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The multi-player component confused me, i don't understand what the point of it is. If you aren't really supposed to interact with other players why bother? 

 

It sounds like the core of the game is discovery, and I guess they've decided that discovery is pointless if there's no difference between things that are new to you, and things that are new to everyone.

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Google showed only 7 results for "You can't take the No Man's Sky from me" so here's another one.

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This was definitely my personal Game of Show. Like, not even close.

 

Danny O'Dwyer over at Gamespot intimated that they'll have a sizable video feature up in a few weeks on this week's Bombcast.

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I'm listening to them talking on Giant Bomb's E3: day 1 podcast.

Turns out that they have bots playing the game for them and spitting out animated gifs so that they can get quick samples of the procedurally generated planets. Dude gives an example of how he might play and see three blue skies in a row (and think that the algorithms build too many blue skies), but then we he checks the thumbnails of all the gifs recorded by bot-players, he can get a more reliable sample.

There is something appealing to me about this detail.

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The amount of work, thought, and care that has gone into this game from such a small team is mind-boggling. I'm super excited to see what the end result is like, not just because what has been shown so far looks increasingly ambitious and promising but also to see of that hard work get some well-deserved recognition.

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The amount of work, thought, and care that has gone into this game from such a small team is mind-boggling. I'm super excited to see what the end result is like, not just because what has been shown so far looks increasingly ambitious and promising but also to see of that hard work get some well-deserved recognition.

I really love your screen name.

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Procedurally generated animals and ships blow my mind. I can understand how they generate landscapes, that's fine, that makes sense. How do you make the animals look right???? whaaaaaat

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If the game feel is as great as it looks in those trailers then this is a game for me.

A lot is being made over the procedural or exploration mechanics (sure that's just about all we know right now). But it's the music, tight transitions and how awesome the flying looks that sell it.

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I'm crossing my fingers so hard that this game turns out to be incredible. Although I'm naturally averse to anything procedurally generated, the level of tech on display here is truly something to behold. I hope these planets feel a bit "lived in" and have a bit of history to them. Would also love to see some crazy environmental hazards!

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The Verge has a piece up which probably gives the best look at what the game actually will play like whenever it gets out.

 

Based on articles like this, they seem to be really pushing the procedural generation and exploration aspect, and I am extremely skeptical that it's possible to make an interesting procedural exploration game. My skepticism about procedural generation aside, I think everyone's getting hyped over nothing, literally. We have nothing to go on, no idea what the gameplay is, pretty much all we know is that there's going to be procedural planets to wander, some of them look like that, and there's some kind of resources to gather.

 

It's the problem Spore had all over again. Everyone got hyped about the broad-strokes concept, without really knowing anything about how the game plays. We're not even imagining "Oh it'll be a sweet FPS" or "Oh it'll be Minecraft with better combat", everyone just seems to think "It'll be great" without considering how. No possible gameplay for Spore could have lived up to the game people were imagining, and that's because everyone's imaginations stopped at the broad strokes, not bothering to consider what the gameplay could actually be.

 

Murray describes that Maxis title as a millstone around his neck that gave games like the one he is building a bad name. It made everything fantastical. Every planet was lush, with a thriving ecosystem of spectacular and weird creatures. That’s what the trailer for No Man’s Sky depicts too — with fluorescent dinosaurs grazing alongside space antelopes — but Murray says that will be a very uncommon sight in his game.

 

The developers have set themselves a 90–10 rule. 90 percent of all the planets will not be habitable and won’t have any life on them. Of the 10 percent that do, 90 percent of that life will be primitive and boring.

 

I can't understand the thought behind this. They seem to be saying "What Spore needed was more lifeless rockballs". Sure it makes the interesting stuff more special, but it does that by forcing the player to slog through a bunch of uninteresting stuff. That's like saying you can make a box of chocolates better by taking nine tenths of the chocolate and replacing it with soda crackers.

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I like how you say "everyone thinks it'll be great" when basically every opinion I've read or heard - everything that isn't the typical hype-train video game preview article that exists for all of video games - is exactly what you're saying. Complete with "I don't know why everyone's so excited". Over and over and over.

 

And I mean it's cool to be negative and all but fucking hell I'm so tired of seeing it.

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We must visit different sites, because everything I've seen and heard is nothing but positivity, including the last page or so of this thread (I didn't have time to read from page 1). But more importantly, the anti-hype isn't negativity. I said some negative things about rockball planets and soda crackers, but "We haven't seen enough to have any idea if this game will be good" isn't negative. "This game will probably suck" is negative, "We don't know anything about this game" is as neutral as it gets.

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I've only seen people saying how amazing it will be.

I'm skeptical too, but that's because I hate Minecraft, and there's been a lot of talk about how similar they are.

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pretty much all we know is that there's going to be procedural planets to wander, some of them look like that, and there's some kind of resources to gather.

 

Yeah, that sounds awesome.

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And I mean it's cool to be negative and all but fucking hell I'm so tired of seeing it.

 

I don't think it's negative so much as skepticism. Video games are expensive and many people don't have the money to buy all of them! Which means, from marketing material designed to obscure this fact, we must work out which games are actually good while they're in the zeitgeist. I mean, Portal is a fine game, but if I'm playing Portal in 2015 my opinions on it matter to literally no-one.

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Well, for my part, I don't know if the gameplay is going to come together fully (as, yeah, they're keeping a lot of it quiet) but I'm interested in it for the ideas and ambition behind it.

 

Most of the scepticism or negativity I've seen have been on forums and comment threads rather than articles (although I don't read that many gaming sites).

 

EDIT: oh, Ninety-Three, I just noticed that you went back and referenced an article from a year ago. Did you read the ones I linked to, and if so did they sway you at all either way?

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I don't think it's negative so much as skepticism. Video games are expensive and many people don't have the money to buy all of them! Which means, from marketing material designed to obscure this fact, we must work out which games are actually good while they're in the zeitgeist. I mean, Portal is a fine game, but if I'm playing Portal in 2015 my opinions on it matter to literally no-one.

 

I kind of get what you're saying with this, but would you mind elaborating? Like, I'm sure a lot of people here would be interested in each others thoughts on Portal. I guess you just mean average game-playing public?

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I mean that there's very little I could say about Portal that hasn't already been said. You're not going to influence anyone's thoughts on Portal at this point, so if you're playing games to participate in the games subculture, you need to be playing 'fresh' games.

 

I think part of it is that the games subculture has very little interest in revisiting and re-evaluating old games, either to discover that they're much more progressive than we thought, or that they were vastly overrated at the time.

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Hmm. I think that there is more to talk about than just "It's good/bad/overrated/underrated." You can have nuanced thoughts about the tiniest aspects of a game.

 

No doubt games press and Johnny Gamer are always looking forward towards the next big game, but there is totally value in sharing thoughts on 'old' games. Portal came out in what, 2007? I guess that's almost a decade ago now, but still feels very recent in terms of tech.

 

Anyway, this is pretty derail-y. I think No Man's Sky looks pretty sweet, but I too am concerned with how it will actually feel once it's out. I hope the flight mechanics are well done, playing Elite with a proper HOTAS set-up has been a huge eye opener for me.

 

  :getmecoat

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I think that No Man's Sky has a chance of being more interesting than it promises simply because developers (and a good deal of this is down to Mojang's Minecraft) have worked out that random generation works if the environments are interesting enough and there's some game design on top of it that turns the RNG environments into a haystack. Minecraft uses the sun going down, which turns it from 'explore all these samey looking environments' to 'one of these fucking hills has coal, where's some goddamn coal'. No Man's Sky seems to be promising a resource management element, where you need resources to get to the centre and it gets more dangerous as you go. So I'd imagine there'd have to be some gameplay pressure to find the raw materials you need, and therefore to find a way to automatically locate them so you don't have to comb through every planet in the galaxy to collect the obtanium you need.

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