17 ms·
My Ten Years in No Man's Sky
- thataccount 1mo agoThe scary thing about this article is how quickly ten years can pass—especially if you are in a video game world for many of those ten years.
- Brajeshwar 1mo agoThe days are long, the decades are fast. (Something like that)
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- kergonath 1mo agoI know, right? I got the same feeling for WoW’s 20th anniversary.
- somenameforme 1mo agoHere's a "fun" one. The XBox 360 release is closer to the US release of the NES, than it is to today. I read this one before and had to double check it, because that stings lol. But yeah, it's true. If you're planning to have kids, don't wait til a good time, because wow do the decades fly by - and "good times" like you might envision never come. There's always something that could be better, and with the world going through so many inflection points - predicting the future now is less possible than ever before.
- jambalaya8 1mo agoI would've said, if you plan to have your wisdom teeth removed, to be more inclusive. Actually, I think it is far easier to predict the future than ever before, but only because we are heading down some pretty distressing pathways where predicting and creating are more intertwined than ever before. ps: no thanks to trading names :)
- somenameforme 29d agoKids are a real issue, because age just sneaks up on you. By the time a woman starts hitting her mid to late 30s, it starts getting very hard to have children. And you are in a constant race against menopause, made even more stressful if you want to have multiple children. My wife and I got very lucky on this front, but nobody in their right mind should ever plan to start anywhere near this age. And the worst part is that we both turned out to love having children which is kind of ironic because neither of us are especially fond of kids, at least other peoples' kids I guess. We'd probably have 5+ if we'd started earlier, but the chance of that happening now are near zero. I regret almost nothing in my life, except for not having children earlier, and the only reason that didn't happen is because I wasn't really aware that sometime in your mid 20s we all apparently just step into a time machine.
- epiccoleman 1mo agoGood god. The 360 and the NES are perfectly chosen to sting me personally (and I'm sure many others of my generation). A story I've told too many times at work: I was born in 1991. The first game console I owned was an NES which we got one year, for Christmas, new in box.[0] I can't imagine I was any younger than 5 or 6, first off because I remember the Christmas and second off because I don't think my parents would have bought a game console for me as a toddler. So that means they'd have bought it in 96 or 97. But the N64 released in '96! So we were two console generations ahead of the NES by that year. So when I tell this story to co-workers, I always end: "where did they find it?? Anyway, the 360 was also a sort of signpost in my gaming career. I don't think it was the first console I self-purchased, but it was kinda the first "grown up" console, I guess. Many happy evenings spent during high school with friends on XBL. tl;dr - thanks, I hate your fun fact [0]: From some quick research it appears to have been the "NES Challenge Set," and I saw reports of people buying them as late as 1997, so maybe I'm not as unique as I thought.
- UltraSane 1mo agoMy parents bought the original NES when it still came with the R.O.B. robot.
- michal_kurowski 1mo ago[flagged]
- ralusek 1mo agoOne of the most interesting talks on the math behind procedural generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9RyEiEzMiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9RyEiEzMiU That presentation was foundational for me personally wrt quite a few things.
- Retric 1mo agoThe issue with procedural generation isn’t how to do it, the issue is how to keep it from being boring.
- nrjames 1mo agoIt's the Bowls of Oatmeal problem: https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-generation/ https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-ge...
- tejohnso 1mo agoYeah the scope and detail of the universe is great, but it still feels like a well polished demo to me. The interactions with intelligent beings are very repetitive and boring. I can wander around and build things, but I never really feel strongly engaged like I do in a game like Valheim or GTA.
- 21asdffdsa12 1mo agoIf you add civilizations and intelligence to procedural generation- you get really fast into foundation prime radiant territory- where you generalize from huts to radioactive ruins or substrate (matrices) - the rise and fall of civilization from first principles. To put that into deterministic math- is fascinating - but then to add the players input and have the fate diverge.. As in deterministic circumstances + a historic noise + a formula for civilizational fungi. Basically a recursive scenario-tree- with branches for capabilities- and regressions as loops to previous iterrations. The noise function is the index and the dice - and the tree modifies its branches depending on the iterration. You gain a panopticon- your chance of accidental nuclear war wither- the loop back to savagery reduces in likelihood. And so on and so forth.
- alienbaby 1mo agoHug of death already I think
- mikestew 1mo agoSlashdotted: https://archive.ph/RnExB https://archive.ph/RnExB
- Forgeties79 1mo ago"The Galactic Hub" is the best. Very active community, ongoing ambitious projects (many completed), it's really so much fun. It's also easy to get in to it. They have a "taxi service" on discord where a user gets on the mic and coordinates with you to bring you to the hub worlds so you don't have to do it manually. If you're remotely considering it, join up. I hop on every month or two and it's a treat.
- iagooar 1mo ago10 years. I still have the game in my Steam library, waiting for me to try it. I guess I will never try it, once you hit your 40s, games lose their appeal anyway.
- SleekoNiko 1mo agoNo Man's Sky is great, but it does feel a bit too relaxed for the kind of experience I'm typically looking for in a game these days. What kind of games did you play before and how do you enjoy spending your time now?
- john_strinlai 1mo ago>I guess I will never try it, once you hit your 40s, games lose their appeal anyway. you say this as if it is a law of nature, but into my 60s, i still quite enjoy relaxing with a good game. no mans sky is one of them!
- steveBK123 1mo agoI think it's a free time by age thing? Would be interesting in your observations on the other side of this, but to me it seems related to those studies showing the trough of happiness is on average the mid-30s to mid-50s. Most studies ascribe this to being the overlap of peak career hustle, childrearing, taking care of aging parents, and personal health scares all hitting at once. Putting aside the obvious emotional toll, to me it looks/feels like a dearth of free time. Personally I find it hard to find blocks of time to do anything "for myself" that are more than 30-60 minutes. Video games now, compared to my youth, seem to be much deeper and entail much longer time commitments.
- john_strinlai 1mo agoi certainly played less in my 40s/early-50s than i do now, mostly due to lack of free time and other commitments, so i totally understand what you and the parent are saying. but i never stopped playing entirely. in those 30-60 minutes where my wife would watch her weekly show, i would pick up where i left off in a game. i find most games today are pretty well-designed around being able to play in spurts, even if the game is long + deep. for longer story games, though, i usually keep a notebook beside me to jot down some context to help me pick it back up if i know it will be a while (mainly because my memory isn't what it used to be).
- retrac98 1mo agoI was so pissed off by the lies around the launch of this game and subsequently being refused a refund that I never went back to it.
- gtaylor 1mo agoThey really turned it around. You should check it out. But yeah, super crappy launch.
- john_strinlai 1mo agothis is an understatement (on both fronts) in my opinion. the launch was beyond super crappy, and "turned it around" is underselling it. "the engoodening of no mans sky" was a youtube video that came out ~5 years ago and covers the story of the launch up until the point the video was made. since then they've had several more really amazing (and compeltely free) updates.
- squigz 1mo ago> and "turned it around" is underselling it. This. I really feel that the good will they burned up with the launch - and I'm not denying it was very poorly handled - they've made up for 10x over since then. Every expedition is like a whole new DLC, but they've released every single one of them for free.
- dev0p 1mo ago"Sean we forgive you" became a meme for a reason. The fact that to this day they keep working on the game is truly noteworthy; they could have called it quits at any point in time, especially after NMS got good enough. Obviously it's not purely ego driven (if at all), so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative. I suppose the fact that it sold so much throughout the years gave them enough runway to actually work on it with no worries? And I suppose that people would be skeptical of a new game launch by this studio, thus dooming them to work on NMS for eternity... we'll see how Light No Fire's launch will do.
- jackb4040 1mo agoI can't believe how little this article says about the game itself. It's basically the author taking a victory lap for being the game's #1 fan since launch. If I didn't already know what the game looked like, I would leave still not knowing.
- dpoloncsak 1mo agoThe OP is also the author, and writing on 'NMS Spot .com". This is an article for fans, with an audience of fans. Explaining the basics would be unnecessary for the vast majority of readers. Now, maybe posting to HN requires you address your new audience as well, but I'm just pointing out the above.
- blakespot 1mo agoI am the author. I've been running the blog these 10 years. I sat down to write about the game, summarizing it and how it has grown over the years at this huge milestone. And then, as I started writing, it occurred to me that ... I -- a person who has been playing this game daily for ten long years -- am probably more of a story that some may find notable than anything I could write on my "just for fun" NMS blog as a general recap of the game's history, with so many mainstream gaming sites surely doing the same in articles and YT videos. So, instead, I just told about my time playing it. Obviously a lot of people couldn't care less about what I've been up to all this time (that's not lost on me!), but I'm still happy with how I decided to mark the occasion and what I decided to write about.
- zbikowski 1mo agoDoes anyone know what the roughly square-aspect monitor in the middle of his 3-monitor setup is? Looks interesting but I can't zoom in far enough to see a logo, and the Upgrading the Gaming PC[0] post. Thanks [0] <https://nmsspot.com/2023/01/20/upgrading-the-gaming-pc/ https://nmsspot.com/2023/01/20/upgrading-the-gaming-pc/>
- jabroni_salad 1mo agoIm having trouble zooming on the image but I'm pretty sure benq has the only 3:2 desktop display on the market that isn't a graphics tablet. You should also look at the LG Dualup if this kinda thing interests you. https://www.benq.com/en-us/monitor/programming/rd280u.html https://www.benq.com/en-us/monitor/programming/rd280u.html https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b-dualup-monitor https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b-dualup-monitor
- zbikowski 1mo agoThanks for the reply. The Benq definitely interests me. Maybe one day companies will be more incentivized to make "strange" aspect ratios like this.
- haunter 1mo agoIt's an LG Dual Up (you can find the info in some earlier posts) Technically it's 8:9 so not a perfect square, 2560 x 2880 https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b-dualup-monitor https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b-dualup-monitor
- Incipient 1mo agoI actually really enjoyed the game on day 1! Unfortunately, even with all the updates - they never fixed my main gripe - each planet is just lifeless, and it's basically the same few square kilometres copy and pasted over the whole planet (I'm about 120h played). I wished they somehow made it more exciting to explore.
- squigz 1mo agoHave you played somewhat recently? They've had a few expeditions that addressed variety in planets.
- enraged_camel 1mo agoI think that's the limit of procedural generation. What you're asking for probably requires gen-AI or similar.
- laughing_man 1mo agoWhen I was younger I was really excited about procedural generation, because it seemed like a way to give games replayability. And it does do that for certain types of strategy and builder games, e.g. MOO2 or Factorio. But, so far at least, it really doesn't work for first person games. You end up with a universe that's seemingly, but also endlessly boring.
- ajmurmann 1mo agoI used to quite enjoy exploring in Minecraft though.
- ux266478 1mo agoYou can do really complex and interesting stuff with procedural generation, even at-scale. You need a large breadth of well-designed rules, and then you need temporal simulation over that breadth. That simulated history is just as important as having a lot of high quality rules when you want to create a living, breathing world. Ultima Ratio Regum is an example of how important this time aspect really is, that a place needs to have a history. The real limitation is that virtual worlds get boring. It really doesn't matter how sophisticated they are. Generative AI can't help with that. It's not a problem of the structure, or needing some additional variety, or more sophisticated set of constraints. It's the simple fact that while you can day dream about endlessly flying around a galaxy, landing on planets, eventually it just becomes rote. It's a normal biological process of adaptation and normalization. Like how when you first move somewhere, everything is fresh and full of potential, and then 3 years on everything that was novel and cool has become just background noise.
- bopping_grommit 1mo agohttps://archive.ph/RnExB https://archive.ph/RnExB
- LostInTheWoods 1mo agoNever played, but it seems to me that this shares the same problem with Holodecks, from Star Trek, which is why would anyone ever want to leave?
- moomin 1mo agoSuch a frustrating game. Feels so big but it’s so insanely shallow. Mechanics abound, but they just don’t interact.
- adamrezich 1mo agoExactly. Every few years I return to the game (which I bought day one on PS4 and again later on PC when it was released there), each time hoping that the fundamental play experience has been enhanced after all these updates, but it hasn't. The best part about the game is still experiencing the “seamless” planet-to-space-to-planet transition for the first time.
- michal_kurowski 1mo agoPossible this isn't ten years of loving No Man's Sky so much as a self imposed bet to only play it until GTA 6 ships. Rockstar really is out here ruining lives on a delay.
- the_other_side 1mo agoIt's sick what Rockstar makes us do!
- x______________ 1mo agoAnyone else went along and reached the center of the universe on permadeath?
- glimshe 1mo agoBiggest gaming disappointment in my life. Could have been so much...
- ticulatedspline 1mo ago10 years later I can say they spent a lot of time putting lipstick on that pig, maybe even a dress and a tiara. Probably one of the nicest pigs out there, but it's still a pig and always will be.