No Man's Sky Cosmos

Clutch Nixon is the only thing good thing about the last few games.

I've bounced off NMS several times, despite having tried quite hard to get into it. So, my take is based on ~20 hours of early game, from 2025ish. Probably the best parallel I can draw is to Elite: Dangerous, which I played for several hundred ours before getting bored of it. What I find lacking in both games is that there's no _meaningful_ emergent gameplay that spawns off the procgen. Everything is wildy different on each planet, yet very same-y, because none of the differences really play into each other. In both, one can discover random biomes and creatures, but it's not like they are inherently interesting, they are mostly just following the same scripts.

Contrast this with something like Dwarf Fortress, which takes a slightly more in-depth approach to procgen, one where things have history, and in many ways, things "make sense". Or Rimworld, where the game tries its hardest to conjure up a narrative for you, dynamically, but still in a sandbox. So, basically, NMS is a perfectly functional sandbox game, and I have huge respect for them for keeping on working at it for so many years. However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch, and so far I haven't been grabbed by any of its story generation. It just felt like a long series of fetch quests and "collect them all" games.

If you’re looking for a scripted arc, wrong game by construction.

I think the multiplayer aspect is a bit weaker than it could be, maybe improved more recently, but it is a something that Minecraft has done well

Does it? I put about 80-ish hours into NMS last year. According to the wiki NMS has 13 biomes. In practice it has even fewer because the actual biome has little to no effect on gameplay. It's just a "look".

No matter the biome, no matter the planet you just tick check-boxes which systems are enabled or not, but their combinations do not give you anything special back.

No matter what environment is generated you play in very similar way.

Elite: Dangerous suffers from the exactly the same issue. There's tons of interesting systems, yet you will do one thing of your choosing, that will play in the same way all the time. Like a theme park, while the game promises you a simulation.

Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.

A little bit of depth to go with all that breadth?

I'm not saying there aren't deep systems in NMS. Its just that they are sparse. You can tool around all day having only the most cursory interactions with most of the game's systems. They've added so many interesting things, yet last time I played it felt there wasn't much of anything to do with them. For example, the Pokemon clone they added a few updates ago -- fun for five minutes. Super simple battles. However many months of development for something that got old after 5 minutes.

Hah. Sorry but what kind of Minecraft do you play? In mine the biomes become unrecognizable because I build on top of them. What can you build in no man's sky? Nothing, judging by most reviews/comments.

This was also one of many gripes I had with Starfield.

Eh with a planetary cluster of that scale they have little choice. And Proc Gen is also in Bethesdas history, its how they built Arena and Daggerfall IIRC.

My issue isnt that you can see the same base on every planet, my issue is largely that when you have reached a sufficiently high level, most planets will be absolutely plastered with pirate bases. The universe goes from empty to full of RNG pirates and mercenaries so damn quickly. They really needed to create more unique encounters, but less of each kind, and spread them out a lot further.

And I mean the old freeform Lego, not the paint by numbers sets they're selling now.

Modded Minecraft is a very different beast, depending on the mods

It's pretty cool to see what modders have done with it over the years. I genuinely think Minecraft + Create is the best factory game.

The game is 2 million light years wide, but a meter deep.

The creatures, vehicles, and buildings weren't generated -- they were created by other players and exchanged asynchronously, then seeded into your procedurally generated galaxy.

Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game: no real-time multiplayer, but your galaxy fills with other people's content.

That's the opposite of the oatmeal problem. Procgen gives you infinite bowls that all taste the same. Spore gave you a finite but large set of bowls, each made by someone who cared about it. Different tradeoff, different failure mode -- but not the one this thread is about.

GDC 2005, Will Wright, The Future Of Content:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw

>[...] Also I want to apologize for the title of this talk in the description, which I know was kind of hopelessly vague.

>What usually happens every year is GDC, they call me up, and they say "we want you to do a talk" and I say okay, and then a week later they say "what's your talk about" and so then I think about it for a while and oh, get a rough idea of what I'm going to talk about, and I give them some kind of generic title in that area.

>That's what usually happens. But this year was different. This year when they asked me what I was going to talk about, I just flat out lied.

>But, so I'm not really going to talk about the future of content. I'm really more in fact going to talk about a possible future of content you know.

>It seems like the theme that I'm coming away from this conference with so far is that the next generation titles are going to be incredibly expensive, we're going to have to build mountains of content, and it's going to drive most of the smaller players out of the market.

>And I'd like to offer potentially an alternate vision of that. You know I think that there is a way to deal with that more creatively. So maybe a more accurate title for this talk would be "What I learned about content from The Sims".

That was 21 years ago. The same argument is being made again right now, with a different machine offered as the answer, and Will's alternative is still the one nobody is trying.

Will's advice for game designers and creative humans in general, from my notes on the talk:

>If you have a weird idea that's so outside of the box, don't forget it. You should go back and revisit your weird ideas later, because you can never know where they might lead to.

In February 2007 PopSci, Will explains the whole design rationale:

https://www.popsci.com/entertainment-gaming/article/2007-02/...

>We thought about it. In fact, technically, based on all the stuff we've already done for it, it wouldn't be very hard at all. We've already solved all the hard problems we would need to do a persistent online world version of Spore. The hard part is, what happens when you come to a planet and the planet's offline? Which would be the case. In fact, one of the reasons why I kind of went down this path is that nobody has really explored the hybrid model. And this really is a hybrid, it's what we call a massively single-player game, where we try to get the benefits of an online game, which is all the people building the world collectively together, without the liabilities, which is that the 14-year-old can kill you or that you've invested all this time in your planet and somebody comes along and blows it up, and therefore you had to put everybody on the same level treadmill. And I hate these level treadmill games, and I wanted the players to feel really empowered.

GDC 2005 Report: The Future of Content

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/gdc-2005-report-the-fut...

I posted more details on the Spore Stats discussion in 2023:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280275

>Here are my notes and summary of the GDC 2005 talk where Will Wright first revealed Spore, which I asked Will to review and check for accuracy. It's interesting to compare the design he described in the talk with what Maxis eventually shipped. Video of the hour long talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw

>One of the essential problems with designing a Massively Multi Player Online Game like Spore is that players at different levels of the simulation run at different time scales.

>Maintaining time synchronization between players is also the reason The Sims Online doesn't have a "Pause" button or speed controls, or automatically pause in build and buy mode, like The Sims.

>So instead, Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game. Users don't interact with each other in real time, but instead users can create their own content, and it exchanges that content between users asynchronously.

>That's also how The Sims Exchange lets players asynchronously upload and download their Sims save files along with web pages describing their house, sims, and photo album.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-content-will-wri...

>The Future of Content — Will Wright’s Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005

>What I learned about content from the Sims. …and why it’s driven me to procedural methods. …And what I now plan to do with them. Talk by Will Wright, Game Developers Conference, 3/11/2005.

>Based on notes taken by Don Hopkins at the talk, and other discussions and review by Will Wright. The title of the talk “The Future of Content” was purposefully vague, because Will wanted to show Spore in public for the first time, but he had to flat out lie about the title and send a fake set of slides for the EA executives to review, so they didn’t know what he was about to do. A more accurate title for the talk would be “What I Learned About Content from The Sims, and Why it’s Driven Me to Procedural Methods, and What I Now Plan to Do With Them”. [...]

>Wired asked for an illustration to print in the magazine, anything he wanted. So he made a diagram of Spore that Wired published, but he didn’t tell them what it was. The design docs for Spore have been out in Wired Magazine for a year now. (It’s in the Feb 2004 issue of Wired.)

>Will’s Secret Diagram of Spore published in February 2004 Wired:

https://donhopkins.com/home/WiredSporeDiagram.jpg

[...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280831

>And that is the whole point, how you win the game: become involved with the content creation community!

>The powerful but easy to use direct manipulation editor tools, the automatic content sharing system, and the online community around user created content, were together the most innovative and successful things about Spore. (As contrasted with the not as well realized gameplay and storytelling design goals.) [...]

>Chaim Gingold, A Brief History of Spore:

http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...

>Creativity

>Of course, these aren’t any old aliens we ask players to invest in — they’re your creation, your aliens. Once you start customizing, and design your creature, emotional investment is generated. It’s magic. Even the ugly ones are loved by their parents. Many games thrive on the interest generated by players’ creative investment. Console role playing games, for example, get this effect when players invest time in equipping and naming characters. I’ve always felt more attached to my characters as I fuss over their outfits and equipment. Creative interaction seems to always generate emotional involvement and attachment. Psychologically, it would seem that part of this stems from the sunk cost fallacy — we become attached to things we’ve invested time and energy into. Of course, it’s not just the hundreds of hours invested in a World of Warcraft character, their relationships, and possessions that generate attachment, it’s the sense that our fabrications are extensions of ourselves. As recipients of our attention and creative energy, our handiworks are reflections of who we are, tangible manifestations of our personalities. It’s no wonder we become attached to what we make, and take the success or failure of our own work and ideas very personally.

>Spore neatly solves the alien attachment problem by asking the player to design them. If a player makes a creature, and it’s appealing, they’ll be quite invested in it. Reflecting on the success of The Sims Exchange, where players shared stories, characters, houses, and objects for The Sims, Will realized that shared creativity would give Spore a broader appeal. Why not build creative exchange into the game, rather than as a website that orbits it? Player created assets are constantly being uploaded and downloaded by Spore, enough material to fill a galaxy. There’s nothing like taking home your latest finger painting, and having mom hang it on the fridge for everyone to see. Sharing not only fills up the galaxy with cool stuff, but allows the entire world to see your fridge, motivating you to continue creating.

>Of course, a lot of deep magic must work properly for something like Spore’s creature creator to function properly. It must be natural to use, easily producing satisfying results for anyone, from beginners to advanced users. And these aliens, lumps of polygons that no animator has ever seen before, must be brought to life. These are rather complicated endeavors, from a design, aesthetic, and technical point of view, but the player should never notice any of it. The game design implications are also challenging — the game must be playable and interesting, regardless of the creatures dropped into it.

That and the trailer was very different than the released game.

They apologized IIRC and then continued to work on it for like a decade - adding multiplayer and many large changes to the game

Weird question: do you have any tips on how one might apply these principles to a semi-stochastic synth plugin for musicians?

(I have several ideas, but I'd be curious to hear yours, independently.)

First procgen game I ever played was Starflight 2. (Pre-Internet era, so I couldn't get hold of Starflight 1. SF 2 spoils you, hard, on the major spoiler in SF 1, so if you're playing them from GOG or other sources then you should definitely play 1 before 2).

My ten-year-old mind was boggled. Hundreds of star systems, each one with several planets (usually), and you could land on each one? And explore the whole planet (in a very limited top-down 2D view, because this was the 1980's), harvesting minerals, and the map was quite a bit larger than what would fit on one screen? And it all fit onto one 720K floppy disk?!??!?

Now, of course, I know how they did it. But there was an actual game there. There were half-a-dozen alien races you could interact with (talk or shoot, as required), and there was an actual story. With a twist at the end that 40-year-old me would see coming, but 10-year-old me was shocked and amazed by. (And the twist in SF 2 wasn't even as good as the one in SF 1). And you progressed that story by following the gameplay loop:

    - Fly around looking for planets with valuable minerals
    - Land, scoop up what you can carry, fly home to sell them
    - Gradually increase your ship's capabilities

    - Collect plot-important artifacts, fly home to get them researched
    - Research tells you "go talk to these aliens".
    - Do a fetch quest so they like you, then talk to them.
    - They tell you where to go to kick off the next plot point.

    - Find out where the Big Bad's home base is
    - Find out where the MacGuffin is that lets you access that location
    - Take MacGuffin to right place, fight Big Bad, save the day.

And they timed it well: the core harvest-resources-and-upgrade-the-ship loop didn't have time to get boring before you were off to collect plot coupons. And there weren't too many plot coupons before it was time to find the MacGuffin, use it to beat the Big Bad, and save the day.

Star Control 2 did it really, really well, with better graphics since it was released a few years later. BTW, if you haven't played SC 2, search for "The Ur-Quan Masters" to download and play a totally free, legitimate, open-source version of the game, with full original assets since the copyright reverted back to the original creators who released it into the public domain for the UQM project to port to modern machines. I wish that had happened to all the old classics, but Star Control 2 is truly a good game. Definitely seek out The Ur-Quan Masters.

But before you do that, I would strongly recommend to play Starflight 1 and Starflight 2, to get a feel for the origins of the procgen-with-good-story genre that Star Control 2 did so very well.

P.S. Edited the "core gameplay loop" paragraph to better make it clear there were two or three loops, and you progressed forward through them, rarely having to go backwards.

I think the opposite. The more dimensions you have, the more "invalid space" there should be. Otherwise you end up with giant dinosaurs with tiny feet and fairy wings. You end up with a yellow kitchen with a barrel full of arrows next to a blue dungeon with a giant dresser. You end up with nothing making sense, and everything feeling random in the same way. Trying to spot the differences between 100100111101011110110001001011101 and 1101101110111010000100111001011101 is exactly the "bowl of oatmeal" problem. The vast majority of possible combinations of values should be invalid and impossible, otherwise the choices actually don't matter.

The actual geography doesn't vary that wildly most of the time ( if you've seen one lightly forested river valley, you've seen them all), but players generate a relatively low number of worlds, and in each world probably only see a handful of sites, where dwarf-scale world gen actually matters. Unlike NMS, though, the details of world gen matter to gameplay a lot. Trade caravans and invading armies can't traverse mountain ranges and ocean, so a mountainous peninsula can be extremely isolated. At the site level, you'll probably want to design your fortress to take advantage of local geography to help fortify your fortress and provide resources, so terrain and features like rivers, volcanoes, etc. placement matters a lot.

In contrast, No Man's Sky world gen feels pretty tangent to the actual gameplay. The game does a good enough job incentivizing you to explore lots of planets, but in terms of the survival/base-building aspects, there's a pretty short list of resources that matter to deciding where to setup, and geography hardly matters in terms of how you build.

After generating the level structure, emplace an entrance and exit such that they are maximally apart. And emplace a strong monster in one of the rooms around the exit. And emplace a health potion in one room before the strong monster. And emplace treasure in the exit room.

That sort of stuff and be specialized and coded towards your particular games structures fairly easily.

Scale is much harder though. In something like NMS it’d be intensive doing such a constraint solver on the whole galaxy. Might work in chunks or regions though.

Fly out of SeaTac or Chicago O'Hare in most flight sims at sunrise, and you'll get a richly detailed airport, realistic traffic, realistic surrounding terrain, etc. with hopefully jaw-dropping views.

Pick a random airport at a random time with an obscure name or location in the US Midwest, and they all start to look the same (even with detailed, realistic geography): a mostly flat expanse with some hills, and either just the local city lights (if that) or a dull mid-day sun.

To be fair, those checklists are also largely there for so many pilots and those in training whom want to get the experience.

Outposts sound cool. I assume they aren’t just all the same thing. What do they offer? I’m sure it won’t be something I look at for 5 minutes and think ‘yeah this is neat’ and then realise there’s nothing deeper than that, right?

Ship building and freighters sound cool. I’m sure I’ll be motivated to do that because my stock ship is really holding me back. Oh wait, combat is a joke and I can perma farm max bounties playing with my toes with my default shop I bought on max difficulty/permadeath.

Pet fighting? What’s the point of that?

This sounds like it would be a great mod for Factorio. Adds other players factories but in a dilapidated and decayed state.

Shame that it just languished to a point where I think Microsoft completely lost both interest and control over that feature, where in Horizon 6 it just gives you the exact same few driveatars every race, and somehow no one at Playground Games is interested in fixing this. At this point I strongly suspect that they literally don't know how to, the knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode.

Minecraft's procgen villages and mines are oatmeal by comparison. Oxygen Not Included generates ruined stuff, but it isn't from other players, and I've never found it interesting -- just a way of handing you some advanced objects you don't have yet. Ruins with no provenance are a loot table with extra steps.

NetHack bones files, The Sims Exchange in 2000, Spore's pollination, Drivatars, and this mod are all the same mechanism, reinvented every few years by people who don't know it has a history or a name.

It has a name. Maxis called it the Pollinated Content System, and Caryl Shaw's job title was Pollinated Content Producer. GDC 2006, "Building Community Around Pollinated Content in Spore":

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013402/Building-Community-Aro...

"Massively single player" names the shape of the game. "Pollination" names the mechanism, and it's the better word, because pollen goes where it's needed, carried by something that isn't the plant.

Chaim Gingold wrote: "Why not build creative exchange into the game, rather than as a website that orbits it?" The Sims made you visit a website. Spore made it invisible and automatic. That difference is most of the value, and it's the part every mod-based version of this still hasn't got.

http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...

Placement is the hard part, and it's the part nobody proposing these mods has thought about yet. Spore's server pulled content in as needed to keep the ecosystem balanced, and the game built a model of your taste to decide what to ask for. Will, in the February 2007 PopSci interview:

>We're basically building a model of the player's aesthetic. So if you keep picking things from the shopping catalog that are like super-cute, Disney-like, then it will start offering you and downloading more stuff that matches your aesthetic... And when it makes a request to the server it's taking that into account, so the world will slowly start to represent your aesthetic choices.

https://www.popsci.com/entertainment-gaming/article/2007-02/...

Caryl Shaw, whose actual job this was:

>I have a team that works on the server like the database schema who figure out the algorithms to do the matching so that the content that you get make sense for your game and you don't have to download hundreds and thousands of mega bytes of content. You only get the kind of stuff that makes sense for your game.

https://www.animationxpress.com/interviews/exclusive-intervi...

That one mechanism answers Avicebron's "co-evolve the ecosystems", ratelimitsteve's "geography never affects the animals", and analog8374's curation problem, all at once.

Curation comes free. Download counts rank quality better than a designer can, because thousands of people are each picking for their own taste instead of one person guessing at everyone's. The "tedious lot of work" analog8374 describes is work the community does unpaid, and does better!

Payload size is why any of this is possible. Spore creatures compressed to about 3KB; 1KB of source expanded to 5MB of content, a 5000:1 ratio. Better than that: every piece of pollinated content was a "card" -- a 30KB PNG with the game data embedded inside the image file. You could email a creature. You could post one on a forum and somebody could drag it straight into their game. The picture was the data. A decayed Factorio base or Minecraft settlement is a small diff, not a 30GB folder.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/gdc-i-spore-i-p...

Why it keeps dying: the mechanism is cheap to build and expensive to maintain, and it generates no recurring revenue, so it's always first on the chopping block.

Drivatars rotted. The Sims Exchange is gone (but I'm working on solving that problem). Spore's servers are somehow still up, which I always assumed was because there's nobody left at EA who knows how to log in and turn them off.

Now that EA belongs to the Saudi Public Investment Fund (93.4%) and Jared Kushner, the failure mode I worry about isn't a forgotten password.

The PIF's chairman is Mohammed bin Salman. In 2018 his people met the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul with a bone saw and a forensic pathologist who had explained the plan on tape twelve minutes before Khashoggi walked in: "After I dismember it, you will wrap the parts into plastic bags, put them in suitcases and take them out." He left the building in five suitcases and his remains have never been found. Three days later they sent the consulate car to a car wash. The Saudi government's account changed five times in three weeks; the New York Times ran it under the headline "Khashoggi's Death Is Explained by the Saudis in Five Acts (and Counting)". In 2021 the US declassified its assessment that bin Salman approved the operation. Every word of that is one search away, and reality is worse than any joke I can make about it.

So the thing I actually worry about is not Spore. Nobody is going to convene a meeting about Spore. It's The Sims. Saudi Arabia's media regulator banned Final Fantasy XVI from the kingdom in 2023 over Square Enix's "complete refusal to modify the content to suit the region", and made Roblox switch off voice and text chat and delete over 300,000 games. The Sims 4 has shipped gender-independent clothing since 2016, sexual orientation as a character setting since July 2022, and since patch 140 in January 2023, chest binders under Tops > Tanks and top surgery scars under Body > Body Scars. Go look, it's in the base game. A regime that could not tolerate one man writing newspaper columns is not going to tolerate two little cartoon women getting married in a suburban house you built for them. That content is a rounding error in EA's revenue and an existential affront to the people who now sign EA's checks, cutting it costs nothing and buys goodwill in Riyadh, and the $700 million a year in cost reductions gives them a reason to say it was about money. I am writing this down with dates and menu paths so that when it happens, nobody gets to say it wasn't foreseeable.

But I digress...

"The knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode" is the symptom. Nobody being paid to own it is the cause.

And generative models are trained to produce the conditional average, so pointing one at the oatmeal problem gets you oatmeal faster and in greater volume. The only fix anyone has ever demonstrated is a person who cares about one specific creature.

Kate Compton says 10,000 bowls of oatmeal. Phil Hartman on SNL got there in 1989, and it was a lot more than 30,000.

Stop settling for oatmeal. There's fiber, and then there's high fiber!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku42Iszh9KM

Because I really wanted to like it? Because it didn't get boring immediately? Because the updates kept promising to make it better? I dunno, does that justify my actions enough to satisfy you, or are my observations somehow invalid because I kept beating my head against the thing for what we apparently both agree was far too long?

Most of it is not enjoyable gameplay.

NMS is no crown jewel, but Hello Games did add multiplayer and held pretty close to the original vision that was offered. It's much more "fixed" than current Cyberpunk 2077 is, at least IMO.

Every time I come back to the game and try a new update, the game is indeed sparse after a few hours, and the novelty wears off...

Here, NMS launched with abysmal content and atrocious systems. Now at least it doesn't have abysmal content. A bad game is a bad game (yes, my opinion).

the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates. i did not pay for those updates. so it seems completely reasonable to consider those updates to be free.

wording it as something i paid for when i didn't pushes the baseline towards dishonesty.