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[Necromanti]

Is the game, in essence, a survival game? I never got that impression until now when Sean mentioned The Long Dark as an influence as well as previews talking about having to power your suit with resources, at least to stay warm in the cold.

 

[OmegaDL50]

One preview mentioned grenades that deform the environment.

Makes we wonder if these are grenades with the specific purpose of manipulating the landscape, and if so, what kind of exotic gun upgrades and gear we'll find.

And re:hacking, I wonder if we'll be able to hack Sentinel bots and make them fight for us?

About a Grenade that can deform a world.

Does this potentially mean planets could be destroyed. Maybe something not that extreme, but it sounds interesting.

 

[More_Badass]

Sean said Ted Price is one of his favorite people in the industry so hopefully he gets a little R&C inspiration



lol, sounds like "drug smuggling" was just the writer's way of spicing up the fact that you can get in trouble for screwing with the environment too much but idk.

Well, if you can be a trader and a pirate, perhaps selling illegal drugs is frowned upon on certain stations or a trading posts owned by certain factions. This is an arcadey space sim essentially, and you can smuggle illegal cargo in those games

 

[More_Badass]

Is the game, in essence, a survival game? I never got that impression until now when Sean mentioned The Long Dark as an influence as well as previews talking about having to power your suit with resources, at least to stay warm in the cold.

It is, for dangerous and inhospitable planets. Acid rain, blizzards, the ocean, etc. I dont recall any mentions of hunger or needing to sleep or those kinds of survival mechanics. Just surviving the planets themselves

 

[Shinypogs]

From the rock paper shotgun preview

I finally reach my ship. Just before I hop in a bigger creature attacks and kills one of the nearby tiger things (I don’t remember their in-game name). I turn to observe the killer like David Attenborough would do if this was a wildlife documentary. “He’s eating its butt!” I observe, also like David Attenborough would do. “That’s the law of the jungle,” says Murray.

This is why I will never get to the center of the universe. I will spend all my time on each planet observing and taking notes about the wildlife interactions. Which herbivore species can intermingle and graze together, which predators share territory peacefully and which ones will fight, do all predators hunt the same prey species, do they have different hunting ai etc etc

 

[Necromanti]

It is, for dangerous and inhospitable planets. Acid rain, blizzards, the ocean, etc. I dont recall any mentions of hunger or needing to sleep or those kinds of survival mechanics. Just surviving the planets themselves

That's probably the best compromise without making it feel like a chore, honestly.

 

[More_Badass]

From the rock paper shotgun preview


This is why I will never get to the center of the universe. I will spend all my time on each planet observing and taking notes about the wildlife interactions. Which herbivore species can intermingle and graze together, which predators share territory peacefully and which ones will fight, do all predators hunt the same prey species, do they have different hunting ai etc etc

Man, Rain World is going to be one of your favorite games if you like observing wildife. No game has wildife as naturally animated and intelligent as Rain World

 

[blackjaw]

Can't wait.

Some of my fun in games like Morrowind, Skyrim, Witcher, etc was just from exploring and doing weird things like making a pillow fortress in Morrowind or trapping NPCs in Skyrim...just non-game stuff.

I love the openness and the "do what you want" nature of this, can't wait!

 

[Zophar]

I think this looks cool and I'm pretty happy it finally has a release date.

It definitely needs meaningful objectives though; I could never get into crafting games like Terarria or Minecraft because I don't see the point in doing anything.

 

[More_Badass]

I think this looks cool and I'm pretty happy it finally has a release date.

It definitely needs meaningful objectives though; I could never get into crafting games like Terarria or Minecraft because I don't see the point in doing anything.

But Terraria isnt a "crafting game". It has crafting but it's essentially a survival action-RPG with bosses, quests, experience, leveling up, stats, etc.

Just like this is an arcadey space sim with trading and space combat and piracy and factions and so on

 

[Shinypogs]

Man, Rain World is going to be one of your favorite games if you like observing wildife. No game has wildife as naturally animated and intelligent as Rain World

I'll have to watch a let's play of it, I am pretty garbage at platformers but just off the video on steam is looks amazing.

Yeah I like wildlife stuff IRL and in games. Heck it was really cool in skyrim when it became apparent that certain species liked and disliked each other and you could come across wild battles of spiders and their allies vs i think it was spriggans and their allies.

Stuff like that makes worlds feel more real and alive.

 

[MarineMountie]

Dont know why, but im starting to think the center of the galaxy is the biggest planet, and when you reach it you can make it home. It becomes sort of like a Minecraft. Go to other planets to find building materials, mine on the home planet for materials, etc...

It would be a great way to keep the game going and keep the community active. Otherwise, why even make it multiplayer since you likely will not run into anyone?

I cant wait for this game!

 

[More_Badass]

I'll have to watch a let's play of it, I am pretty garbage at platformers but just off the video on steam is looks amazing.

Stuff like that makes worlds feel more real and alive.

Yeah, all the animations in that are procedurally generated so every creatures moves with this fluid grace. But the real cool thing is the AI. A lot of people say AI is pretty stagnant in games; Rain World is doing things that no other game is doing. We're talking creatures that can dynamically react to and adapt to changes and threats in the environment, be it another member of its species or a predator or prey. That fight for dominance or can get annoyed with each other. Species that work in packs, communicate with each other, and obey an alpha. Species that can predict where you might be if they lose sight of you. That have personalities and memory and attention spans. It's crazy complex stuff

 

[RiverKwai]

One preview mentioned grenades that deform the environment.

Makes we wonder if these are grenades with the specific purpose of manipulating the landscape, and if so, what kind of exotic gun upgrades and gear we'll find.

And re:hacking, I wonder if we'll be able to hack Sentinel bots and make them fight for us?

I'm trying to remember what they said before about the grenades. I think maybe it's like an "alt fire" kind of thing you can upgrade on your multitool that lobs a ball of energy that does more AOE type destruction than the "laser" setting it normally fires at. I don't know if we've seen it before in a video or not, but Sean has talked about it a bit on one of his interviews.

 

[More_Badass]

Maybe I'm nitpicking here, but it just seems weird for a species living in an "extreme cold" climate to be a hairless reptilian. Have we seen species with fur or mammalian creatures?

 

[CarbonFire]

Maybe I'm nitpicking here, but it just seems weird for a species living in an "extreme cold" climate to be a hairless reptilian. Have we seen species with fur or mammalian creatures?

Weird for an earth animal maybe.

That guy probably has boiling nitronium flowing through his veins.

 

[Icyflamez96]

I don't think we've ever seen fur.

 

[Odrion]

I think Spore's disappointment traumatized me because I am still inherently very skeptical at a game at this scale.

 

[omnislayer]

I think Spore's disappointment traumatized me because I am still very inherently skeptical at a game at this scale.

I feel like it's always best to keep expectations in check.
Even an incredible game can be disappointing if you're expecting too much.

 

[the_batman]

If i on a planet and I make changes to it, no one else can see it. thats a bummer.

Will you be bale to see other games too?

lay off the acid, cuz.

 

[Odrion]

Like, no way did a small team crack the code at designing a universe sized sandbox that can offer gameplay deep enough to give just what you experience the feeling of variety and a sense of purpose to everything you see. Right?

 

[More_Badass]

Like, no way did a small team crack the code at designing a universe sized sandbox that can offer gameplay deep enough to give just what you experience the feeling of variety and a sense of purpose to everything you see. Right?

A team of smart people slaving away for years can do some crazy stuff

 

[nictron]

Do we know if the PC and PS4 are exploring the same universe? Like cross play?

 

[Netherscourge]

Maybe I'm nitpicking here, but it just seems weird for a species living in an "extreme cold" climate to be a hairless reptilian. Have we seen species with fur or mammalian creatures?

Why does it have webbing behind it's arms? Does it swim? Fly?

 

[unknownstranger]

One preview mentioned grenades that deform the environment.

Makes we wonder if these are grenades with the specific purpose of manipulating the landscape, and if so, what kind of exotic gun upgrades and gear we'll find.

And re:hacking, I wonder if we'll be able to hack Sentinel bots and make them fight for us?

Penises everywhere.

 

[Odrion]

Space games have seen a nice revival, and there are now so many "sandbox crafting" games. And these games, by bigger teams, seem to struggle with making the player feel that what they're seeing isn't just the same bullshit with a pallet swap. Or. more specifically with crafting games, trying to keep the player from not running out of things to do at hour 30.

And this is a game of a scale that fucking dwarfs anything anyone has tried to do before. This isn't Elite Dangerous's "Ride on all these featureless planets inbetween flying between these generic star systems." Heck, this isn't even Star Citizen's ambitious solution of having "a hundred (or whatever) hand crafted planets/satellites" This is so, so, so, so so, sosososo so. So. so much bigger and crazier than any of that.

A team of smart people slaving away for years can do some crazy stuff

If they do achieve this, give these guys the nobel peace prize. Also check me into a ward because I'm not going to be able to comprehend how they pulled it off.

 

[RedSwirl]

Before today I had it in my head that this game was pretty much a more arcadey and casual-friendly version of Frontier: Elite II. After reading all these previews and watching the videos it seems more like a mix between that and The Long Dark. When you're on a planet, you're gathering resources and crafting to survive. When in space, you're fighting and trading. I've never actually tried to get into any of those survival-style games, but I'm still down for this mostly for the scale and exploration aspect.

The thing that excited me the most is the reveal that you can actually walk around inside buildings and that there are actually rooms and things to explore inside space stations. In particular my favorite thing to read was that you could go into a room in a space station and look out a window to see planets in the background -- planets you can actually walk on without any loading screens. It feels like the next logical step forward from GTA III, or perhaps like the original promise of Mass Effect 1.

Of course until we play the game we still won't know the longevity of the procedural generation before it get's repetitive. I think that's going to mostly depend on how much you actually explore though. Playing Elite: Dangerous now, the skins of the planets themselves definitely get repetitive, but unless you're playing Horizons the planets themselves don't matter much in that game. If you're an explorer like I am what matters is what the configuration of the next star system might be -- how many planets and stars it has, how they orbit each other, and for me that aspect hasn't gotten stale. If you're a trader or fighter, you do almost nothing with the planets themselves -- you really just worry about trade routes or engage in what's basically deathmatch. Traders and explorers care more about the economy, about earning money for upgrades. But in NMS it seems like everyone will have more reasons to land on planets. Traders will be able to harvest resources to trade, pirates will have the opportunity to rob surface trading posts. At that point what matters is whether the trading posts and resources will get repetitive. I think one decision that will turn out to be good though is Hello Games' decision to tailor more dangerous planets and more advanced tech to appear closer to the center of the universe. That's going to encourage people to travel. It's basically telling people that if planets in one sector get repetitive, there will be different kinds of planets and things in another area of the universe.

The other reason some might end up not quite liking the game is understandable -- other than getting to the center it doesn't give you any explicit goals. It's the same reason I couldn't really get into Minecraft the last time I tried. When I started Elite though I figured out the crux of the whole matter: You have to set your own goals. For most people I think those goals are going to be "I want to make enough money to afford this ship," or "I want to make enough money to buy an upgrade that will allow me to reach this place." Murray said in one of the previous you might land on a planet, find out it's too hazardous with your current gear, leave, and wonder "what's down there?" So you might gather up enough resources to craft or buy a suit that let's you survive that atmosphere. Simple pursuits like that could end up taking many hours depending on how things go. Just reaching the center of the galaxy in Elite can take like eight hours, and that's if you don't stop to scan every system you warp into. That's just exploration. If you choose to be a fighter or pirate it's probably going to feel like causing mayhem in GTA -- you just do it because it's fun and maybe to get more upgrades. Or maybe it'll end up feeling like Destiny where you just shoot more and more enemies in order to loot things.

 

[Vex_]

Maybe I'm nitpicking here, but it just seems weird for a species living in an "extreme cold" climate to be a hairless reptilian. Have we seen species with fur or mammalian creatures?

This creature cannot eat.

 

[Kaz42]

Yeah, all the animations in that are procedurally generated so every creatures moves with this fluid grace. But the real cool thing is the AI. A lot of people say AI is pretty stagnant in games; Rain World is doing things that no other game is doing. We're talking creatures that can dynamically react to and adapt to changes and threats in the environment, be it another member of its species or a predator or prey. That fight for dominance or can get annoyed with each other. Species that work in packs, communicate with each other, and obey an alpha. Species that can predict where you might be if they lose sight of you. That have personalities and memory and attention spans. It's crazy complex stuff

Huh, that's pretty interesting. It's impressive what a small team can do when they put constraints on themselves, and force themselves to think outside the box, like what I saw Sean Murray talking about in an interview when he was comparing his work on NMS to the 800-900 person teams that work at Ubisoft when they're creating Assassins Creed Worlds.

 

[Gsnap]

Still looks great but I wish they'd stop being so vague about things. When somebody asks you if there's multiplayer just say yes or no. Don't be like, "well the universe is sooooo vast that you probably wouldn't encounter..." STOP. Can my friend and I meet on the same planet and explore together? Yes. or No. Clearly the answer is no, but you don't want to turn people off so you keep making vague statements about it. If it's all asymmetric, dark soulsian messages, then that's fine. Just be honest about it.

And now they're talking about NPCs. And yet, they don't show any? Are these npcs actually there. Character model and everything? Or do we walk up to a building and a text box pops up? If this universe is so vast that nobody is going to see the same thing twice then stop beating around the bush and show us stuff and give the questions real answers. I don't like how they've handled the build up for this game.

Other than that, I think it looks great. Can't wait to see what's in store.

 

[Alucrid]

a lot of people were excited about the head game from adult swim, but i thought that rain world looked to be the real winner. especially the music.

 

[USC-fan]

Is the gaintbomb video working for anyone else? I cannot get it to play.

 

[Trouble]

Maybe I'm nitpicking here, but it just seems weird for a species living in an "extreme cold" climate to be a hairless reptilian. Have we seen species with fur or mammalian creatures?

Never skip leg day.

 

[DOWN]

i am keeping in mind that much like borderlands, the numbers on variety are not a measure of how unique the locations will feel since lots of very similar planet generations will happen. over time or right away in some accidental cases, the game will give you worlds with lots of obvious shared asset combos that don't feel delightfully different. heck, wasn't it at a VGX or E3 demo when Murray went to a new planet and it had the same weird creature flying around as if it had never left the sky?

 

[JTripper]

I wonder if critics are going to rush to the center of the universe in efforts to complete the game before reviews go public or not. It'd honestly be kinda cool if no critic gets there and the mystery is still there for when the game releases.

 

[Icyflamez96]

Just got a bunch of quotes together that stuck out more to me as I was reading through the articles in the OP.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-03-no-mans-sky-questions-answered

-Blueprints can be found at downed ships

our death sending us to a space station where once again it's hard not to slow the pace and just take it all in. There are surprising little incidentals - chairs that can be spun in one of its rooms, or the lamp that can be switched on and off, much to the annoyance of the alien trader who watches on in bafflement at our dumb wonder at it all.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/03...ands-on-the-real-game-begins-to-reveal-itself

-You can recharge your thermal shields with elements.

It’s a space station. I walk down one of two hallways – one on either side – and find another shop terminal. I walk to the other side and find three person-sized tubes; here they act as save points. At the far end of the small room is a porthole window. I approach it and gaze outward into space. The scene is mostly red – maybe from a sun, maybe it’s just a planetary anomaly – and stare at a planet in the foreground. The bottom half is shrouded in darkness. A few ships zoom by in-between the planet and I. Murray says that my targeting reticule currently hovering over the planet approximately represents the size of the large area I just got done exploring down on the surface. It’s a mind-bending thought.

“My favorite thing in the whole game is this window,” Murray muses.

Cool tidbits we're getting about the space stations

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-to-play-no-mans-sky-a-detailed-breakdown/1100-6435316/

In my playthrough, I broke into a factory with a shielded door, sounding an alarm, which if memory serves earned me a two-star wanted level. By a stroke of luck I accessed the factory core to switch off the alarm. As your crime notoriety increases, the music--composed by post-rock group 65daysofstatic--dynamically builds..

* Due to the natural hazards of each planet, players will benefit by observing their surroundings carefully. Finding caves and other areas to shield them from extreme temperatures, for example, is crucial.

* Binoculars allow you to look in the distance and mark key objects on your radar, similar to the tagging system in Metal Gear Solid V.

* Waypoints and beacons, if found, will give you a wider view of your surroundings, much like the synchronisation swoops in Assassin's Creed.

* The majority of your surroundings are destructible, and often it's strategically advantageous to blast holes in the planet. Opening up the floor will sometimes reveal caves and vast catacombs beneath you (more shelter). Shooting plutonium crystals, meanwhile, will break free some of the element to take with you, but also triggers a wanted level. Metal doors can be blown open with enough sustained force; this triggers a two-star wanted level, at least.

* Weapons are customisable, meaning they can adapt to a role that best suits each player's taste. Murray: "If I am a trader, for instance, I might have my weapon very much focused towards mining. A survivalist may customise it completely differently."

* Tech blueprints, product blueprints, and scrap parts can be scavenged from crashed ships, factories, and so on. You can install these blueprints in your gun, suit, or ship.

* An unknown number of races and factions exist in this universe, and members of each will speak to you in their own language. The text is gobbledegook at first, which means that decision-tree conversations can only commence if you make wild guesses.

* However, dotted across each planet are monoliths. These giant tablets with alien calligraphy function like the Rosetta Stone. Discovering them will further increase your language skills, meaning that more of each race's speech text will be translated into English. At some point you will be able to make calculated guesses about what each faction representative is saying to you ("Can XXX XX offering XX XXX technology?"), and later your conversations will be fluent.

* Monoliths also teach you some lore about each race. Additionally, sleeping in front of them will restore your health.

* Each race has its own technologies, such as different types of ships and suits. The only creature I encountered appeared to be an android, and my guess is that it was in awe of my presence.

* When conversing, choosing the right option can make races happy. Frequent interactions can raise your reputation within each faction. Friendly factions can open up trading options, and even offer items such as upgraded weapons. The races who you befriend will help you in their own specialised field--one could be skilled in the sciences, for example, meaning your bond will increase some of your tech skills.

* Players have a standing with each of the races, who have their own relationships and rivalries with each other, much like in Civilization.

This gamespot article has so much good stuff right now.

* As you fly towards planets, you're given calculations on how long it'll take to enter the atmosphere.

* Befriending races that possess strong science skills can help you discover more advanced space ships. Resource gathering and trading can also help you acquire technologies such as a boost drive, hyper-drive, and a mini-jump drive, which are powered from other minerals you find.

* You can find and enter space stations. The interior that I saw was very Halo in terms of aesthetics, with basic panels and bare metal walls and flooring. These stations act as save points and trade areas. Some also have small windows, which allow you to observe planets floating by.

* When on planets, you can create an EMP device by mixing silicon and plutonium. With this placed on a docking computer, you can call your ship. Or you can go find it.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/3/11152396/no-mans-sky-preview-sean-murray-interview-ps4-pc

True to the game’s promise, the new planet couldn’t be more different than the ice world I came from. Sweltering temperatures force me to dismantle my thermal protective layer, and rolling hills stretch out into the distance.

http://www.pushsquare.com/news/2016...y_is_gorgeous_ginormous_and_potentially_great

In our demo, we needed to create an EMP in order to override a docking station and call in our ship; a swift combination of two substances lifted straight from the Periodic Table got the job done.

One neat touch, however, is that they'll all speak different languages, and you'll gradually pick up on the meaning of words by exploring their planets; fail to take the time to pick up on the local lingo, however, and you'll find communication more difficult. This can be particularly problematic in trading scenarios, where picking the wrong option due to a misunderstanding may find you on the receiving end of a blaster to the rear.

http://www.psnation.com/2016/03/03/hands-on-with-no-mans-sky/

Since most planets are planets that have been undiscovered, the game does not feature a mini map. You will have to rely on your scans to tell you where to go. It’s a smart design choice to forgo a minimap as it makes sense that there would be no map for a place that is undiscovered.

I mean, I can see why they wouldn't want a minimap, but if that's their reason then I'm a bit confused. What about the planets that have intelligent NPCs on them? I feel like there should be a way to get a minimap from them that covers a given area.

With that said, the game is quite challenging, especially in the early going. It might take a while before players are upgraded enough to put up a good fight on land and in space against the NPC characters. Add that to the environmental elements and this might be a challenging game to some people and potentially a slow burn in upgrading a character to a mighty space pirate.

The worlds are so huge and beautiful that I just wanted to walk around and find what they had hidden. I was directed to shoot the ground at one point and when I did I came across a whole network of caves hidden beneath the planet’s surface and it blew my fucking mind

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/...rts-its-star-path-with-major-gameplay-reveal/

Like other recent open-world adventures, No Man’s Sky asks you to endure dangerous conditions like scorching heat, toxic rain, torturous freezes, or other, even odder environmental perils. Unlike other games in the genre, though, the survival conditions tend to vary wildly just by flying one planet over.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/03/no-mans-sky-preview/

For this demo the game has actually been slightly altered. As Murray puts it, the developers had increased the number of resource crates and things “because we’re supposed to sit down with someone like yourself for half an hour and get a feel for a game that needs to be sat and played for five hours.” He uses The Long Dark as a reference point. Players will probably die a lot to begin with as they get to grips with the systems and environments.

I ask whether the sentinels and the alien NPCs affect the idea of discovery in the game. “Star Trek would be a very boring show if they just landed on one undiscovered planet after another,” Murray points out. “The key thing with Star Trek is ‘where no man has gone before’. It doesn’t bother me that much that an alien created by the computer may have visited this place before. I think that’s fine and the trade-off there is we want a living, breathing universe.”

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/03/no-mans-sky-preview/2/

Encouraging players to move is also the reason the game currently doesn’t have temporal aspects like seasons or the deaths of suns or different biomes on a planet. “I don’t want [players] to be just staying on one planet. I think some people will but I don’t want people being like, ‘I can’t leave this until I’ve gone to the North Pole!'”

That’s not to say ideas and mechanics beyond the core set haven’t been discussed. “It kills me a little bit because we had to cut a lot of those ideas. They’re not gone but they’re kind of in a box,” says Murray. If the game is successful the team might be able to look into the box and reassess some of the ideas but for now it’s the core set of survival, exploration, trading and combat.

There’s also supposed to be this low-level encouragement to head towards the centre of the universe. It’s kind of an aim in the game, although not one that that team are pushing hard. Moving towards the centre you’ll find a reasonably linear improvement in terms of better tech, better ships, more valuable resources so that rewards heading inwards and I’m guessing most players will start to drift that way even if they’re not deliberately racing towards the point.

“The person playing just before you did not have that experience. I must admit,” says Murray. “I sat there watching, feeling really pained because it’s somebody walking around quite a barren planet, then we were really lucky at the the end that he came across this crazy, weird-looking creature and that made his playthrough. If that hadn’t happened he probably would have walked away and written about how No Man’s Sky was dead boring. It kills me – it’s a really hard game to demo.”

http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/thirty-minutes-with-no-mans-sky/1100-5407/

In another example, when I blew open the doors of an alien factory to raid it for resources, I set off an alarm that brought the robo-cops running. There was a terminal inside I could interact with, and if I'd been able to read what it said, I could have easily shut down the alarm and gotten back to raiding. But since I couldn't read it, I picked the wrong answer and locked the alarm in the "on" position, which made for a rough time.

very player will start on a uniquely random planet with no resources to their name, so your first few hours will be spent extracting materials from the environment to build your first hyperdrive and get out into the galaxy (and this will take some players longer than others, depending on the richness of the planet they start on). But Hello says that once you've got your basic gear in place, it would be viable to largely focus on working the markets, buying low and selling high to get the resources you need, rather than scrounging them planet to planet.

https://blog.eu.playstation.com/201...erse-with-lore-language-and-intelligent-life/

Sean goes onto explain that there is real value in developing relationships with these characters. If you make the effort to learn the language of a particular race and interact with them regularly, your standing with them will increase. If you’re tight with a particular race, they’ll duly give you preferential treatment – cheaper prices perhaps, or better equipment. Indeed, if you want to buy a better ship that might allow you to travel to more distant star systems, you’ll need to cosy up with these factions.

“If you’re playing the game for exploration’s sake, you might want to focus on that race. But if you’re playing the game and all you want to do is kill things, there are more military-based races, so you might want to try and become friends with them.”

As aforementioned, there are a number of races in the game, and each speaks their own unique language. So, how long is it going to take the average player to wrap their tongues around a foreign dialect to the point of fluency?

“It depends how much you’re seeking it out. Even if it’s all you do, you’re definitely talking hours and hours of play to learn a language. But I think most players will never become fluent, unless it’s specifically something they’re seeking out.

“And there’s an element of fun to that! I like some of the silliness that ensues.

“Say you were to go into a farming building, and there are some instructions on the wall written in an alien language telling you how to run the machinery. You could make sure you have the necessary language skills to make sense of it, or you could just run up to the console and randomly press buttons. Take the latter approach and the sign could read, ‘DEFINITELY DO NOT PRESS THE RED BUTTON”, and you wouldn’t know it. That’s fun to me!”

It’s probably important to stress that the interactions you have with these NPCs are reasonably light. No Man’s Sky is not a narrative-driven RPG with a script to follow – it’s procedural, and enormous on a scale that is impossible to properly comprehend. Don’t expect contained quest lines à la, say, Mass Effect.

“Having said that, being No Man’s Sky, there is a procedural element to your interactions. The AI you talk to will know the name of the planet you’re on and will reference it. They’ll reference wanting certain things based on the environment they’re in. They’ll know if it’s cold, or hot, or whatever. You’ll see a reasonable amount of variety – it’s not just pre-baked dialogue.”

Before all of you who failed French class at school start getting a little nervous, No Man’s Sky is not expecting you to learn complex grammar, syntax, verb forms, pronunciation and so forth. To take a simplistic view of it, the languages are more like codes to decipher – generally speaking, you’re simply replacing a word for a word. That was a deliberate decision, made in order to foster a sense of collaboration and coordination amongst the game’s community of players. If you figure out what a particular word means, you can paste it up online and share the knowledge.

“Some of the languages – well, one in particular – is much harder to learn than the others,” Sean adds. “I think it will probably only be possible for people to decipher some of the dialogue by working together online.

....

“I don’t expect to find people meeting at conventions and speaking one of our languages. That would be awful; please don’t do that!

 

[More_Badass]

i am keeping in mind that much like borderlands, the numbers on variety are not a measure of how unique the locations will feel since lots of very similar planet generations will happen. over time or right away in some accidental cases, the game will give you worlds with lots of obvious shared asset combos that don't feel delightfully different. heck, wasn't it at a VGX or E3 demo when Murray went to a new planet and it had the same weird creature flying around as if it had never left the sky?

Borderlands weapon designs was randomly generated. A finite amount of parts and attributes from an existing pool

Instead of building planets from parts and assets from an existing pool of assets, this game uses base prototypes then builds off and evolves and mutates those into new things through mathematical algorithms

As for the worlds

Originally the game was entirely randomly generated. “Only around 1 percent of the time would it create something that looked natural, interesting, and pleasing to the eye; the rest of the time it was a mess and, in some cases where the sky, the water, and the terrain were all the same color, unplayable,” Murray says. So the team began to create simple rules, such as the distance from a sun at which it is likely that there will be moisture,” he explains. “From that we decide there will be rivers, lakes, erosion, and weather, all of which is dependent on what the liquid is made from. The color of the water in the atmosphere will derive from what the liquid is; we model the refractions to give you a modeled atmosphere.”

Similarly, the quality of light will depend on whether the solar system has a yellow sun or, for example, a red giant or red dwarf. “These are simple rules, but combined they produce something that seems natural, recognizable to our eyes. We have come from a place where everything was random and messy to something which is procedural and emergent, but still pleasingly chaotic in the mathematical sense. Things happen with cause and effect, but they are unpredictable for us.”

 

[eyeball_kid]

It's funny, I really don't like crafting mechanics in games, and I don't know if the exploration alone will hold my interest for hours and hours, but the idea of endless worlds to discover and the visual aesthetic of it is so powerful that I pre-ordered anyway. I do like that they added NPC traders, and outposts you can infiltrate, and that you can buy ships that are 10x as large as your original one. It seems like there's at least enough gamey mechanics to keep people who tire of exploration busy for a while, even if those mechanics might not be as finely-honed as more traditional games.

I kind of hope that whatever is in the center of the universe is a different experience for everyone who plays, perhaps tailored on how you played it, because it'd be kind of discouraging if someone plays 20 hours a day to rush to the center a year or two before anyone else and spoils the ending for everyone.

Before all of you who failed French class at school start getting a little nervous, No Man’s Sky is not expecting you to learn complex grammar, syntax, verb forms, pronunciation and so forth. To take a simplistic view of it, the languages are more like codes to decipher – generally speaking, you’re simply replacing a word for a word. That was a deliberate decision, made in order to foster a sense of collaboration and coordination amongst the game’s community of players. If you figure out what a particular word means, you can paste it up online and share the knowledge.

I wasn't wanting to learn complex grammar rules, but I do wish learning languages was more interactive than fetch quests to find Rosetta Stone artifacts. I was imagining something more like the trader shows a gun and says a word, or points at a tree, or uses a tool and says the verb and noun association with that action. And if you choose the appropriate response, you learn those words. Just auto-learning a language by scanning artifacts seems like a feature that was cobbled together quickly. There's no real challenge or interactiveness that constitutes "learning". Maybe I'm nitpicking, but it feels like a superficial, rather useless thing to me the way they implemented it.

 

[mrklaw]

Like, no way did a small team crack the code at designing a universe sized sandbox that can offer gameplay deep enough to give just what you experience the feeling of variety and a sense of purpose to everything you see. Right?

A small team made the original elite, and minecraft. This (massively simplified) could be considered both of those in one game. The skeleton is having all theses worlds and systems to explore, and then you later in a world simulator with unique seeds but a common set of rules.

Seems super ambitious but not impossible

 

[Zeuanimals]

I hope they tone down on the wildlife. Too many creatures just walking about without a care in the galaxy. Prey looking ones walking calmly next to predator looking ones who are also calm.

Maybe I'm nitpicking here, but it just seems weird for a species living in an "extreme cold" climate to be a hairless reptilian. Have we seen species with fur or mammalian creatures?

It's also got terrible camouflage. Maybe future games like NMS will address these smaller issues, or maybe they address it in a patch but I can't see that going over well in some ways.

Why does it have webbing behind it's arms? Does it swim? Fly?

Vestigial structures?

 

[Zeuanimals]

Edit: Double post.

 

[Drazgul]

Borderlands weapon designs was randomly generated. A finite amount of parts and attributes from an existing pool

Instead of building planets from parts and assets from an existing pool of assets, this game uses base prototypes then builds off and evolves and mutates those into new things through mathematical algorithms

Right, but it remains to be seen whether that'll translate to truly unique worlds for the player on the long-term. I don't care about the math magic behind the game, I only care about the end result.

 

[kyser73]

Penises everywhere.

Draw a continent-sized penis that can be seen from orbit.

 

[googleplex]

I'm incredibility excited for this game but what with all the screen tearing? But I'm still there day one.

 

[GribbleGrunger]

I'd love to do a survey to find out if introverts will dig deeper into the planets and extroverts will continue to branch outwards seeking other planets. The idea that we are what we play or how we play interests me.

 

[Reckless Onion]

Anyone else amazed this is 60euro?

 

[Mutombo]

Anyone else amazed this is 60euro?

There is a wholly different thread about just that very subject, and it's tiring.

 

[MarineMountie]

Anyone else amazed this is 60euro?

Its the price i expected for a game this big and ambitious. Why expect anything else?

 

[BruceLeeRoy]

Anyone else amazed this is 60euro?

Have you read the previews for the game? Its insanely ambitious

 

[Kyoufu]

I'm incredibility excited for this game but what with all the screen tearing? But I'm still there day one.

Is that actually screen tearing or an intended effect? It seems to happen every few seconds without fail.