> So maybe it’s not such a New Thing. What is a game like No Man’s Sky, really? A set of symbols that specify a world but do not themselves constitute it. A rich grammar that’s inert without the trigger of human attention.
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>Doesn’t that sound like something else?
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>It sounds like a book.<p>This is the author's thesis, even if it is, arguably, the only time the thought crops up in the piece.<p>It strikes me as so empty and abstract as to be "not even wrong". Yes, a book is an inert object that needs to be combined with a very specific decoding mechanism (namely, a human) in order to derive semantics. This is also true of shoes. In fact, most things surrounding the human experience are (under certain, current, postmodern-leaning interpretations) stripped of their meaning in the absence of their human meaning-givers. This is the heart of the problem of semantics, and the duality of encoding/decoding. Would the author agree that No Man's Sky is like shoes? If not, then this claim could be restated as, "No Man's Sky is a thing that humans made". Which is delightfully tautological.<p>To follow, I'm not convinced that the extent to which No Man's Sky is procedurally generated is anything but orthogonal to its status as a "thing to be interpreted". Does the author also think that Minecraft is like a book? What about DOOM? Most modern games that are not strictly deterministic have, at their heart, some set of emergent semantics that are the byproduct of algorithmic world-grammars, be it procedurally generated landscapes or responsive AI. I'm not sure what bearing this has on 'worthiness of interpretation'; one could, I suppose, try and link this to the ongoing conversation about the relevance of author intent, but that is a deep (albeit interesting) hole, and I'm not really sure how the author's examples point to this being their intention.<p>I shouldn't succumb to snark, but I can't resist here. This article strikes me as an attempt to intellectualize a cognitive dissonance. "No Man's Sky is a priori -worthy-, because that's what is said. But I'm not having fun".
> But the planets all harbor the same kinds of structures. The same alien remnants. You do the same kinds of things on all of them.<p>Watching this game on twitch and going from one stream to the next I was left with thinking exactly this, it's all the same, and it's all a grind. The game's procedural generation creates superficial visual differences. It doesn't create anything non-visual worth exploring. Outside of wondering what the next thing looks like, what is there to be curious about?<p>They should add procedurally generated problems to solve in the environment that can affect your life in the game. Different environments requiring unique ways to survive, perhaps some not even solvable. There could be online discussions about particular dangerous places about how one could possibly create a habitable solution for exploring them.
Hmm... interesting how much hate this game is getting on here, I guess that's how it is (reviews are similarly polarizing).<p>For me the game is perfect. I love the slowness of it all. I love just being able to go where I want. I discovered by accident that mining asteroids in space is quite lucrative. I've spent the past few nights doing exactly that and for some that's a grind; for me it's a peaceful, relaxing way to spend my evening. I managed to earn enough to buy a much larger ship that looks amazing and it's been fun sharing pics of her with my nerdy friends also playing.<p>But beyond all that this game feels like stepping into artwork from Heavy Metal magazine circa 1978. As a kid that would lay awake in bed at night dreaming of what it would be like to step inside a Mœbius painting, this game nails it.<p>I get that this isn't for everyone but some of us, esp. those that grew up playing pen & paper RPG's like Traveller in particular, yeah good stuff!
The ability to explore a huge, living world/universe in a game sounds great on paper, but I find that it almost invariably leads to shallow games - the <i>real world</i> is also big and sparse, and so the "alternate life" you end up living in the game ends up being as dull and routine as real life can be.<p><i>Density</i> is where the fun is at. The world doesn't need to be <i>big</i>, it needs to be <i>intricate</i>: packed with interesting characters, interactions and stuff to do. Big spaces are good for battlefields and pretty vistas, but don't make for fun "live another life" games. The first Deus Ex figured this out, Human Revolution refined it and it sounds like Mankind Divided has distilled it even further.
I'm not sure why the game has so much hype. We already seen games like this, just in 2D. In some regards one cannot even hope to get the depths of a Dwarf Fortress or Nethack out of this, since these games were - although ugly - developed with an inherent desire for complexity. This one here is a product. A product needs to be efficient. You need to spend limited ressources to create a limited experience, and also spend some of your resources on marketing.<p>It probably is not a bad game. But it's simply impossible to have the depth that people imagine into it. Maybe if the developers find other ways to refinance the next ten years and continue working on adding more details, objects, animal attributes, ship parts, crafting trees, etc.<p>PS: I'm really really disappointed that this game has taken so much from Out There and Out There is not even mentioned anywhere in the website, the marketing or the media coverage. Out There is an incredible indie game and should get the praise it has earned if it is so good to even motivate other creators to copy parts from it. (I'm not related to the Out There team. Just love playing the game)
Dunkey dissects this game very succintly. As expected, generated universes are not that fun.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgfxo3CLdNM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgfxo3CLdNM</a>
I keep reading mixed reviews on the game. I want to play but so far have seen nothing but the hyped videos of playing for the first time. I'm wondering how the game will pan out once you have people who know how to exploit it, which will change the landscape for newcomers.
If someone wrote a book that was as shallow as this game, it would be a $.99 affair on Amazon. No characters, no story to speak of, no meaningful interaction or progression, and I found that after a handful of planets, it was really clear how Mr. Potato-Head "The Game" worked.<p>I don't see how it's like reading, when a book offers you a story and then asks you to imagine accordingly, with something that offers you synthetic imagination and asks you to come up with a story.