[jkas789]

So last week I decided to invest some of my free time to play yet again No Man's Sky. I have been previously playing this game for the last few years since it has released and it has been a joy to see it evolve and get better over time. Not because I'm sentimentally attached to the game in any sort of way, or because I have stakes in it, but rather because I think it is such a breath of fresh air to have a high profile game dev to try and actually fix their game and not cash out.

Anyways, I have been playing it for a while in short bursts across the years, totaling around 50 or so hours. And while I liked what I played, there was always something that make me stop playing and leave it installed on my pc for months at a time without touching it. Just sitting there wasting space. And I finally figured out. While the game has a story mode and a quest that leads you through a nice progression, it all feels so soulless. The core elements of the game are fine, they work great. It's all boils down to get to planet, scavenge resources, complete objective, get off planet. And i could live with that if the worlds I visited didn't feel too alike. I know what you are thinking: Alike how, dipshit?, it's all procedural generated.

The devil as always, is in the details. It's the alien ruins that all look the same. It's all the prefab bases and abandoned outposts that you start spotting from a distance and make you think "God damn it! It's another observatory with the annoying puzzle" or "It's on of those abandoned bases that were invaded by space bugs. Nah bro miss me with that shit." The more time you play the game continuously, the more you start to see a pattern. Like if you fly on a planet every 2 or 3 minutes you will get near a base and there is guaranteed 2 alien monuments nearby. The animals you see start getting really familiar, shapes start blurring together and the novelty of the different body shapes start disappearing. There is very few unique planets, and when you find one that makes you go "Oh!" it's usually a disappointment because for a fleeting moment you expect to find something unique. Perhaps a different alien ruin in comparison to others or a different type of base. But then it's the same old shit.

Don't misunderstand me. Fundamentally the game is not bad. It's quite good. The worlds feel utterly lifeless and samey to me. In a universe were the possibilities are endless and evolution takes a different path depending on the planet's unique conditions, why am I finding the same type of quadrupedal animal on another planet of the same solar system? It's like snow. Every snowflake is unique, but at the end of the day it's still all fucking snow.

What do you all think about No Man's Sky? Did you have the same problems as me? Have you ever experienced something like this with other procedural games?

[DisgustedGrunt]

Never played No Man's Sky but i get you, i try to avoid any games with procedural generated anything. It's just, you can tell they're made by some computer algorithm and not humans, there's no care to put anything interesting for players to find.
I remember playing Daggerfall and deciding to walk from the starting dungeon to the first town, It took 40 minutes. 40 minutes of nothing, not a single enemy, not even a slight variation in terrain. And the dungeons? good god, i tried to avoid all the non-story ones, they're a mess. Still better than Oblivion though, a game that is (supposedly, at least the dungeons) hand crafted yet it feels randomly generated.

[luciusDXL]

There are two issues at play here, though it certainly isn't limited to No Man's Sky but rather general challenges of procedural generation.

1. Procedural algorithms generate results from a core set of building blocks, whether that is models, tiles, noise, letters in an L-system, etc. With No Man's Sky, the number of building blocks is limited and fairly "coarse" (i.e. large pieces like body parts or whole buildings, instead of bricks or sub-parts). This means that there is not only a limited number of ways these building blocks can be combined, but even when the combinations are unique - you recognize the individual parts.

2. Real-time procedural algorithms in games tend to be "local" in nature. Basically, this means the building blocks are put together in a way that, at best, is in relation to the immediate neighbors. Noise is purely local, which is great for computation but, without additional transformation, produces a very repetitive, samey look. And if you look at the mathematics - it makes sense. Noise is basically a wave, with a period and amplitude - you zoom out far enough and it becomes a solid color (i.e. the zero-line). However, nature doesn't work this way. There are global effects that shape local processes - fluvial erosion, movement of tectonic plates, large-scale weather patterns, periodic changes in the distance between the earth and the sun, periodic changes in the sun versus the galactic center, and so on (though in-general there are diminishing effects with each zoom out in scale).

Non-realtime procedural generation has greater success as a part of the art pipeline because some of these global effects can be simulated (such as erosion) and the building blocks can be tailor-made for the specific situation or greatly expanded.

[Jimmy]

Diablo is probably the only game that got "random levels" right.

[Morpheus Kitami]

The problem you have with No Man's Sky is in no way unique. I've probably played half a dozen space games with randomly generated worlds and they all generally had that problem with their worlds. The better ones removed all the pointless crap so you could focus on why you were actually there playing it. If you were there to harvest some minerals, you just extracted them from orbit. If you were there to explore, well, you just explore, nothing about building a base or ship or anything. I think the algorithms are much better than they used to be, but we've lost sight of why we wanted these infinite worlds, to explore, not to build arbitrary structures to make a bunch of numbers go bigger. Everything's gotta be within visible distance of where the player starts or he'll get frustrated and give up. Not saying it was some masterpiece in this regard, but people trashed sections of Mass Effect for that reason.
That said, most roguelikes are better about this. And by that I mean the more tradition ones, rather than the ones aiming to create whole worlds. They tend to have less noticeable algorithms, probably because there are less moving parts and less need to stitch a world together.

[jkas789]

Quote

I remember playing Daggerfall and deciding to walk from the starting dungeon to the first town, It took 40 minutes. 40 minutes of nothing, not a single enemy, not even a slight variation in terrain. And the dungeons? good god, i tried to avoid all the non-story ones, they're a mess. Still better than Oblivion though, a game that is (supposedly, at least the dungeons) hand crafted yet it feels randomly generated.

The thing with Daggerfall for me is that it was shock full of interesting lore and quests that made the world feel somewhat realistic. Today Daggerfall in UNity has a wealth of mods that make it a better experience and makes both terrain and dungeons way better than they were in the vanilla version.

I'm not that well versed in the behind the scenes of procedural generation, but I think luciusDXL explains it well enough.

Quote

That said, most roguelikes are better about this. And by that I mean the more tradition ones, rather than the ones aiming to create whole worlds. They tend to have less noticeable algorithms, probably because there are less moving parts and less need to stitch a world together.

I'm not a fan of roguelikes this days, mainly because i burned out with the genre. But I do agree that games like Dead Cells (which I really like) do better the procedural generation than other procedural games. Though AFAIK Dead Cells cheats because it is not really completely procedural generated. This video explains it better than I ever could:



And you can tell when you play. While the rooms are different almost every play through, the levels have a similar layout and it never looses it's congruence. Granted, the meat and bones of that game is the souls-like combat, metroidvania elements and the speedrun nature of it. Not the procedural generation.

Quote

Diablo is probably the only game that got "random levels" right.

I agree. If nothing else, the random levels in Diablo 2 & 3 never felt out of place. Grim Dawn also does it really well.

It's a shame that No Man's Sky suffers to much from this. Because outside Elite Dangerous (which has been a buggy mess since the release of Odyssey) there is no other game were just climbing into your space ship and flying into the sky of a planet, pass the atmosphere and into space feels quite as good. There is a feeling of freedom there that feels genuinely fresh every time i do it. Sadly the planets all suck balls.

[MusicallyInspired]

The only roguelike to this day I enjoy is The Binding of Isaac.

I get your feelings for No Man's Sky. I started playing with my daughter in multiplayer to see if having a co-player makes it any more fun. Haven't decided yet. But I still think Minecraft is a better game. At least mods add tons of gameplay.

[jkas789]

Minecraft I enjoy but at least up to a certain point. There is so much I can do there before I get absolutely bored and change to something else. To be honest I can imagine NMS being a hell of a lot more enjoyable if you are playing with someone else. Minecraft was that for me. Me and my best friends used to make lan parties and playing minecraft with them was a blast.