I always feel like games like this die in the late-game. Once you've had fun with the exploring and are collecting resource units for the nth millionth time, the game kind of runs its course.<p>It would be far more interesting if, as you play, you can participate in a large economy, slowly growing your gameplay experience out from say, a single guy mining and selling minerals on a planet, to an galactic empire.<p>Even better if you could participate at just about any part of the virtual economy, buying, selling, crafting, shipping, policing, fighting, robbing, pirating. You could own a store on a space station or a repair shop, make enough and buy a ship, or buy a station. Now you're managing station ops.<p>Exploration is just one of the X's in 4x, and I feel like there's so much untapped potential in the genre.
Games like these come from amazingly humble beginnings:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDNMTnXoG9M" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDNMTnXoG9M</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTJFChB5wyY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTJFChB5wyY</a>
>> Murray’s primary coding contribution is to planetary terrain, and he had developed a special appreciation for such formations.<p>So Slartibartfast then: "[Norway] was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges."
The trailer, which the New Yorker is too old school to link to: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gQi2bv1DHg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gQi2bv1DHg</a>
I wish he could join this up with Elite Dangerous. Elites space environment is pretty impressive and if it needs something, then a proper surface-dimension.
The strength of this is its weakness: because the worlds are generated procedurally, they cannot contain dependencies between the elements of the world, unless they have been specified in the formula. The article gives a good example, of how a river can't emerge from the slopes of the terrain - instead, you have to encode the river as part of the terrain. It's not emergent. It's analytical, not numerical.<p>They can still have a sophisticated generation method, which does encode several different features, that can co-occur in unexpected ways, but it can't be a deep interaction. In effect, the designers are exploring the space of equations for world generation. The advantage is they can have billions of planets without storing them or expensively generating them. Analytical solutions are extraordinarily efficient - it's just a formula, you punch in the seed and you're done. No iteration or search.<p>In the videos I've seen, the planets all look alike, just different shapes and colours for trees, grass, terrain.<p>Still, I admire their dream and fervor and hope it's more interesting than I expect.
I still haven't seen any comparisons of this game with Mirrormoon EP, which seems a lot alike to me.<p>You could fly through space to any of the stars you see, it was procedurally generated planets, bright artistic colour design choices, etc.<p>The only thing that seems different is the much more content and actual realism in No Man's Sky.
There are theories that our own universe is more likely to be a simulation than "real". e.g. <a href="http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html</a>