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 would love for some more variety on the one planet. I feel like once you’ve landed and explored a 100m radius you’ve basically seen everything the planet has to offer.
How cool would it be to land in a desert, then takeoff and fly across jungles, heading to the poles for snow etc.
They said, the updates they’ve made have been amazing. You can land on water and fish from your spaceship now!
Yep, that’s my biggest gripe, too. “As vast as an ocean, as deep as a puddle”, is the notion I heard about it. Applies to all procedurally produced worlds I’ve seen. Doing more different would be a great effort for the devs, probably too expensive.
I’d suggest having community designed worlds (with enough regulations and filtering to avoid the unoccasional swastika and the likes).
Idk, old Minecraft generation was excellent. All they really needed to do was make it literally deeper/taller and make the biomes wider. The extreme and weird landscapes were rewarding to explore on their own back then. Imo developers just need to be comfortable letting interesting landscapes from instead of boring, uniform ones like NMS does. The novelty would eventually wear off, sure, but it’d last a lot longer.
And community worlds is an excellent idea. Having custom planets, or hell even just things players have made in their games, show up would add a lot to any game like this.
This is part of what’s going to make Light No Fire so cool. I’m sure that some of the tech now being added to NMS is being added as a way of testing or proving hypotheses for LNF. I hope we do see more of the LNF mechanics (like multiple biomes on one planet) be backported, like I suspect the improved water, and fishing mechanism may have been.
Or how about really radically different planets? Right now they are pretty much all the same. Just a vast natural landscape of $BIOME with the occasional point-of-interest dotted about. Where are the city-planets? Factory planets? Planets strip-mined to the core? The giant space wharfs? How can there be trillions of aliens but there are never more than 30-ish in the same place?
I’m hoping a lot of the work they’re putting into Light No Fire will be brought back into No Man’s Sky, and that this will be a part of that.
some of my best planets got screwed in an update and I stopped seeing any point exploring.
of course fishing is the only thing they ever needed to add for me to go full Andy, I’ll have to re-install now.
So this happened to me as well, all the planets I had named reverted back to their original name but were still founded by me…so I thought why bother? and then it just lost its appeal.
I never cared but that would really suck if you did.
I was talking about the biome changes. Lot’s of nice planets turned to trash. My first paradise earthlike with zero weather became some pink, yellow, and peach hellscape with constant extreme storms.
The extreme storms are just time wasters…not immersive at all when you sit in a river for 5 min, or just go afk, make a sandwich & come back for 2 minutes before another storm hits.
I wish they’d make proc-genned interiors for certain planetary buildings, or at least create slightly different architectures. Every abandoned research station, every small outpost, every trade outpost, everything everywhere in the galaxy is exactly the same. Even the ruins you can excavate once in a while are always the same sandrock, tilted walkways with some chests
I wish there were some big story / quest updates. Exploring the galaxy was a fun for the 150 hours I put into it, but after the end of the storylines and relatively few sidequests it got boring pretty quickly. This whole “Explore a new galaxy!” thing didn’t make sense to me either. What was I supposed to do that for? It looks practically the same everywhere. And there is nothing that would be actually new or surprising.
I mean, I could still do things like finish upgrading the freighter and the fleet, but for what? There is nothing to do with it.
Nevertheless, the purchase was definitely worth it. Games these days can rarely entertain me long enough to get that much time out of them.
Expeditions are what you’re looking for, for the most part. There’s also at least two main story lines now. But yeah there needs to be more
I don’t actually like the game but boy am I impressed with the dev. I was critical early on but he more than exceeded expectations. I wish them all the success in the world
Yeah, they had a really disastrous launch, and the months of radio silence definitely ruined the game for a lot of people as they lost faith in the studio. Glad to see that they were able to turn it around, but it’s an excellent example of why you shouldn’t release a game until it’s done; a lesson that a lot of studios still haven’t learned to this day.
it’s been a fun journey so far. cool
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).
