I'm pretty certain terrain is now locked in.
I wouldn't bet on it. There are certainly things that could be changed like having more distinct continents, large lakes and oceans on one planet (as opposed to just archipelagos across the entire planet etc.), caves could get a large overhaul (which would directly influence the entire terrain again), and with the introduction of a few exotic and weird planets in this update, I wouldn't be surprised if they kept adding more weird variations like that, which would certainly force more galaxy resets.
As a matter of fact, I'd go as far to say that I wouldn't be too attached to anything too much, so bases, cool home planets, trade routes, ships, freighters etc. will be getting constant changes during the life of this game, and frankly, if HG are willing to update this game for a longer time, I think the scope and the nature of those changes will force them to reset a lot of stuff all the time.
What's the difference between an animal or a Gek?
I agree that we'll see player models running around so, at least from an animation standpoint it's doable.
The difference between an animal and a Gek however is much larger. Animals in NMS have very simple AI, they walk around, attack or run away and occasionally poop if you feed them, and they do this in often comically exaggerated animations. Doing the AI and interactions between NPCs running around a planet would need considerably more work, otherwise we'd probably see clusters of NPCs running around like idiots and still standing around most of the time, which just wouldn't work well.
Another major thing is how animals are generated in the game world. Pretty much everything in the game is generated in various radiuses/distances around the player. The animal detection dots you see through the visor are just potential regions where random creatures might eventually spawn around you, and they really spawn pretty close to the player. Even the special buildings you "detect" from space, you're basically pressing a button to spawn a random marker that will eventually generate the building once the player is close enough.
What I mean is, there is nothing in the game world that can exist at a precise location and freely move around the star system if it isn't in the immediate proximity of the player. You can't have a trader ship fly around and do its thing on its own from one end of the system to the other because it'll vanish when it gets far enough from the player.
So in that sense, it would be pretty hard for HG to have a lot of the mission types or situations you mentioned without a major and more fundamental overhaul of multiple technical systems. I would love to have stuff like that, but apart from them doing the same tricks and spawning predefined clusters of NPCs in predefined situations in the very near proximity around the player, I don't see them doing anything more than that.
Cities. People seem to think these are far fetched wishes. When you've got a game like this, which is pushing absurd levels of detail from maths, I hardly think the straight lines of a city are going to be that troubling. Just look at the space stations and freighters. Huge structures.
The performance of the game isn't that great as it is with vast open terrain. I can't imagine just how much the performance would tank if they added even dozens of buildings (and that's like a small city block, you'd need hundreds of structures visible in the distance to create the illusion of a city). It would just be a performance, popup, NPC and ships spawning nightmare. The freighters and space stations exist in a much less intensive environment (empty space) and are fairly simplistic in design, and even then, when you have a small fleet of freighters, a few ships and a station on screen and the performance can drop considerably. I just don't think having cities in this game is realistic. Yes, you can have large buildings, but having a large number on them on screen, have them look reasonably well (a lot of parts from the crashed freighters are just smudgy messes) and even be able to enter some of them, and possibly adding more flying ships and NPCs on streets etc. is not happening.
But why not have missions within the station?
Deeper space stations could totally work, probably even with NPCs running around (or at least standing
).
One thing they might implement one day that ties in to base building and your base missions idea are procedurally generated dungeons like in Minecraft. HG would need to do a lot of work around that, and build new room/cave/whatever building blocks, but the essential tools are there, so having procedural roguelike rooms and floors on special missions etc. could work.
Travelling between systems without warping. That was a particularly foolish thing to talk about. How was that ever going to be possible?
Space Engine already does this, and that probably one of the reasons why people expected a more open and seamless universe. If you remember, Sean said multiple times that if you see a star in the sky, you can go there. And you "kinda" do, but in Space Engine you literally do that, without any loading or hitching. I don't really have a problem with it, all space exploration games in the past have done the same thing, Elite: Dangerous does the same thing (loading a new star system during hyperjump), so it's not unreasonable for HG to do the same thing for NMS. There's just so many things to calculate and generate, it wouldn't be very realistic for them to pull off something like Space Engine where, even though really impressive, has very empty and basic systems in place with no game elements at all.
The speeds are irrelevant here, because again, you can sort of roleplay in Space Engine and set the flight speed at whatever you want and seamlessly travel not just trough the galaxy at a fun and reasonable speed, but also between other galaxies as well. You could even imagine a very game assisted way of flying many times the speed of light and still not missing your destination. It's the sense of interactive hyperspace surfing that would've made a really cool feeling every time you jump, but that's just not how NMS's universe works. Even the star systems themselves aren't realistic star system spaces, which unfortunately diminishes the feeling of being in space, but it is what it is.
Anyway, I think that after a year's worth of updates, there are certain things we have to just come to terms with that probably won't be there, at least not in a satisfactory fashion. Atlas Rises adds a lot of good stuff, but it's still limited within the possibilities of the engine and the nature of how things are generated and exist in the game world. I'm not saying we won't get some surprises along the way, but I wouldn't hold my breath on some things.
I can totally see there being procedural dungeons, customizable ships and player avatars, cooperative multiplayer missions and hangouts and possibly larger community goals (as in all players working towards opposing goals as factions), more story, more ships, animal types etc, maybe keeping creatures in a zoo, another thing with creatures could have their individual parts have different properties (because they're already built from individual parts) so scanning the head and left leg could yield more info, resources etc. or you'd need to hunt a t-rex by shooting it's weakest parts (the head) better hunting missions, maybe even add weird cross breeding experiments (because, again, the building blocks are there, if they add custom ship building, could potentially add custom animal building, with limited but hilarious results).
Would be nice to have more random systemic events just while walking around, so just like having animals spawn in your vicinity, also have marauders attacking you or each other (like bandit fights in STALKER, just smaller scale and in closer proximity) or injured Gek or Vy'keen needing gas, just spawning more NPCs on ground (would still probably mostly be static) instead of buildings and language stones.
And also have procedural questlines, maybe tied to those dungeons, so the game spawns a distress signal on the comms, creates a waypoint leading to a temple, there you find a note saying go north, then run into a monolith which gives you an artifact, then maybe have a multi-tool upgrade beeping radar that beeps faster when you're closer to a treasure, which unveils (generates) an entrance to a dungeon type that holds nasty tentacle monsters and guards an artifact which costs 20mil on the market or teaches you a portal glyph. That kind of stuff is what I'd like to see the most.
