More stuff about NMS…
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Here’s an 18 minute video of NMS with IGN and one of the devs. He shows more of the same but talks about how procedural the game is and what not.
Well… to be fair, that’s pretty much what procedural means.
At worst, it’s an effectively infinite universe of everything being exactly the same so many hundred blocks (Minecraft), at best, it’s an effectively infinite universe of everything being very slight variations of the same so many thousand blocks* (Limit Theory).
Where ever you fall on the spectrum, though, it is just (a lot) more of the same. Kind of like the real world. I mean, don’t you hate how it reuses the models of animals and dead Presidents for determining the shape of clouds? My highly evolved human brain sees straight through applying a noise and blur function to the surface of your volumetric cloud implementation, Reality!
*) Often not literal blocks. See for example flowers and mushrooms in Minecraft.
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The key will be to focus on the gameplay within the universe, rather than driving the gameplay with the environment.
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As I posted on a Youtube video a while ago:
It’s not about the size of the sandbox, it’s about how much you can do in it.
How much time do Minecraft players spend just walking towards the horizon looking at the world that gets generated? Answer: Not much. They find somewhere that looks nice and get to work building/sculpting/adventuring.
NMS needs to give players the tools to do more than just explore. Gameplay is key and I haven’t seen much gameplay on display yet.
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A very quick, 5 Random Planets video.
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Well except of course that one man who made a series out of walking in minecraft in one direction… Three years + of “Far lands or bust”.
However unless you’re from the “vid or it didn’t happen”, it has been mentioned so far (one way or another), that you can:
Mine resources
trade mined resources
trade between different space stations to gain profit from price differences
shoot stuff
craft stuff
upgrade stuff
explore stuff
Sounds more than just explore to me … But I might be wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time.
The “crafting” consists combining 2(or more, probably) “elements” in the universe which gives you new materials/upgrades. I’m sure those can be combined with other combinations and go pretty deep, but that’s all it really is from what I’ve seen.
ps. Fictional elements 
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To be fair I don’t care much about crafting, and I just heard him mentioning it in the … economy vid I think ^^’
Am I the only one or is the news feed from NMS close to zero these days/last months? I rarely actively look for general games news, but when there is some awesome/new/great stuff out I usually get the wind of it. The same goes for Star Citizen. Elite: Dangerous is still out there, but NMS and SC feels like non-existent. I hope it’s just because of unfullfilled expectations/ dissapointment then general drop of interest in the space-flight genre…
It’s hard to put content release and news out when you are in full production mode. That’s my less ominous speculation.
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There is a lot about to come for SC in October. NMS should be nearing some kind of milestone. In contrast they are not really obligated to show content until the game is nearly out.
Very much looking forward to this game. Glad they are releasing the pc version with the console, or lets say, I still hope that is the case.
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I must admit that I feel a bit conflicted about the pc version.
It’s okay when you port a pc game to a console (accompanied by the expected loss of quality), but I don’t like it, when a (initially presented as console exclusive) console game gets ported to pc. There are just too many people whining around. Initially the ones, who whine about the game not being on their console/pc (“How dare they make their best game, their magnum opus so to speak, on a console?!? This couldn’t possibly have been their artistic vision”), then, once the game gets pressured into a pc release, the ones who whine about the port looking ugly compared to some other pc-exclusive game from last year, then those people who whine about the control scheme including radial menus, which “dumb the game mechanics down too much”. Then the people who whine about the game being locked at 30 fps, the resolution being restricted to 1080p … missing support for input device xyz …
I really hope that they concentrate on the PS4 version first (preferably including vr headset support), before even starting this hellhole of pc port. Then again, they might already be in full steam pc porting right now. I am not really keeping an eye on the game rather than the release date, so that I know when to dish out x amounts of money to get it on ps4.
Speaking of the devil…
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excellent, bring more people into the genre 
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SLAP
“MINE!”
That is priceless 
I hope they can allow custom sound effects for our own discoveries.
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Maybe a 99 cent dlc? ^^
uuuuh how about voicepacks in general?
A very interesting video about the NMS tech, ~30min of it.
I really, really wish he’d stop demoing the game and just let me (and everyone else, of course) bloody play it.
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