No Man's Sky Cosmos

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 think these efforts more have to do with bean counters taking over the industry than game designers being lazy. I'm sure there are plenty of talented people working at these studios, but they are held back by MBAs.

I feel like my issue was that every "site" on different planet was the same. Maybe I just hit poor randomisation or something. But I felt that I found exactly same thing just on different coloured environment. Or then things like pirate ships were just the same. Every single time...

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 unique ship nobody else will ever have, you can make a unique base on a unique planet and even build cities with other players, you can decide to be a space pirate or a wanderer and just explore to your heart's content, is that not enough? what else do people want? people always say nms planets are boring but is it just because they are a single biome? sure it would be amazing to have real planets, like light no fire but for all 18 quintillion something planets, but that would mean having a 30gb folder for every planet! just because they're procedurally generated doesn't mean they don't use up storage when they are generated, and it would be, i think, completely unfeasible to offer what light no fire promises to do but for the entire universe. IMHO you should view the entire nms universe as your equivalent to a minecraft world, and every planet as a unique-ish (there is some repetition but really not a lot) biome in that world. at least it helped me contextualize what the game does, because you're really not meant to spend the entire game on one planet. it's no man's sky, not no man's land...

I played it about a year ago for the first significant time after having bought it some point a long time back.

It's... fine? It kept me engaged until it didn't. Part of the "didn't" came about because I was being paper-cut to death by bugs that googling showed me had been reported for a long time, if not since the very beginning.

I kept feeling like it was a game on the verge of happening throughout, and it never quite made it. Lots of things to go do to serve.. no purpose. Nothing was that unique or memorable, and I often had very little clue where I was in relation to anything. At one stage I was overseeing a town but that seemed to do nothing for me other than make me go back and make a snap decision for no discernible reason, occasionally fight hostile creatures, and also act as a sink for resources I was gathering.

I kept thinking "Why am I even doing this" until it really sunk in "Why am I even doing this?" and quit.

It also exasperated me that even though I was using a pretty fast gaming system, on a regular basis assets would take ages to appear, including buildings. "Fly to this place on the planet, land at this archaeological dig, wait 3 minutes for the dig to bother to appear before you can do anything." (saw identical behaviour on my steamdeck too, so doesn't seem "my machine" per se?)

It's even worse when you see the exact same animal asset but scaled differently with a different color hue on a completely different planet. Ruins the immersion immediately. Obviously, it has come a long, long way since the 2016 article, but still.

It’s the simulation effect - From the perspective of a interstellar travler you too are not meaning different from any other two legged quasi intelligent naked ape. :)

Dwarf fortress or rim world solves that by generating personalities.

Isn't Mincecraft basically that? I've never played it, so would be curious to hear from someone who's played both. From the outside both look very dull/soulless and yet people spend hours playing Minecraft building things - just engaging with their imaginations

> Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way.

This is also the problem with the procedurally generated planets and moons in Starfield. Yeah, there's a whole lot of them, but they're also all populated with the SAME points of interest. You can only see a cryo lab or abandoned radio station so many times before it completely loses any meaning. It's basically the antithesis of the hand crafted world of Skyrim.

It's done so badly that you get points of interest spawning with outdoor food and beverage, folding chairs, umbrellas in icy moons that have no atmosphere and -200C temperature.

The alien creatures in Starfield were at least all designed by hand, and are somehow 'assigned' to specific planets and biomes in a way that's hard coded into the game.

I still think it's a remarkable success story and they can and should be incredibly proud of what they've built. But this vision of what is meant by cosmic depth and expansiveness seems to tragically miss the point.

Compare it to even our own solar system where even so much as a new high-res photo of the hexagon storm on Saturn comes with stunning new and specific detail, or the "heart" on Pluto, we're practically ambushed with novel configurations of atmospheric dynamics and geology. It's frustratingly rare for games to truly activate that feeling of wonder.

I think NMS is still an unbeatable deal for what it is as a game but it's a frustrating near miss flyby of what I think people want a true space exploration game to feel like.

Spore had that but I kind of liked it. I guess that was 20 years ago almost, maybe my standards were lower. It felt charming seeing others' animals, some of them looked pretty cool.

That's funny because that's exactly what I feel when I travel IRL.

I played it in VR and it still does.

No Man's Sky suffers from planets being "deserts", they have different attributes but it's still a fairly lifeless empty world.

Ironically this is realistic but also not terribly fun as a player.

They've added a lot of elements inspired by other games. One of the first things they added was base-building. Also a colony sim subgame, a pokemon-like subgame, fishing and cooking subgames, a roguelike subgame (exploring derelict dreadnought spaceships), as well as a lot more non-procedurally generated storyline/quests.

The worst thing I can say about it is that it tries to be everything for everyone, and is relentlessly friendly - all the new mechanics are very forgiving, very optional and (from what I've seen) rather easy. But there is sort of an in game story explanation for why it sometimes feels more like Stardew valley than a space exploration game.

Indeed, I remember it being pilloried after release but the Steam reviews now are generally quite positive from players who've logged tons of hours.

I've thought about it a bunch over the years and my advice is to follow a few principles: procedural elements should almost always impact how the player plays, procedural elements should cross-interact with each other as much as possible, and procedural elements should be understandable to the player.

As an example in No Man's Sky the player immediately starts with a jetpack. It makes it so the terrain is approached the same way every time: you just jetpack over it. Very rarely something is tall enough to require you to walk around.

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a positive counter example. You have stamina so you're constantly thinking about the height of cliff faces, you can glide so you're thinking about height points and straight lines through the world, cliff faces cannot be climbed in rain so you think about the weather, slopes can be slid down on a shield, etc. There are a bunch of systems that may you think about the topology of the terrain, so even just varying the height map becomes interesting.

Similarly in No Man's Sky there are different resources but they work the same way on each planet and the player interacts with them pretty much the same way everywhere.

When I say elements should be "understandable" what I mean is that a trap, which Dwarf Fortress falls into, is to add a vast simulation which the player feels they can never really grasp. Simulations should not be a black box because then they begin to feel like a random number generator.

The aim shouldn't be to make an "infinite" game but to make a very interesting system for the player to slowly understand and master. The developer shouldn't just add stuff, but they should think about the long journey (and eventual mastery) a player might take as they spend significant time with the systems.

Procedural generation is not gameplay. Procedural generation makes your already fun game more interesting via more variety.

If you don’t already have a fun game, then pro gen won’t make it any more fun than it already is. It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game.

If every single Minecraft player loaded into only a single Minecraft world, it would still be as fun as it is. Would No Man’s Sky really be that much different if it just shipped with a handful of pre-defined planets? It might have less replay value but the gameplay wouldn’t be any different.

Good proc gen changes things in your game such that the player is given interesting reasons to make different choices each time they play.

The advice I've heard is 1) have as many different dimensions of variation as you can manage, and try to have them matter, 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation, since this just reduces variety, and 3) allow your parameters to become extreme occasionally, so that some parts of your generation are notably different, and special because they're rare.

1) is the really hard part, I think: it's a challenge to come up with enough meaningful variations that also work from a gameplay point of view.

Spelunky and Terraria do a good job with Procgen.

Spelunky uses handcrafted chunks that are connected together like a puzzle. Each generation feels interesting because each chunk is interesting and they are just strung together into a unique maze.

Terraria does a similar thing, where all the things that matter are hand-crafted. Bosses, items, layer details, progression. The map and cave system is generated but the caves tend to string together hand-crafted experiences and hand-crafted monsters. Many areas are generated, but in a unique style for variety. And there was still a fixed progression in the background (ore and boss progression). I think its in a big contrast to a similar game like Starbound, where all the weapons and creatures and maps were procgen at first, and it felt very '10000 bowls of oatmeal'. Terraria vs Starbound is the most like-for-like comparison I've seen for "procgen done right vs wrong"

You want to look at dwarf fortress talks for that, I think?

Roguelikes are the ultimate in procgen technology, and should be the basis of any design. (DF is the ultimate simulation but uses procgen as a tool to achieve it; a different vein than NMS trying to explore the procgen and its direct outcomes itself)

1. Any imaginary world needs to be internally consistent to be interesting. Procgen does not void this rule; randomization needs to be gated to that internal consistency.

2. A world can be composed of multiple environments, and each environment can a different definition of internal consistency. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup does this very openly and to fairly good effect, but pretty much any decent procgen game will inevitably end up with the same choice, because it's what enables you to play with various procgen systems/rules while still having a coherent overall game.

3. Generalizing 2, procgen systems generally do not start from nothing; You embed reasonably well-defined bases (races, weapon forms, etc) and then apply randomization on top of those bases to form the final element. Meaningful fundamental variation in those bases leads to guaranteed meaningful variation in the end result.

4. Games are fundamentally interactive systems. Generating a thousand variations without actually changing interaction is equivalent to generating exactly one variation. A blue orc vs a red orc is a not real variant, unless you make it so by attaching effects / statuses / capabilities. The color distinction is then a signal into the more abstracted changes that have occurred. This is where NMS falls over -- the images have changed, but the interaction has not.

5. A corollary to point 4, changing numbers without changing interaction is equivalent to doing nothing. If a meaningful damage threshold is functionally every 10 points of damage, then generating numbers 0-9, 11-19, etc is equivalent to generating just the numbers 0 and 10. This is where borderlands falls over -- a million variations in guns, but the vast majority of those variations are just numeric differences that don't change anything in practice.

6. If the procgen applies to equipment/builds, you pretty much need permadeath as a driver for exploring a procgen game and its systems, because you need players to explore for a local optima. Exploring the space for a global optima in a procgen game inevitably devolves into a gambling simulator, because players optimize out the fun, and the optimal play is to the kill unit XYZ repeatedly for the 0.5% drop. Games like Terraria fall into this trap (though Terraria resolves it mostly by making unit XYZ be trivially summon-able bosses)

7. Procgen can never guarantee interesting results; You inevitably need a system of vaults/artifacts -- hardcoded quality items -- to guarantee periodic interesting locations/items. Ideally more notable than average generation, but less than strictly optimal so as to not overpower the other systems -- an issue I've had with games like Diablo 3, where finding an item-set was vastly more powerful than anything else that I acquired for the next 5+ hours, eliminating the entire looting system (and even character skill system, since it forced my build too)

8. Decent Procgen is inevitably rule-based, with possibly multiple chained-rules each doing their own rolls, to ensure coherency. Ideally the rule-chain is roughly discoverable from the end results (by virtue of following internally consistent and apparent rules) -- an end-result that cannot be explained is indistinguishable from pure-random, and pure-random in incoherent. See any Tabletop RPG generation tables.

9. Hell, just start any procgen design from tabletop RPG tables.

10. The number of variations that can be produced is meaningless. This is only for marketing.

11. A procedural system that generates exactly once is fairly pointless. Permadeath.

12. A procedural system is inherently unfair, because you cannot guarantee difficulty, proper placement, unit composition, etc without removing the procedural systems outright. Embrace the unfairness, and design around it. Permadeath.

13. A procedural system is inherently unfair; you need to give some guaranteed items with guaranteed results to navigate an uncertain world (e.g. escape tools).

14. It's always good to enable some control by the player over the procedural generation. Choice of environments, chances at additional loot, etc. You want the player to engage with procgen rules, because they're interesting (and if they're not, what are you doing?), and the easiest way is to give them tools to manipulate it to their advantage. Also permadeath.

I'm listening to OK Computer right now. Came upon this reply half way through "Let Down". Hmm.

In my own procedural explorations, the solution to the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem is to manually curate them and give the user only the exceptionally good ones. It's a tedious lot of work.

I think because the Minecraft world is like a giant tub of Lego. You go out into the procedural world to collect your pieces and then you create from that. It's actually your creations that are interesting and without them Minecraft would equally purposeless and bland.

Multiplayer, demographic, community, and probably because it mainstreamed the genre. I'm pretty sure people, especially early teens, like to socialize on Minecraft with their friends. There is also the pseudo campaign of defeating the ender dragon. Minecraft is a juggernaut.

I suspect it does apply to Minecraft too, however Minecraft also benefits from its multiplayer communities in modding scene.

And yet it was posted as a reply to someone saying that it still feels like oatmeal.

There really are a lot of things that they could do it with it, but they've already done a lot of things over the years; you can't say they haven't tried things, though I can't say they've always delivered a fun experience with the various experiments. They did pets and pet battles (boring to me), various building ideas (freighters and corvettes, bases, moderately more interesting), trading (I don't care for the implementation, feels detached), salvage, colonization (you become the governor of existing towns and make them run more efficiently and build stuff), etc. And, the worlds and critters got more varied several times over the years since release.

In short, I found it a very fun game until it wasn't, and then I had no reason to log back in. There are things you can do to make your own fun outside the story line; grind for a better freighter, find an build on interesting/valuable planets, find the coolest ships.

Once the story ran out, I was pretty much done, but even if you just play the story and then quit, it's still an excellent value! I got many hours of enjoyment out of a game I paid maybe $20 for. It's a hell of an entertainment deal. I recommend it to anyone who hasn't played it all the way through in recent-ish times. Even if you only play the story out one time and don't find any of the other stuff fun, it's still a very enjoyable game with hours of fun play at a good price that runs well on any decent system.

If I were a designer on the game, I'd find more reasons for human players to be in the same places at the same time and have their actions have a lasting impact in the universe. Riding in someone else's ship (which is what corvettes added) aint it, though. Projects to colonize specific worlds where anyone can stake a claim in a landrush type thing and maybe you setup competitive trade networks or battle for terrain or strategic resources or whatever, would be super fun, I think.

And, I wish space battles were more skill-based, as well. I've never played Eve, but I assume the space battles require skill and strategy and not just the biggest/baddest ship? So, if NMS got really good space battle mechanics, they could implement crazy cool space wars. But, they've got to shrink the game world for that to work (not literally delete the billions of planets, just give players a reason to all fight over one planet or system). Maybe competing for unique resources, like the spice on Dune.

I'll definitely try to find time to log back in and check out the new stuff. Whether it keeps me coming back after I try out all the new stuff and run whatever new missions/stories they've introduced remains to be seen. But, I don't think anyone plays it for the "billions of worlds" thing, because they're all the same after you see the first couple dozen.

True realism is often interesting though, which provides more long term engagement than fleeting shallow fun. Look at some of the hard core 3rd party addons for flight sims, for instance, which are so realistic they actually ship licensed versions of the real aircraft training manuals and checklists - because every switch and procedure works.

> Dogfights carry no difficulty or skill.

You've been hanging out with Claude too much :)

I think the first major issue I had with Elite Dangerous is that there’s, I think, three orders of magnitude of flying around. Which really disconnects me from the feel of it all.

It becomes boring very quickly for me too, the planets are the same, the stations are exactly the same, every alien you meet is the same as the previous ones. You build a base on one planet, then another base on another planet, and it's just the same.

The game is also too unrealistic for me: the planets are too close, you shoot asteroids just like you could 47 years ago, you can't dig very deep at all, your ship follow you wherever you jump to.

The trailer was beautiful, the actual game is really nice for a short while, but it's too simplistic and repetitive.

Visiting planets is just a very small part of the overall game. That was more the first NMS.

Wildlife for example you can train as pets, mounts or milk/harvest.

Once you get access to the Space anomaly the game opens up more and if you are social you will find outposts, pet arenas, race tracks and dog fighting/pvp zones. Ship building and freighters.

The latest update appears to allow groups to control areas of space.

All games eventually get boring but there is plenty in now.

I agree; I stopped playing years ago after completing what was the main quest of the time (uncovering the nature of the universe and getting to the center). I even setup a decent sized farm for one of the more rare materials to make a billion or so credits (until they nerfed the economy for that).

The planet variety is disappointing. And the prefab 'locations of interest' get really, really boring.

But, I admit I may have to fire it up if what I get to explore is player generated now. And if they're actually making some locations more lucrative for either the resources or what's available to actually process them, I would at least want to check it out.

That, and I totally want a base on an asteroid.

The first 60 minutes are definitely a slog, but once you open up access to the quest hub and get access to larger ships that function as bases, the game really opens up. I play it as a "get away" from more competitive/stressful games. The exploration of planets never really appealed to me and doesn't feel like a huge component of the game as much as maybe it did in the early days unless you're hunting for particular resource nodes.

I think Minecraft gets it right by using procedural generation to add depth to the existing content rather than making different content.

There's a fixed set of biomes and notable geographical features designed by the devs, so there's no incentive to keep finding unseen ones, but each world gets its own layout and landmarks, so you get to explore the details of that specific generation for days without carrying over your knowledge of the previous one.

In the long term it might get repetitive too, but it does at the same rate as one gets tired of any other game I think.

I agree a lot with your point on Minecraft. The farther you explore and the more you see, the higher the bar feels for what's worth your interest.

When you first start playing the game, a medium sized mountain is exciting. Then the bar raises towards more interesting features (a deep canyon or a village), and then towards really interesting features of land. Finally, you look for obscure biomes (e.g. badlands or ice spikes). By the end, you can go thousands of blocks without seeing something that feels worth exploring.

Luckily Minecraft has other aspects beyond just the exploration.

> even just like 3-5 actual cities per planet would be a start

This often takes me out of immersion in reading sci fi books. Every planet has one culture, one ruler, one major city. I know it's usually just a convenience but has the author never seen earth? Why would future human colonized planets not have hundreds of thousands of cities and competing factions?

Finding only one village on each planet is kind of laughable in the same way. The stage of human evolution where there was one village is such a tiny slice of time (if it ever even existed at all).

This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept

That sounds a lot like that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup approach of randomly generated floors/levels with designed "vaults" emplaced within them

I actually created a Minecraft server plugin a long time ago which did this. It allowed server owners to create their own dungeons/buildings/etc and they would generate randomly in the world. It even supported custom procedural generated dungeons and structures.

Mine was a procedurally generated FPS I've forgotten the name of, it used a seed key to generate the map and then you could fight on it, if it was a cool map you could just keep or share the key so was replayable.

Iirc it used a voxel engine so would have been late 90's.

I play Tekxit for the same reason. The world feels genuinely alive and surprising. I just love automation as well, and Tekxit hits that sweet spot of "building complex resources extraction and refinement chains" but also "a big world full of adventure where you can actually use those resources for something other than making bigger machines to implement bigger processes to build more complex extraction and refinement chains".

What made you play a game for a couple of hundred hours to then conclude that it is boring? I played the first release and put in roughly 100 hours. The first 90 hours were wonderful. Eventually I realized that I wasn't enjoying it as much so I put it down. But I would never call those 90 hours boring.

I felt like I got a lot of value out of it, and have fond memories of discovering interesting planets. I really view NMS as an artistic experience. I don't care for the gameplay loops. I played this game like an curious explorer. There are infinite planets, many feel the same but occasionally you land on something so special that no one else has ever seen.

If its any consolation you would have otherwise gone from where you were to pretty much end game resources/money/ran out of stuff to do in like 2 weeks anyhow.

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 planets, stepping out of my tiny ship and holding my breath, not knowing much about what awaits me outside - scorching heat, a blizzard, hostile or friendly players... it felt like I got my money's worth if space immersion.

If you don't expect much in the way of an actual game, but are content with a few game loops held together by string and duct tape, you can find a vast and pretty universe to explore.

Reeaallyyy gotta manage your expectations, though. It's very much an alpha, and you better not think it's gonna release, like, ever. Disclaimer: I have no idea how it's evolved in the past years.

But you are pretty much guaranteed never to meet anyone while roaming around randomly. Only if you go to a galaxy center, the Anomaly, an expedition, or matchmake into someone else's game (is that still a thing?)

Also the existing mechanics are overly simplified. Like space combat...

RDR2 feels to me like a game that would be awesome to play once I'm in retirement and have all the time in the world.

'I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world"'

Funny how this is exactly the same sentiment I feel about NMS. Go figure, different strokes, ya know?

> I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".

Two hours is like three or twelve story missions, depending on where in the story you are. Did you spend most of that time farting around doing stuff that wasn't main story [0], or are you just not really into the stories being told? IME, Rockstar's 3D games have always been not-all-that-great third-person shooters, but made up for it with the storytelling and world-building.

> ...because these games didn't respect my time.

If I were Global Overlord for a month, I'd permanently banish the sentiment "This video game doesn't respect my time". It's fine to say "This game bored me." or "I just didn't enjoy this game.". Unless we're talking about predatory "free" to "play" games [1] that survive by deliberately reaching deep into the wallets of whales, mixing pride into the discussion and claiming the injury of disrespect is very silly.

[0] ...of which Red Dead 2 has an absolute assload -most of which will bore folks to tears who don't really dig the "late 1800's outlaw going on about his day" thing-, and GTA V has a fair bit...

[1] Games that you have to pay up front to play can also belong in this category.

What hate? What dogpiling? People are simply talking about how they aren't into the game and find it shallow.

I sense a lot of unwarranted defensiveness from certain fans of the game. Having sustained concurrent players on Steam isn't going to transform the game into something it's not for the people who just aren't into it.

I've relaunched it multiple times over the years when a new content update comes out, and I get the same feeling of shallow blandness every time and move on. The core gameplay simply does not do it for me.

That's another great point. And the general trend (ignoring the peaks of releases) is trending upward which is especially rare on Steam.

Yes, I believe this is a thing. I'm not sure why, but I think for game releases, especially hyped AAA games, your highest player counts are almost definitely going to be the highest in the first weeks of release, so that's the strongest impression. Almost all games see a steep drop off of concurrent players later on, then it stabilizes. Improvements later are thus much less visible, and all the players that got the bad first impression have little reason to go back. I think NMS particularly made a bad mistake compounding this by hyping up the game beyond what it could actually do when it was released - that's an unforgiveable sin to a gamer.

Stuff like this, it's why I often avoid big releases for the first year or two then go play it when it's on sale.

For another perfect game example - Star Wars Outlaws. Terrible, buggy release with obnoxious gameplay loops. They fixed it, now it's one of the better games I've played recently. You can go look up gameplay reviews from the last year to see people shocked at its reputation, it's a very good game now and arguably would have been a candidate for GOTY if it had released in its current form.

In general that’s correct and you can generally estimate sales over the life of the game before the the end of release day. But there are also early access games, which are completely the opposite. Not very much in between those two extremes though.

NMS really is an exception, that they sold well enough at launch that they can keep providing free major updates for 10 years.

No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 are actually proof you can have an awful launch and still pivot into a large player base and continued sales via updates.

Reception for both games is largely positive despite their poor initial response.

> I think maybe you're discounting that people have agency and can decide that a game they are playing actively doesn't tick their boxes.

> Mile wide and inch deep is exactly the way to describe it.

Aren't you doing the same thing you're saying? Plenty of comments in this thread disagree with your assessment. If the game isn't for you, that's one thing, but it's a factually untrue thing to say "there's nothing to do, game is sparse after a few hours and novelty wears off" like many comments say. This suggests the person did not actually see a lot of the game, which is fine, but it's still not a trustworthy evaluation to me.

I can see your viewpoint. Some people don’t like sandbox games. that’s fine, I actually hate them, but this game’s additions led me into it gently in a way I’d never interact with say, a minecraft game. However, this is like, a sandbox game on steroids. There’s a strong mmo component of grouping, more being added (per this topic), and playing however you want to is entirely possible. In that regard I consider it one of the better sandboxes I’ve played lately, and I have played hundreds of hours of games like star citizen. I’d wish star citizen approached the game loop similarly.

I find incremental (clicker) games fascinating because they are like crack for certain brains (myself included if I let them).

There's something interesting going on with certain kinds of activity - exponential progression and incessant busy-ness. It tickles something that shouldn't be tickled.

I had this exact thought today, having recently been on a nostalgic Minecraft binge.

Incidentally, I can't place it, but Minecraft is an infinitely more enjoyable hangout and break/build stuff game than NMS. NMS is just very sterile to me.

I feel like for some of them they are almost like tarpits for some gamers. Think of some gamers in mmorpgs with like thousands of hours under their belt in some game, content with grinding, learned complicated meta, have some working understanding of the in game economy. Or these other sort of "logistics simulator" games where they are making spreadsheets to min max various in game phenomenon and scaling out and compounding their efforts.

It is like what if they were putting that undiagnosed hyperfocus into the local lawncare industry instead. Start off with a $50 mower at Level 1. Grind all summer gaining xp and unlocking more quests. Get enough for a riding mower with better DPS so you can do more lawns in a day and improve xp rate. Get enough to unlock a helper. Get two helpers. You stop mowing and its the helpers going out with your name on the side of the truck. Now you are a successful small business owner.

Same sort of mind that optimizes the in game meta could play the real life meta too. No one tells you about this when you are 14 years old though. None of your friends are doing this. There aren't forums and discords talking about this. Everyone's gaming though.

And it can be even a tar pit for smaller stuff than one's career. It is a big meme for someone to have say a beautiful base built in some game, really carefully done and really ornate, and the room they play in is an absolute disgusting disaster of trash and unclean clothes tossed everywhere. All in game chores done to a T of course.

The comment you're linking actually says that the game "feels like nothing" and that there's nothing substantial to the gameplay. It doesn't even use the word "empty."

I have over 3500 hours logged on Steam for NMS, and at 65 hours you have barely scratched the surface. Like many open world sandbox games, you have to make yourself goals. If you want a nice guided "start here" to "finish there" type game NMS is not for you.

There's a fair bit out there about their launch circumstances. From memory they weren't entirely in control of the timing.

Doesn't matter, people move on. Those who stay, who funneled money into the endeavour want it to succeed. That's all.

Yeah, imagine the reviews if it would've been what was promised from the get go.

I suppose because you still bought the game, after all, and on some level it was about catching up to expectations for what you would have paid for out of the box.

That said, I don't agree with their take at all. Hello Games offered a mountain of content that's right in the bullseye center of game's core vibe and identity; and continuing to hold the original critique against them based on the "not procedural enough" argument is increasingly equivocating between two different things. You've been given a game that's more than worth the cost of admission, and you'll see dozens, hundreds, of slop space games come and go with less than one tenth the value proposition of NMS. That should be more than enough to quell 99% of the criticism.

The fact that it's not procedural enough amounts to, say, feeling that The Odyssey was good, not great. For however true that is, it's not a scandal.

Content updates for a paid game aren't free. They're adding to a package that, more often than not, was incomplete to begin with. And they'll often result in more sales, which is how they pay for themselves.

Not that they're bad, but wording them like they're some huge act of generosity from the studio instead of a reasonable expectation pushes the baseline away from where it should be.