Topic: No Man's Sky

[emmet]

I've watched a few let's plays of this game and it seems so boring. It always seemed boring and it seems like there isn't much more to it than what was shown in their first demos a couple years ago.

Why was this such a big thing?

[Ultimatum]

E3 makes everything look like a big thing

So blame E3 and the media

[Krakow Sam]

Because everyone wants the game that has IIIIIINFINITE POTENTIAL and want it to be true so badly they blind themselves to the fact the games are always boring and terrible.

[/lurk]

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Sony's marketing strategy revolves entirely around making people feel angry and insulted. It gets a lot of attention to their products (but doesn't sell that many).

[Yokto]

Because everyone wants the game that has IIIIIINFINITE POTENTIAL and want it to be true so badly they blind themselves to the fact the games are always boring and terrible.

But games are fun!

[Krakow Sam]

Yeah i'm not disputing that I said the games in question are boring.

[Legodragonxp]

Well, I've launched NMS enough times now to get Steam to say I've played it for 2 minutes now! I'm tempted to do it until I can post a review, just to see how many times it takes.

I'm already in barricade mode in Spore, slowly picking off the Grox and 42-ing the pink spice planets for myself.

-Lego

[PatMan33]

http://vid.pr0gramm.com/2016/08/15/5322c9ed537c76b8.mp4

loooool

[Inkling]

Lego's making me want to go play spore again what is happening to me please help

[PatMan33]

I also want to play Spore again.

But I won't.

[GroxGlitch]

I very, very nearly pre-ordered No Man's Sky, and seeing how well it's run on most peoples' systems makes me very glad I didn't, plus from what I've seen even if it DOES run, you'll have seen the entirety of what the game has to offer in two hours.

Pretty sad that eight years later we've got a game that fails nearly the exact same way Spore did, whilst attempting to do (to some degree) the exact same things Spore did as well. It's like this specific niche genre has a curse or something. IIRC this is the second major game to try this sort of thing, maybe the third time will be the charm? Hopefully?

[Inkling]

Maybe we need the game to be made by a studio that doesn't have EA breathing down it's neck, and isn't just some guy and a team scrambled together once they accidentally hit it big.  Maybe user generated and procedurally generated aren't all they're cracked up to be.

[Krakow Sam]

Probably a combination of those but I think it's mostly the last one.

Humans are way too good at pattern recognition for the kind of procedural generation most games are capable of these days to impress us. As soon as you've intuitively figured out the rules the system uses to create aliens/plants/planets/spaceships or that the restrictions on the creativity of other players are the same as the ones on you nothing seems impressive even if it really is something nobody has ever seen before.

any system which bolts together a bunch of predetermined parts using simple rules and then tries to animate the result is barely one step better than all aliens being humanoid, and if their behaviours are similarly restricted (which they will be as AI still seems to be really lagging behind other game design elements) then it's even worse because your brain can't resist just categorising them as "bat alien", "cow alien", "wolf alien" no matter what they look like because that's the role they play in terms of their interaction with you.

[Celdur]

Yeah, you can't have procedual generation with an exploration focus, because people are going to notice repetition and as soon as that happens the magic is gone.
It works well for other gameplay stuff though, like roguelikes and such.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HefCxo9UVtA" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HefCxo9UVtA</a>


<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nQ1bt9eflU" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nQ1bt9eflU</a>

[PatMan33]

Procedural generation should be used for simple things or for, like... designing a planet in the rough, and then the designers go in and sculpt that base into something beautiful. I don't need a bazillion planets. And if you do want a bazillion planets, then give us design tools and let us sculpt the planets. That's a good compromise.

But otherwise take your three to five years and craft a couple dozen nice places for us to visit and explore. And then add on more afterwards. This is what DLC should be, I feel like this is what was sold to us when DLC was first becoming a thing. And yet very few developers use that tool to expand their games in meaningful ways.