ichtyander
Member
The thing is, even if you look at games with man made levels (as in non-procedural), depending on the type and theme, you could be looking at anything from one to maybe a dozen different environments, but that's it. When you start talking about "infinite" or at least hundreds or thousands of somewhat different environments, the actual amount stops being important. I'm pretty sure we'll see a lot of similar or samey environments and creatures during our gameplay, but if you look at various shooters or open world games, they probably have a lot less variety yet can easily keep you occupied for at least 10-20 hours, even the painstakingly repetitive Ubisoft titles.
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.
But I agree with some concerns about the exploration gameplay. I would greatly enjoy just exploring these planets, cataloging the various species and possibly gather resources but the minute by minute gameplay needs to be engaging enough or it can become stale very fast. Stuff I'd really like to see:
- High difficulty (think Dark Souls or at least Minecraft in terms of survivability and resource requirements). The devs mentioned something early on about traversing to nearby planets would be relatively easy but wanting to jump further would require a lot of work, so that sounds nice so far.
- Various obligatory tasks on most planets. Something like planet prospecting, placing a grid of markers to scan a continent for resources, mining/drilling, clear an area of plants or wildlife to build a base or beacon, terraform an area to balance out the ecosystem, lots of "gotta catch'em all" analysis and gathering, send probes all around the world to draw out the map of the planet etc. And all of this should be rewarding in some way, either by making the tasks fun to play or rewarding you with experience, upgrades, new equipment etc.
- I think they mentioned you'll have at least some sort of puzzle elements while exploring, figuring out what you need to do etc. This can help in breaking the monotonous aspects of exploration if done right.
- Trading would be nice although it seems this will be a more of a "lonesome spaceman" experience, so I doubt it. Still, you could at least gather excessive resources from planets and sell them at some automated space stations for rewards.
I mean, there's a whole bunch of old games like Starflight and Protostar that have most of these elements set and working very nicely, but they didn't have the more approachable first person, realtime oriented gameplay. If NMS manages to fuse the two, even on a more shallow level, I'll be more than happy.
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.
But I agree with some concerns about the exploration gameplay. I would greatly enjoy just exploring these planets, cataloging the various species and possibly gather resources but the minute by minute gameplay needs to be engaging enough or it can become stale very fast. Stuff I'd really like to see:
- High difficulty (think Dark Souls or at least Minecraft in terms of survivability and resource requirements). The devs mentioned something early on about traversing to nearby planets would be relatively easy but wanting to jump further would require a lot of work, so that sounds nice so far.
- Various obligatory tasks on most planets. Something like planet prospecting, placing a grid of markers to scan a continent for resources, mining/drilling, clear an area of plants or wildlife to build a base or beacon, terraform an area to balance out the ecosystem, lots of "gotta catch'em all" analysis and gathering, send probes all around the world to draw out the map of the planet etc. And all of this should be rewarding in some way, either by making the tasks fun to play or rewarding you with experience, upgrades, new equipment etc.
- I think they mentioned you'll have at least some sort of puzzle elements while exploring, figuring out what you need to do etc. This can help in breaking the monotonous aspects of exploration if done right.
- Trading would be nice although it seems this will be a more of a "lonesome spaceman" experience, so I doubt it. Still, you could at least gather excessive resources from planets and sell them at some automated space stations for rewards.
I mean, there's a whole bunch of old games like Starflight and Protostar that have most of these elements set and working very nicely, but they didn't have the more approachable first person, realtime oriented gameplay. If NMS manages to fuse the two, even on a more shallow level, I'll be more than happy.
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