No Man’s Sky is both a cautionary tale and a redemption tale all in one, and Hello Games is not giving up on its title any time soon!
No Man’s Sky is both a cautionary tale and a redemption tale all in one, and Hello Games is not giving up on its title any time soon!
I think they’re overcompensating.
all this effort should be put into a sequel using generative AI. because this is one of the few perfect use cases for it.
What advantage would AI generation have over procedural generation?
it doesn’t take long to see everything procedural has to offer but you could feed a biology textbook to an AI model and spit out unique creatures all day
Maybe, but would that improve the gameplay experience? In my opinion, if you can generate a million unique creatures or a billion unique creatures doesn’t matter all too much, because I can’t imagine that the average player will ever see more than maybe a thousand. Even as it already exists, it’s pretty much impossible for a player to experience the full breadth of No Man’s Sky’s potential. It would definitely be an impressive technological accomplishment, but not one that I think offers anything substantial to a player.
Personally, I think AI’s use in games is better-suited toward NPC dialog. There’ve been some tech demos showing this, and it still needs a lot of work, but shows a ton of promise. I think that given the right parameters and limitations, there’s more potential for gaming on the LLM-side of AI than anything else. I’ve not played NMS since launch, but I don’t think the current version has much in the way of character development, but that could be something that a sequel could make use of AI for in a sequel, I think.
Not seeing the full extent is not the issue, the issue is not seeing basic variety. They need to let their algorithms run more wild with what they generate, imo. If every animal looks roughly the same in a game about exploring a vast universe, then the algorithm has failed and the game suffers massively for it. I haven’t played enough NMS to say if that’s an issue with the flora and fauna, but it is an issue with the planets.
Setting aside the merits of an AI-generated world, that shit is computationally expensive and already causing environmental issues.
They’re working on their next game already, Light No Fire. No genai, as far as I know, which is a win. The algorithmic approach they are taking is already good enough, it just needs to be used to generate biomes (which they are doing in the next game).