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[Akura]

You're either with me or you're my enemy!

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes." 

I've always wondered about that line from Revenge of the Sith. The statement is itself an absolute, so the person using it must also be a Sith, right?

[LoSboccacc]

You're either with me or you're my enemy!

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes." 

I've always wondered about that line from Revenge of the Sith. The statement is itself an absolute, so the person using it must also be a Sith, right?

is it? an absolute would be "all Sith deals in absolute"

[miauw62]

@FD:

X3 has a galaxy which feels big but which is mostly hand-crafted. It's not impossible.

Also, nobody says that procedurally generating your universe is bad. Just that then making the fact that you generated a few million samey worlds a central feature of your game is bad, because procedural generation doesn't make good content. This entire game wants to hinge on having thousands of unique planets, but it doesn't have that many, not in a meaningful way. I like my exploration to be meaningful, be that carefully hidden loot, plot, or whatever. Not "look at all the possible colors tree leaves can be!"

[Gabeux]

Hahaha, I read all these posts and its funny..did you guys forget Sony backs the indie team behind NMS? The marketing, of course, is stupid, over-the-top and unnecessary.

I bought the game and paid its high price with full awareness of what it is and what it will be. Procgen in it will be decent but won't achieve the real levels of awesomeness procgen can achieve, like in DF. Because as someone else said in some earlier page, "The beauty is in the meaning". It annoys me to no end to see so much life, spaceships, space stations and all the stuff in these trailers as if the whole universe is over-populated for no specific reason.

I can only hope that Sean Murray is as much of a nerd as I am, and that he meant all the stuff he said in interviews. Like that the trailers and demos aren't representative of actual gameplay, because in those the distance between planets is shortened, there's always a ton of life and stuff happening everywhere, etc.
Still..even if the game behaves like those old space games (like Flatspace) which there was ships moving around anywhere and everywhere for no reason, I'll still enjoy it. NMS is not meant to be Space Dwarf Fortress.

There'll be a bunch of crap generated for no reason, without context, most definitely. But it seems like a fun game. I played the hell out of Prospector (that very-indie ASCII game that I found on this board a few years ago), so I'm pretty sure NMS can be enjoyed too.
I don't get why this seems to be a problem. This game is being marketed as the Next Big Thing by Sony, yes...to casual console gamers. Not to DF players. Don't forget that.

TL;DR/Conclusion: My only hope is that they deliver what they have been repeatedly saying for years. But Spore taught me to hope for the worst. I did that for Fallout 4, and I enjoyed the hell out of it - even if it wasn't all that I ever wanted out of a Fallout game yet.

[umiman]

You're either with me or you're my enemy!

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes." 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[jhxmt]

You're either with me or you're my enemy!

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes." 

I've always wondered about that line from Revenge of the Sith. The statement is itself an absolute, so the person using it must also be a Sith, right?

is it? an absolute would be "all Sith deals in absolute"

Nope, the word 'only' is what makes it an absolute.  It could just as easily have been phrased, "No non-sith, ever, at all, deals in absolutes", which makes it a bit more obvious.

Anyway, off topic.    On-topic: I'm going to be taking my now-standard approach to games prior to release...which is waiting to see what Bay12 say about it once it's released.     I agree with a lot of the comments made about proc-gen feeling hollow and meaningless unless it's backed up with gameplay that works well alongside it, but I'm not going to try and pre-judge whether NMS has fallen on the right side of that line or not.

[Flying Dice]

@FD:

X3 has a galaxy which feels big but which is mostly hand-crafted. It's not impossible.

Also, nobody says that procedurally generating your universe is bad. Just that then making the fact that you generated a few million samey worlds a central feature of your game is bad, because procedural generation doesn't make good content. This entire game wants to hinge on having thousands of unique planets, but it doesn't have that many, not in a meaningful way. I like my exploration to be meaningful, be that carefully hidden loot, plot, or whatever. Not "look at all the possible colors tree leaves can be!"

Um. And it also has a galaxy that is essentially a connected sequence of 1k km spheres with nothing meaningful outside of those. And no interaction with planetary bodies beyond burning up in the atmosphere if you decide to weigh down your controls while aimed at one and then leave for a few hours.

I'm not disagreeing that procgen in and of itself does not equate to a good game, but I'm saying that it doesn't necessarily mean it's bad either. A lot depends on the granularity of its effects, on how many options are made available to the process, and whether the extremes are tightly or loosely constrained. Your last sentence is just as much of an unrealistic depiction as someone claiming that every single world will be as detailed and complex as the playable area of a game with a relatively small map space with a lot of attention paid to it.

One simple way to make planets feel different is to give each different latitude in the terrain generation. And the bit people bring up about "Well, nobody will ever see more than a few thousand planets" actually works in the game's favor here, as it means that they just need to ensure sufficient diversity that in those few thousand planets it's statistically unlikely for the player to see too many repeats.

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.

May i sig this? It pretty much sums up what I wanted to say.

Feel free.

Ranting aside, I'm keeping my preorder and will be happy to play canary after it releases.

Do you have any plans to do videos/streaming when the game is released?

My connection would probably have an electronic heart attack if I tried to stream. I don't have any recording software (and not much disc space, maybe 1.5 TB free), but I could see about doing a few videos on free software if people are actually interested. It'd be basically raw footage with live commentary, no more than basic editing out of long stretches of nothing happening, 'cause I don't have the time to into Youtube or the money to buy good editing software.

[heydude6]

The default windows moviemaker is good enough to at least cut out bits where nothing happens, unless they changed something about it in later versions.

[miauw62]

It was an example of a universe which is entirely hand-crafted yet feels very large. About a hundred sectors is apparently better than a practically infinite amount of procedural worlds.

Varying latitude still falls into the same problem. You're visiting hundreds of worlds. They ARE going to feel samey. Procedural generation is simply not fit to be the central feature of a game by itself. If the player has no reason to care about particular planets in the long term, and the premise of the game implies that they don't, they'll start feeling samey. Minecraft works around this because you have a base, your presence in the area gives landmarks a meaning, both for navigation and potential locations to build something. In NMS you're always just passing by and mobile. It's likely for players to care more about a lucrative space station than a world.

[Flying Dice]

...As with all games of this sort, the focus is on the player's ship. Obviously.

Yes, the devs are treading new ground here, so it's not unreasonable for them to be proud of it, but if you think that this isn't another game about a person and their ship I don't know what game you've been watching. It's not about the planets any more than (for another contemporary example) Elite: Dangerous is about the thousands of literally identical space stations.

[Toady One]

There has been a bit of squabbling in here.  Hopefully people can keep it together as events continue to unfold.

[Cthulhu]

You're either with me or you're my enemy!

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes." 

I've always wondered about that line from Revenge of the Sith. The statement is itself an absolute, so the person using it must also be a Sith, right?

And in the phantom menace darth maul has the high ground against Obi Wan and Obi Wan just jumps up and kills him like it's nothing.

[Sirus]

You're either with me or you're my enemy!

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes." 

I've always wondered about that line from Revenge of the Sith. The statement is itself an absolute, so the person using it must also be a Sith, right?

And in the phantom menace darth maul has the high ground against Obi Wan and Obi Wan just jumps up and kills him like it's nothing.

Obviously Maul never had to deal with that sort of situation before and was unprepared for it. When the situations are reversed in Episode III, Obi Wan knows exactly what to do.

[miauw62]

...As with all games of this sort, the focus is on the player's ship. Obviously.

Yes, the devs are treading new ground here, so it's not unreasonable for them to be proud of it, but if you think that this isn't another game about a person and their ship I don't know what game you've been watching. It's not about the planets any more than (for another contemporary example) Elite: Dangerous is about the thousands of literally identical space stations.

So it's a game about a dude in a ship, but the advertising completely revolves around [ridiculous number] UNIQUE UNIQUE UNIQUE planets? Sounds pretty fucking dishonest to me.

Which is my main problem with the game. It's 60 bucks and advertising an entirely different game than it is.

[Akura]

You're either with me or you're my enemy!

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes." 

I've always wondered about that line from Revenge of the Sith. The statement is itself an absolute, so the person using it must also be a Sith, right?

And in the phantom menace darth maul has the high ground against Obi Wan and Obi Wan just jumps up and kills him like it's nothing.

Spoiler: *cough* (click to show/hide)

Maul didn't die from that. Or at least, pre-Disney retcon he survived.