[Luis Dias]

I understand what he's trying to say though. There's a difference between game design in games where you have to draw every single "level" and game designs where you just have to design the architecture of the game (and the "game" is the end result). His comments make sense in the "procedural generation" shtick.

[The E]

And make no mistake: Having a procedural universe generator is just one part of the whole thing. There's still a lot of actual gameplay that has to be designed and tested before this is marketable; Something like the Universe Sandbox can get away with not really having gameplay, but a project like this (or Limit Theory) has to have compelling gameplay in addition to being this giant sandbox.

As mentioned in the interview, this is much the same approach to game design that Minecraft took. Instead of designing a world and gameplay systems that allow you to interact with that world, games like these separate the two. This means that unlike a game like, say, Mass Effect, where the world design is heavily influenced by the game design, here the connection between the two is much weaker.

[Luis Dias]

What makes me excited about this is the art design direction. The "Journey" feeling it gives to me, uplifting and optimistic, even the music design is that way, really puts a smile in my face.

Also, I enjoyed this talk by their artist last year:

[666maslo666]

A good proceduraly generated space sim is long overdue. I just hope that with at least four such games in development (Elite: Dangerous, Limit theory, No mans sky, Infinity:Battlescape) someone will get it right..

[Phantom Hoover]

As mentioned in the interview, this is much the same approach to game design that Minecraft took.

Not a very comforting comparison, as Minecraft was on the design level a total shambles. I think it's the main reason I'm so dour about all these procedural games being made nowadays.

[Luis Dias]

"Not a very comforting comparison"

Just look at how minecraft was so amazingly badly received by anyone really.

[NGTM-1R]

And it did not have to be. Being the first virtual lego blocks on the block was the only real reason Minecraft survived, it had very little to do with its qualities as a game. Even now as a game the community's created far more viable mods than then Minecraft has ever been standalone.

It shouldn't make you feel good to be compared to Minecraft because the niche is filled and the room for people who can't work out how to make a game but stack blocks real good is gone by now.

Take Starbound as an example. They knew how things stood and they put much more effort into the game side of the house than earlier productions of the platforming construction sort because they knew that was running out of room.

[Luis Dias]

I just disagree with you on the notion that lego isn't a game.

[BloodEagle]

Legos are definitively toys, not games.

Not that I'm saying Minecraft isn't a game, mind you. (Although, I do feel like Minecraft is a much stronger toy than it is a game, and every update that tries to swing it in the other direction makes it a little less fun to play)

--

I suppose this could turn out one of two ways.

Either it's a really fun game that lasts for a year or so before the player-base completely ruins it or it's a well-done bit of simulation that gets boring after the first few minutes or hours.

My chief concern, as mentioned earlier, is the persistent and propagating changes feature.  I'm pretty sure that that is going to be the most critical, potential point of failure

[Luis Dias]

You may be right about that.

Personally, I detest this (unspoken but implicit) mental framework of "this ain no game it's a toy therefore its bad somehow". I loved Doom when it came out, but the really great moments of it (to me) were precisely before the game started out and just let me explore it. The grunty zombies and monsters were more of a distraction to overcome for me to get to more amazing vistas that this gorgeous engine was providing me with.

There are games right now that don't have "win states". And perhaps the purists hate that ****, I couldn't give a rat's ass about that. I think it's a disservice to games and toys and whatever that we constantly try to tunnell games into this really focused and short canvas of what is a game and what is not a game. Then the same people complain it's all about COD and whatever. Well what did you expect if you are so demanding of a perfect definition of what a game should be, how it should behave, the proper themes, etc.,etc.?

[BloodEagle]

Toys aren't bad.  Toys are fun.

But toys don't have rules, and games do.

That's pretty much the one thing everyone agrees on when fighting that meaningless battle over the definition.

I (personally) recognize that there is a distinction between Interactive Entertainment and Video Games, and that that isn't a good thing or a bad thing.

[Luis Dias]

Toys have lots of rules. Lego is filled with rules. They just don't have any win states (although even this can be argued: one can definitely say that when you finish to make the model of the Lego that comes inside a box, then you "won" that game, but it's stretching quite a lot).

I wasn't ranting against your point, I think I agree with your concerns regarding this game (or toy or whatever).

I just hope someone makes a game like this eventually and it really works and it's awesome. OK, or a "TOY" or whatever!

[Phantom Hoover]

Just look at how minecraft was so amazingly badly received by anyone really.

Because its basic gameplay mechanism is brilliant. The rest of the game, especially after late alpha? Not so much. I said 'on the design level' for a reason.

[Luis Dias]

Minecraft needs design levels as bad as legos need gamerules which is to say not at all.

The problem with Minecraft was the very expectation that people insisted on having (including the creator himself) it as a "game" with "game mechanics" and all the traditional mindless stuff that everyone else had.


Nevermind about all that. I think this "No Man's Sky" is well designed from the start in that "win state" front. It's objective is to travel the galaxy from one corner to the other (or the center or wtv). This is a good starting point for a game win state, and it's really well suited for a game type that appreciates exploration and discovery. The theme is "journey" and although there's a clear purpose and objective to the game, you can go about it in any way you want and how fast or slow you want. I think that is real solid (as long there isn't any "time counter" to this).

Take Mass Effect 2 as a counter example. Although you could explore anything you wanted and choose to take any missions you liked, there was always this strange gap between the clock running thing on the plot and the "waste any time you want doing every single mission you want" thematics. Which kinda ruined the experience for me, who wants to waste time playing some stupid side game when THE WORLD IS ABOUT TO END? And yet we are both asked to take the clock seriously and stressfully and not at all, depending on the situation.

I think that if they take the approach that "Journey" gave (and extend it, naturally), I think they'll be really OK in this design level thing.

[The E]

Because its basic gameplay mechanism is brilliant. The rest of the game, especially after late alpha? Not so much. I said 'on the design level' for a reason.

I was about to say, there once was a time when Minecraft was a very cool sandbox experience, where you had a vast world, and a set of tools that allowed you to leave your mark on it. By expanding the whole thing to include what amounts to endgame content, that cleanness was kinda ruined.

Ultimately, if you are going to go the Minecraft route of incrementally updating your game, I think it's a bad idea to leave people in the dark about what the actual, completed game is supposed to look like. I get the feeling that Mojang never started out with a good idea of what the finished game would look like, but just added stuff until it seemed "complete" to them; If these guys have a better plan, and if they are able to communicate that plan to us early on, I think some of that backlash that Minecraft suffered from can be avoided.

[Phantom Hoover]

Minecraft needs design levels as bad as legos need gamerules which is to say not at all.

The problem with Minecraft was the very expectation that people insisted on having (including the creator himself) it as a "game" with "game mechanics" and all the traditional mindless stuff that everyone else had.

That's EXACTLY WHAT I'M SAYING. Minecraft's creative direction was, especially after late alpha/early beta, increasingly at odds with the thing that actually made it fun.

[Luis Dias]

Oh sorry. Slightly awkward everytime I am aggressively agreeing with someone without realising it.

[Mongoose]

While I do agree that there were elements of Minecraft's later development that moved away from the initial sandbox focus, they never really actively took away from what was there previously, and even then there were additions of block and construction types along the way that allowed you to do more.  I think that the most recent update, 1.7, is probably the biggest contribution to the sandbox in years, as there are now a myriad of new biomes to explore, and whole new classes of blocks to use.

[Phantom Hoover]

While I do agree that there were elements of Minecraft's later development that moved away from the initial sandbox focus, they never really actively took away from what was there previously,

IMO they definitely did. The big one was the revamp of the terrain generation for the adventure update which really dulled the joy of exploration by making the world a patchwork of largely-identical biomes and sprawling, tedious setpieces; but there were other things too. A lot of fruitful corner-cases in the engine were removed: boatvators were greatly nerfed, and all the weird and wonderful intricacy of boosters was replaced with a bland, simplistic facsimile (and nobody bothered to fix the fun solution, powered minecarts, for well over two years!). Oh, and how could I forget the hunger system, a mechanic which actively punishes free exploration. I might just be speaking from nostalgia here but Minecraft delivered best on its potential somewhere around beta 1.2 and 1.5 for me.

[Phantom Hoover]

As far as No Man's Sky itself goes, today's Diecast has a segment on it (at 48 minutes in). I can't listen to it right now but Shamus Young is the official internet procedural generation guy so I'm sure he'll have something worthwhile to say about it (the errant signal guy is also there if you like him).