Looks amazing - I love the aesthetic and exploration focus, but I get a strong feeling of ‘tech demo’ over actual game atm.
I don’t want to be the cynic here, but I do want to poll the crowd: Have many (any?) games succeeded in using something like ‘Procedural Generation’ to create the story/writing/characters?
Procedurally generated landscapes I get, that clearly works. But I’m not especially interested in playing another round of Mass Effect 1 where I get to cruise around on (mostly) sterile moonscapes. The trailer had sharks and fish and worms and trees, so that’s better, but do we think they can make ‘procedurally generated sharks’ that are unique and varied across planets?
From the kotaku article:
The game is entirely procedural in all of the environments it creates, promising unique planetary environments, all of them unexplored. Sean Murray of Hello Games said he wanted to build a game that honored the kind of science fiction he enjoyed in his youth, which weren’t just action tableaus but worlds with extremely rich backstories and characters.
Other than Dwarf Fortress, I can’t think of any games that have tried (much less succeeded) in making interesting ‘procedurally generated’ stories and characters. On the plus side, I don’t really need or even want an infinite game: I’d be happy if it’s a big and interesting space environment with just a few types of planets with mostly scripted (pre-written) characters/stories/quests.
Sure, why not? It all depends on how many variable attributes you can put together. Ultra-fast piranha mini-sharks that travel in schools, huge leviathan sharks, sharks that burrow in the silt to ambush you, sharks with legs that can chase you on land, sharks that can leap out of the water and glide for distances, sharks with laser beams for their eyes. Whatever. It seems like there’s a ton of attributes and abilities you could put together in categorized biomes/species to keep an explorer on his or her toes.
Sorry to shorten you epic post thus. But i wanted to say that Frontier and FFE both had all this back in what?..1998 or something? It didn’t look as nice granted, but we could travel directly from planetside to space to planetside and it looked pretty awesome as long as you didn’t just play those games with full speed setting. You had to gradually and manually adjust the ‘Stardreamer’ speed settings to get the real feel of all that foot-to-stars-to-foot splendor.
Now it is a crying shame that we won’t be getting that until an expansion with the new Elite: Dangerous game. But much of the other stuff you mentioned (astronomical correctness etc) is going to be part of the new Elite. David is an amateur astronomer and into that kind of detail.
True, but if we’re talking about land sharks and ambush sharks with unique behaviors, then I’m assuming those variants would all require human-made animations and AI. If they have the manpower to code all of those AI variations and animations and to build all of the little art blocks to make various types of sharks (not counting size and color, which could of course be randomized), it seems to me like they’ve already done most/all of the work in creating the shark-variants, just as we’d see in a typical action RPG where the same monsters reappear with slight variations.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m just wondering whether they can really expand their scope (or conversely, save themselves development time) by using procedural generation for something like that.
Dwarf fortress has procedural generation for its mega beasts (I think), but nobody minds if those monsters are wacky and ridiculous. The player can use their imagination to make sense of a half-steam flying slug because it’s just represented by an ASCII character that follows the same basic movement/pathing/combat rules as everything else in the game. I think the bar is much higher if the player will be interacting with such megabeasts in a 3d rendered graphical environment with free movement and hit boxes.
Spore automated the AI and animations for creatures with pretty much any shape. I’d be skeptical as well if Spore hadn’t already done most of the stuff you’re talking about.
Yeah, that’s why I was asking. I can believe such games might exist, but I’ve not seen them. I never played Spore, mostly because it had a poor reputation.
Spore’s shortcomings were in the game design. The engine was amazing. It did a very good job of animating creatures given that you could have no legs or a dozen or more. The wild thing was that it did so while giving you a huge range of scales, from planetary to star systems to interstellar to galactic arms to a galaxy with at least 10,000 stars, each with planets that remained consistent between visits.
And let’s not forget X: Rebirth so quick, on this one.
I’m not making the connection with X: Rebirth. Could you elaborate, Zak?
A little bit more info (but only a little more!) in the RPS preview
Every player in No Man’s Sky will begin their life somewhere along the edge of a galaxy. Everything in the trailer takes place in a single solar system near the galaxy’s edge and, red grass aside, on Earth-like planets. “It helps to ground people and I think if we hadn’t shown that, people would go, ‘what the fuck?’” Sean Murray, lead developer on No Man’s Sky, is choosing his words carefully. “It’s quite weird to see a thing that isn’t a fish, in the water. And so we have grounded the trailer in a particular solar system that kind of makes sense for people.”
Which suggests it’s not going to make sense later. The loose objective for player’s of No Man’s Sky is to head away from the edge and towards the galaxy’s centre. As you do, the planet’s you visit along the way become more mutated, more dangerous.
As you make your way towards the centre of the galaxy, the planet’s you pass are stepping stones along the way. You’ll land your ship on them and go hunting for resources. Those resources then, in some unexplained way, aid you in upgrading your ship and yourself. These upgrades allow you to travel larger distances, or maybe make you faster, or probably improve your guns. It’s still ambiguous.
Exploration and resource gathering are the ways, really the only ways, in which the game is similar to Minecraft. The planets you land on aren’t cube-shaped and it’s unlikely you’ll build a house on them. They are the equivalent of Minecraft’s network of underground caves: exciting to find, unique to you, and full of materials which give them significance and value despite not being handcrafted.
It seems to use the planet-sharing model of Starbound. Also, some comparisons to Minecraft, Terraria and Dayz inside.
It looked good but turned out to be shit.
It sure is shit. That’s the risk of every game ever announced, though, right?
The risk is directly proportional to the ratio between ambition of the title and the resources of the devs. And the ambition of his game is pretty big, while only being 4 guys doing it.
To continue with X:Rebirth, it was a game of stripped-down ambitions compared to it’s predecessors and had an established dev team, publisher support, and seven years to work on it. :) But I understand your point.
Good counterpoint, you can also fail despite lack of ambition or having lots of resources, I suppose. But usually it’s harder to reach the goal if you put it so high :).
For example, in this game. It seems to have a space combat part between travelling from planet to planet. How good, how complete will feel the combat, if it seems most of the meager resources are focused on doing it well the procedural stuff? Can we expect Freespace 2 levels of awesome?
Whoa whoa whoa, slow your roll there chuckles, let’s not get all crazy up in this motherfucker now…
Yeah, this exactly. So for those that suffer from bogg-eyed-beer-goggle-sexygraphitus (a terrible affliction for any gamer!) let’s not forget that X: Rebirth had 90% of you (not me) all weak at the knees based on the preview video clips they released, and look where that got a bunch of you! Still maybe this will be different. More news hot of the press here:
The music from the clip is by 65daysofstatic, it’s great to discover a band i didn’t know about, especially one i might well like, here’s the youtube of the song from the game clip:
Let’s not forget this sounds like it will be an MMO for console, so far. (Please be a SP PC game! pretty please!)
Not really, read the RPS preview linked upthread, it details the multiplayer aspect of the game.