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No Man's Sky E3 trailers

coldcrush

Neo Member
I don't know what it is about this game that captivates me so much, but it just looks like a very cool place to be. Will be day one. Has anything been mentioned about Morpheus support?
 

BulletTheory

Neo Member
From what I took from the interview, it is technically feasible to team up with a buddy and fly around together, but theres almost 0% chance that you'll actually be anywhere near enough to them without having to literally fly years, as every player is randomly placed around the edge of the universe.

He mentioned Journey and i think it'll be more like that, you will cross paths with other random players from time to time. I'm guessing there will be more players at/around the center of a galaxy as he said something about flying towards the center? Maybe you can either team up or kill them and steal their potentially upgraded ship, who knows!
 

GreenFear

Banned
They described this game as having an infinite universe with an infinite amount of different planets and such but from the videos it seems that the only difference between the planets will be the color palette and different mixes of the same animals. ie: this planet will have blue grass, a blue goat, and greenish blue brontosaur while the next planet will have red grass, a red goat with slightly longer horns, and a purple brontosaur with a slightly shorter neck. I hope I'm wrong though.
 
SOOO hyped for this, but doing my best to remain healthily skeptical until we see a live demo and more of the general flow of gameplay. I'm also bearing in mind that the fruits of procedural generation depend highly upon how clever the programmers are with their maths, and games like Elite and Starbound show clearly that it can be handled to varying degrees of success (that is to say I haven't touched Starbound in months).

But really. DREAM GAME. Please pull this off, Hello Games. I don't want to relive my Spore experience.
 

Fedele

Member
From what I took from the interview, it is technically feasible to team up with a buddy and fly around together, but theres almost 0% chance that you'll actually be anywhere near enough to them without having to literally fly years, as every player is randomly placed around the edge of the universe.

Yep, seems like it according to this feature list:

  • A TRULY OPEN UNIVERSE If you can see it, you can go there. You can fly seamlessly from the surface of a planet to another, and every star in the sky is a sun that you can visit.
  • EXPLORATION IS SEEING THINGS THAT NO-ONE ELSE HAS EVER SEEN BEFORE Every creature, geological formation, plant and spaceship is unique.
  • SURVIVE ON A DANGEROUS FRONTIER You are alone and vulnerable, and will face threat everywhere, from deep space to thick forests, barren deserts to dark oceans.
  • BUILD FOR AN EPIC JOURNEY Collect precious materials and trade them for better spacecraft and upgrades for your suit and equipment.
  • PARALLEL UNIVERSES Choose to share your discoveries with other players, or not. You will never see another player, but you could make your mark on their worlds as well as your own.

Source.

I guess that as everyone is jumping around planets, galaxies, etc you will eventually stumble on stuff discovered by other people before, but they will be long gone. I wonder how you can "mark" those worlds, tho.

Please give us a planetary annihilation gun.
 
Yep, seems like it according to this feature list:



Source.

I guess that as everyone is jumping around planets, galaxies, etc you will eventually stumble on stuff discovered by other people before, but they will be long gone. I wonder how you can "mark" those worlds, tho.

Please give us a planetary annihilation gun.

Ehh not sure how I feel about not being able to party up with friends and explore. Thats like the biggest joy I find out of these types of games.
 
Yep, seems like it according to this feature list:

No, it doesn't seem like that at all. It very clearly says you'll never see another player--note that it says PARALLEL universes--it's not merely suggesting that the distances are so vast that it's unlikely you'll ever see another player. Don't get your hopes up that you could fly around with a buddy if the press material explicitly states the contrary. As others have already pointed out, it appears that each player will have his/her own instance of the same universe--only the consequences of other players' actions may be made apparent to you.
 
No, it doesn't seem like that at all. It very clearly says you'll never see another player--note that it says PARALLEL universes--it's not merely suggesting that the distances are so vast that it's unlikely you'll ever see another player. Don't get your hopes up that you could fly around with a buddy if the press material explicitly states the contrary. As others have already pointed out, it appears that each player will have his/her own instance of the same universe--only the consequences of other players' actions may be made apparent to you.

It's still early, but Hello Games are solid dues and hopefully they hear the feedback of us wanting to fly around with our buddies--if you have friends that is.
 
It's still early, but Hello Games are solid dues and hopefully they hear the feedback of us wanting to fly around with our buddies--if you have friends that is.

They're also an 8 person team with a not-inexhaustible amount of resources to put towards development, of which implementing the kind of MP you're suggesting I'd imagine would stretch out development even longer. I get the idea of exploring things with your mates, but if there is a choice to be made between what their original vision is of a vast, unique space to explore with more subtle interactions with other players a la Journey, or compromise on that by diverting resources towards implementing a fun, stable multiplayer experience given the intended scope of this game.... Honestly, I personally vote the former.
 

Screaming Meat

Unconfirmed Member
It's still early, but Hello Games are solid dues and hopefully they hear the feedback of us wanting to fly around with our buddies--if you have friends that is.

Wishful thinking most likely.

If this is a success, I imagine NMS2 would probably feature something but that's so many moves ahead that it's hurting my brain thinking about it.
 
Man, I was sitting in my chair saying aloud, "Dude, what the fuck???" when the ship took off into space and then again when it broke atmosphere of the second planet.

But what's going on with the actual planets? What are we supposed to accomplish on them? What can we do with our time?
 

Pop

Member
Every time I see gameplay of this game, I am in complete shock. Just thinking about it, holy fuck. Everything sounds amazing, only one minor turn off is not having a buddy or two to explore with.
 

Crispy75

Member
For example, Spelunky has about 10 different, procedurally generated environments yet it's one of the most replayed games ever. Even stuff like Payday 2 is surprisingly addictive even if it has a relatively low amount of levels. The very variations of the same looking levels can still be challenging and interesting for a long while.

Ah now Spelunky is an interesting example. It's not generating things that *look* different, but things that *play* different each time. Game mechanics are things with objective rules and can therefore be subjected to the "boringness algorithm" (as coined upthread).

It's comparatively easy to create a system that always generates playable spelunky levels because the constraints are so tight. The player's abilities are known and the level generator can avoid "unplayable" arrangements with ease.

But with something as subjective and open-ended as generating entire planets and ecosystems, it's impossible to write a "check" against results that are either hideously broken or really dull. So all you end up doing is moving the author one step up the levels of abstraction. Now you're not designing individual cliffs, but an algorithm that reliably produces good-looking cliffs, not weird, impossible, non-traversable, nonsensical or monotonous cliffs. In order to reach that sort of reliability, the edge cases have to be ironed out. And it's in those edge cases that you'd see anything unexpected.

I respectfully disagree with this, unless Minecraft totally changed the way this worked in the last year or so. Generation is constrained by rules, but one of the best parts of Minecraft for me was always starting on some random seed and finding something like an amazing valley with a natural arch, a huge cave entrance, or an extensive tunnel system you can get lost in for literally hours.

Yes ultimately it's just a computer program generating that, but it was still fresh for ME even if it was just another neat tunnel or mountain landscape.

Maybe I'm jaded (I've played a lot of minecraft :D).

But you're actually pointing out exactly my point. The algorithms that make those amazing landscapes in minecraft have been carefully tuned to be *just* exciting enough. Not too boring, not too wacky. The new terrain gen tweaking mode in the 1.8 pre-release shows just how wild and weird (or flat and lifelsess) it can get. So well done Mojang, you tamed the algorithm. But as a result, the exciting terrain is always exciting in predicatble ways. Yes, there's the steep cliff, the wild overhang, the gaping cave. But once you've seen a few you've seen them all.

I think Hello! are trying to beat this system by having multiple well-tuned systems that overlap. This will probably work quite well, but I reckon it won't take long before you realise that "oh this planet is using terrain generation type C and those animals come out of the type 2 quadruped generator"

It's better than "green fish with long fins, blue fish with short fins" but jaded old me will still be able to see the strings and get all grumpy about it.

Still.
Day fucking one.
 
Did anyone catch this on the No Man's Sky about page???

link:

Are we talking permadeath here? Shiiiiiiit.

edit:
Dug up the interview posted on RPS...

Ok, well, I'm gonna apologize for my earlier posts, I totally missed this old interview and it seems to me they've put a lot of thought into this. I'm still skeptical about how they are going to implement some of this, but this sounds a lot more encouraging than the stuff I had read which basically seemed mostly PR fodder. Hopefully they really can flesh out all these ideas and have punishing consequences to really take all this beauty to the next level.
 

Fedele

Member
No, it doesn't seem like that at all. It very clearly says you'll never see another player--note that it says PARALLEL universes--it's not merely suggesting that the distances are so vast that it's unlikely you'll ever see another player. Don't get your hopes up that you could fly around with a buddy if the press material explicitly states the contrary. As others have already pointed out, it appears that each player will have his/her own instance of the same universe--only the consequences of other players' actions may be made apparent to you.

Thanks for clarifying. I said this because during the Gamespot session, Sean Murray says something slightly different at the MP question around 14:20 - "you probably will never see each other". Murray then mentions Journey and Dark Souls, games with MPs that rely on random, seamless encounters, moving away from your friends. He also says that there is the ability to communicate and work with other people, but he doesn't go into further detail.

I acknowledge this is no MMO and agree with you, but I'm really curious to know more (just as everyone else).

By the way, here's the YouTube version of the Gamespot session, folks.
 

GreenFear

Banned
The expectations for this game are too high now after what the developer said about it. It won't contain an infinite universe with an infinite diversity of species like we imagine, it will just be a universe full of slight variations of the same things. Red sharks on one planet and slightly redder sharks on the second planet, technically they are different but not in the sense that you will encounter an animal that looks like a bus with 12 hamster heads as you would in a realistic infinite universe.
 
Straight up asked if its coming to Xbox One.. "Error..uhhhhh. We're not talking about other consoles right now'". = My marketing contract with Sony prohibits me from commenting on that right now.

Some good info otherwise. No released date.

As much as I like exclusives on the platform, NMS is one of those games I feel needs to get out there as much as possible. I never doubted that it would be coming to both current gen consoles-- and almost assuredly PC-- but it's good to hear that the answer fumbling is likely a mark of co-marketing agreements as opposed to exclusivity rights for one system.
 

MattyG

Banned
I still have no idea how an infinite, procedurally generated universe is feasible. I want to believe, but I just don't see how it will work. Please prove wrong, Hello Games.
 

Leb

Member
Hrrrk. That is so awesome, it's like what I dreamed about playing as a kid.

I have to say though, the sense of scale is a little odd -- those would be some absolutely tiny planetoids which I would imagine wouldn't have sufficient gravity to trap an atmosphere, let alone support life, etc. But I mostly don't care, it just looks too awesome. I just hope there's enough good sandbox gameplay to warrant extended playthroughs.
 

Fedele

Member

Thank you for this.

So there you go, Sean Murray said that yes, you can find other players, but the chances are really small due to the huge size of the universe. Planets will have "planet scale", for example, and you will be light-years away from other players. Their focus is not an MMO-like experience, as he said before.

About the release date: they have a date for themselves but will only say something once they're confident about it due to being a small studio etc.
 
No, because you always just generate the same densely populated world from scratch every time you go there. The actual game world never has to be permanently stored. Minecraft has the problem you describe, because the world has to be stored as it's created. The world of NMS doesn't change its geometry, so it doesn't have to be stored. The only storage requirements are for the map. Who discovered the planet, what the atmosphere's made of etc. Even if 100 billion stars and planets are catalogued, it's still within the storage limits of a simple server.

If that is true, it's a bit worrying IMHO.

It means the landscape can't be altered. All you got is the procedurally generated stuff. No user content.

How interesting will procedural content be? Minecraft's fun isn't in the exploration - that part wears out it's welcome pretty quick; after a few hours you would have seen it all - but in the building.
 
They've got the scale of the game all wrong, the planet is too close, the asteroids are too large, the player flies there in like 30 seconds, and the new planet is apparently the size of the death star instead of a huge planet. Those floating rocks you see near the end are very clearly visible from high altitude space, but they're the size of a large floating football stadium at best and only a few hundred feet off the ground, seen when the player flies near them.

Here's what the meager state of florida looks like from high altitude space:
earth-from-space-7.jpg

If earth were in the game florida would be the size of a planetside 2 map
 

Bsigg12

Member
They've got the scale of the game all wrong, the planet is too close, the asteroids are too large, the player flies there in like 30 seconds, and the new planet is apparently the size of the death star instead of a huge planet. Those floating rocks you see near the end are very clearly visible from high altitude space, but they're the size of a large floating football stadium at best and only a few hundred feet off the ground, seen when the player flies near them.

Here's what the meager state of florida looks like from high altitude space:


If earth were in the game florida would be the size of a planetside 2 map

It's a videogame. Fun trumps reality.
 

Portugeezer

Gold Member
They've got the scale of the game all wrong, the planet is too close, the asteroids are too large, the player flies there in like 30 seconds, and the new planet is apparently the size of the death star instead of a huge planet. Those floating rocks you see near the end are very clearly visible from high altitude space, but they're the size of a large floating football stadium at best and only a few hundred feet off the ground, seen when the player flies near them.

Here's what the meager state of florida looks like from high altitude space:


If earth were in the game florida would be the size of a planetside 2 map

I noticed when I saw the trailer, but didn't give a shit.
 

the_champ

Banned
Looking unbelievable. Game of the show for me. Guess we are looking at a 2015 release?

This a serious question... why is there so much excitement about this game? I mean, looks really great, colorful. Now, what is the game about? Its a Tie Fighter like game? Not even know if there are missions or some kind of objectives in game, seems like a go and travel across these beautiful random generated geographies... is that enough to not become boring shortly?
 

op_ivy

Fallen Xbot (cannot continue gaining levels in this class)
This a serious question... why is there so much excitement about this game? I mean, looks really great, colorful. Now, what is the game about? Its a Tie Fighter like game? Not even know if there are missions or some kind of objectives in game, seems like a go and travel across these beautiful random generated geographies... is that enough to not become boring shortly?

came to post this. seems to be a neat idea with cool tech, but i don't get "the game" aspect. i dont get the hype. seems like it would be interesting for an hour or two, then what? of course i'm pretty ignorant on what the devs claim
 
This game was the E3 highlight for me.

Little Big Planet was the biggest surprise; just because it came out of nowhere.

Uncharted 4 is my most anticipated game; but NMS took the win, as U4 was too much of a tease.
 

alatif113

Member
They've got the scale of the game all wrong, the planet is too close, the asteroids are too large, the player flies there in like 30 seconds, and the new planet is apparently the size of the death star instead of a huge planet. Those floating rocks you see near the end are very clearly visible from high altitude space, but they're the size of a large floating football stadium at best and only a few hundred feet off the ground, seen when the player flies near them.

Here's what the meager state of florida looks like from high altitude space:


If earth were in the game florida would be the size of a planetside 2 map

You do understand this is a video game, not Google Earth...right?
 
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