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No Man's Sky Cosmos

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Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#361

Post by krige »

I'll echo a sister comment saying that NMS still feels like a tech demo. However, I'll also use the occasion to mention slash shill Noctis IV, a game that NMS more than likely owes a lot to.

Noctis IV is an old DOS game, or perhaps more of an art project about flying through a galaxy and exploring (sections of) planets on foot. Notably, you can name stars, planets, and place markers with notes on planetary coordinates, and then you can share those with other players via an "INBOX" system. While it technically has even less gameplay than NMS ever did, its primitive but custom 3D engine produces absolutely striking landscapes to explore [0]

While the author's webpage seems to have died at some point in the recent years, the project lives on through two community made mods, Noctis IV Plus [1] and Noctis IV Community Edition (NICE) [2].

[0] https://mooses.nl/nice/screenshots/city2.gif

[1] https://github.com/jorisvddonk/Noctis-IV-Plus

[2] https://mooses.nl/nice/releases/R11dot6a/

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#362

Post by vintermann »

feoren wrote: post #95
rcxdude wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advice I've heard is 1) have as many different dimensions of variation as you can manage, and try to have them matter, 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation, since this just reduces variety, and 3) allow your parameters to become extreme occasionally, so that some parts of your generation are notably different, and special because they're rare. 1) is the really hard part, I think: it's a c…

> 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation I think the opposite. The more dimensions you have, the more "invalid space" there should be. Otherwise you end up with giant dinosaurs with tiny feet and fairy wings. You end up with a yellow kitchen with a barrel full of arrows next to a blue dungeon with a giant dresser. You end up with nothing making sense, and everything feeling random in the same w…

Yes, and it's a problem procedural space games have in particular. Because the planets usually don't interact at all in any meaningful way - what's on one planet (or indeed in one zone on a planet) has no impact outside it. Maybe you can get random quests on planet A to find some landmark on planet B, but it doesn't feel like that was because anything on planet A had anything to do with what was on planet B. For all its improvements over the years (and they are many, and OK in their own way) this is a thing which has not changed in No Man's Sky.

This I think is a core challenge with procedural generation. You can have procgen countries with procgen cities with procgen citizens, but if none of those citizens have an aunt in another city - who you can actually visit, in a new world from the same seed, and learn that she has a nephew in the first city - then it feels empty, fake.

Hierarchial procgen is easy. But you need cross-interactions like that to make it feel alive, and that's hard.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#363

Post by matheusmoreira »

wvenable wrote: post #286
an0malous wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A procedural universe may be technically impressive but it is also bland, empty, purposeless. Why doesn't this apply to Minecraft? People love Minecraft even though it's equally purposeless and arguably bland and empty.

I think because the Minecraft world is like a giant tub of Lego. You go out into the procedural world to collect your pieces and then you create from that. It's actually your creations that are interesting and without them Minecraft would equally purposeless and bland.

That's exactly what No Man's Sky is though. There are entire communities centered around colonizing entire regions of the procedurally generated space. People build some seriously intricate bases and it really makes the worlds feel lived in.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#365

Post by shmeeed »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #166
t-writescode wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has a Steam Review Score of 84%. What are you talking about?

Yeah and Star Citizen has half a billion funding, and then WHAT? Also what was it when the game released? It was waaay negative.

One billion by May...

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#366

Post by shmeeed »

sfn42 wrote: post #79
BISH-BASH-BOSH wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just about to say this. I have a lot of respect for the dev team but man is it so not my type of game. I wish somehow the complexity of eve could meet a game like this. I would sell a kidney for that

I recently tried star citizen and it's kind of trying to be something like that but it's way too half baked with lots of game breaking bugs like you'll just lose the entire cargo of your ship which can completely bankrupt you after days of saving up. Also they keep releasing bigger and fancier pay to win ships at ridiculous price points like hundreds and even thousands of dollars instead of fixing the game. I tried i…

I don't know about the PTW aspect. What's there to win in a broken sandbox? In my view, they mostly just keep ripping off delusional "collectors" to keep the gravy train going. It's not like these solo players then take off in their huge multi-crew ships and are able to "win" in any meaningful sense.

A few years ago, I had a couple dozen hours of good fun with my starter pack just zooming around all those moons and planets, stepping out of my tiny ship and holding my breath, not knowing much about what awaits me outside - scorching heat, a blizzard, hostile or friendly players... it felt like I got my money's worth if space immersion.

If you don't expect much in the way of an actual game, but are content with a few game loops held together by string and duct tape, you can find a vast and pretty universe to explore.

Reeaallyyy gotta manage your expectations, though. It's very much an alpha, and you better not think it's gonna release, like, ever. Disclaimer: I have no idea how it's evolved in the past years.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#367

Post by Gareth321 »

uzish wrote: post #63

I think facts would be helpful for this discussion: 1. Total Revenue - ~$500m-$700m 2. Copies Sold - ~15-20m 3. Steam Review Score: 84.36% 4. 40 Free Major Updates I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early. NMS is a great example of a developer who was devoted to their customer base, kept updating the game for free, and saw great market success in return. This is a story…

> I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.

It's the sandbox concept. Some people load into Minecraft and think, "AWESOME! I'M GOING TO BUILD A MALL!" Some people load into Minecraft and think, "WTF is this? Why is there no story? What the hell am I meant to do?"

I'm not going to cast judgement. It's a preference. The people who bounce off NMS are the latter. NMS is a very fun sandbox. The story is secondary to making your own fun.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#368

Post by dwaltrip »

ByThyGrace wrote: post #147
raincole wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It more or less reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode. They were playing an asteroid shooting. > Morty: it's boring. crank up the realism slider to max > Rick: why does it get even more empty? Wait, I got it... because the universe is empty. At the end, I think there is little point in simulating the vastness of the universe in a video game (even just a fraction of it).

There are levels to this. The NMS day/night cycle is geocentric . It's a sandbox game yet when it comes to its "space" premise everything is thrown out the window. Dogfights carry no difficulty or skill. Flying around a system is pretty much pointless other than to stumble upon quests (100% RNG). Most of the fun you'll get at planet surface.

> Dogfights carry no difficulty or skill.

You've been hanging out with Claude too much :)

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#369

Post by danielbarla »

Ars_Armegis wrote: post #296
kjs3 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 u…

> is that not enough? what else do people want?

I've bounced off NMS several times, despite having tried quite hard to get into it. So, my take is based on ~20 hours of early game, from 2025ish. Probably the best parallel I can draw is to Elite: Dangerous, which I played for several hundred ours before getting bored of it. What I find lacking in both games is that there's no _meaningful_ emergent gameplay that spawns off the procgen. Everything is wildy different on each planet, yet very same-y, because none of the differences really play into each other. In both, one can discover random biomes and creatures, but it's not like they are inherently interesting, they are mostly just following the same scripts.

Contrast this with something like Dwarf Fortress, which takes a slightly more in-depth approach to procgen, one where things have history, and in many ways, things "make sense". Or Rimworld, where the game tries its hardest to conjure up a narrative for you, dynamically, but still in a sandbox. So, basically, NMS is a perfectly functional sandbox game, and I have huge respect for them for keeping on working at it for so many years. However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch, and so far I haven't been grabbed by any of its story generation. It just felt like a long series of fetch quests and "collect them all" games.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#370

Post by mastermage »

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

Weird take cause the game is definetely there and it has tons of content. Admitedly it is not for me because I just do not like the way resource gathering works. Does not tickle my fancy. But saying there is nothing substantial is an odd take, there is base building, space battles (fighter and corvette), expeditions. You can even do a little automatisation if you are into it.
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