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No Man's Sky Cosmos

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Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#441

Post by qwerpy »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #295

I have hundreds of hours with my son in creative mode just building bases, fishing, battling our animals and hanging out. We’ve explored hundreds of systems just cataloguing all the animals and flora. We’ve learned all the languages. We basically have infinite money. It’s all very shallow but it’s also “cozy”. This game is much more Animal Crossing than Minecraft. Other than the planets with extremely dangerous atmos…

I love this, thank you for this write-up. A breath of fresh air amidst the pervasive negativity here. I’m going to buy the game to play coop with my sister and then when my kids are old enough I’ll do a coop play through with them as well.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#442

Post by newsoftheday »

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've looked at videos of Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld, neither looks interesting to me at all.

Yet I've spent hundreds to thousands of hours in Minecraft, No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous.

> However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch

Elite Dangerous is the most hardcore space game I'm aware of any I play several space games. I wish it did more fun stuff like No Man's Sky actually.

It sounds like your interest is in simulation games. I don't play those really much so I can't recommend any other than I guess Elite Dangerous.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#443

Post by newsoftheday »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #256
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).

On that last point, when I first played Dyson Sphere Program (DSP), I left the starting planet without enough resources and didn't understand the inter-planetary warp drive system .. I just drifted out into space and couldn't get back with the fuel I had left. It was almost scary; the vastness of the space was so apparent, it was very immersive to me. Early game you don't have enough resources to travel quickly throu…

I wasn't aware of this space game, not sure how I missed it, thank you for mentioning it, might just have to try it now. Although it might be too heavy into simulation for me.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#444

Post by patagurbon »

schnevets wrote: post #120
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...

I vaguely recall an episode of the Triple Click podcast around 2023 where they had a serious AI fanboy who was rah rah-ing about future procedural generation in games. It might have been Casey Anthony, but I'm unable to re-listen while at work. The fanboy started saying how they could have endless different levels in Destiny 2... which is absurdly off-base since the entire game is just running through the same 9 sand…

By the end of it's lifetime Bungie had created quite a bit of variety in the Destiny 2 content library (although there's always a bit of orb dunking, plate standing, and symbol reading). And if they hadn't rebuilt the engine from scratch it would've been even bigger.

There's like 30+ strikes, ~8 pinnacle ops/exotic missions, 11 dungeons, 10 raids, and many campaigns. But more to the point of the original comment: it's quite engaging to spend an hour or two a week mastering one of those missions at the hardest difficulty. The modern difficulty knobs are really neat and complement the immensely fun gameplay loop very well. NMS, unfortunately, has no real enjoyable gameplay loop.

We are still years off of an LLM creating a gameplay system even 1/4 as good as Destiny IMHO.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#445

Post by newsoftheday »

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

Your tastes for video games may be more aligned with another genre than a sandbox game which is what NMS is. If so, that's not a reflection of any kind on NMS.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#446

Post by 0x457 »

john_strinlai wrote: post #31

at the time of posting, i think every top-level comment except one is negative. so, i'd like to balance it by saying that i have never seen a better executed turnaround than what the no man's sky team did. they cratered their reputation on launch, worked hard and long to restore it, and then continued to offer free updates long after they needed to. lots of respect there. (i will reward the effort by purchasing their…

Huge turn around for sure, but still extremely shallow. I'm not even saying that because planets and universes are all the same (they are), but saying there is no depth to any mechanic in the game.

I come back to play every now and then and its all still the same.

Its an issue with many sandbox games - a mile wide and an inch deep.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#447

Post by newsoftheday »

cchance wrote: post #318
SwellJoe wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best things about the game (and it is a good game at this point, they continued to add to it at a steady pace since launch) are the human written stories. But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast. But also, the worst thing about the human-written stories is that they're often transparentl…

The thing is they could probably have easily had the pvp and economy and soverignty of eve, and that would have been amazing

I don't play PVP and am not interested in a heavy economy simulation game. I like NMS the way it is, like Minecraft, a sandbox.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#448

Post by kuschku »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #256
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).

On that last point, when I first played Dyson Sphere Program (DSP), I left the starting planet without enough resources and didn't understand the inter-planetary warp drive system .. I just drifted out into space and couldn't get back with the fuel I had left. It was almost scary; the vastness of the space was so apparent, it was very immersive to me. Early game you don't have enough resources to travel quickly throu…

I actually managed to travel from one star system to another in DSP without warp, they happened to be just close enough that a full inventory of fuel was just barely enough to make the trip.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#449

Post by 0x457 »

Leptonmaniac wrote: post #398
darkwi11ow wrote: post #393

I discovered NMS only recently (100 hours in, 2nd save now), and it has become one of my favorite games. It reminds me of the old TES (Morrowind, Oblivion), but the world is truly limitless, and possibilities are huge. I enjoy finding rare things, and 100 hours in NMS keeps delivering me those. I get why people complain about challenges being no biggie, but to me it is an advantage: I pick NMS when I want to chill an…

As someone who bounced off Morrowind in favor of Gothic (II) because there weren't enough guardrails in place for my old self, how much of the old "here are some breadcrumbs and here's the game's final goal, but the way in between is up to you to find" design intent is in No Mans Sky? I love finding little niche stories, but they have to be crafted with intent, (procedural) environmental storytelling does not scratch…

Morrowind had no guardrails or quest markers, but it had a good story and clear final goal that you learn eventually. No guardrails here mean that you can kill anyone and make main quest impossible to finish, but it had a direction that you can choose to follow. Plus a ton of interesting side-quests.

NMS lack of guardrails is "do whatever you want", story is lacking and only reason to progress "main quest" is to unlock certain things by doing the same thing over and over again: go to the system, scan the planet, investigate the anomaly, rinse and repeat.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#450

Post by newsoftheday »

NBJack wrote: post #255
Avicebron wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse". A thought that comes to me as I type this is what if you try to co-evolve the ecosystems so it doesn't feel like it's just a mix of the same base components in different quantities.

I am but an armchair expert here, but I do think most of what's missing is the complexity of real-life ecosystems and "connections". Having biomes that are substantially large on a given planet and diversity among them, animals unique to each, and some kind of connections between the sparse settlements (even just like 3-5 actual cities per planet would be a start) would be a big difference. It would be a bit less abo…

I assume you mean modern cities? NMS has had settlements for a long time now. What kind of computer would be required to even generate and render 18 billion planets with 3-5 actual cities per planet? Most open world/sandbox games are challenged just to have several large cities in a game.
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