No Man’s Sky
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Clearly the game doesn't have 18*10^18 unique planets, since this is impossible. The problem this game has is, does it have enough variance in its planet generation, so that the average player will not notice a pattern.
The planets I have seen all looked mostly the same, with slightly different color schemes and animals made from generic pre-built parts. Unless the devs are only showing a couple of percent of the game, getting the 10 random samples from the game, all of which show a very similar planet is almost impossible.
I don't think this is impossible, since most of those planets will never be visited and hence will never have to be generated. It's possible to have that many planets in principle with just a handful of parameters, but if no player ever has the time to visit more than a few...
Unique - 1. existing as the only one or as the sole example; single; solitary in type or characteristics: a unique copy of an ancient manuscript. 2. having no like or equal; unparalleled; incomparable: Bach was unique in his handling of counterpoint. 3. limited in occurrence to a given class, situation, or area: a species unique to Australia. 4. limited to a single outcome or result; without alternative possibilities: Certain types of problems have unique solutions. 5. not typical; unusual: She has a very unique smile.
By those definitions, their planets are not unique. If your definition of unique differs from those established by the language we are using, then you have to specify this.
I wonder how many arguments ultimately boil down to this kind of misunderstandings over words. And it doesn't help that marketers will happily use loaded words like "unique" to create hype.
I think it could be done online since there is no strict text limit and it helps with understanding.
Will try it next time.
The problem is you can have an unimaginably large number of unique planets but yet they still all end up looking the same. Sure, the coastlines might vary or the colouring may be mildly different, but if the gameplay effect is negligible, then it's not an advantage.
I was (unrealistically) thinking that there would be planets with bustling cities, unique architecture, races, cultures and technologies.
They could even import races from nearby planets that have already been generated if it made sense that they would have colonised the new planet also.
Obviously those steps are very high-level and the genius would be in making it all actually work together... but yeh, just seems like the hype machine was in overdrive and really this is just Spore 1.1
I think that's why people keep on making games like this, but all past attempts have utterly failed at being interesting, except where human construction and ingenuity impinges on the random.
I don't argue there exists a tremendous number of configurations but I don't think they are not substantive enough to make a difference. Look at Spore if you want a case in point.
The hype train is very strong with this game because the media loves a good indie darling. I'm not convinced yet but have high hopes!
Spore suffered greatly from this: It was conceptually fascinating but really not much fun to actually play. Hopefully team No Man's Land have taken a lesson!
"If only," is all anyone ever says about Spore anymore. So if No Man's sky is the product, I don't care. If it's the beginning of some greater thing, however, I'm interested.
I personally would love a game where you choose a role, from tradepost manager to shipping magnate and the universe is large and complete enough to make this kind of role rewarding and interesting.
It's hard to say anything for sure given how little actual gameplay info they've provided so far, but it doesn't look like No Man's Sky's going to be that kind of simulation. It's very much a wanderer's game.
And after all that, the 3rd generated planet would need to take into account the story of the other other 2 planets and so on and so on.. (even if the planets don't interact, the missions still need variety)
I agree with your scripting idea, to extend upon it: they release the game with an editor, then a designer would go in and use the editor to pre-generate a set of planets to their liking, and then they could layer story, missions, characters etc on top. Sort of like a build your own Mass Effect.
There could even be wormholes joining all the player created universes together! Oh the possibilities...
A lot of first person shooters also don't have much of a storyline. There usually is one but it's not part of the multiplayer aspect.
I hope that at some point they add something like that virtual computer that Notch had added to 0x10c?
No matter what this is the first game that I've been excited about since I was a kid.
EDIT: Damn. The negativity in here is weird. What is it with gamer's that they just want to shit all over things? No gas planets...yeah they are real pricks for that. ??? What? A procedural universe is kind of a big deal. There's nothing that says that this thing can't be extended in the future as well.
The planets look the same? If you look at the screens from the PSX demo there was some really beautiful landscapes there. There is a palette that was chosen to reflect early sci-fi novel covers. That's actually really cool.
Remember, you can always go play another muddy-poo-brown cover based first person shooter. There will be 10 published by the time you finish reading this comment.
> Remember, you can always go play another muddy-poo-brown cover based first person shooter. There will be 10 published by the time you finish reading this comment.
This is not the first time we've seen this pattern before. Somebody promises The Ubergame, the all-singing, all-dancing Game of Games to End All Other Games, generated by writing down the wishlist of all possible features of a game in some genre and promising at least half of them. The appearance of "procedural content" and the resulting large numbers is not the first time we've seen this, either.
The result, up to this point, is rather uniform... what actually gets delivered is a "meh" game, in some sense because while all the endless list of features were getting checked off nobody took any time to put a game in there.
Here's one historical example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD
Many of them never even get released.
I rather fully expect that No Man's Sky gets released, gets reviewed well, and then about a month in, people start realizing there isn't much "there" there.
One problem is that people don't understand how to think about procedural generation. Quadrillions of planets nothing... why not octillions? The number of possible outcomes of the procedural system is irrelevant. The sum total of all possible Minecraft seeds and all possible spaces within those seeds is within spitting distance of the number of orders of magnitude of what you'd need to pave over the entire Milky Way galaxy, but nevertheless one can pretty much explore Minecraft and see just about everything there is to offer from the landscape generator in a month... and I'm being generous. The proper measure of procedural generation is not the raw number of combinations, but how many truly distinct things can be generated, and whether or not the parameters can interact to produce unexpected things. For instance, my favorite thing I've seen in Minecraft was an island with a cave that happened to cut right through the outside of the island, producing a space within it where the ocean was basically one of the walls of the cave. Unrealistic, but cool, and a credit to the ways things interacted with each other.
Anyways, to sum up, if this isn't your first time around the hype cycle on a game like this, it's hard not to see similarities to things we've already seen before, draw comparisons, and want to deflate the hype bubble. The end result of this may be a good game, it probably won't be a great game, it has a decent chance of still being a bad game to play even if sometimes pretty to look at, and odds are extremely high that it won't actually match the expectations that anybody has for it.
If those predictions are wrong, I won't have problems saying so. Maybe this is the one. No sarcasm. It's possible. But don't, you know, pour thousands of dollars into preordered goods on it or anything, like apparently some have for Star Citizen, one of the other Everything Games currently out there. http://www.reaxxion.com/10195/why-star-citizen-is-likely-goi... (Kickstarting an Everything Game is unfortunately quite simple... even approximately finishing it is quite another.)
See also: Spore, Fable and most of the latter half of Peter Molyneux's career (Black and White too), all of the iterations of Elite past the first one. Some of these turned out OK (at best), none so much as resembled their hype.
I believe them if they say it'll only appeal to a certain demographic, but so far the game they've been advertising seems designed to appeal to as large a demographic as possible. From their interviews, if you like space exploration or combat or walking with dinosaurs or any number of other things, then this game has them. So what do they know, that they're not saying, that will lead this game not to appeal to all of these groups of people they've been advertising to?
I've been Molyneux'd too many times. Is this your first big game launch?
What is the proper reaction when someone spends years promising things they almost certainly can't deliver? The game that they're describing sounds amazing, but it also sounds beyond the ability of a large team to deliver, let alone a tiny one. As others have mentioned, this isn't the first time that we've been down this road, nor the second, nor the third. So it's hard to get excited when we know what's most likely at the other end.
Maybe someday we'll be able to develop the game that they're advertising, and that they're going to charge people real money for. But 2015 is probably not that year.
I always love the technology behind procedural games, but I still ultimately prefer an environment and story crafted by human beings. Perhaps No Man's Sky will have sufficiently advanced algorithms as to give me the same variety and intensity of experience that hand-crafted game environments do, but as I said I remain skeptical.
So there you go, the target audience for this revolutionary game is people who are confused by the existence of gas planets.
> Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
> Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Well, it's a space ship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.
Or space between planets, that's a bit meh and needed in a model of reality, how about just a drop-down menu to select where to teleport your ship to next?
I suspect the target audience is people who want to play an infinite universe space game, to whom little details like "An approximation of real life" tends to kind of be important. See: People in this thread, interested in the game, criticising it for the above.
The game isn't supposed to be a game for game's sake, in other words; it's intended to just be an adventure. "Winning" and "losing" are a means towards that end.