8 ms·

That's pretty much the perfect description of NMS. Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful

by kjs3 7d ago

That's pretty much the perfect description of NMS. Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way. Oh look...this planet has 4 legged animals that are green and bumpy and the last one they were brown and spiky...but they move the same and act the same. Yawn.

glenstein 7d ago
I still think it's a remarkable success story and they can and should be incredibly proud of what they've built. But this vision of what is meant by cosmic depth and expansiveness seems to tragically miss the point. 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.
- k4j8 7d ago
  The best space exploration game I've played is Outer Wilds (https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/), but instead of the NMS sandbox there are puzzles.
  - peheje 7d ago
    one of those games where i wish i could erase my memory just to play it again, still think about it, i think it's like a year ago i played it, maybe more. idk. great game.
  - benterris 7d ago
    Outer Wilds is really an amazing game. I highly recommend playing it without looking at anything online: when I started I reached for google every time I was stuck, just to realise I could have found answers if I has searched just a little bit more. After a while I stuck to a rule to never look at answers online, and it was such a bliss to finally crack puzzles after trying lots of different things.
    - zargon 7d ago
      Unpopular opinion, but for me, no amount of puzzles/story can offset the utter obnoxious frustration of the time loop.
      - lompad 6d ago
        In case you want to enjoy it anyway, I've got a recommendation: there are quite a few mods for the game, including one which quadruples the time limit, essentially making the time between major events 4 times as long. 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.
        zargon 6d ago
        I didn't think to check for mods. Thanks.
  - IshKebab 7d ago
    I played it recently. Very good game (although mediocre ending if we're being honest). The thing they did really really well is that it's true exploration in the sense that you could complete the game very quickly if you've already played it, because the only thing you need to complete it is some knowledge that you discover by exploring. 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.
    - dyzone 7d ago
      > although mediocre ending if we're being honest I'm not saying ending was perfect, but I can't think of a better way of ending it.
  - socalgal2 7d ago
    I couldn't get into every day dialog etched in stone. It's one thing to find an old ruin that has some profound sounding thing like "All men are created equal". But it's beyond the pale for people to write tablets that are effectively mundane things like "Woke up and had breakfast".
- soulofmischief 7d ago
  Have you played Outer Wilds? It nails this feeling. If you haven't played it, don't read or watch a single thing about it and just play it with zero expectations.
  - intreble 7d ago
    100%. I installed and began playing Outer Wilds on gamepass thinking that I was playing Outer Worlds. After about 10 minutes I knew I was wrong, it didn't feel like an Obsidian game. One of the best mistakes I ever made when it came to gaming.
    - soulofmischief 7d ago
      I wonder how many other people have had that same delightfully lucky misfortune. :)
- embedding-shape 7d ago
  What do you think people want a true space exploration game to feel like?
  - chrisjj 7d ago
    Depends on which they want more. True space or true game.
  - weard_beard 7d ago
    Rick and Morty. Procgen surfaces but a human story under every furniture-aliens-sit-on-humans multiverse. 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.
  - dividefuel 7d ago
    There are different ways to take it. 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.
- ryandrake 7d ago
  I think Elite Dangerous had this same issue, at least the years after it was released when I played it. You have this whole to-scale galaxy to explore, but the vast majority of them contain no story, no life, no space stations, no other players, and are just similar rocks and noble gas bags over and over. Once you've seen about 100 systems, you've seen them all. Which is likely what our real galaxy is like, too. The game is 2 million light years wide, but a meter deep.
  - yayachiken 6d ago
    I always find it interesting to read takes like this. I get it, I also bounced multiple times off Elite Dangerous due to boredom. 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?
swat535 7d ago
It's not just NMS.. the "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" is a plight of all AAA games these days. 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.
- porphyra 7d ago
  Fallout 4's endgame with the autogenerated "quests" of defending settlements get boring extremely fast.
  - LarsDu88 7d ago
    I really hated the fact that Fallout 4 doesn't communicate to you what missions are procedural and which ones are actually handcrafted. This is the most frustrating part of that game. The procedural missions lack narrative closure, so you keep playing for a payoff that never comes
  - TranquilMarmot 7d ago
    This was awful in Fallout 4, but a lot of fun with friends in Fallout 76
    - ethbr1 6d ago
      Weird. It's almost like synthetic content is less fulfilling to humans than friendship.
- Loughla 7d ago
  The far cry games should be good but just aren't because of the repetitive bullshit. Clutch Nixon is the only thing good thing about the last few games.
kaashif 7d ago
Spore had that but I kind of liked it. I guess that was 20 years ago almost, maybe my standards were lower. It felt charming seeing others' animals, some of them looked pretty cool.
- DonHopkins 7d ago
  There's a fundamental difference between procedurally generated worlds and how Spore actually works. 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 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/wright-stuff/ 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-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 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 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-wrights-spore-demo-at-gdc-3-11-2005-9eab0cedc583 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://donhopkins.com/home/WiredSporeDiagram.jpg [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280831 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/ 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.
porphyra 7d ago
It's even worse when you see the exact same animal asset but scaled differently with a different color hue on a completely different planet. Ruins the immersion immediately. Obviously, it has come a long, long way since the 2016 article, but still.
- empyrrhicist 7d ago
  For me it's the asteroids. Having space being so densely populated with procedural asteroids is immediately, irreversibly immersion breaking for me. Like... space would be opaque and life on these plants would immediately cease in a cataclysm of bombardment. This was also one of many gripes I had with Starfield.
  - montagg 7d ago
    I think you gotta set aside some of that to enjoy both as Sci-Fi games, not space sim games. In Sci-Fi, asteroids are close together and you can shoot them for resources or lose an enemy in them like a dark forest, because those things are fun. IRL, they are ridiculously far apart and not nearly as fun. It's always a potential danger to one's enjoyment to know too much about something though. :)
    - empyrrhicist 6d ago
      I mean, I do, but there's a reason KSP is so popular despite all the flaws.
  - 00ze 7d ago
    Well this update fixes your asteroid complaint then Adds persistent asteroid belts, asteroid mining, and base building on asteroids Go wild
    - empyrrhicist 6d ago
      [dead]
Twirrim 7d ago
I played it about a year ago for the first significant time after having bought it some point a long time back. 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?)
scotty79 7d ago
That's funny because that's exactly what I feel when I travel IRL.
geokon 7d ago
Isn't Mincecraft basically that? I've never played it, so would be curious to hear from someone who's played both. From the outside both look very dull/soulless and yet people spend hours playing Minecraft building things - just engaging with their imaginations
- bluefirebrand 7d ago
  Basic Minecraft is basically that imo 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.
  - root_axis 7d ago
    Even vanilla minecraft is a far superior experience to NMS. Minecraft's approach to procedural generation poduces more meaningful exploration because its terrain, resources, structures, and building system interact far more deeply with the gameplay than NMS linear number-go-up grind. 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.
- marcus_holmes 7d ago
  Building in Minecraft is a very different beast than building in NMS though. The prebuilt cabins and machines of NMS aren't the rabbit hole of redstone engineering that Minecraft has.
- Pifanjr 7d ago
  I think one thing that Minecraft does very well is that it does not push the player towards any of its game systems, which allows the player to make up their own fun. No Man's Sky on the other hand throws a lot of different game systems at you. Just having points of interests pushes the player into just going from one to the other instead of them exploring what might make the game fun for them.
- 6d ago
Ars_Armegis 7d ago
A lot of criticism from no man's sky, like this one, comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what no man's sky is, i fear... No Man's Sky really is just a sandbox game. a sandbox game doesn't need infinitely complex mechanics, it just needs to give you a blank canvas to do what you want to do... minecraft has like what 40 biomes, no man's sky has practically infinite biomes, is that not enough? you can build a unique ship nobody else will ever have, you can make a unique base on a unique planet and even build cities with other players, you can decide to be a space pirate or a wanderer and just explore to your heart's content, is that not enough? what else do people want? people always say nms planets are boring but is it just because they are a single biome? sure it would be amazing to have real planets, like light no fire but for all 18 quintillion something planets, but that would mean having a 30gb folder for every planet! just because they're procedurally generated doesn't mean they don't use up storage when they are generated, and it would be, i think, completely unfeasible to offer what light no fire promises to do but for the entire universe. IMHO you should view the entire nms universe as your equivalent to a minecraft world, and every planet as a unique-ish (there is some repetition but really not a lot) biome in that world. at least it helped me contextualize what the game does, because you're really not meant to spend the entire game on one planet. it's no man's sky, not no man's land...
- Vegenoid 7d ago
  The difference is that Minecraft gives you much more granular access to manipulate the world, which enables a lot people to feel more connected to the world and become more invested in it.
- dansquizsoft 7d ago
  Oh, my mistake, now that you've explained it like this it is magically fun for me now.
  - 00ze 7d ago
    Oh, everyone else's mistake; we didn't realize all of human output had to satisfy you...of all people!
  - 7d ago
walrus01 7d ago
> Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way. 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.
- protocolture 7d ago
  >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. 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.
  - TonyStr 7d ago
    I haven't played Daggerfall, but Arena had hand-crafted main dungeons. There were side quests that took you to proc gen dungeons (that sucked) and a massive proc gen wilderness outside the cities that you never had any reason to go into. The towns were also proc gen, but that mostly amounted to just shuffling around the inns and shops, to give weight to the "ask NPCs for directions" mechanic.
- 7d ago
Merkur 7d ago
It’s the simulation effect - From the perspective of a interstellar travler you too are not meaning different from any other two legged quasi intelligent naked ape. :) Dwarf fortress or rim world solves that by generating personalities.
Ekaros 7d ago
I feel like my issue was that every "site" on different planet was the same. Maybe I just hit poor randomisation or something. But I felt that I found exactly same thing just on different coloured environment. Or then things like pirate ships were just the same. Every single time...
- kjs3 6d ago
  No, you didn't hit bad randomization. That's the game. It's just that some people apparently like that or can look at two identical structures with different color tints and convince themselves "Totally different! Game is awesome!".

by kjs3 7d ago

glenstein 7d ago

I still think it's a remarkable success story and they can and should be incredibly proud of what they've built. But this vision of what is meant by cosmic depth and expansiveness seems to tragically miss the point. 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.

k4j8 7d ago
The best space exploration game I've played is Outer Wilds (https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/), but instead of the NMS sandbox there are puzzles.
- peheje 7d ago
  one of those games where i wish i could erase my memory just to play it again, still think about it, i think it's like a year ago i played it, maybe more. idk. great game.
- benterris 7d ago
  Outer Wilds is really an amazing game. I highly recommend playing it without looking at anything online: when I started I reached for google every time I was stuck, just to realise I could have found answers if I has searched just a little bit more. After a while I stuck to a rule to never look at answers online, and it was such a bliss to finally crack puzzles after trying lots of different things.
  - zargon 7d ago
    Unpopular opinion, but for me, no amount of puzzles/story can offset the utter obnoxious frustration of the time loop.
    - lompad 6d ago
      In case you want to enjoy it anyway, I've got a recommendation: there are quite a few mods for the game, including one which quadruples the time limit, essentially making the time between major events 4 times as long. 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.
      - zargon 6d ago
        I didn't think to check for mods. Thanks.
- IshKebab 7d ago
  I played it recently. Very good game (although mediocre ending if we're being honest). The thing they did really really well is that it's true exploration in the sense that you could complete the game very quickly if you've already played it, because the only thing you need to complete it is some knowledge that you discover by exploring. 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.
  - dyzone 7d ago
    > although mediocre ending if we're being honest I'm not saying ending was perfect, but I can't think of a better way of ending it.
- socalgal2 7d ago
  I couldn't get into every day dialog etched in stone. It's one thing to find an old ruin that has some profound sounding thing like "All men are created equal". But it's beyond the pale for people to write tablets that are effectively mundane things like "Woke up and had breakfast".
soulofmischief 7d ago
Have you played Outer Wilds? It nails this feeling. If you haven't played it, don't read or watch a single thing about it and just play it with zero expectations.
- intreble 7d ago
  100%. I installed and began playing Outer Wilds on gamepass thinking that I was playing Outer Worlds. After about 10 minutes I knew I was wrong, it didn't feel like an Obsidian game. One of the best mistakes I ever made when it came to gaming.
  - soulofmischief 7d ago
    I wonder how many other people have had that same delightfully lucky misfortune. :)
embedding-shape 7d ago
What do you think people want a true space exploration game to feel like?
- chrisjj 7d ago
  Depends on which they want more. True space or true game.
- weard_beard 7d ago
  Rick and Morty. Procgen surfaces but a human story under every furniture-aliens-sit-on-humans multiverse. 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.
- dividefuel 7d ago
  There are different ways to take it. 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.
ryandrake 7d ago
I think Elite Dangerous had this same issue, at least the years after it was released when I played it. You have this whole to-scale galaxy to explore, but the vast majority of them contain no story, no life, no space stations, no other players, and are just similar rocks and noble gas bags over and over. Once you've seen about 100 systems, you've seen them all. Which is likely what our real galaxy is like, too. The game is 2 million light years wide, but a meter deep.
- yayachiken 6d ago
  I always find it interesting to read takes like this. I get it, I also bounced multiple times off Elite Dangerous due to boredom. 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?

swat535 7d ago

It's not just NMS.. the "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" is a plight of all AAA games these days. 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.

porphyra 7d ago
Fallout 4's endgame with the autogenerated "quests" of defending settlements get boring extremely fast.
- LarsDu88 7d ago
  I really hated the fact that Fallout 4 doesn't communicate to you what missions are procedural and which ones are actually handcrafted. This is the most frustrating part of that game. The procedural missions lack narrative closure, so you keep playing for a payoff that never comes
- TranquilMarmot 7d ago
  This was awful in Fallout 4, but a lot of fun with friends in Fallout 76
  - ethbr1 6d ago
    Weird. It's almost like synthetic content is less fulfilling to humans than friendship.
Loughla 7d ago
The far cry games should be good but just aren't because of the repetitive bullshit. Clutch Nixon is the only thing good thing about the last few games.

kaashif 7d ago

Spore had that but I kind of liked it. I guess that was 20 years ago almost, maybe my standards were lower. It felt charming seeing others' animals, some of them looked pretty cool.

DonHopkins 7d ago
There's a fundamental difference between procedurally generated worlds and how Spore actually works. 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 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/wright-stuff/ 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-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 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 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-wrights-spore-demo-at-gdc-3-11-2005-9eab0cedc583 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://donhopkins.com/home/WiredSporeDiagram.jpg [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280831 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/ 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.

porphyra 7d ago

It's even worse when you see the exact same animal asset but scaled differently with a different color hue on a completely different planet. Ruins the immersion immediately. Obviously, it has come a long, long way since the 2016 article, but still.

empyrrhicist 7d ago
For me it's the asteroids. Having space being so densely populated with procedural asteroids is immediately, irreversibly immersion breaking for me. Like... space would be opaque and life on these plants would immediately cease in a cataclysm of bombardment. This was also one of many gripes I had with Starfield.
- montagg 7d ago
  I think you gotta set aside some of that to enjoy both as Sci-Fi games, not space sim games. In Sci-Fi, asteroids are close together and you can shoot them for resources or lose an enemy in them like a dark forest, because those things are fun. IRL, they are ridiculously far apart and not nearly as fun. It's always a potential danger to one's enjoyment to know too much about something though. :)
  - empyrrhicist 6d ago
    I mean, I do, but there's a reason KSP is so popular despite all the flaws.
- 00ze 7d ago
  Well this update fixes your asteroid complaint then Adds persistent asteroid belts, asteroid mining, and base building on asteroids Go wild
  - empyrrhicist 6d ago
    [dead]

Twirrim 7d ago

I played it about a year ago for the first significant time after having bought it some point a long time back. 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?)

scotty79 7d ago

That's funny because that's exactly what I feel when I travel IRL.

geokon 7d ago

Isn't Mincecraft basically that? I've never played it, so would be curious to hear from someone who's played both. From the outside both look very dull/soulless and yet people spend hours playing Minecraft building things - just engaging with their imaginations

bluefirebrand 7d ago
Basic Minecraft is basically that imo 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.
- root_axis 7d ago
  Even vanilla minecraft is a far superior experience to NMS. Minecraft's approach to procedural generation poduces more meaningful exploration because its terrain, resources, structures, and building system interact far more deeply with the gameplay than NMS linear number-go-up grind. 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.
marcus_holmes 7d ago
Building in Minecraft is a very different beast than building in NMS though. The prebuilt cabins and machines of NMS aren't the rabbit hole of redstone engineering that Minecraft has.
Pifanjr 7d ago
I think one thing that Minecraft does very well is that it does not push the player towards any of its game systems, which allows the player to make up their own fun. No Man's Sky on the other hand throws a lot of different game systems at you. Just having points of interests pushes the player into just going from one to the other instead of them exploring what might make the game fun for them.
6d ago

Ars_Armegis 7d ago

A lot of criticism from no man's sky, like this one, comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what no man's sky is, i fear... No Man's Sky really is just a sandbox game. a sandbox game doesn't need infinitely complex mechanics, it just needs to give you a blank canvas to do what you want to do... minecraft has like what 40 biomes, no man's sky has practically infinite biomes, is that not enough? you can build a unique ship nobody else will ever have, you can make a unique base on a unique planet and even build cities with other players, you can decide to be a space pirate or a wanderer and just explore to your heart's content, is that not enough? what else do people want? people always say nms planets are boring but is it just because they are a single biome? sure it would be amazing to have real planets, like light no fire but for all 18 quintillion something planets, but that would mean having a 30gb folder for every planet! just because they're procedurally generated doesn't mean they don't use up storage when they are generated, and it would be, i think, completely unfeasible to offer what light no fire promises to do but for the entire universe. IMHO you should view the entire nms universe as your equivalent to a minecraft world, and every planet as a unique-ish (there is some repetition but really not a lot) biome in that world. at least it helped me contextualize what the game does, because you're really not meant to spend the entire game on one planet. it's no man's sky, not no man's land...

Vegenoid 7d ago
The difference is that Minecraft gives you much more granular access to manipulate the world, which enables a lot people to feel more connected to the world and become more invested in it.
dansquizsoft 7d ago
Oh, my mistake, now that you've explained it like this it is magically fun for me now.
- 00ze 7d ago
  Oh, everyone else's mistake; we didn't realize all of human output had to satisfy you...of all people!
- 7d ago

walrus01 7d ago

> Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way. 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.

protocolture 7d ago
>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. 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.
- TonyStr 7d ago
  I haven't played Daggerfall, but Arena had hand-crafted main dungeons. There were side quests that took you to proc gen dungeons (that sucked) and a massive proc gen wilderness outside the cities that you never had any reason to go into. The towns were also proc gen, but that mostly amounted to just shuffling around the inns and shops, to give weight to the "ask NPCs for directions" mechanic.
7d ago

Merkur 7d ago

It’s the simulation effect - From the perspective of a interstellar travler you too are not meaning different from any other two legged quasi intelligent naked ape. :) Dwarf fortress or rim world solves that by generating personalities.

Ekaros 7d ago

I feel like my issue was that every "site" on different planet was the same. Maybe I just hit poor randomisation or something. But I felt that I found exactly same thing just on different coloured environment. Or then things like pirate ships were just the same. Every single time...

kjs3 6d ago
No, you didn't hit bad randomization. That's the game. It's just that some people apparently like that or can look at two identical structures with different color tints and convince themselves "Totally different! Game is awesome!".