Morty: it's boring. crank up the realism slider to max
> Rick: why does it get even more empty? Wait, I got it... because the universe is empty.
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).
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 feel both the a sense of adventure, and the vastness of space-time.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1uLHmxmcg
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.
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.
The trailer was beautiful, the actual game is really nice for a short while, but it's too simplistic and repetitive.
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.
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.
Same, it's basically sci-fi Minecraft, it's just a chill game you can potter about doing whatever you want in.
I also recently came back to it and liked the story and progression system a lot more, especially on their "casual" mode.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 feel like this is where AI would come in handy. An AI can get a lot more 'creative' than a procedural generation algorithm.
> I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse"
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
There are enough hand built things that you don't quickly start running into repeats, and they are just melded into the generated terrain.
That sounds a lot like that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup approach of randomly generated floors/levels with designed "vaults" emplaced within them
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Iirc it used a voxel engine so would have been late 90's.
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)
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.
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!
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.
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.
I wish somehow the complexity of eve could meet a game like this. I would sell a kidney for that
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.
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.
You do occasionally find some pretty cool stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.
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?)
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?)
FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1.
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.
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 fun, 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 could 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?".
There's never been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both got 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 very seriously and want there to be a ton of stuff to do in it.
Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of stuff [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.
> It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that...
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.
> Can we move on from this "game"?
Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it.
[0] ...some of which is clearly playtesting for things planned for Light No Fire...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also the existing mechanics are overly simplified. Like space combat...
This is why you really need a good geologic, climate etc models. Like a full blown simulation.
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.
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.
they add feature after feature. but never a good drive for the player. 'why should i go to this planet?'
i have an idea for it,
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:
- "Bandits have occupied our town", but actually bandits are tax collectors. You instead may help them document the goods.
- "Our star is dying", instead a huge starhip is recharging and refusing to move without some condition.
also add a rumor system to lead players to quests.
you can use my idea Hello Games, you have my permission.
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.
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 feel the same way about Starfield. Just soulless projects instead of engaging video games.
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 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.
If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.
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.
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.
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.
I felt this way for a while until I decided to sit down, start a new game, and engage with it.
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.
But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.
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.
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.
To the guy who replied to me: Our genius overlord moderators rate limited my responses so I'll post here.
> I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding
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
you spend most of your time finding/farming resources and unlocking builds
most of your time is traveling between planets/systems/galaxies for different resources
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
What are people on about, there is tons to do in NMS, tons of missions, expeditions, build bases, build a corvet, hunt rate parts, ships, rifles, creatures, manage a settlement, automate crafting chains, find a lucrative trading route, and this new update apps even more things. I'd never consider NMS anything close to empty, there is so much variety in the content
I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development - the game of the last few years is absolutely nothing like the early one and I agree, there is a surprising amount of stuff to do.
I have never played, but I watched all the drama unfold on reddit. It makes me wonder, is this what happens when you have an underwhelming launch? "You only make a first impression once" - and there is a huge price to pay for that?
In SaaS and YC, it's ship early and ship often, right? Is that absolutely not the case in games? Also, how true is it in SaaS? Genuinely curious here.
Yes, I believe this is a thing. I'm not sure why, but I think for game releases, especially hyped AAA games, your highest player counts are almost definitely going to be the highest in the first weeks of release, so that's the strongest impression. Almost all games see a steep drop off of concurrent players later on, then it stabilizes. Improvements later are thus much less visible, and all the players that got the bad first impression have little reason to go back. I think NMS particularly made a bad mistake compounding this by hyping up the game beyond what it could actually do when it was released - that's an unforgiveable sin to a gamer.
Stuff like this, it's why I often avoid big releases for the first year or two then go play it when it's on sale.
For another perfect game example - Star Wars Outlaws. Terrible, buggy release with obnoxious gameplay loops. They fixed it, now it's one of the better games I've played recently. You can go look up gameplay reviews from the last year to see people shocked at its reputation, it's a very good game now and arguably would have been a candidate for GOTY if it had released in its current form.
The game has so much stuff to do its actually overwhelming. The game is definitely a sandbox though and I think for some reason a lot of people don't like going out and doing the different things you can do in the game if the game doesn't force you to or if there's not heavy progression.
I feel like the same thing happens to other sandbox games too. Minecraft is one of my favorite games of all time and I could easily spend a thousand hours in a vanilla world and still find things to do, however the game gets constantly shit on by the community no matter what it does. They speedrun through the progression and then lack any creativity to do anything else in the game.
I personally love building bases and customizing and collecting things, which is a large part of the gameplay in NMS. I could spend hundreds of hours doing that but I guess some people just need a constant sense of progression and the game telling you what to do because they aren't capable of setting their own goals. Anyone who says NMS lacks content or things to do has barely touched the game.
I think it comes from a difference in what people want. Some people want to achieve goals, while others want to be given tools to be creative. There's a whole spectrum in between, plus other motivations as well.
I enjoy being creative to an extent, but I like to solve problems, so I naturally gravitate to something with a long-term goal to achieve like Factorio (I rapidly lose interest after launching a rocket though).
There are lots of things to do, but the actual mechanics are for doing them are shallow. The best example of this is the trading system; the way trading works is there are 7 economy types a star system can have, which determines which goods they produce (can buy in large quantities) and demand (can sell for a higher price than at normal systems). Thus the best way to make money from trading is to simply find a loop of systems which chain together the production -> demand goods. For instance, the economy types trading -> advanced materials -> scientific -> trading each produce the goods demanded by the next economy type in the chain.
So the system is fairly shallow, since what you end up doing is just jump from system to system and buy and sell everything.
stuff to do != fun stuff to do
at the time of posting, i think every top-level comment except one is negative. so, i'd like to balance it by saying that i have never seen a better executed turnaround than what the no man's sky team did. they cratered their reputation on launch, worked hard and long to restore it, and then continued to offer free updates long after they needed to. lots of respect there. (i will reward the effort by purchasing their next game on day 1, sight unseen.)
i also happen to enjoy the game itself.
I disagree with this logic.
They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.
I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.
>And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't
why scare quotes around for free? they were free.
>haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it.
i went from hating it to really enjoying it. i am not the only one.
>based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
my comment comes from my opinion and my experience, not social media. i think its a good game, and i would say it's absolutely worth the money.
I suppose because you still bought the game, after all, and on some level it was about catching up to expectations for what you would have paid for out of the box.
That said, I don't agree with their take at all. Hello Games offered a mountain of content that's right in the bullseye center of game's core vibe and identity; and continuing to hold the original critique against them based on the "not procedural enough" argument is increasingly equivocating between two different things. You've been given a game that's more than worth the cost of admission, and you'll see dozens, hundreds, of slop space games come and go with less than one tenth the value proposition of NMS. That should be more than enough to quell 99% of the criticism.
The fact that it's not procedural enough amounts to, say, feeling that The Odyssey was good, not great. For however true that is, it's not a scandal.
I think it looks like a variety of game that it's not, and there's a dissonance there... it's not an action/adventure game, it's a sandbox of procedural generated worlds where you gather resources to unlock new builds.
You can build bases, manage settlements, maintain a fleet, build ships and exocraft, build multi-tools, have pets battle each other, cook food, manage the economy... but there's only a thin relationship/lore system and not much of a difficulty ramp at any point.
You're space farming, if you expect anything else you won't like it.
I don't really enjoy the game for more than 10-20 hours after picking it up (gets boring fast for me), and have problems with it, but kudos to the dev team. I agree, huge turnaround
no matter what, that always happens with this game. Any news about it causes the people who played for 10 minutes at launch however long ago come back to tell you how much they didn't like it.
I am grateful that the devs and their commitment to continuously improving the game have long left those people behind.
The gameplay is completely engaging and this update looks like it fills in even more spaces than were hoped for.
That is a predictable consequence of their decision to launch before the game was ready. The game as it is now may not deserve that kind of contempt, but it's the price they chose to pay forever at launch.
For sure. Even as someone who bounced off the game several times, the scope of their post-launch additions are truly impressive, even matching up against a lot of the subscription games (whose whole deal is regular content drops)
There is no such thing as a turnaround. People wait for a game to be released. When you give a release date, you must give one that shows the almost complete state of your game. Not something that is half done, not something that will feel completely different 1 year later. When you buy a thing you get an experience. If your game is a different experience 1 year later, well, I couldn't care less about it. I'm not gonna sink another 10+ hours into it, just to see what you have done in one year's time. Imagine you go to the matrix and you get a half movie, bad coloring and the like. Just ridiculous.
Early access, early release, beta, whatever is just an euphemism of becoming a backer. You thought you buy something final, and in the end you become a financier. You lend your money upfront. All this because a group of pampered kids can't keep a deadline. And think that the world is a playground and they can keep their game 5 years in early access. Get a grip.
Sorry. You release your shit, it gets evaluated, end of story. Nobody cares the rest. Gaming space is already half dead because people think that sitting at a game company means you get to have knitting lessons during workhours, and you can daydream and chitchat all day long. Ridiculous.
I agree with you in principle, but "nobody cares" clearly isn't true given the steam review history.
Yeah, imagine the reviews if it would've been what was promised from the get go.
It has a Steam Review Score of 84%. What are you talking about?
I think facts would be helpful for this discussion:
1. Total Revenue - ~$500m-$700m
2. Copies Sold - ~15-20m
3. Steam Review Score: 84.36%
4. 40 Free Major Updates
I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
NMS is a great example of a developer who was devoted to their customer base, kept updating the game for free, and saw great market success in return.
This is a story to be celebrated.
I don't think anyone disagrees and I don't really see negative comments about the devs or the studio.
The problem is the game itself, gameplay wise. It's just boring for many (including me)
Somewhat of an aside but, personally, I also found GTA V and Red dead redemption 2 to be boring because these games didn't respect my time. I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".
That’s fine, it has a sustained concurrent players online of > 7k every day for the last 6 months [0]. Few games on Steam achieve that.
While several people are complaining about a one-time-cost game with an absurd amount of updates that had a rough launch, thousands of people are continuously happy, the subreddit expresses joy. It’s okay to “not get it”; but at some level, this much hate and dogpiling over a game that’s not harmful and not fostering a toxic community is … embarrassing for those participating in the hate.
[0] https://steamcharts.com/app/275850#6m
I’m one of those weird people that liked the game from the very beginning, and I’ve bought it at least twice for myself (different systems). I played it like 50 hours at the start. I always wanted a simple, procedurally generated space exploration game.
They’ve done an incredible job fleshing out the universe, giving us new things we can build, simple city management for people that want that, and the same exploration system for those that wanted that.
It was sold as, is, and will always be a sandbox game with some simple, procedurally generated “missions” to get you going to the next point of interest or having the next, relatively low-stakes fight.
And that’s okay. People play Animal Crossing and Minecraft. People can play this. Some of us are happy to. Some of us see a $50 game and say “yeah, 50-100 hours of time in this is my money’s worth”. And some of us spend 3000 hours in the game because we love the creating and sandbox feel of it.
Some people like Farming Simulator 2020 - I’ll never understand it and it’s not for me, but plenty of people do. Some people like Powerwash Simulator.
It’s okay if No Man’s Sky wasn’t the *specific* game you were hoping for and if it hasn’t become it; but that doesn’t make it a bad game, it just makes it “not for you”.
I wish these threads weren’t always filled with people complaining about a game that wasn’t made for them. It’s been a decade. It’s time to move on.
What's also great about NMS is its all running on a custom bespoke engine they've built for the game and properly invested in. Wish they'd do more talks and deep dives into how it has all progressed, and how much it paid off for them. Things are getting far too homogenised around UE5 in game dev.
I really like this game and have played it for years but I think it's popularity outgrew it's niche. It's a very niche game, the devs have made the ultimate space Lego kit, but I see lots of people complain about it being boring because there are no stakes, no challenge. I think they are trying to play the game they want it to be not the game it is. The overwhelming scale of the meme this game has become I think is the cause of that.
Spent a lot of time in this game… The team is excellent and they ship incredible ambitious work.
I really wish they would just focus 100% on Light No Fire.
Part of me is secretly hoping / assuming they’re releasing new features as a testing bed for the changes in Light No Fire. I’m also very hopeful for Light No Fire. *VERY* hopeful, but I have to assume all these updates are for their broader engine. I hope..
I like playing the game in abandoned mode in single player, just me, my ship, a lot of dead space stations and planets and some fauna here and there. I explore every planet (except aggressive sentinel ones) and make short hops to nearby systems. If I run across too many systems that have already been explored I made a large hop in a random direction and try there. There's something about playing this way that keeps bringing me back. I tend to nope out of the main game as soon as I get a freighter, I'm not that into a lot of game mechanics, but I love exploring planets, even if they are ultimately not that different from one another. I like going on hikes even though it's just the same trees with some variety in real life.
NMS is one of the best comeback stories in gaming, but I'll keep dying on this hill: the game is an ocean wide and a puddle deep. I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours. Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials. It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content. The UI isn't intuitive and badly needs modernizing. It feels so clunky after all these updates.
A huge vastness of nothing. The game has no soul at all. Worlds are ugly, animals are ugly, plants are ugly. With the first trailer I thought it could've been the game of my life, but it's just horrible, besides the feeling of moving around in the vastness of the universe, but once you get to a planet, it's just a turn off
My Legion Go came with a free Game Pass trial. I spent 20 minutes playing No Man's Sky in VR and liked it, bought it on Steam, but haven't actually played it yet.
Maybe this is the nudge to move it higher in my queue.
I am just wondering where do they get the money to keep pushing out big content updates like this
AFAIK, there is no in-game microtransactions or anything, so basically retail sales I suppose? The studio is relatively small (indie-scale) last time I checked, and the launch was pretty big and I'm sure they pulled in a ton of money, even though as always on the "vocal internet" the launch was a huge failure, they still sold a lot of copies. "Just" 1-2 million copies would go a long way to fund a small passionate team. The all-time peak for simultaneous players on Steam (PC only) was 200K, so I don't think 1-2 million copies sold is far off as a minimum.
It did well commercially looking just at steam stats, not to mention the other platforms. It seems like alot of that was used to turn it around to save their reputation to keep going not only with one game, but to make sure the next isn't "stay away" labeled even it is "wait and see" for many.
Small studio, don't have to generate a lot of sales to keep them afloat. Updates push visibility and generate new sales. Obviously, they need new projects to keep them afloat in the future.
The enhancements they're making to NMS appear to be backports from the Light No Fire engine, so my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort while the actual technical work is predominantly on the next game.
It has strong sales so must assume the gameplay loop is enjoyable by a lot of players, but I don't think I'll ever understand
Love the game, insane work from devs. Can't play it for too long, have to make a pause from time to time, which is similar in feel to Minecraft.
If you haven't seen this video about no man's sky, it's really really good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ
10 years, i wonder what the codebase look like now !
i wish they considering making it multiplayer MMO, that would kill all its emptiness in one second (:
Holy shit, they're charging $60 for a 10 year old game that only runs on windows.
Not even worth pirating if I have to set up a container with wine, I'd rather spend that time drinking wine.
It runs great on Linux and Steam Deck
https://www.protondb.com/app/275850
Valheim had its 1.0 release today too
How the hell could that cookie consent form ever be legal? Fuck them.
Are we EVE yet?
Sadly NMS could get 1000 years of updates and it still wouldn't be even 1% as complicated or deep as Eve - and I'm not an Eve fanboy, I stopped playing that more than 10 years ago at this point.