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[Retropunch]

Procedural generation works very well if it has solid context and systems in place to frame it. More than that, you need to be able to interact with the content in a meaningful way. 

DF and URR procgen very well, because all the procedural generation is housed in very good systems. DF has procedural world generation and stories and the like, but the game play doesn't RELY on procgen.

Case in point: If Toady created one DF world and shipped the game with that, you could have a perfectly great game and lose out on nothing by it only being generated once. If you had to play NMS just on one planet (and the space around it), it'd be unplayable.

[milo christiansen]

Case in point: If Toady created one DF world and shipped the game with that, you could have a perfectly great game and lose out on nothing by it only being generated once. If you had to play NMS just on one planet (and the space around it), it'd be unplayable.

A very good point. When thinking about buying a game with procedural generation ask yourself "if I can only generate one world, would this be worth playing"? That should weed out most of the garbage.

[Retropunch]

Just in case you haven't seen it - this fixes a lot of problems with the flight model:

http://nomansskymods.com/mods/lowflight-by-hytek-packed/

[Flying Dice]

Just in case you haven't seen it - this fixes a lot of problems with the flight model:

http://nomansskymods.com/mods/lowflight-by-hytek-packed/

I guess that's one advantage of it not being always-online, eh? 

Might start playing again with that in the mix.

[Neonivek]

Case in point: If Toady created one DF world and shipped the game with that, you could have a perfectly great game and lose out on nothing by it only being generated once. If you had to play NMS just on one planet (and the space around it), it'd be unplayable.

A very good point. When thinking about buying a game with procedural generation ask yourself "if I can only generate one world, would this be worth playing"? That should weed out most of the garbage.

I think that is kind of also an issue with No Man's Sky is that single planets have waaaaaaaaay too many resources of certain types (like Ruins...)

[IWishIWereSarah]

Apparently, Hello Games removed the possibility to fly this low because you can too easily clip into the planet and get stuck/die. Which are the dangers of this mod, obviously.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, but, like. It's one of those cone-collars to stop idiot dogs from biting out their stitches. You don't need it if you're not entirely brainless and are willing to accept the costs of your mistakes. :|

[Neonivek]

Apparently, Hello Games removed the possibility to fly this low because you can too easily clip into the planet and get stuck/die. Which are the dangers of this mod, obviously.

But of course Hello Gamers DID remove the ability for other ships to fly that low right? right? right? right? right?

[IWishIWereSarah]

Apparently, Hello Games removed the possibility to fly this low because you can too easily clip into the planet and get stuck/die. Which are the dangers of this mod, obviously.

But of course Hello Gamers DID remove the ability for other ships to fly that low right? right? right? right? right?

... Meow.

[Neonivek]

Well ok... But they DID input an easier way to chose your landing locations since you cannot fly close to the planet right? right? right? right? right? right?

[forsaken1111]

Yeah gosh, we can't have players taking risks by flying too low. That would be awful.

[Gunner-Chan]

I think the major reason they tried to not let you fly so low was because they didn't want to sanity check the collisions, since I know there's parts of the terrain you can get the ship easily stuck in... Really just feels like laziness.

I've also been playing Evochron Legacy, which also has seemless planet to space and vice versa. It ALSO has a flight assist but it's handled so much better... If you get too close to an obstruction and you're not going fast enough to overwhelm the system it will hit the thrusters to practically attempt to bounce you away from the surface, or at least cushion the impact.

I think if a devteam of about 4-5 people could do it right, certainly a devteam of 15 can. They just didn't want to.

[Ibid Straydrink]

The server will get wiped with a new build, the bugs are in the superformulae, and other players renaming things seems weird.
I saw an animal that a player had discovered before on a planet that had not being discovered in a system I had found..
I am in dead space too.
No one around me and I found a pet

Probably Spore syndrome- they game has a finite number of combinations, so it eventually populates different planets with the same creatures. Not sure how prevalent that is.

Definitely going to get this game when it's $15 on a Steam sale in a year.

[IronTomato]

I'm torn about whether I should refund this game or not. Like I said before, I am enjoying playing it, though not as much as I thought it would. Also, I've been enjoying it significantly less now that I know about all of the features that it should have but doesn't. Now I can't play it without constantly going "oh gee I sure wish I could be doing X right now" which kind of ruins the experience. Also, whether HG "lied" or not, they definitely did something really shitty and I don't want to help reward them for it by allowing them to keep my money. But again, like I said, I am enjoying it and I feel like I'd probably miss it at least a little if I wasn't able to play it anymore.

* IronTomato 's head emits the sound of grinding gears

[Vendayn]

The server will get wiped with a new build, the bugs are in the superformulae, and other players renaming things seems weird.
I saw an animal that a player had discovered before on a planet that had not being discovered in a system I had found..
I am in dead space too.
No one around me and I found a pet

Probably Spore syndrome- they game has a finite number of combinations, so it eventually populates different planets with the same creatures. Not sure how prevalent that is.

Definitely going to get this game when it's $15 on a Steam sale in a year.

I dunno. Creature wise, I find Spore has a TON more variety in animal life and most of it looks pretty good (most not all). The trick is adding tons of friends so the game downloads their creations. Some of the creatures are kinda messed up and either made by the worst creators ever or just to troll people (like one of my games there was literally a question mark creature). So that is a downside. But you can "ban" the creatures from showing up and they disappear, so not a big deal. For the most part though, I find in Spore that the alien creatures people make are far better than what is found in No Man's Sky. On a rare occasion, I've found an epic planet in No Man's Sky (like I found a snowy planet that looks like whoville, with even creatures that look like they'd come from whoville.). This planet is by far better than most of what I encounter in Spore, but this is a rare occasion in my experience and not the norm.

Planet wise, I'd say No Man's Sky has a large advantage. SPORE planets aren't very varied (not counting creatures), and you can't really explore on them anyway (you can make a hologram of yourself, but if I recall you can't do much).

Content wise, Spore has No Man's Sky beat hands down. With two caveats. One, Spore without galactic adventures kinda sucks and gets boring fast like No Man's Sky. The adventures people make in Spore are AMAZING. Some of them are incredibly impressive. It really adds a lot of fun and if it wasn't for that, I probably wouldn't play it. And two, Spore with Titan Spore 2016 is epic. But that is a mod, so not very good comparison. Outside of mods though, I actually find Spore to be a lot more relaxing and a lot more to do.

And, multiplayer...even though Spore is a singleplayer game (both games are advertised as such), the multiplayer part of it is vastly better. They are both kinda the same, but all the multiplayer in No Man's Sky is seeing a planet and animals named by some random dude if you happen to find one. In Spore, there is a far more community aspect with sharing creations and sharing adventures and creating new content for players.

However, No Man's Sky has Spore beat by far for exploration (so it beats Spore in two ways for me, planet generation variety and the exploration part). Spore isn't a very exciting exploration game for me, and sure you can find relics or whatever on planets. But No Man's Sky you can get out of your ship, go into caves and explore all kinds of cool stuff.

There is however a game breaking design issue (game breaking for me anyway) with No Man's Sky (that for me nullified the exploration part completely). You can't easily find planets/solar systems you've explored. This pretty much put the nail in the coffin for me. I wanted to go back to Whoville, but after spending an hour of raging trying to find the Whoville solar system...I could never find it again. Why can't I go back to places I've been? I don't want to go to the center, ever. I want to be focused on one planet, and explore but go back to my "home". Most of the planets I find suck, I wanted to go back to my "home" of Whoville. I then shut down the game, asked for a steam refund, and even though I had 21 hours played, the money went back to my friend's steam wallet (since he was one who gifted it to me). That annoyed me WAY too much, I thought not being able to find stuff you explored pretty much killed the game for me. I don't want or would ever want to play it as a linear game to the center