Cool, good to hear. Hopefully the examples from that video are an outlier since all those little things seemed to have about the same weird squeeky sound
The audio team has a lot of work to do still to hook up the procedural generation component with the system they've created. For those that didn't read the article (and you should, it's great), NMS's Audio Director brought in The Wolf (OG programmer Sandy White). Sandy
digitally modeled vocal chords and other throat organs that we need to produce sound. It's freakin amazing. I mean, just listen to this video, or check out
this sample The New Yorker put up on Soundcloud. Those are all generated from Sandy's system. So now Sandy has to plug his system into the procedural generation system and make sure it always creates believable vocalizations.
Having said that, I'm still a bit skeptical given my experiences with Molyneux over the years. I totally love Sean's passion, but I've also seen it before in Molyneux. Seeing the video again made me see details that seemed off, and those little things are what I'm afraid a 10-person team won't be able to address given the scope of the game. For instance, the walking is very floaty, as if your avatar has no weight. The laser blasts on ships look amateurish. So I think in broad strokes it seems stunning, but as a refined experience, I'm cautious they can pull that off.