"A mile wide and an inch deep" (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Monday, August 01, 2016, 15:25 (3036 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Why is it that I could see that coming back when the game was announced, but the people who were working on it could not? How could I know this just by a press release?

#codywasright

The way they marketed this game tells me they absolutely knew it, they just didn't want us to.

The studio could have saved themselves the trouble in the idea room to begin with. If someone told them in the initial pitch meeting that the idea is stupid, then they wouldn't have to market the game in a way to mask that, and they could have developed a game that was really great.

I am all for experimentation, because sometimes you don't know until you play. But as soon as you know you have stinker, you should do a full stop.

I knew the moment I read "procedurally generated universe".

If you could make a game like rogue, which is a procedurally generated game, but then instead of generating each level on the fly, you generated all of the levels at once and made each level its own planet in a procedurally generated universe, well, that's what NMS is. There's nothing about the concept that's fundamentally bad, and there's a lot that's novel. in both cases, it all comes down to how the moment to moment gameplay is, and whether that loop is fun or not.

Being able to see a map of every possible generated thing and travel back and forth between them isn't bad, in and of itself.