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No Man's Sky Cosmos

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Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#231

Post by nkrisc »

meowface wrote: post #35
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big name in proc gen is Kate Compton who coined the term "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" to describe this phenomenon of technically unique but not different enough to matter - I googled "10000 bowls of oatmeal" to see if there was a good article and the second link was about it and nms https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...

One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity. It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.

Procedural generation is not gameplay. Procedural generation makes your already fun game more interesting via more variety.

If you don’t already have a fun game, then pro gen won’t make it any more fun than it already is. It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game.

If every single Minecraft player loaded into only a single Minecraft world, it would still be as fun as it is. Would No Man’s Sky really be that much different if it just shipped with a handful of pre-defined planets? It might have less replay value but the gameplay wouldn’t be any different.

Good proc gen changes things in your game such that the player is given interesting reasons to make different choices each time they play.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#232

Post by agentultra »

setr wrote: post #209
meowface wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity. It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.

Roguelikes are the ultimate in procgen technology, and should be the basis of any design. (DF is the ultimate simulation but uses procgen as a tool to achieve it; a different vein than NMS trying to explore the procgen and its direct outcomes itself) 1. Any imaginary world needs to be internally consistent to be interesting. Procgen does not void this rule; randomization needs to be gated to that internal consistency…

You can work around 12. with constraint satisfaction solvers.

After generating the level structure, emplace an entrance and exit such that they are maximally apart. And emplace a strong monster in one of the rooms around the exit. And emplace a health potion in one room before the strong monster. And emplace treasure in the exit room.

That sort of stuff and be specialized and coded towards your particular games structures fairly easily.

Scale is much harder though. In something like NMS it’d be intensive doing such a constraint solver on the whole galaxy. Might work in chunks or regions though.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#233

Post by oooyay »

BoBaitlyn wrote: post #67
big-chungus4 wrote: post #29

What are people on about, there is tons to do in NMS, tons of missions, expeditions, build bases, build a corvet, hunt rate parts, ships, rifles, creatures, manage a settlement, automate crafting chains, find a lucrative trading route, and this new update apps even more things. I'd never consider NMS anything close to empty, there is so much variety in the content

The game has so much stuff to do its actually overwhelming. The game is definitely a sandbox though and I think for some reason a lot of people don't like going out and doing the different things you can do in the game if the game doesn't force you to or if there's not heavy progression. I feel like the same thing happens to other sandbox games too. Minecraft is one of my favorite games of all time and I could easily…

I think what most of the commentary is on is the initial gameplay loop which has to do with planetary exploration and learning words. After that there's a multitude of new gameplay loops that become intertwined. I don't think most players get that far unless they have a very old account.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#234

Post by m12k »

helle253 wrote: post #5

It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing. It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game

I've heard it described as "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle"

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#235

Post by montagg »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #230
porphyra wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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. :)

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#237

Post by djeastm »

TylerE wrote: post #216
trashb wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I have never thought to myself that realism is fun" - Gabe Newell

True realism is often interesting though, which provides more long term engagement than fleeting shallow fun. Look at some of the hard core 3rd party addons for flight sims, for instance, which are so realistic they actually ship licensed versions of the real aircraft training manuals and checklists - because every switch and procedure works.

It's interesting for a niche audience (and I'm one of them). But that's a small minority of gamers (and $$$).

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#238

Post by asdff »

eclipticplane wrote: post #203
asdff wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all of it is like, run around, press x. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. oh your crops are ready. pres x, x, x, x, x, x, x. go to sales terminal, sell crops, go to processor, take stuff out of processor load in processor again. oh hey crops are ready again, x, x, x, x..... Missions: fly to randomly chosen planet in solar system…

My hot take on why these games get popular (including some like PowerWash Simulator that are 'press x, then x again' type games): it gives people satisfaction of completing something in a world that it is increasingly harder to accomplish what the prior generation did.

I feel like for some of them they are almost like tarpits for some gamers. Think of some gamers in mmorpgs with like thousands of hours under their belt in some game, content with grinding, learned complicated meta, have some working understanding of the in game economy. Or these other sort of "logistics simulator" games where they are making spreadsheets to min max various in game phenomenon and scaling out and compounding their efforts.

It is like what if they were putting that undiagnosed hyperfocus into the local lawncare industry instead. Start off with a $50 mower at Level 1. Grind all summer gaining xp and unlocking more quests. Get enough for a riding mower with better DPS so you can do more lawns in a day and improve xp rate. Get enough to unlock a helper. Get two helpers. You stop mowing and its the helpers going out with your name on the side of the truck. Now you are a successful small business owner.

Same sort of mind that optimizes the in game meta could play the real life meta too. No one tells you about this when you are 14 years old though. None of your friends are doing this. There aren't forums and discords talking about this. Everyone's gaming though.

And it can be even a tar pit for smaller stuff than one's career. It is a big meme for someone to have say a beautiful base built in some game, really carefully done and really ornate, and the room they play in is an absolute disgusting disaster of trash and unclean clothes tossed everywhere. All in game chores done to a T of course.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#239

Post by djeastm »

JohnMakin wrote: post #34
big-chungus4 wrote: post #29

What are people on about, there is tons to do in NMS, tons of missions, expeditions, build bases, build a corvet, hunt rate parts, ships, rifles, creatures, manage a settlement, automate crafting chains, find a lucrative trading route, and this new update apps even more things. I'd never consider NMS anything close to empty, there is so much variety in the content

I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development - the game of the last few years is absolutely nothing like the early one and I agree, there is a surprising amount of stuff to do.

>stuff to do

This is the whole problem in a nutshell. I want a Game™ and they're providing "stuff to do".

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#240

Post by Barrin92 »

helle253 wrote: post #5

It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing. It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game

>but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay.

to me that has become a big positive aspect of the game. The non-teleology of it, that you just run around and immersive yourself in it is pleasant in its own right. Especially modern games to me seem to have substituted games as an experience with reward system driven busy work. Everything is always instrumental.

I started to notice this when games like Journey came out, or Death Stranding during the stress of the pandemic. No Man's Sky is obviously not as artistically strong as either one but the exploration only for explorations sake has me come back to it very regularly. It genuinely is a game about nothing (so is Seinfeld, never hurt the show) but to me that boredom is a genuinely good thing.

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