Will _No Man's Sky_ be boring?

Joe Wezorek · 2015-07-13T21:27:40

I'm really looking forward to No Man's Sky and will probably buy a PS4 just to play it. I am a fan of procedural generation. I am old enough to have played Elite on an Apple II and been blown away by it at the time. (For younger readers, No Man's Sky is basically an elaborate modern reboot of Elite) However, I know as a developer and game player in his 40's that there is a reason everyone doesn't use procedural generation for everything and I know that we all were more used to putting up with repetitive gameplay in the 8-bit era. Procedural generation is great for demos but is hard to get right for games. Demos need to look cool. Games need to be fun. It is hard to procedurally generate fun. Another personal data point for me is how dull I found Sid Meier's Pirates! on my iPad even given that I remember loving Pirates on the Apple IIgs in another life and given the fact that the iPad version is pretty much a straight port of the original. Pirates was not exactly procedurally generated -- the map was fixed on the realworld carribean -- but it was an open world game and which countries were at war with which when and where treasure was located etc was randomly generated. I remember I used to like sailing around and doing pirating and trying to maximize yields of each voyage and plan out where I wanted to go, etc. Recently I played the remake a little but had a feeling of "Is this all that it was?" So maybe my tastes have changed, but hasn't everyone's?

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Started by jwezorek July 09, 2015 05:59 PM

20 comments, last by jwezorek 9 years, 3 months ago

Brain

19,059

July 12, 2015 06:57 PM

I think this will be a game for those with.imagination. If you need story handed to you on a plate and to be guided through a game you'll hate it and if you're a sandbox metagamer who makes your own entertainment out of what's available you'll love it and I'm sure we will see lots of videos on YouTube of players doing interesting things that we didn't expect.

I'm sure I'll be eating my words though by this time next year :)

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jwezorek

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July 13, 2015 09:27 PM

I personally think it's going to be boring.

The reason I say that is because almost every planet we've seen so far, is a pretty close representation of every other planet we've seen.

This is my thought too ...

but I also think they're holding back and are only showing one kind of planet for obvious reasons. I get the feeling that there will be fundamentally different planets but they will generated from templates the way the planets we have seen were generated from a 'earthlike grasslands + ocean" template. There are going to at least be ice planets and desert planets -- I think, desert planets are going to have Dune-like sand worms.

But still seems like it with get old after we've seen all the templates.

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