Ubisfot is a perfect example, look at their "Watch Dogs: Legion" for example. They decided to get creative and give you random characters generated by AI.. it turned out to be a disaster.
Another one is their Far cry games, where they copy and paste the same events but slightly different, all over the map and call it a day.
I think these efforts more have to do with bean counters taking over the industry than game designers being lazy. I'm sure there are plenty of talented people working at these studios, but they are held back by MBAs.
That purposefully designed settings and properly gated procedures can make procedurally generated realities…better? More fun?
Clutch Nixon is the only thing good thing about the last few games.
I've bounced off NMS several times, despite having tried quite hard to get into it. So, my take is based on ~20 hours of early game, from 2025ish. Probably the best parallel I can draw is to Elite: Dangerous, which I played for several hundred ours before getting bored of it. What I find lacking in both games is that there's no _meaningful_ emergent gameplay that spawns off the procgen. Everything is wildy different on each planet, yet very same-y, because none of the differences really play into each other. In both, one can discover random biomes and creatures, but it's not like they are inherently interesting, they are mostly just following the same scripts.
Contrast this with something like Dwarf Fortress, which takes a slightly more in-depth approach to procgen, one where things have history, and in many ways, things "make sense". Or Rimworld, where the game tries its hardest to conjure up a narrative for you, dynamically, but still in a sandbox. So, basically, NMS is a perfectly functional sandbox game, and I have huge respect for them for keeping on working at it for so many years. However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch, and so far I haven't been grabbed by any of its story generation. It just felt like a long series of fetch quests and "collect them all" games.
DF is a great comparison, because it speaks to the composability of properties and systems as a key requirement.
2,000+ variants that still funnel through one predesigned interaction system is not variety.
The variants need to actually compose with each other into meaningfully unique experiences / systems for the player, which is much harder to align.
No Man's Sky is much more like Minecraft in that way, you have to make up your own goals, the game doesn't really prompt you in any way to do anything.
That's basically it. It's not a simulation. So if you want simulation, then NMS isn't your game. Maybe X4 might be better suited. Or maybe not.
Sometimes people forget that not everybody has to like every game :D
Yet I've spent hundreds to thousands of hours in Minecraft, No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous.
> However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch
Elite Dangerous is the most hardcore space game I'm aware of any I play several space games. I wish it did more fun stuff like No Man's Sky actually.
It sounds like your interest is in simulation games. I don't play those really much so I can't recommend any other than I guess Elite Dangerous.
If you’re looking for a scripted arc, wrong game by construction.
I think the multiplayer aspect is a bit weaker than it could be, maybe improved more recently, but it is a something that Minecraft has done well
Does it? I put about 80-ish hours into NMS last year. According to the wiki NMS has 13 biomes. In practice it has even fewer because the actual biome has little to no effect on gameplay. It's just a "look".
No matter the biome, no matter the planet you just tick check-boxes which systems are enabled or not, but their combinations do not give you anything special back.
No matter what environment is generated you play in very similar way.
Elite: Dangerous suffers from the exactly the same issue. There's tons of interesting systems, yet you will do one thing of your choosing, that will play in the same way all the time. Like a theme park, while the game promises you a simulation.
Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.
I don't think they intentionally misled people. It's not that different to how Spore was marketed during development - a wildly-overconfident dev team promised a living breathing simulated universe, and at some point they had to actually ship the portion they had managed to get working, and most of the complex systems landed on the cutting floor to meet the final deadline.
A little bit of depth to go with all that breadth?
I'm not saying there aren't deep systems in NMS. Its just that they are sparse. You can tool around all day having only the most cursory interactions with most of the game's systems. They've added so many interesting things, yet last time I played it felt there wasn't much of anything to do with them. For example, the Pokemon clone they added a few updates ago -- fun for five minutes. Super simple battles. However many months of development for something that got old after 5 minutes.
Hah. Sorry but what kind of Minecraft do you play? In mine the biomes become unrecognizable because I build on top of them. What can you build in no man's sky? Nothing, judging by most reviews/comments.
If the game doesn't appeal to you, then that's fine too. But overall the game fills an interesting and accessible niche beneath games like X4: Foundations and Elite Dangerous.
It's... fine? It kept me engaged until it didn't. Part of the "didn't" came about because I was being paper-cut to death by bugs that googling showed me had been reported for a long time, if not since the very beginning.
I kept feeling like it was a game on the verge of happening throughout, and it never quite made it. Lots of things to go do to serve.. no purpose. Nothing was that unique or memorable, and I often had very little clue where I was in relation to anything. At one stage I was overseeing a town but that seemed to do nothing for me other than make me go back and make a snap decision for no discernible reason, occasionally fight hostile creatures, and also act as a sink for resources I was gathering.
I kept thinking "Why am I even doing this" until it really sunk in "Why am I even doing this?" and quit.
It also exasperated me that even though I was using a pretty fast gaming system, on a regular basis assets would take ages to appear, including buildings. "Fly to this place on the planet, land at this archaeological dig, wait 3 minutes for the dig to bother to appear before you can do anything." (saw identical behaviour on my steamdeck too, so doesn't seem "my machine" per se?)
This was also one of many gripes I had with Starfield.
It's always a potential danger to one's enjoyment to know too much about something though. :)
Adds persistent asteroid belts, asteroid mining, and base building on asteroids
Go wild
This is also the problem with the procedurally generated planets and moons in Starfield. Yeah, there's a whole lot of them, but they're also all populated with the SAME points of interest. You can only see a cryo lab or abandoned radio station so many times before it completely loses any meaning. It's basically the antithesis of the hand crafted world of Skyrim.
It's done so badly that you get points of interest spawning with outdoor food and beverage, folding chairs, umbrellas in icy moons that have no atmosphere and -200C temperature.
The alien creatures in Starfield were at least all designed by hand, and are somehow 'assigned' to specific planets and biomes in a way that's hard coded into the game.
Eh with a planetary cluster of that scale they have little choice. And Proc Gen is also in Bethesdas history, its how they built Arena and Daggerfall IIRC.
My issue isnt that you can see the same base on every planet, my issue is largely that when you have reached a sufficiently high level, most planets will be absolutely plastered with pirate bases. The universe goes from empty to full of RNG pirates and mercenaries so damn quickly. They really needed to create more unique encounters, but less of each kind, and spread them out a lot further.
And I mean the old freeform Lego, not the paint by numbers sets they're selling now.
Modded Minecraft is a very different beast, depending on the mods
It's pretty cool to see what modders have done with it over the years. I genuinely think Minecraft + Create is the best factory game.
Of course, introducing mods makes Minecraft the most compelling entry in the genre by a huge margin, but not necessarily a fair comparison since the combined human effort involved in the minecraft mod ecosystem vastly eclipses what the NMS team could do on their own.
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.
In that configuration, the mechanic is still there but you aren't feeling on a clock anymore and can explore and play around with stuff at your own pace.
As someone hating any kind of timed missions in games, that's what made a frustrating game into a masterpiece for me personally.
For example there might be a wormhole that takes you to a different destination if you fly through it backwards. You're very unlikely to find that out by chance, but if you explore you'll find a thing that tells you (probably behind some other puzzle).
Great game.
I'm not saying ending was perfect, but I can't think of a better way of ending it.
The game is 2 million light years wide, but a meter deep.
But in the end it was always intended to be Euro Truck Simulator in Space.
The main problem was that (just like ETS2 interestingly) there was no real satisfying end-game money sink.
For me the colonialisation update fixed that. But I also find interesting that it seems to be very personal. For me it is motivating that eventually you will have one or multiple systems that you made "your own" (I loved playing X2 and X3 back in the day for the same reason). But lots of people played Elite for years and just hauling cargo and honking systems for the heck of it, and just watching the credit balance go up was motivating enough seemingly?
There's the Kerbal Space Program approach, where space exploration is tough and you need to learn a LOT to succeed at it. The tradeoff of this is a high sense of accomplishment, where simply landing and returning from another body feels like you did something incredible.
There's also the Outer Wilds approach, where the story carries it. Moving around isn't hard at all, but you have specific goals to accomplish that move you towards a final ending. Diversity in how you accomplish those goals makes it feel fresh.
Mass Effect is similar, where you have some freedom to explore, but it's again in the pursuit of this broader story. So exploration feels like a rich side quest more than the main point of the task.
Or alternatively Scavengers Reign
Personally I want spelljammer. Baldurs Gate meets Sea of Thieves in space with 80s killer clowns
There is so much drama that can happen there and the scale is the least of it.
Dwarf fortress or rim world solves that by generating personalities.
The creatures, vehicles, and buildings weren't generated -- they were created by other players and exchanged asynchronously, then seeded into your procedurally generated galaxy.
Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game: no real-time multiplayer, but your galaxy fills with other people's content.
That's the opposite of the oatmeal problem. Procgen gives you infinite bowls that all taste the same. Spore gave you a finite but large set of bowls, each made by someone who cared about it. Different tradeoff, different failure mode -- but not the one this thread is about.
GDC 2005, Will Wright, The Future Of Content:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw
>[...] Also I want to apologize for the title of this talk in the description, which I know was kind of hopelessly vague.
>What usually happens every year is GDC, they call me up, and they say "we want you to do a talk" and I say okay, and then a week later they say "what's your talk about" and so then I think about it for a while and oh, get a rough idea of what I'm going to talk about, and I give them some kind of generic title in that area.
>That's what usually happens. But this year was different. This year when they asked me what I was going to talk about, I just flat out lied.
>But, so I'm not really going to talk about the future of content. I'm really more in fact going to talk about a possible future of content you know.
>It seems like the theme that I'm coming away from this conference with so far is that the next generation titles are going to be incredibly expensive, we're going to have to build mountains of content, and it's going to drive most of the smaller players out of the market.
>And I'd like to offer potentially an alternate vision of that. You know I think that there is a way to deal with that more creatively. So maybe a more accurate title for this talk would be "What I learned about content from The Sims".
That was 21 years ago. The same argument is being made again right now, with a different machine offered as the answer, and Will's alternative is still the one nobody is trying.
Will's advice for game designers and creative humans in general, from my notes on the talk:
>If you have a weird idea that's so outside of the box, don't forget it. You should go back and revisit your weird ideas later, because you can never know where they might lead to.
In February 2007 PopSci, Will explains the whole design rationale:
https://www.popsci.com/entertainment-gaming/article/2007-02/...
>We thought about it. In fact, technically, based on all the stuff we've already done for it, it wouldn't be very hard at all. We've already solved all the hard problems we would need to do a persistent online world version of Spore. The hard part is, what happens when you come to a planet and the planet's offline? Which would be the case. In fact, one of the reasons why I kind of went down this path is that nobody has really explored the hybrid model. And this really is a hybrid, it's what we call a massively single-player game, where we try to get the benefits of an online game, which is all the people building the world collectively together, without the liabilities, which is that the 14-year-old can kill you or that you've invested all this time in your planet and somebody comes along and blows it up, and therefore you had to put everybody on the same level treadmill. And I hate these level treadmill games, and I wanted the players to feel really empowered.
GDC 2005 Report: The Future of Content
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/gdc-2005-report-the-fut...
I posted more details on the Spore Stats discussion in 2023:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280275
>Here are my notes and summary of the GDC 2005 talk where Will Wright first revealed Spore, which I asked Will to review and check for accuracy. It's interesting to compare the design he described in the talk with what Maxis eventually shipped. Video of the hour long talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw
>One of the essential problems with designing a Massively Multi Player Online Game like Spore is that players at different levels of the simulation run at different time scales.
>Maintaining time synchronization between players is also the reason The Sims Online doesn't have a "Pause" button or speed controls, or automatically pause in build and buy mode, like The Sims.
>So instead, Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game. Users don't interact with each other in real time, but instead users can create their own content, and it exchanges that content between users asynchronously.
>That's also how The Sims Exchange lets players asynchronously upload and download their Sims save files along with web pages describing their house, sims, and photo album.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-content-will-wri...
>The Future of Content — Will Wright’s Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005
>What I learned about content from the Sims. …and why it’s driven me to procedural methods. …And what I now plan to do with them. Talk by Will Wright, Game Developers Conference, 3/11/2005.
>Based on notes taken by Don Hopkins at the talk, and other discussions and review by Will Wright. The title of the talk “The Future of Content” was purposefully vague, because Will wanted to show Spore in public for the first time, but he had to flat out lie about the title and send a fake set of slides for the EA executives to review, so they didn’t know what he was about to do. A more accurate title for the talk would be “What I Learned About Content from The Sims, and Why it’s Driven Me to Procedural Methods, and What I Now Plan to Do With Them”. [...]
>Wired asked for an illustration to print in the magazine, anything he wanted. So he made a diagram of Spore that Wired published, but he didn’t tell them what it was. The design docs for Spore have been out in Wired Magazine for a year now. (It’s in the Feb 2004 issue of Wired.)
>Will’s Secret Diagram of Spore published in February 2004 Wired:
https://donhopkins.com/home/WiredSporeDiagram.jpg
[...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280831
>And that is the whole point, how you win the game: become involved with the content creation community!
>The powerful but easy to use direct manipulation editor tools, the automatic content sharing system, and the online community around user created content, were together the most innovative and successful things about Spore. (As contrasted with the not as well realized gameplay and storytelling design goals.) [...]
>Chaim Gingold, A Brief History of Spore:
http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...
>Creativity
>Of course, these aren’t any old aliens we ask players to invest in — they’re your creation, your aliens. Once you start customizing, and design your creature, emotional investment is generated. It’s magic. Even the ugly ones are loved by their parents. Many games thrive on the interest generated by players’ creative investment. Console role playing games, for example, get this effect when players invest time in equipping and naming characters. I’ve always felt more attached to my characters as I fuss over their outfits and equipment. Creative interaction seems to always generate emotional involvement and attachment. Psychologically, it would seem that part of this stems from the sunk cost fallacy — we become attached to things we’ve invested time and energy into. Of course, it’s not just the hundreds of hours invested in a World of Warcraft character, their relationships, and possessions that generate attachment, it’s the sense that our fabrications are extensions of ourselves. As recipients of our attention and creative energy, our handiworks are reflections of who we are, tangible manifestations of our personalities. It’s no wonder we become attached to what we make, and take the success or failure of our own work and ideas very personally.
>Spore neatly solves the alien attachment problem by asking the player to design them. If a player makes a creature, and it’s appealing, they’ll be quite invested in it. Reflecting on the success of The Sims Exchange, where players shared stories, characters, houses, and objects for The Sims, Will realized that shared creativity would give Spore a broader appeal. Why not build creative exchange into the game, rather than as a website that orbits it? Player created assets are constantly being uploaded and downloaded by Spore, enough material to fill a galaxy. There’s nothing like taking home your latest finger painting, and having mom hang it on the fridge for everyone to see. Sharing not only fills up the galaxy with cool stuff, but allows the entire world to see your fridge, motivating you to continue creating.
>Of course, a lot of deep magic must work properly for something like Spore’s creature creator to function properly. It must be natural to use, easily producing satisfying results for anyone, from beginners to advanced users. And these aliens, lumps of polygons that no animator has ever seen before, must be brought to life. These are rather complicated endeavors, from a design, aesthetic, and technical point of view, but the player should never notice any of it. The game design implications are also challenging — the game must be playable and interesting, regardless of the creatures dropped into it.
But the models are fun, sure. And other people can find your models, and you can find theirs.
So if we recognize that the "gameplay" part of Spore never worked... we're left with Second Life, a much, much older thing. It hasn't been much of a success.
>Spore has some 3D modeling tools
The tools are the least interesting part. The mechanism has a name: Maxis called it the "Pollinated Content System", and Caryl Shaw's job title was "Pollinated Content Producer". What she ran was a server, a database schema, and a matching algorithm that decided which content your galaxy should receive.
The transport isn't a modeling tool either. Creatures compressed to about 3KB, and every piece of content shipped as a 30KB PNG with the game data embedded inside the image. You could email a creature. The picture was the data.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/gdc-i-spore-i-p...
>And other people can find your models, and you can find theirs.
No. That is precisely what Spore did not do, and the difference is the subject of my comment. Nobody finds anything. The server builds a model of your aesthetic and requests content to match it:
>We're basically building a model of the player's aesthetic. So if you keep picking things from the shopping catalog that are like super-cute, Disney-like, then it will start offering you and downloading more stuff that matches your aesthetic... And when it makes a request to the server it's taking that into account, so the world will slowly start to represent your aesthetic choices.
https://www.popsci.com/entertainment-gaming/article/2007-02/...
Chaim Gingold: "Why not build creative exchange into the game, rather than as a website that orbits it?" The Sims made you go find things on a website. Spore made it invisible and automatic. "You can find theirs" describes the version Spore replaced.
Placement is the hard part, and it is the part you skipped.
>So if we recognize that the "gameplay" part of Spore never worked...
I said so first, in the comment you replied to: the editor, the sharing system and the community were "the most innovative and successful things about Spore. (As contrasted with the not as well realized gameplay and storytelling design goals.)" We agree on the premise and disagree on what follows.
>we're left with Second Life
We are left with its opposite, because you deleted the property that separates them. Spore is asynchronous: other people's content injected into your private world by a server that picks it and places it, with nobody else in there. Second Life is synchronous: one shared persistent world, land you buy, placement you do by hand.
You can't reach Second Life by removing a feature. You have to add back the one thing Will designed out, and he gave the reason: "without the liabilities, which is that the 14-year-old can kill you or that you've invested all this time in your planet and somebody comes along and blows it up."
Second Life is the control group for the placement problem. Same ingredient, opposite architecture.
>a much, much older thing
2003 versus 2008: that's just five years, hardly "much, much older". The genuinely much older ancestors are Lucasfilm's Habitat in 1986 and LambdaMOO in 1990 for shared worlds, and NetHack bones files and The Sims Exchange in 2000 for pollination. My point is that you and other people keep forgetting or never knew the full history.
>this doesn't look like it's making any new observations
My comment's third paragraph says this mechanism has been "reinvented every few years by people who don't know it has a history or a name." Telling me it's old is agreement filed as objection, making my point for me.
The observations in there: the matching and placement layer is the invention, not the editor. Curation comes free, because download counts rank quality better than a designer can, since thousands of people each pick for their own taste instead of one person guessing at everyone's. And this keeps dying because nobody is paid to own it.
>abysmal gameplay that could never persuade anyone to start up a game of Spore
One million copies and 25 million uploaded creations in the first 17 days. 100 million creations by May 2009, averaging 307,000 a day, 31,017,761 of them creatures, more than 19 times the number of known species on Earth. Two million copies in three weeks; EEDAR put lifetime sales near 2.8 million, or 3.2 million counting the Creature Creator.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251207022405/https://ir.ea.com...
Spore's TTP (Time To Penis) was negative. The Spore team coined the term, and Chaim optimized the tools so well that it went negative: players, testers and "children" were building and sharing penis-shaped creature monsters during the pre-release beta phase, before the Creature Creator was even officially launched to the public. The first public use of the term was Margaret Robertson's GDC 2009 talk "SPORE's Wake: What Seriously Happened?", at 38:00, and Engadget wrote it up the same day:
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1317/
https://web.archive.org/web/20191115084555/https://www.engad...
It then got referenced several times in the hilarious series that parodies a game development company, "Mythic Quest":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_xqyIMwbew
And the Creature Creator shipped standalone for $10 in June 2008, three months before the game: an editor sold as a product with no gameplay attached, which had over three million creatures uploaded before the game existed. One million of those came in its first week. At E3 that July, Will noted that fans had created 1,589,000 creatures in about 18 days, the same as the number of known species on Earth, and put that at doing God's work at 38% efficiency.
This is the same playbook we used before for The Sims which was released in 2000: I implemented the character animation system, pipeline, and a standalone tool called SimShow, which we released in 1999, before the game was released, that enabled players to create their own skins. So just like Spore, there was already lots of user created content for The Sims on the day it was released.
https://www.geocities.ws/shayla_jade/simshow.html
Here's a more recent reimagination of SimShow that runs in the browser:
>This tutorial is to help familiarize you with using Sim Show and it's uses. "Sim Show" is used to help preview the skins you've made for your sims.
Then After The Sims was released, I published The Sims Transmogrifier to enable players to create their own objects:
https://www.thesimstransmogrifier.com/TransmogrifierDocument...
>What Transmogrifier Is: Transmogrifier is simple tool that enables many people to create their own content for The Sims. Like SimShow, it is limited in scope, so that it's easy to use. Transmogrifier lets you edit the text of the catalog product description, change the price, and most importantly it exports and imports all of the sprite images, so you can edit them with paint programs like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.
Your separation of editor from game is right, and it runs the opposite way from your conclusion. The mechanism stood up without the gameplay. The gameplay is what needed carrying.
>It hasn't been much of a success.
620,000 monthly actives as of December 2025. A $650 million a year internal economy. Linden Lab has spent $1.3 billion building it and paid about $1.1 billion to creators, keeping 10% and giving creators 90%. Spend per active user around $190 a year against Roblox's $12. Average resident tenure about 14 years. 23 years old, still running, and investors have never taken money out.
https://gamesbeat.com/linden-lab-has-spent-1-3b-building-sec...
Call that unimpressive if you like, but look at what it does to your argument. You say stripping the gameplay off Spore leaves Second Life. If it leaves a 23-year-old platform that has paid a billion dollars to the people who make the content, the stripped version is the part that works. Which is what I said.
The right inference from "great editor, weak game" is not that the editor is worthless. It's run it again with a good game. People did. Super Mario Maker: 7.2 million courses by May 2016, played over 600 million times, on 3.5 million units sold, and roughly 68.6 million courses uploaded across its life. Then LittleBigPlanet, Dreams, Animal Crossing dream addresses, Drivatars, Steam Workshop. This model has never failed because players didn't want to make or share things.
It fails the same way every time, and those two make my point rather than yours. Mario Maker's online services went offline in April 2024. LittleBigPlanet 3's servers were pulled in January 2024 "temporarily," then kept off indefinitely that April, wiping 16 years of player levels with no warning:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/22/24137357/sony-is-abruptly...
Drivatars rotted. The Sims Exchange is gone. Spore's servers are somehow still up. Cheap to build, expensive to maintain, no recurring revenue, so it's always first on the chopping block. "The knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode" is the symptom. Nobody being paid to own it is the cause.
That's the argument. It was never about the modeling tools.