I just saw the RPS comments based on Graham Smith's interview of Hello Games's Sean Murray, lead developer of No Man's Sky.
I think they are trying to make my brain explode.
I really, really do not like designed-for-consoles or online-required. But nearly
everything else described about NMS sounds exactly like the kinds of things I like in computer games.
Examples from the RPS story:
RPS wrote:Any planet you discover on your journey is marked on your galactic map, along with its name, its atmosphere and what resources you found there. If you choose to, you can then share that information with every other player, uploading it so that it’s shared across everyone’s galactic map.
You’ll get credit for discovering it. You’ll also, if the materials there are valuable, attract players to come visit. No Man’s Sky isn’t a multiplayer game, in as much as you’ll never see another player. But the galaxy is the same between everyone and actions of “significance” will be shared. If you kill a single bird, that won’t be shared. If you make an entire species of bird extinct, then those creatures will blink out of existence for everyone.
So it's not people being jerks directly to each other; it's much closer to Spore in that players will share some data that affects their gameworld. That's better than conventional multiplayer (for me), but it's still online-required.
RPS wrote:“We are designing a set of rules, not designing a game, and I think when I talk about DayZ that’s how those feel to me. Your experience in DayZ is your experience, and there’s a set of rules in that 200km square that you then go out and experience and make stories in. And that is what we want.”
Those systems-driven experiences begin with the way the galaxy is constructed – “Every Atom Procedural” – but extend to every part of the game design. “If there’s a crashed ship, it’s there because a ship has crashed. If there is a trading outpost, those things are there for real reasons, and the way the creatures behave around those, and the type of creatures you see are there for real reasons.”
It’s about moving the design away from strictly authored experiences, in which your actions are tightly scripted and controlled, in favour of something more expressive.
YES. That is the beauty of the Looking Glass games such as System Shock and Thief. Systemic games are not about intense sensations, they're about thinking and feeling. Instead of leading players by the nose through prepackaged linear content, systemic games create an ecosystem in which personal stories evolve through interactions among complex systems.
To the extent that No Man's Sky does that, I could love it.
RPS wrote:“How it is at the moment, is that you can’t die, but you can lose everything,” explains Murray. “There is no saved game. Your game will be saved, your progress is saved all the time as you go along, but if your ship is destroyed then you go back to a lifepod and you’ve lost that ship, and that is your everything.”
And now its developers want me to hate it again. Instant loss of your personal history is completely antagonistic to exploration. Yes, you can still explore, but permageardeath tells you no, don't do that, it's too dangerous. It makes NMS back into an "intense sensations" survival game instead of a game that delights in seeing what's around the next star.
So I'm back to I'll watch it, but I just don't know about playing it.
Sigh.