No Man’s Sky

I don't argue there exists a tremendous number of configurations but I don't think they are not substantive enough to make a difference. Look at Spore if you want a case in point.

The hype train is very strong with this game because the media loves a good indie darling. I'm not convinced yet but have high hopes!

Spore suffered greatly from this: It was conceptually fascinating but really not much fun to actually play. Hopefully team No Man's Land have taken a lesson!

Unique - 1. existing as the only one or as the sole example; single; solitary in type or characteristics: a unique copy of an ancient manuscript. 2. having no like or equal; unparalleled; incomparable: Bach was unique in his handling of counterpoint. 3. limited in occurrence to a given class, situation, or area: a species unique to Australia. 4. limited to a single outcome or result; without alternative possibilities: Certain types of problems have unique solutions. 5. not typical; unusual: She has a very unique smile.

By those definitions, their planets are not unique. If your definition of unique differs from those established by the language we are using, then you have to specify this.

This is not the first time we've seen this pattern before. Somebody promises The Ubergame, the all-singing, all-dancing Game of Games to End All Other Games, generated by writing down the wishlist of all possible features of a game in some genre and promising at least half of them. The appearance of "procedural content" and the resulting large numbers is not the first time we've seen this, either.

The result, up to this point, is rather uniform... what actually gets delivered is a "meh" game, in some sense because while all the endless list of features were getting checked off nobody took any time to put a game in there.

Here's one historical example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD

Many of them never even get released.

I rather fully expect that No Man's Sky gets released, gets reviewed well, and then about a month in, people start realizing there isn't much "there" there.

One problem is that people don't understand how to think about procedural generation. Quadrillions of planets nothing... why not octillions? The number of possible outcomes of the procedural system is irrelevant. The sum total of all possible Minecraft seeds and all possible spaces within those seeds is within spitting distance of the number of orders of magnitude of what you'd need to pave over the entire Milky Way galaxy, but nevertheless one can pretty much explore Minecraft and see just about everything there is to offer from the landscape generator in a month... and I'm being generous. The proper measure of procedural generation is not the raw number of combinations, but how many truly distinct things can be generated, and whether or not the parameters can interact to produce unexpected things. For instance, my favorite thing I've seen in Minecraft was an island with a cave that happened to cut right through the outside of the island, producing a space within it where the ocean was basically one of the walls of the cave. Unrealistic, but cool, and a credit to the ways things interacted with each other.

Anyways, to sum up, if this isn't your first time around the hype cycle on a game like this, it's hard not to see similarities to things we've already seen before, draw comparisons, and want to deflate the hype bubble. The end result of this may be a good game, it probably won't be a great game, it has a decent chance of still being a bad game to play even if sometimes pretty to look at, and odds are extremely high that it won't actually match the expectations that anybody has for it.

If those predictions are wrong, I won't have problems saying so. Maybe this is the one. No sarcasm. It's possible. But don't, you know, pour thousands of dollars into preordered goods on it or anything, like apparently some have for Star Citizen, one of the other Everything Games currently out there. http://www.reaxxion.com/10195/why-star-citizen-is-likely-goi... (Kickstarting an Everything Game is unfortunately quite simple... even approximately finishing it is quite another.)

See also: Spore, Fable and most of the latter half of Peter Molyneux's career (Black and White too), all of the iterations of Elite past the first one. Some of these turned out OK (at best), none so much as resembled their hype.