Exploration is fine when there is something worth seeing. So far it seems like planets are all the same but a different colour and the animals are random Lego pieces put together by a child.
No Man's Sky
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Quote from Skybex
6 minutes ago, Skybex said: Exploration is fine when there is something worth seeing. So far it seems like planets are all the same but a different colour and the animals are random Lego pieces put together by a child.
LMAO that fucking creature...
No it's ok, procedural generation is the future ?
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Quote from Skybex
5 hours ago, Skybex said: Exploration is fine when there is something worth seeing. So far it seems like planets are all the same but a different colour and the animals are random Lego pieces put together by a child.
What were you expecting to see, though? Real time procedural tech isn't going to get you anything more than goofy looking Spore creatures and somewhat standard looking voxel terrain. Especially out of a 15 person team, the stuff they accomplished is absolutely nuts.
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Quote from DrywallDreams
13 minutes ago, DrywallDreams said: What were you expecting to see, though? Real time procedural tech isn't going to get you anything more than goofy looking Spore creatures and somewhat standard looking voxel terrain. Especially out of a 15 person team, the stuff they accomplished is absolutely nuts.
but it's 60 bucks ...
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Quote from 2d-chris
7 minutes ago, 2d-chris said: but it's 60 bucks ...
Hello Games has been working on this for over two years, using procedural tech in a way/scale that no one has quite done before. $60 isn't so bad a price for the game, imo. I've paid more for less. Hell, I'm preparing to spend more than that amount on a single copy of a Tetris game, so I may be a bit crazy.
Really, the game seems like this year's Destiny.
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More like inventory is full simulator
It's fine, but already after 2-3 hours yesterday I feel like I've had my fill, but it might also be a thing that you kinda need to be in a particular mood for.The part where you're speeding towards a new planet and enter it's atmosphere is pretty amazing, it's just all the other stuff you do that loses it's charm very quickly for me. Gonna give some more time to see if it throws some surprises into the mix.
It's also going to be interesting to see how they support the game in the coming time, almost more than anything it felt like any of the countless early access survival/crafting games on Steam.
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Quote from DrywallDreams
3 hours ago, DrywallDreams said: What were you expecting to see, though? Real time procedural tech isn't going to get you anything more than goofy looking Spore creatures and somewhat standard looking voxel terrain. Especially out of a 15 person team, the stuff they accomplished is absolutely nuts.
I was expecting planets to be different along with the resources you can gather. Find a planet that is barren of everything but one resource but mining it might piss off the local mining group, another planet that has lots of sentient life, another that is constantly hit by meteor storms or a planet that looks like its recently been hit by some massive natural disaster.
So far we just have a varied bumpiness, colour and different lego piece animals. And instead of searching for rare materials and minerals, it seems that everything is abundant and its just a grind to keep certain meters from nagging you constantly.
Also I see that "its only a small team" argument on reddit a lot. Quite frankly I don't care how many people or who made it. The price point is all i care about, and at $60 I expect a full AAA title in terms of quality. But what i see is a game with much less depth than Minecraft or Terraria offered on release, both of which i paid about 8 dollars for.
To be honest, the game reeks of being a programmers game. A game with some nice features that can serve as a quality starting point. But did they have a singe game designer on the team to focus any of these ideas into an actual game? I really does just look like a tech demo and at some point someone decided to cobble together some form of game and what they ended up with is the "inventory full" simulator @Mazy mentions.
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@Skybex possibly a decent structure that could be refined for a sequel then...or a large patch?
Patch notes 2/10/16:
- Added gameplay
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Quote from Skybex
11 hours ago, Skybex said: Exploration is fine when there is something worth seeing. So far it seems like planets are all the same but a different colour and the animals are random Lego pieces put together by a child.
HAHAHA
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I think the problem is not procedural generation, it's when you clearly realise it's procedural generation
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Quote from DrywallDreams
10 hours ago, DrywallDreams said: Hello Games has been working on this for over two years, using procedural tech in a way/scale that no one has quite done before. $60 isn't so bad a price for the game, imo. I've paid more for less. Hell, I'm preparing to spend more than that amount on a single copy of a Tetris game, so I may be a bit crazy.
Really, the game seems like this year's Destiny.
2 years is not the point, and even then it's not a lot of time for a AAA priced game, you'd expect some serious quality and scoped content (1 trillion procedural world is pointless if the content doesn't compliment it) even Overwatch realized this and priced their game down to $40 for PC. Value is undoubtedly one of the most important parts of games these days, or well, perceived value I should say. I'm not trying to hate on this game, it excites me from a concept point of view, but for me it's a $15-20 game from what I have seen thus far, and charging full AAA price upfront to seeming catch the hyped fans is only punishing the people that cared the most.
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Procedural games are still in their baby shoes. We've seen some impressive tech for world generation but the next step needs to be procedural content generation that doesn't feel weird and shallow. I imagine it's only a question of time that someone makes a game as complex as say Skyrim, only that the world, quests, characters, factions etc. get generated afresh everytime you start a new game.
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Quote from Steppenwolf
29 minutes ago, Steppenwolf said: Procedural games are still in their baby shoes. We've seen some impressive tech for world generation but the next step needs to be procedural content generation that doesn't feel weird and shallow. I imagine it's only a question of time that someone makes a game as complex as say Skyrim, only that the world, quests, characters, factions etc. get generated afresh everytime you start a new game.
I think the bottom line is that people will either 1) want stories or 2) want to create stories. Either way, there has to be a story somewhere.
When you know that a code just randomly generated the world you're in, it's going to feel very meaningless and shallow.
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Quote from 2d-chris
2 hours ago, 2d-chris said: 2 years is not the point, and even then it's not a lot of time for a AAA priced game, you'd expect some serious quality and scoped content (1 trillion procedural world is pointless if the content doesn't compliment it) even Overwatch realized this and priced their game down to $40 for PC. Value is undoubtedly one of the most important parts of games these days, or well, perceived value I should say. I'm not trying to hate on this game, it excites me from a concept point of view, but for me it's a $15-20 game from what I have seen thus far, and charging full AAA price upfront to seeming catch the hyped fans is only punishing the people that cared the most.
The problem is that the definition of "content" is now "art assets". The Witness had people complaining about the same things, after all, that was "just line puzzles". A game can have 100 hours of art assets, and it's a great game. If most the game's content was created through programming, the devs are lazy or are overcharging for their game.
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I remember losing the immersion and being very disappointed when i realised most of the loots in skyrim were randomized and will adapt to the level of your character. On the contrary, the procedural generation of the levels of FTL or Nuclear Throne for example don't get me out of the game. Dwarf fortress is also a great example. I do think procedural generation can be an added value, if its mechanic stays hidden or well dressed and you don't get "oh, another random event again" moments
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Quote from FMPONE
6 hours ago, FMPONE said: When you know that a code just randomly generated the world you're in, it's going to feel very meaningless and shallow.
Didn't seem to bother all the Minecraft players out there. Probably still gonna take 10-20 years before AI or some neural networks can create a narrative that's difficult to distinguish from something man made. But once it's there i don't think it will take anything away from the experience. It's all a question of quality and depth not how it came to be. Also procedural games being virtualy infinite is just a recent trend. I could imagine there is lot of untapped potential for shorter and more focussed adventures.
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Quote from FMPONE
9 hours ago, FMPONE said: I think the bottom line is that people will either 1) want stories or 2) want to create stories. Either way, there has to be a story somewhere.
When you know that a code just randomly generated the world you're in, it's going to feel very meaningless and shallow.
Have you ever played Dwarf Fortress?
What a lot of these randomly generated games lack is what Dwarf Fortress does really well: When you start a new game, the first thing the game system does is to generate a world. It then applies several rules and checks to see if that world is valid and moves on to the next step: Populating the world with characters, biomes, nations etc... The simulation then runs for decades and this is where the real magic happens. Wars are fought, climates are changed, civilizations rise and fall, legends are born etc... When you start a new game you have a huge amount of backstory of past events that happened in that newly generated world, which you can then continue and evolve. This is something that I hope games take more advantage in the future.
No Man's Sky from what I've seen falls only in the realm of randomly generated content. The generated content doesn't interact with older content and doesn't evolve. It's an infinite but static game. The most the player can influence the game is by naming things.
I really want to check it out but I think I'll wait until it's cheaper. No point in paying 59 bucks for a game that might get old in a matter of hours.
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Quote from Steppenwolf
1 hour ago, Steppenwolf said: Didn't seem to bother all the Minecraft players out there. Probably still gonna take 10-20 years before AI or some neural networks can create a narrative that's difficult to distinguish from something man made. But once it's there i don't think it will take anything away from the experience. It's all a question of quality and depth not how it came to be. Also procedural games being virtualy infinite is just a recent trend. I could imagine there is lot of untapped potential for shorter and more focussed adventures.
we already have the technology for procedural stories: http://objectdreams.tumblr.com/post/147401575…ynopsis-written
but really, I might even say we're maybe even 5 years off of something like this, looking at stuff like Dwarf Fortress, there's some really interesting stuff in the realm of procgen when it's allowed to go a little crazy, which seems like the huge point against NMS (though there's some good shit out there: https://twitter.com/tha_rami/status/763616163511341056), NMS just seems to ground itself in reality just a bit too much (also while I was typing this Minos also made a great point about the universe being forced to be static), making it seem a bit bland.
Also it's worth noting that with Minecraft, there's actually a huge community for custom maps, Minecraft does well as a simple level editor for whatever the players may want.
I think the procgen magic is going to start to wear off, though, particularly in the realm of Rogue-likes and other arcade-style games, as the people who grew up with developers like Amusement Vision start making games
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Guess we are just waiting for some smart guy to put all the puzzle pieces together. A game that combines elements from Minecraft, the world history thing from Dwarf Fortress and some quests and npc interactions that go beyond simple fetch and grind missions would be pretty awesome.
As for proceduraly generated stories, i think we are still in the uncanny valley with that looking at the different chat bots and things that already exist. For games it's more complex then a simple story on a page aswell, since it all has to branch out and still make sense.
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I have a feeling that even if procedural games were this huge phenomenon, there would be a separate urge for content that went far in the other direction. All of the art I really like is so personal and narrative driven, if it was so easy to program that I think it would have happened long ago.
Undertale was a great game because it was so _not_ made by a computer. Every second of that game was calculated and designed. To set up constraints which would deliver you content like that, you'd have to design the constraints to such a degree that you might as well make it in the first place.
Not saying procedural generation could never work, but I'm getting the feeling people might be studying this game (No Mans Sky) for a long time as evidence of what not to do.
Quote from Minos35 minutes ago, Minos said: Have you ever played Dwarf Fortress?
What a lot of these randomly generated games lack is what Dwarf Fortress does really well: When you start a new game, the first thing the game system does is to generate a world. It then applies several rules and checks to see if that world is valid and moves on to the next step: Populating the world with characters, biomes, nations etc... The simulation then runs for decades and this is where the real magic happens. Wars are fought, climates are changed, civilizations rise and fall, legends are born etc... When you start a new game you have a huge amount of backstory of past events that happened in that newly generated world, which you can then continue and evolve. This is something that I hope games take more advantage in the future.
That sounds cool, but at the same time the graphics are just like 1s and 0s right? What's the point of all that scale of its so out of proportion to what can be presented feasibly. I'm not saying this is a recipe for a bad game or anything, I would just have a million questions as a player like, "why should I care about this iteration of a universe vs the next one the computer generated" or "how can I share this experience with my friends when we're all playing a different game." Or "even if we could share this world, what's the point?"
Minecraft is an interesting example but the core gameplay loop of crafting and building seems to be the most salient part there, at least to me personally.
I probably would argue against making a procedural game, but I'm myself rather biased in favor of tailored experiences for obvious reasons, not sure how much that's blinding me.
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