I played it in VR and it still does.

No Man's Sky suffers from planets being "deserts", they have different attributes but it's still a fairly lifeless empty world.

Ironically this is realistic but also not terribly fun as a player.

Indeed, I remember it being pilloried after release but the Steam reviews now are generally quite positive from players who've logged tons of hours.

It's not just NMS.. the "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" is a plight of all AAA games these days.

Ubisfot is a perfect example, look at their "Watch Dogs: Legion" for example. They decided to get creative and give you random characters generated by AI.. it turned out to be a disaster.

Another one is their Far cry games, where they copy and paste the same events but slightly different, all over the map and call it a day.

I think these efforts more have to do with bean counters taking over the industry than game designers being lazy. I'm sure there are plenty of talented people working at these studios, but they are held back by MBAs.

It's even worse when you see the exact same animal asset but scaled differently with a different color hue on a completely different planet. Ruins the immersion immediately. Obviously, it has come a long, long way since the 2016 article, but still.

I played it about a year ago for the first significant time after having bought it some point a long time back.

It's... fine? It kept me engaged until it didn't. Part of the "didn't" came about because I was being paper-cut to death by bugs that googling showed me had been reported for a long time, if not since the very beginning.

I kept feeling like it was a game on the verge of happening throughout, and it never quite made it. Lots of things to go do to serve.. no purpose. Nothing was that unique or memorable, and I often had very little clue where I was in relation to anything. At one stage I was overseeing a town but that seemed to do nothing for me other than make me go back and make a snap decision for no discernible reason, occasionally fight hostile creatures, and also act as a sink for resources I was gathering.

I kept thinking "Why am I even doing this" until it really sunk in "Why am I even doing this?" and quit.

It also exasperated me that even though I was using a pretty fast gaming system, on a regular basis assets would take ages to appear, including buildings. "Fly to this place on the planet, land at this archaeological dig, wait 3 minutes for the dig to bother to appear before you can do anything." (saw identical behaviour on my steamdeck too, so doesn't seem "my machine" per se?)

I still think it's a remarkable success story and they can and should be incredibly proud of what they've built. But this vision of what is meant by cosmic depth and expansiveness seems to tragically miss the point.

Compare it to even our own solar system where even so much as a new high-res photo of the hexagon storm on Saturn comes with stunning new and specific detail, or the "heart" on Pluto, we're practically ambushed with novel configurations of atmospheric dynamics and geology. It's frustratingly rare for games to truly activate that feeling of wonder.

I think NMS is still an unbeatable deal for what it is as a game but it's a frustrating near miss flyby of what I think people want a true space exploration game to feel like.

Spore had that but I kind of liked it. I guess that was 20 years ago almost, maybe my standards were lower. It felt charming seeing others' animals, some of them looked pretty cool.

I've thought about it a bunch over the years and my advice is to follow a few principles: procedural elements should almost always impact how the player plays, procedural elements should cross-interact with each other as much as possible, and procedural elements should be understandable to the player.

As an example in No Man's Sky the player immediately starts with a jetpack. It makes it so the terrain is approached the same way every time: you just jetpack over it. Very rarely something is tall enough to require you to walk around.

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a positive counter example. You have stamina so you're constantly thinking about the height of cliff faces, you can glide so you're thinking about height points and straight lines through the world, cliff faces cannot be climbed in rain so you think about the weather, slopes can be slid down on a shield, etc. There are a bunch of systems that may you think about the topology of the terrain, so even just varying the height map becomes interesting.

Similarly in No Man's Sky there are different resources but they work the same way on each planet and the player interacts with them pretty much the same way everywhere.

When I say elements should be "understandable" what I mean is that a trap, which Dwarf Fortress falls into, is to add a vast simulation which the player feels they can never really grasp. Simulations should not be a black box because then they begin to feel like a random number generator.

The aim shouldn't be to make an "infinite" game but to make a very interesting system for the player to slowly understand and master. The developer shouldn't just add stuff, but they should think about the long journey (and eventual mastery) a player might take as they spend significant time with the systems.

Procedural generation is not gameplay. Procedural generation makes your already fun game more interesting via more variety.

If you don’t already have a fun game, then pro gen won’t make it any more fun than it already is. It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game.

If every single Minecraft player loaded into only a single Minecraft world, it would still be as fun as it is. Would No Man’s Sky really be that much different if it just shipped with a handful of pre-defined planets? It might have less replay value but the gameplay wouldn’t be any different.

Good proc gen changes things in your game such that the player is given interesting reasons to make different choices each time they play.

The advice I've heard is 1) have as many different dimensions of variation as you can manage, and try to have them matter, 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation, since this just reduces variety, and 3) allow your parameters to become extreme occasionally, so that some parts of your generation are notably different, and special because they're rare.

1) is the really hard part, I think: it's a challenge to come up with enough meaningful variations that also work from a gameplay point of view.

Spelunky and Terraria do a good job with Procgen.

Spelunky uses handcrafted chunks that are connected together like a puzzle. Each generation feels interesting because each chunk is interesting and they are just strung together into a unique maze.

Terraria does a similar thing, where all the things that matter are hand-crafted. Bosses, items, layer details, progression. The map and cave system is generated but the caves tend to string together hand-crafted experiences and hand-crafted monsters. Many areas are generated, but in a unique style for variety. And there was still a fixed progression in the background (ore and boss progression). I think its in a big contrast to a similar game like Starbound, where all the weapons and creatures and maps were procgen at first, and it felt very '10000 bowls of oatmeal'. Terraria vs Starbound is the most like-for-like comparison I've seen for "procgen done right vs wrong"

You want to look at dwarf fortress talks for that, I think?

Roguelikes are the ultimate in procgen technology, and should be the basis of any design. (DF is the ultimate simulation but uses procgen as a tool to achieve it; a different vein than NMS trying to explore the procgen and its direct outcomes itself)

1. Any imaginary world needs to be internally consistent to be interesting. Procgen does not void this rule; randomization needs to be gated to that internal consistency.

2. A world can be composed of multiple environments, and each environment can a different definition of internal consistency. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup does this very openly and to fairly good effect, but pretty much any decent procgen game will inevitably end up with the same choice, because it's what enables you to play with various procgen systems/rules while still having a coherent overall game.

3. Generalizing 2, procgen systems generally do not start from nothing; You embed reasonably well-defined bases (races, weapon forms, etc) and then apply randomization on top of those bases to form the final element. Meaningful fundamental variation in those bases leads to guaranteed meaningful variation in the end result.

4. Games are fundamentally interactive systems. Generating a thousand variations without actually changing interaction is equivalent to generating exactly one variation. A blue orc vs a red orc is a not real variant, unless you make it so by attaching effects / statuses / capabilities. The color distinction is then a signal into the more abstracted changes that have occurred. This is where NMS falls over -- the images have changed, but the interaction has not.

5. A corollary to point 4, changing numbers without changing interaction is equivalent to doing nothing. If a meaningful damage threshold is functionally every 10 points of damage, then generating numbers 0-9, 11-19, etc is equivalent to generating just the numbers 0 and 10. This is where borderlands falls over -- a million variations in guns, but the vast majority of those variations are just numeric differences that don't change anything in practice.

6. If the procgen applies to equipment/builds, you pretty much need permadeath as a driver for exploring a procgen game and its systems, because you need players to explore for a local optima. Exploring the space for a global optima in a procgen game inevitably devolves into a gambling simulator, because players optimize out the fun, and the optimal play is to the kill unit XYZ repeatedly for the 0.5% drop. Games like Terraria fall into this trap (though Terraria resolves it mostly by making unit XYZ be trivially summon-able bosses)

7. Procgen can never guarantee interesting results; You inevitably need a system of vaults/artifacts -- hardcoded quality items -- to guarantee periodic interesting locations/items. Ideally more notable than average generation, but less than strictly optimal so as to not overpower the other systems -- an issue I've had with games like Diablo 3, where finding an item-set was vastly more powerful than anything else that I acquired for the next 5+ hours, eliminating the entire looting system (and even character skill system, since it forced my build too)

8. Decent Procgen is inevitably rule-based, with possibly multiple chained-rules each doing their own rolls, to ensure coherency. Ideally the rule-chain is roughly discoverable from the end results (by virtue of following internally consistent and apparent rules) -- an end-result that cannot be explained is indistinguishable from pure-random, and pure-random in incoherent. See any Tabletop RPG generation tables.

9. Hell, just start any procgen design from tabletop RPG tables.

10. The number of variations that can be produced is meaningless. This is only for marketing.

11. A procedural system that generates exactly once is fairly pointless. Permadeath.

12. A procedural system is inherently unfair, because you cannot guarantee difficulty, proper placement, unit composition, etc without removing the procedural systems outright. Embrace the unfairness, and design around it. Permadeath.

13. A procedural system is inherently unfair; you need to give some guaranteed items with guaranteed results to navigate an uncertain world (e.g. escape tools).

14. It's always good to enable some control by the player over the procedural generation. Choice of environments, chances at additional loot, etc. You want the player to engage with procgen rules, because they're interesting (and if they're not, what are you doing?), and the easiest way is to give them tools to manipulate it to their advantage. Also permadeath.

I'm listening to OK Computer right now. Came upon this reply half way through "Let Down". Hmm.

In my own procedural explorations, the solution to the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem is to manually curate them and give the user only the exceptionally good ones. It's a tedious lot of work.