Once upon a time, not so very long ago, I was excited about No Man's Sky.
It looked pretty and the seamless open-universe approach was intriguing.
However, almost right from the start people were asking questions to the effect of, "Okay, but what does the player actually do?"
Now that large quantities of gameplay footage are running free on the internet, those questions seemed to have been answered with, "Not fucking much."
On planets you walk around gathering resources for upgrades. You can scan procedurally generated animals and plants, which does basically nothing. You can make holes in the terrain by shooting it. You can engage in some browser-game level first person shooting. In space you can get into dogfights while flying between planets.
It all looks incredibly basic, the kind of thing that one can tire of after an hour or two.
The other big draw is the procedurally generated worlds which allow for massive amounts of (technically) unique content without the devs actually having to personally having to make that content.
However, now that I've seen a bunch of these procedurally generated worlds, my response is, "So what?" The whole thing amounts to this planet having blue grass while that planet had red and this planet having six-legged animals while another had lots of birds. It's like the difference between Minecraft maps. "Well, last time I started near the sea and there was some trees over here. But this time I started on a hill and the trees are over there!"
I'm actually a fan of randomized content, but it works best as a complement to fun mechanics that forces the player to adapt rather than learn content by rote.
The only thing on offer that looks remotely appealing at this point is the spaceship dogfights. But I'd rather play a game that focuses on being a good spaceship dogfighting game than one that includes shallow dogfights alongside a few other equally shallow activities.
It looked pretty and the seamless open-universe approach was intriguing.
However, almost right from the start people were asking questions to the effect of, "Okay, but what does the player actually do?"
Now that large quantities of gameplay footage are running free on the internet, those questions seemed to have been answered with, "Not fucking much."
On planets you walk around gathering resources for upgrades. You can scan procedurally generated animals and plants, which does basically nothing. You can make holes in the terrain by shooting it. You can engage in some browser-game level first person shooting. In space you can get into dogfights while flying between planets.
It all looks incredibly basic, the kind of thing that one can tire of after an hour or two.
The other big draw is the procedurally generated worlds which allow for massive amounts of (technically) unique content without the devs actually having to personally having to make that content.
However, now that I've seen a bunch of these procedurally generated worlds, my response is, "So what?" The whole thing amounts to this planet having blue grass while that planet had red and this planet having six-legged animals while another had lots of birds. It's like the difference between Minecraft maps. "Well, last time I started near the sea and there was some trees over here. But this time I started on a hill and the trees are over there!"
I'm actually a fan of randomized content, but it works best as a complement to fun mechanics that forces the player to adapt rather than learn content by rote.
The only thing on offer that looks remotely appealing at this point is the spaceship dogfights. But I'd rather play a game that focuses on being a good spaceship dogfighting game than one that includes shallow dogfights alongside a few other equally shallow activities.
![ZeD [taken 0]](https://eg-forums-escapist-data.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/data/avatars/l/192/192348.jpg?1620256419){kind=avatar}
