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No Man's Sky Cosmos

nomanssky.com

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Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#401

Post by Zitrax »

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 feel like can also compare the difference to some rougelikes where the combos of random things can yield vastly different experiences but in NMS the randomness felt more like a skin - not affecting gameplay much.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#402

Post by 7bit »

mstank wrote: post #8

Spent a lot of time in this game… The team is excellent and they ship incredible ambitious work. I really wish they would just focus 100% on Light No Fire.

I do not have high hopes. It's been 10 years of constant NMS updates but the game still has nothing that keeps me hooked. Everything feels insignificant to me, every interaction is like the one before and the one that comes next. They added stuff to the game, but it just feels like more of the same. Light No Fire will surely be just more of the same.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#403

Post by pfix »

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…

> However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch, and so far I haven't been grabbed by any of its story generation.

That's basically it. It's not a simulation. So if you want simulation, then NMS isn't your game. Maybe X4 might be better suited. Or maybe not.

Sometimes people forget that not everybody has to like every game :D

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#404

Post by n2j3 »

krige wrote: post #361

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 coordinate…

Was going through a rough patch in the early oughts. Noctis and ambient music were my solace.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#405

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

Eh. As a Mac user, my AAA choices are limited. I mostly play Borderlands 2 & 3, and NMS. I’m not a huge gamer, and these have been enough for me. I just play in bursts, when I’m taking breaks from coding.

I don’t like playing with others, as the experience of being fragged by a 15-year-old, shouting biologically impossible suggestions to me, is not really on my bucket list.

I’ll play it. It won’t be super exciting, but, if I was serious about gaming, I’d get a dedicated Windows rig.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#406

Post by thunfischtoast »

AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #400

While I love the game I still think they are overhyping the game in the trailers. The game always looks far more dramatic in the trailers than it actually is in practice. One example that struck me is how they show players flying in formation while in practice that's almost impossible to do : your ship always flies faster or slower and it's really hard to follow someone else, even the NPC ships. They also often show…

I recently tried out the multiplayer with two friends and must say, while I like the games vibe, the multiplayer is deeply disappointing. You don't really play together, you just happen to be roughly in the same area at the same time. Nothing is shared really, every quest you need to do for yourself, and the sync is broken to the point where two players standing next to each other have completely different weather and see different enemies. If they fixed that I would come back, but I don't really feel like doing everything by myself.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#407

Post by shmeeed »

sfn42 wrote: post #371
shmeeed wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Well there is pvp and the ship also helps with PvE progression. So I don't know how you figure it isn't p2w. Buy better ship, have advantage over others. It's not just a cosmetic upgrade. That makes it p2w.

Yeah, I guess you're right. I didn't think it through, because my play style didn't involve much PvP or PvE.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#408

Post by oreally »

swat535 wrote: post #187
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.

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…

The quote "vastness of an ocean with the depth of a puddle" describes what the AAA-hollywood games complex aspire to be.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#410

Post by vuvko »

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.

The Tumblr post[0] by Kate Compton makes a good example of how to build a generator with meaningful outcomes. You start by writing down good examples you want your generator to have and bad examples you want to avoid. That will both be a kind of filtering test and a structure to build from.

You can create different metrics and numbers to guide the generator, but every number loses meaning once you decouple it from human feedback in games.

[0]: https://galaxykate0.tumblr.com/post/139774965871/so-you-want...

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