World without end
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
It would be far more interesting if, as you play, you can participate in a large economy, slowly growing your gameplay experience out from say, a single guy mining and selling minerals on a planet, to an galactic empire.
Even better if you could participate at just about any part of the virtual economy, buying, selling, crafting, shipping, policing, fighting, robbing, pirating. You could own a store on a space station or a repair shop, make enough and buy a ship, or buy a station. Now you're managing station ops.
Exploration is just one of the X's in 4x, and I feel like there's so much untapped potential in the genre.
Edit: the other suggestions below offer about a 10th of the admittedly promised gameplay and breadth of Star Citizen.
Edit: Disclosure - I am not playing it anymore, although I did disappear to reality for few months.
The new Powerplay update looks good though. Do you reckon we'll see any announcements at E3?
No Man's Sky is the first game in 30 years that I feel will capture the awe and wonder I felt when playing the original Starflight on my family's Tandy computer back in the 80s.
The vast emptiness between systems, the uncharted nebulae, the wormholes, the topology/bio scans, mining, specimen collecting, and the mysterious force that was at the heart of the plot. Those things kept me engaged to the point of aimlessly sweeping the entire star chart coordinate by coordinate, scanning every planet, encountering probes, the risk of encountering that alien race that could almost always destroy you, finding ruins and logs left by past explorers, examining the stats of every colony of fungus and biped I could find within the fuel-range from the ship my rover had. The thrill of being able to land near a major mineral deposit without dying because the gravity was juuuust on the cusp of your lander's tolerance. It was like exploring with the crew of the USS Enterprise.
Maybe my 40-something self will never be as receptive to such mundane, non-action exploratory gameplay as my tween self, but I hope, hope, hope this game delivers even a fraction of what I loved about Starflight. The first-person nature and the multiple climates and biomes promises a much more interesting experience of exploration than Starflight ever had. The gameplay we've seen thus far is absolutely beautiful.
I am very hopeful.
I wonder if you could make a 2D procedurally-generated exploration game interesting.
Ultimately Minecraft does more by doing less. The art and design are more interesting because they're cute and different. The roughness becomes part of the charm. Notch understood keenly that mechanics are way more important than polish.
Minecraft has a tighter focus, it doesn't waste developer time doing stupid shit for stupid reasons. So much crap that went into Starbound I could really just do without. The procedurally generated worlds, who really cares about the zillions of worlds you can explore, after you've visited five or so, you've seen them all. A lot of design effort went into making a stupid thing look and feel good.
It's like they went and built an MVP by throwing shit against the wall. You're just wasting your potential audience's time by not doing basic research. I see a ton of games like this, crap that might be good in the future, but I don't want to tough it out because the game isn't fun to play now.
Now, Starbound in all likelihood still made a shitload of money, goes to show you how much opportunity is still there in video games, but the free lunch is going to end at some point.
[1] http://www.gamespot.com/videos/reality-check-how-does-no-man...
However, there is no simultaneous multiplayer. You won't see other players running around your world.
To achieve what we expect, the programmer needs to implement features that allow emergent gameplay and unpredictable situations to arise alongside procedurally generated settings. There are few single player games that actually pull this off. Dwarf Fortress, ARMA, and GTA V to name a few.
the game designer needs to design
Additionally, emergent gameplay, by it's nature of being emergent is not really designed. It's a sort of iterative process of implementing a feature and testing the consequences.
Why? It was a very fun game and the narrative arch was a work of beauty. The creature editor and Sporepedia granted unlimited possibilities. My real guess is that entitled players were simply out of touch with the industry capabilities.
"Spore was a disappointment by design. Will Wright prefered "The Sim's sales than Half Life's scores"[1]. They catered to the Sim's public. That's why you have a "design everything" feature. And mechanics so simple.
I remember sprinting through the game, realizing the phases had really simple and boring mechanics, and designing all stuff in less than a minute. When I finally reached the space phase it got a little meatier, but no enough to cater my interest for long. And It had severe interaction problems (I have an interstellar empire, but I have to navigate to each planet to collect its manufactured resources? Come on!)
It was a game with a premise for the hardcore strategy/sim fans that was made to be like the Sims. Biggest disapointment in gaming ever!"
[1] http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2008/09/08/wil-wright-pr....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDNMTnXoG9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTJFChB5wyY
There should be more games like this. The technology obviously isn't the limitation here.
So Slartibartfast then: "[Norway] was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges."
Holy cow, that's a brave move!
They can still have a sophisticated generation method, which does encode several different features, that can co-occur in unexpected ways, but it can't be a deep interaction. In effect, the designers are exploring the space of equations for world generation. The advantage is they can have billions of planets without storing them or expensively generating them. Analytical solutions are extraordinarily efficient - it's just a formula, you punch in the seed and you're done. No iteration or search.
In the videos I've seen, the planets all look alike, just different shapes and colours for trees, grass, terrain.
Still, I admire their dream and fervor and hope it's more interesting than I expect.
You could fly through space to any of the stars you see, it was procedurally generated planets, bright artistic colour design choices, etc.
The only thing that seems different is the much more content and actual realism in No Man's Sky.
Realism vs Cinematics :/