Who said anyone expects there to be a month or year's worth of pre-generated gameplay tasks to do on a planet? I can't speak for others, but when I talk about wandering around a planet for a month, it's just that. Exploring the landscape. You may frame that as a "needless waste of time", but some of the most fun I had in Morrowind was just wandering around the land. Anyway, Sean said he doesn't expect most people to spend a year on a planet, but a few might, and I don't think anyone here has been suggesting otherwise. But you could probably walk around for a couple weeks without running into the same landscape. When you say a few hours, I think you're not understanding just how big the area of these planets are.
I'm not sure why this game attracts such negativity and debbie downer-ism. I have no idea how Sean maintains such a positive and gracious attitude in the face of it.
I merely meant that, in general, most people's experiences will resemble the gameplay loops and timings I've mentioned, and that it's probably something Hello Games are aiming for. There is sort of a desired, "proper" way of playing, if you can even say that, especially for a game like this, but Sean and the team obviously have specific gameplay directions in mind, as in "it's not a game about settling in one place", it's about being an explorer, a nomad, a spelunker etc. So with that in mind, some, if not most people will get tired of seeing, say, canyons on a "canyon planet" after a while, no matter how wild those terrain configurations are. And as you play for hours and hours, that "tolerance" will get even lower for most people, leaving the aforementioned gameplay loops as the hook that keeps pulling you back into the game, which coincidentally are designed in a way to push you outwards into space, to other planets.
So when you talk about wandering around the planet for an actual month, I understand you mean exploring the landscape etc, but if you have the ability to fly a full circle around a planet in a matter of seconds, minutes at most, a planet consisting of a single biome, a few dozen points of interest, caves, minerals, creatures, plants, artefacts, temples, monoliths, crashed ships etc, I really don't think you or most people will spend an actual month or a year occupying their time with just one planet.
I mean, of course you can, and some people might, but I was just saying that given the transportation superpowers, having a compass and waypoint markers makes the whole exploration thing work a lot faster than, say, actually leaving your ship behind and deciding to be a hermit, forever walking on foot. It's just that the game wasn't really designed for such an experience, and I believe that it would feel pointless after a few hours, a day or two at most, even for people like myself who actually love to explore virtual worlds for hours upon hours. "Running into the same landscape" can be interpreted in different ways, sure, but I'd almost guarantee you that once you see a dozen lakes, mountains, caves and canyons of said planet, you will get the idea of what that planet has to offer, and that this will happen mere hours into exploring said planet.
I know, I'm making certain presumptions, and I apologize if it sounds in some way whiny or negative. Believe me, that's not my intention, as I can safely say I'm very biased and a complete fanboy of this game despite not having even had the chance to play it, this literally sounds like the dream game I've been wanting to either play or create myself one day, but the way Sean Murray and lots of people keep talking about spending years on planets, not exploring the galaxies in our lifetimes, without really addressing important details like travel speed, average time spent on basic tasks etc, sounds kind of weird to me. It's not exactly misleading, since these things are technically true, but in practice aren't really probable or realistic to even talk about, in my humble opinion of course.
You can have 18 quintillion planets and spend your life playing No Man's Sky, or have 10 maps and also spend your life playing Quake 3 (obviously for different reasons, with different conditions), or Minecraft with infinite world seeds, or FTL with an extremely limited number of event combinations, or any game ever. The number's so big it's not really relevant, because (and I'm just pulling a number out of my ass), the average player will visit like a total of 300 planets in their playthrough of NMS.
In the same vein, yeah, you can spend a year on a planet, but that one planet will at least be flown around its circumference dozens, if not hundreds of times, over and over, in a matter of hours, days at most, except for the very extreme cases where people will stubbornly keep walking around, running into variations of the same things they've already seen. I just think that exploring a planet for a month will feel like an extremely useless task for even the most hardcore explorers out there, especially when you think just how many new worlds await to be explored.
This is a good description of where No Man's Sky is coming from and what it's probably aiming for in terms of the moment-to-moment gameplay. Games like FTL and Spelunky have explicit goals and are meant to be played in relatively short bursts, but you kind of get the idea. A better comparison might be a dungeon crawler with endless procedurally generated floors, though I can't think of a specific one off the top of my head.
The description of the second level vs the first level in Spelunky is also a good comparison to NMS I think. Things are procedural in NMS, but not really random. There will be factors based upon which you'll be able to predict certain things. You can already see this in Elite and Space Engine. If you find a star system with a white or yellow main sequence star, you can guess that if there are any temperate planets they'll be between 0.5 and 2AU away from that star, and that's where you should look for interesting planets. If a planet is much closer you can guess it'll be really hot. If you see that a planet looks like a featureless disc but is rocky, then it probably has an extremely thick atmosphere (like Venus or Titan) and visibility will be bad on the surface.
I imagine that based on factors like this, you'll be able to make certain assumptions about what you may encounter on planets in NMS. Maybe you'll see what element the atmosphere is made of and be able to plan out what gear you'll need to survive on the surface. Maybe the game establishes that certain elements are more likely to be found on bodies orbiting a certain distance away from certain kinds of stars. Maybe you'll eventually understand that certain pirates or traders tend to do business in systems with certain kinds of resources. Things like that can all predictably play out through procedural generation. We already know creatures will have different behavior patterns.
But yes, people need to realize that at its heart, NMS is going to try to keep players interested with a resource/loot gathering gameplay loop.
Yeah, I suppose I should've made a comparison with something like Dungeons of Dredmor, or maybe Delver, Dungeon of the Endless (I haven't really played a lot of these), but yeah, that's the point. NMS will probably have those recognizable simulations, emergent gameplay situations that will slowly force the player to learn the interactions between these elements and learn how to recognize them to their advantage, which is always a beautiful thing.
I imagine there'll be situations where you hyperjump into the system, see a reddish planet, get in orbit, see if it's more desert-like, or infested with volcanoes etc. and draw assumptions that you'll need good thermal protection, maybe get those bombs since you'll be expecting a lot of cave systems filled with crystalline formations, and maybe a hefty armor piercing weapon for the potential pesky hard-shelled creatures living underground etc, that sort of thing. Welp, I just repeated what you said.
And I'm glad that the new trailer and all the previews are talking about "survival", because that, alongside the loot and money earning loops is what I've felt this game is about mechanically from the start, so it should hopefully clear things up a bit.
You will die a lot.
