[mevile]

> But the planets all harbor the same kinds of structures. The same alien remnants. You do the same kinds of things on all of them.

Watching this game on twitch and going from one stream to the next I was left with thinking exactly this, it's all the same, and it's all a grind. The game's procedural generation creates superficial visual differences. It doesn't create anything non-visual worth exploring. Outside of wondering what the next thing looks like, what is there to be curious about?

They should add procedurally generated problems to solve in the environment that can affect your life in the game. Different environments requiring unique ways to survive, perhaps some not even solvable. There could be online discussions about particular dangerous places about how one could possibly create a habitable solution for exploring them.

[proc0]

Either that, or have an even more powerful building/recipe system than other sandbox games, perhaps building a planetary (or even galactic?) fortress and such. This may get too complicated though, even if it were feasible.

[oms1005]

There are, though. Some planets and moons are poisonous, at least. Overall, the game to me is a lot like starbound, or a less-fulfilling Terreria.

[weego]

It's less fleshed out than starbound was at its early access release though which is saying something.

[k__]

Did the Starbound devs get their bugs and performance fixed now?

I stopped playing it after they included a game-in-game instead of making the game playable...

[TeMPOraL]

It's better now.

And if No Man's Sky is worse than Starbound then honestly I think I don't want to play it. Starbound is still on the level of "fun at first, but quickly getting repetitive" in terms of procedural generation. It's much more engaging than it was - but that's because authors invested a lot of time in adding non-generated content.

My complaint about all the attempts at procedural generation I've seen so far is that they lack depth. You have plenty of randomized stuff on one level, but obviously repetitive patterns on a meta-level. Take Starbound, again, for an example. Sure, on every planet you'll encounter a slightly different set of creatures - they may differ in sprites, stats or attacks. But after visiting a few worlds you quickly notice it's always the same combo of one non-hostile ground critter, one weak and one strong hostile ground critters, one or two flying critters...

[drabiega]

I find No Man's Sky to be much more engaging than Starbound, but I attribute a lot of that to it's newness.

I really liked the concept of Starbound and the games it descended from, but it didn't really feel like it added anything to the formula.

No Man's Sky certainly inherits a lot from that genre, but it feels substantially different and it's been engaging for me in a way that the genre hasn't since I first started playing Minecraft.

[drabiega]

I don't think Terraria and Starbound are a great comparison. They're very combat focused, while combat in No Man's Sky is something of an afterthought.

[mevile]

I don't know. I quite love starbound. This game feels less somehow.

[erikb]

Starbound, Out There and a little Minecraft I would summarize.