This game will be a mile wide and an inch deep.
No, that's really not all that exciting. If it was I would just sit there hitting "new world" in Minecraft over and over. Same situation there. After you've seen a couple dozen such worlds it starts to get old.
Maybe one aspect of it is that at its core, ultimately there isn't any thrill of the unknown, because with it all being generated you quickly get to the point where it is known.
Did you completely ignore the part of my previous post where I talked about how the algorithms change as you progress through the game?
The outer edge of the galaxy, algorithms generate:
- relatively normal 'familiar' shaped planets
- relatively normal physics
- relatively normal animals
- safer atmospheres (in terms of radition, toxicity, etc)
As you proceed closer to the center of the galaxy the algorithms generating:
- planet shapes get more insane
- physics and planetary 'laws' start being bent to the point of breaking
- animal shapes, abilities, properties and animations start getting bent to the point of logical breaking - you might find a winged elephant with the animation model of a bat (there are near-infinite permutations which even the dev team haven't seen yet)
- atmospheres get increasingly volatile - with increasingly unsettling combinations like freezing + water + radioactive, in far higher doses/danger thresholds than ever before
Keep exploring to the center of the galaxy and you
will see new things.
I even recall reading in one preview that the dev team gathered around the journalist to ogle at his screen because he found a mineral/element none of them had seen before. This suggests even resources are procedurally generated to match their environment.
I also thought I had read that once you leave a planet, anything you did to it is typically gone, i.e. it's saved locally as long as you stay nearby. Not sure if there's a more recent source that says otherwise.
Nope, wrong. That quote was from an interview where Sean slightly mis-spoke. What he said was that as you leave a planet the game engine destroys it behind you. He didn't mean your progress is wiped. He was talking about how the computer processes or loads the planet into its memory. As you fly away, the game de-loads the planet, it is taken out of rendered existence. But everything you did on that planet still exists. You can turn a mountain into your own giant base if you want and it will stay there forever.
You might as well forget about any multiplayer side. The game's definitely not about that.
So speaking of things we know about NMS, are there any setting details revealed? e.g. is it set in a particular year? Does your pilot have any backstory? Or will the game simply start with you flying in a ship?
We're assured there is a backstory and there are ways to learn about the lore - but the game won't force any of it on you and the devs are being super tight-lipped about it. Understandably. When you start the game you'll get a small amount of exposition (apparently a 2001-style trippy space-flight) then you'll just
be on a planet.