So, aside from my vain hope that new posts would be actual news rather than more baseless speculation, there are two things that bother me.
The first is the Starbound comparison. I'm convinced that it's coming from people who haven't actually played Starbound in a year or more, since it's totally misaligned. Most of the problems with Starbound as it stands come from three sources.
1. Severely reduced procgen content. The game started as being heavily reliant on procgen for variation in content, for much the same reason that NMS does: it's not sane to expect any size team to hand-craft literal millions of planets, and just making a few hundred is a blatant lie from anyone claiming to have a game set in a full galaxy (incidentally, how do some of you expect a full-sized galaxy with no procgen content to be created? Is there some secret for pulling stuff from the ether or are you just moaning for the sake of it?). But, over time, they stripped that out, replacing virtually everything from planet biomes to weapon functions to enemy design with a greater percentage of predesigned stuff and many fewer options and greater restrictions on the remaining procgen content.
Something like 60-75% of the enemies are pre-designed and the few remaining have lower variation and fewer potential attacks. The amount of options for generated weapons is much lower. Planet biomes are hard-locked to specific levels of difficulty and loot quality, and terrain generation appears to be quite tightly restricted; you'll basically never see sheer cliffs, concave cliffs, bodies of liquid larger than a shoulder-deep puddle on non-ocean worlds, &c. All genned structures are actually just templates, most with the exact same layout barring only which houses are pasted in which order.
2. Tightly confined restriction on content progression. Duh. We all know this. Every single resource is gated by a boss, an environmental hazard impossible to overcome without following progression in the "right" order, or something else. You absolutely cannot fly wherever you like, the game forces you to do exactly what it wants, and resources are common enough that you'll likely only ever visit one or two of each tier of world before the top.
On another note, what's with this obsession with progression? Why do people think that because your numbers don't have any more hardcoded points of advancement you're not allowed to have fun? This mentality has been driving me crazy for years now, this idea that a game can't be fun unless it's periodically doling out (virtual) material rewards and participation medals. What the actual fuck. Not every game is an RPG, you don't need a goddamn experience meter to enjoy playing a shooter or exploration game. I don't know how much time I sank into Goldeneye or Halo 3 back in their respective days with absolutely no notated gain, and I don't really care, because tooling around in custom games (or even just replaying campaign missions with self-imposed challenges!) was an absolute blast.
If you're the sort of person who buys a game that gives you a ship and a gun before pointing you at a full-sized galaxy full of stuff to find, shit to shoot, and other people to meet, saying, "Alright, go have fun!", and you do the metaphorical equivalent of walking down to the corner store to buy milk before heading back home, then yeah, any game that requires an ounce of imagination probably isn't for you.
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Ranting aside, I'm keeping my preorder and will be happy to play canary after it releases.
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Topic: No Man's Sky - 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets to explore (Read 149045 times)