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I like the concept of a procedural space exploration game and No Man’s Sky looks like a promising entry in the genre. There has been a number of attempts so far that approached this concept from different angles (from using space as a setting for fast roguelike gameplay [1] to pure exploration [2]), many of them resulting in good games.

That said, if No Man’s Sky really is totally procedural I wonder how the developers will handle the overall structure of the game and avoid the "quicksand box" [3] trap. This is especially pertinent if the game doesn't feature a Minecraft-style combination of building and survival to make the players not mind the "quicksand".

I know the game in which I enjoyed exploring space the most is The Ur-Quan Masters (formerly known as "Star Control II") [4]. The star systems and planets there are not procedurally generated and I don't think randomizing them would make much of the difference for the reason I'll explain in a moment. My best guess as to why I liked UQM/SC2 so much beyond its audiovisual style is that a) it has no formal mission structure that limits the player's actions; and b) there's a lot you can do; but c) your exploration still ties into an engaging larger story, which and in turn contributes unique one-time encounters to the exploration. A consequence of c) is that mixing up the layout of the galaxies without changing the overall plot, which at its core is fairly linear and features a time limit (think the original Fallout), wouldn't really change what the game is like. My guess is that the company that figures out how to generate distinct game plots that provide c) along with a) and b) will take over the procedural games business, if not the game industry as a whole. The question is whether c) can be done well enough in some way that doesn't involve an artificial general intelligence or per-player MTurk writers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Adventures_in_Infinite...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis

[3] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuicksandBox

[4] It's now FOSS and available from http://sc2.sourceforge.net/. Highly recommended if you have an interest in SF space games.




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