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[rj]

interesting interactions and seeing interesting things

cannot be delivered in the first place.

jesus christ here we go

[ProgramGamer]

Why can't that be delivered? This game looks very interesting since almost everything in it is visually new, so I don't get what you mean by that.

[Capntastic]

Someone pay me $60 dollars to buy and write a 300 word review of it, please

[DireLogomachist]

Why can't that be delivered?

I think he just means the insane hype and Molyneux-level promises of infinite gameplay.

I'm hopeful for the game, but I honestly doubt it can live up to all it's expectations. Doesn't make it a bad game though.

It's not my kind of game and probably won't buy it but I really am loving the incredible variety of creatures that are coming out of its procgen. Honestly very impressed with that so far.

[FrankieSmileShow]

I played five hours of it yesterday. My thoughts so far, if you are expecting a game mostly about pure exploration, with a somewhat simplified Privateer or Elite-like game around it as a structure, you will have a lot of fun with this. The level of engagement is not very high, but it still manages to be fairly engrossing, and I can imagine it could suck many hours of stress-free wandering with tiny little bouts of excitement and discovery here and there. This is the sort of experience the game delivers so far.
I played yesterday and have been looking forward to playing again tonight. I cant imagine still playing this a year from now, but I can definitely imagine still playing for a couple weeks at least.
If they update the game with more content, maybe i'll even come back to it every now and then, kind of like with Minecraft.


The few disappointments:
Encounters with intelligent aliens are a bit disappointing. Entering a space station for the first time was a pretty big letdown: A giant deathstar-like sphere outside, but a big empty hangar with one corridor offshoot leading to a tiny office with one alien stitting in a chair inside. A couple spaceships land every now and then so you can trade. Its functionnal, but its with things like this that the development teams' budget and time constraints show. It might have been worth it to somehow make abstraction of the space station and have it be some sort of menu-based browsing instead, leaving you at least some room to imagine some bustle of activity inside.

Another disappointment so far is something pretty obvious: as impressive as the generated planets may be, they still clearly don't have the flair of something carefully made by art directors and designers. Of course, this is something you must expect from a proc gen game, its an understandable problem, but its still very much there. The planets look quite good visually, have some rich colors, but many places look very much like those boring planet surface exploration bits from Mass Effect 1: a randomly bumped-up ground surface with some bits of ground texture that looks kind of cool from higher up, but walking down there, looks like a generic bad first person survival adventure game. Now, that said, I havent explored many planets yet, and maybe I just got a bit unlucky, we'll see.

[Tanner]

I am enjoying this game a lot and this will be my new chill out game.

[s0]

I am enjoying this game a lot and this will be my new chill out game.

As a fellow noctis fan, how would you say it compares?

[matwek]

Why can't that be delivered?

...Molyneux-level promises of infinite gameplay...

I get what you mean there but I think the comparison to Molyneux might be a bit unfair, its the press/fans that have brought the hype, not the developers.
I've seen plenty of interviews with Sean Murray and as the game got closer and closer to release you could see him get frustrated with keeping the hype at bay, constantly correcting interviewers and managing peoples expectations of what the game actually is.
Obviously they want people to be excited to play their game but I think the fans snowballed that way out of control and I'm afraid its likely to impact on peoples impressions of the game.

[Superb Joe]

Someone pay me $60 dollars to buy and write a 300 word review of it, please

better yet someone pay me £2900 to cover a shortfall in research money into inflammation and obesity. please.

[Capntastic]

Someone do that but then buy me the videogame

[Superb Joe]

the votes are in and it's official: please give me money but also give him money

[SousaVilla]

From all the streams and first looks I've seen the planets look very similar. I'm thinking if I will buy this or not, since I do want to travel through space and see pretty vistas but I'm worried every planet will be more of the same.

[and0]

Why can't that be delivered?

...Molyneux-level promises of infinite gameplay...

I get what you mean there but I think the comparison to Molyneux might be a bit unfair, its the press/fans that have brought the hype, not the developers.
I've seen plenty of interviews with Sean Murray and as the game got closer and closer to release you could see him get frustrated with keeping the hype at bay, constantly correcting interviewers and managing peoples expectations of what the game actually is.
Obviously they want people to be excited to play their game but I think the fans snowballed that way out of control and I'm afraid its likely to impact on peoples impressions of the game.

Yeah, that seems to be the crux of the issue as far as I can tell. Pretty much all people I talked to that were disappointed by the game were disappointed because they had imagined more than the developers have shown and said. I didn't really follow the game all that closely, but to me it always seemed to be what it is now: A tech demo for their procgen algorithms, where you can relax, fly around, discover stuff and not much else. But many people seemed to have imagined there to be more, for whatever reason.

Then again, some people say the developers have been overly vague about the game, thereby creating misunderstandings and fostering speculation. Can't tell how valid that is.

[SousaVilla]

Tha game also changed a lot in development. A year and a half ago there wasnt supposed to be any npcs, just you flying around in space. It feels to me that the mining/crafting stuff was kind of an afterthought as well.

[gimymblert]

So the improbable happen, two player met, but where unable to see each other, despite managing to be in the exact same spot!

[J-Snake]

This game looks very interesting since almost everything in it is visually new, so I don't get what you mean by that.

"new" in an absolute sense, but it is all the same in a structural sense

I don't blame the developer btw. He pretty much knew you cannot expect an interesting game out of it. But as a commercial experiment for proc gen it was a valid try.

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

jsnake is being weirdly strident about something that's actually true this time

[gimymblert]

Only if you can break down exactly given the design goal why he is right. Else it's just a subjective assessment with no ground.

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

Only if you can break down exactly given the design goal why he is right. Else it's just a subjective assessment with no ground.

Procedural generation (as in, making many things from the same process, in any context) is well suited towards variety and randomness, and extremely poorly suited towards actual variety. Everything that springs forth will, by its very nature, spring from the same set of constraints, and (within a whatsoever reasonable level of complexity) no matter how indirect the effects or large the ranges the limitations will become evident to any observer relatively quickly. Since hand-made work rarely comes from a strict set of processes, it's much easier to engineer wonder and surprise and 'things worth seeing' with alternative approaches to making content. Proc gen is 'boring' because most ppl don't care about systems or process as much as they care about results they can connect with or relate to in some way (as with even the clumsiest work made by other humans)

[Tanner]

I am enjoying this game a lot and this will be my new chill out game.

As a fellow noctis fan, how would you say it compares?

i think noctis is still better. the lo-fi graphics (that vaseline filter!) and limitations of the engine/design make noctis way more engaging (at least mentally) for me. there's something about filling in the gaps with noctis that really gets me going. all the kind of half-baked systems in NMS as well as the higher-fidelity graphics do a lot to pull me out of the wondrous state i found myself in when playing noctis. i still find the exploration in NMS a lot of fun and it scratches at least some of that noctis itch, especially the naming/discovery stuff. i got really into naming stuff in noctis. and it has caves. all i wanted from a potential noctis v was caves. and NMS is way easier to play than noctis in this day and age.