Surely its gonna ape Frontier? In one of the videos it showed what looks like a harvest able resource. So it looks like there will be trading,farming and possibly crafting elements. Am I imagining seeing reference to procedural ruins also? Also Im thinking that in order to progress towards the centre of the galaxy there would surely be a need for a capital ship, again this opens to the door to crafting/ship modification. 
I cant remember about the multiplayer side, would player clans be possible I wonder?
Given the videos there is a lot of potential for gameplay elements. Whether this potential is realised is another matter but the scope is huge....

Skray is right in that respect, that's how I remember playing Elite way back when.  I worry that tacking on extra bits will cause issues though.

Skerret wrote:

I will happily set my own objectives and the stories that emerge from my trying to achieve those are what will define my experience in this kind of thing.  It's role-playing as much as anything and player buy-in dictates the level to which one's experience will be meaningful.  I could imagine the exploration itself being enough to hold my interest (I fall primarily on the explorer quadrant of the player-type graph).

Just gimme.

I agree with all of this, No Man's Skerret. But as I've said previously, how compelling this world is to inhabit will depend greatly on the AI of it's occupants, whether it be friendly or hostile, humanoid or beast.

Elm i don't think you've read or watched any of the interviews with the devs. They haven't said there will be tacked on story, they have explicitly said there will be NO tacked on story bits whatsoever other than an extremely overarching goal about an entity called 'The Atlas' and they're saying nothing about it. With the only other explicit goal being finding the center of the universe, it may be something to do with that but that all just gives the player a framework and general direction and it can be completely ignored.

I fully think, and hope, that this is absolutely like Frontier. The procedural technology is exactly the same concept as the very first game of this type, Elite, and was 'perfected' in a way, if you're ever going to enjoy this type of game, in Frontier - but Frontier was all about closely following the laws of physics and how solar systems are composed and this is clearly not (The ships fly star wars style, this is not physically accurate without a 'gravity drive' and with a gravity drive they wouldn't move like that). The planetary bodies are way too close to each other a lot of the time, physics wuld have their gravity have them collide quickly in reality. It seems to be Frontier with 70s/80s sci-fi book cover art in mind.

I just want to play the game to look at stuff, if the stuff stays interesting im happy

Elmlea wrote:

It'll be the first game ever with an emergent war playing out that you can dip into as much or as little as you like, if that's the case.

Loads of space sims play like that don't they? X3 and Smugglers V do from what I've played. You can even chuck Skyrim in there as an example of a war raging in the world whether the player takes part or not.

If they keep it freeform with lots of exploration, what are they going to do to make the exploration interesting?

Many people will find the exploration aspect entertaining in and of itself. Add in the odd skirmish with a space pirate and a bit of trading and ship upgrading and your're all set.

Just watched an interview with Sean and Danny o Dwyer at E3 and it showed some very tasty looking environs.... seems odd though the way the transition from sky to space is so quick, probably edited for the vids.

superflyninja wrote:

Just watched an interview with Sean and Danny o Dwyer at E3 and it showed some very tasty looking environs.... seems odd though the way the transition from sky to space is so quick, probably edited for the vids.

I don't think it's edited, just the scale regarding the speed of your craft (This occurred to me to i watched the speed on the HUD change as the craft accelerated out of there) changes rapidly, and the planets i don't think are true planetary scale for the lifeforms they support. The planets will be massive to our eyes, but not really compared to how massive they should be (I took this from the reentry to the uninhabited moon thing in the E3 gameplay vid, you actually reach the surface quite quickly yet the moon/planet has an atmosphere). The lack of size is a good thing, i can't imagine each planet will exhibit remotely the variety of lifeforms of Earth for eg but enough to have you think 'ohh cool' take some screen shots, grab some resources and scoot to the next location, digestible but 'big enough' and the comparitive lack of diversity be understood and not a worry - just move to next place to feed an urge to follow the goal but indulge in the journey (For me anyways).

It really does seem keen to make the process as entertaining as possible while maintaining the sense of scale - if you've played Frontier you'd know that real size stuff and waiting to travel true astronomic distances and even realistic atmosphere entry can be a dull and sometimes frustrating experience, gravities on bodies anything above 2x earth being extremely hard to get used to flying in - i was obsessed with Frontier, i actually reached elite status which is destroying 6000 ships or something (According to this faq http://www.jades.org/files/frontier.faq) but in its pursuit for realism is was full of gamer-unfriendly dullness

Regarding the variety possible in the game, i'll wax pretentiously on one aspect of it which i can talk in an somewhat educated way about is the landscape and how they will be formed - you'd notice in the promos you can shoot holes in asteroids - those asteroids would be using the same technology as the planets themselves and technically it's not actually a jump to allow the same thing to be done to the planets themselves, but i think this would involve a huge amount of data needing to be saved to record the changes according to how its said it records player discovery. It's using voxels which make extremely varied surfaces possible, including as in the promo, flying islands just as a side effect of how the landscape is generated, and using either of two well known ways of creating the model representing the landscape you can get truly infinite variations of land with numerically definable values to get the type of landscape you want for the type of landscape that can possibly support other factors in the ruleset - like you'd want generally flat-ish hilly or mountainous terrain for quadruped life - you could have a veritable rabbit warren of caves for life that can cling to any angle (I really hope they exploit the caves angle of it, planets can have, as a side effect of voxel terrain, infinitely large and complex cave systems, you could get lost in there for days and reflect what a dev said about the game being a rogue-like even more accurately)

I've been using voxel systems myself for the last few weeks and intend to use one (Not nearly so competently) as my bread and butter landscape system in something i'm doing so i figured i'd share the wealth - terrain is going to be pretty awesome (And completely weird, expect to see flying islands often and a relatively short view distance) if they exploit voxels well and even if the jokes about coloured dinosaurs hold water in the game, it will not apply to the landscape

It's worth adding that voxel landscapes are also, technically, almost infinitely and vaguely accurately sculptable so i'd imagine they show up in games again often and be player-sculptable too

Skerret wrote:

Good thing Elite: Dangereux and Star Citizen are coming out then.

It's weird how there are three of these kinds of games coming out at around the same time. Don't you think it's weird? I think it's weird.

LazyGunn wrote:

Elm i don't think you've read or watched any of the interviews with the devs. They haven't said there will be tacked on story, they have explicitly said there will be NO tacked on story bits whatsoever other than an extremely overarching goal about an entity called 'The Atlas' and they're saying nothing about it. With the only other explicit goal being finding the center of the universe, it may be something to do with that but that all just gives the player a framework and general direction and it can be completely ignored.

I have!  What I mean by tacked-on is your interaction with that background stuff.  It'll feel ancillary, or it won't serve any purpose.  Like Paul said Skyrim had a war on in the background but you never actually felt involved or like you did anything.  I think this'll be the same.  

It's such a fine line.  I think looking at a dozen empty planets just to find a yellow flower on the 13th might not be much fun.  I adored; absolutely adored; Elite and Frontier and made up my own stories and background to fit in.  If it's like that, then I'll squeal, eat my words, and love it.  I just worry that it won't be like that, and there'll be shit "missions" tacked on to appease people.

With what Skray said about it being raved about in future, I see this being the subject of a retrospective in 4-5 years when they announce No Man's Sky 2, "the game we REALLY wanted to make when we started No Man's Sky."

http://youtu.be/YwX0g4ZkMH0

IanHamlett wrote:

Not working for me. What is it so I can search?

It's just that video of your mum again.

I've just rewatched some NMS stuff along with that vid of my mum.

You are in the galaxy with other players but will rarely meet just because of the size. You tag shit if you're the first person to go there/see an animal. If you stumble on a fight you can jump in on either side and be rewarded for helping. The reward can go towards upgrading your ship or suit. Things get harder towards the middle.

This might be boring once you've seen 100 planets but if you're not on the hype train for this then hype trains are meaningless.

I've heard the words 'universe' and 'infinite' used. This isn't really a universe is it? Even if it was just one galaxy the chances of meeting another player would be minuscule.

Every atom procedurally generated.  Out-Molyneuxing Molyneux.

I've heard him say galaxy several times in vids. He also says you start on the outer rim of the galaxy and are motivated to head to the centre.

The only time I've heard him mention universe is when he is getting a little flustered trying to explain shiz.