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No Man's Sky Cosmos

nomanssky.com

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Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#381

Post by fallingbananna »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #363
wvenable wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The last time I tried Minecraft, from the point I dropped into the world, I could start punching dirt and trees and placing stuff around and building things.

In No Man's Sky I got dropped in some world that felt empty with tutorial on how to collect some stuff and how to get to the ship.

The first impressions weren't the same between these 2 games.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#382

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #310
Ars_Armegis wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah this is my experience as well. At first it felt empty, but then I sort of realized it’s not a quest game it’s a building game and it’s all about building bases and ships and what not, and they’re added progressively more ways to build and customize the world. And there are explorations - there are some truly bizarre biomes but they are rare. The variants that feel repetitive are falling along some average world…

I looked for a situational physics game- where what you build and automate becomes part of a larger world ala EVE, with simulated factions that rise and fall depending on the players actions over time. Basically procedural generated civilization as a background game played by others..

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#383

Post by lofaszvanitt »

john_strinlai wrote: post #168
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Also what was it when the game released? It was waaay negative. yeah, it was. and now it isn't. this is known as a "turnaround".

Yeah, but who cares. Most of the people buy a game when it gets released.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#384

Post by Pifanjr »

walrus01 wrote: post #343
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.

> 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 ba…

The procedurally generated planets and moons from Starfield are a bit like the radiant quests of Skyrim, they just pad the game time a bit with procedurally generated content. The main difference is that the radiant quests in Skyrim typically sent you to locations you hadn't visited yet within a hand-crafted world, while in Starfield the world around the locations isn't interesting and the locations themselves start repeating way too quickly.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#385

Post by Normal_gaussian »

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…

Its notable that you dichotomise using the promises of another unreleased game from the same people. Depth was part of the original NMS promise.

Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#386

Post by TonyStr »

protocolture wrote: post #349
walrus01 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ba…

>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 li…

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.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#387

Post by Pifanjr »

danielbarla wrote: post #369
Ars_Armegis wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the main difference in Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld is that the world happens to you, you have to respond to the events the game generates, while in No Man's Sky you happen to the world, you choose how to interact with it.

No Man's Sky is much more like Minecraft in that way, you have to make up your own goals, the game doesn't really prompt you in any way to do anything.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#388

Post by bronkic »

BrokenCogs wrote: post #116
goatking wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone disagrees and I don't really see negative comments about the devs or the studio. The problem is the game itself, gameplay wise. It's just boring for many (including me)

Somewhat of an aside but, personally, I also found GTA V and Red dead redemption 2 to be boring because these games didn't respect my time. I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".

RDR2 feels to me like a game that would be awesome to play once I'm in retirement and have all the time in the world.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#389

Post by Ekaros »

kjs3 wrote: post #51
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...

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.

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...

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#390

Post by hnuser123456 »

dyzone wrote: post #344
swat535 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Far cry 3 and its consequences have been a disaster for the gaming industry.

FC3 is generally quite favorably reviewed. NMS could have been far more interesting if about 25% of the planets had relatively peaceful weather, wildlife, and sentinels, and had palatable color schemes, but near every single planet is either +200C, -200C, or radioactive, and the calm ones are lunar landscapes or barren.
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