[lesingerouge]

While the technical achievements are impressive, I am not convinced how "playable" this game will be in the end. Almost all the games in existence have at least 2 core elements: story and character purpose. I have not seen evidence of either in this game (no, "space exploration" is not exactly a purpose). A great addition to this graphical engine would be a scripting engine that would allow independent writers to create their own quests and method to submit them to the players.

[hacker_9]

The more I think about it the more impossible it seems that there could be ANY story in this game. Even if they managed to procedurally generate one planet + missions, the next generated planet would have to 'make sense' and fit into the story (if it's close by, then has it been taken over by the nearby planetary race? If they are a warrior race then do they use the planet as an outpost, with bases strategically placed around the planet? What does the planet add to the story mission-wise?)

And after all that, the 3rd generated planet would need to take into account the story of the other other 2 planets and so on and so on.. (even if the planets don't interact, the missions still need variety)

I agree with your scripting idea, to extend upon it: they release the game with an editor, then a designer would go in and use the editor to pre-generate a set of planets to their liking, and then they could layer story, missions, characters etc on top. Sort of like a build your own Mass Effect.

There could even be wormholes joining all the player created universes together! Oh the possibilities...

[piptastic]

What about Minecraft? I haven't spent a lot of time with it, but I didn't see either of these elements.

A lot of first person shooters also don't have much of a storyline. There usually is one but it's not part of the multiplayer aspect.