No Man's Sky: Planet discovered by xXBongSlayerXx

So with all the questions people have about the game the one I am surprised no one is asking is "Can I play it by myself?". For a game so heavily focused on seemlessly exploring a universe no one seems to be bothered that whenever you visit somewhere you might find someone beat you to it and see their shitty username stapled to everything. I don't know about you but seeing stuff like that takes me right out of the experience.

Not only that but considering how fast people move through content in ANY given game aren't the people who pick it up weeks, months, years down the line just going to have no exploration of their own to do and instead are treated to a tour of the universe by SSJNaruto?

Maybe I'm just a grumpy shit that doesn't want to play with the other kids but interacting with other people just holds zero appeal to me for a game of this tone.

Am I alone here? Does everyone else want connected experiences in everything?

@hayt: For No Man's Sky? Yes, I do want that connected experience everything they (Hello Games) have talked about wouldn't work by yourself. I mean what would be the point of naming all of the worlds you find when your the only person who will ever be there ever to see it.

Now to the question of do I want literally every game to be interconnected? No, I rather enjoy being able to play a game by myself. In the end it depends on the type of game that I feel like playing and I rather like having choices in that regard.

I suspect the universe will be big enough that most people will be able to discover planets- although it is possible the easier ones will be taken fairly quickly? I don't know. I don't know much about how it works.

I am still not convinced other people are as interested in this game as games media is, though.

Not to down play how neat the game looks, though. It does look neat.

I think they've mentioned before that each player will spawn in their own new galaxy when they start playing the game, so you should be guaranteed to have first claim of those planets in the vicinity of where you start.

As for how interactions with other players will actually work...who the hell knows how any of this game works? I feel like I still don't have a sense of what you actually do in this game. I think Journey and Dark Souls have been mentioned in some interviews while discussing multiplayer, so that might give you some impression of the sort of approach to player interaction that they're taking.

A game like No Man's Sky seems like the last game I'd want to play by myself. But it also seems like it'll be large enough that it'd be easy to ignore other players if I wanted to.

So, because the game tells you someone else discovered the planet, you're saying you'd have no interest in seeing for yourself?

I hate to break it to you, but someone has discovered every location in every open exploration based game before you have. Just because Skyrim doesn't tell who first discovered a particular location doesn't mean you're the first to do so. Who gives a shit if a cool looking planet you stumble upon was first discovered by someone else, if it's an interesting place to explore and you haven't been there before it's still new to you.

@ll_exile_ll: You misunderstand. Imagine if when you discovered a dungeon in Skyrim it told you "Blackwater Barrows - Discovered by MasterChief78" does that not suddenly take you out of the game needlessly? It has nothing to do with "being first" and everything to do with it being covered with immersion shattering fingerprints.

I am kinda with the OP that when games bring the screen names of other users into the game world, it can kinda ruin immersion. And good lord do the consoles have some stupid usernames on their online multiplayer services.

@hayt: They said the universe would be big enough that it wouldn't be that often you interact with other players until you go to the space stations.

Infinity seems a difficult concept to grasp.

No game is perfect. At one point or another you'll be taken out of the experience because of imperfections. It's just the way the cookie crumbles, and if something so trivial has you worried.... I don't really know what to say. How do you get enjoyment from any game?

In Skyrim, sure, given the medieval tone of the game. But maybe for No Man's Sky, which exists ostensibly in some sort of future that has technology advanced from what we have now, maybe we can just assume that people's call signs for their personal space ships will be just as idiotic as their screen names are now.

Immersion is a main thing I also look for in games, but I can't pretend that I won't probably chuckle when I come across the beautiful mountain first discovered by Xx_XelNaga420_xX.

@rongalaxy: The game is about exploring a well realised universe, they have gone to pains to make it feel quite natural. I feel that the atmosphere built up by that sort of thing is lessened when you are exposed to stuff that marks it as clearly a game. I don't think it's trivial and frankly I think your accusation that because I think seeing people's usernames in what is otherwise an immersive setting is lame that I must struggle to enjoy any game slightly offensive. I love a great deal of extremely imperfect but immersive games because their imperfections are not deliberate and more importantly, often fleeting. Seeing an NPC fall through the earth in Morrowind takes you out of the moment but it isn't a feature. Other planets being named and discovered by other people in No Man's Sky is. On paper there is nothing wrong with it, but people aren't going to name planets after Norse or Greek gods, they are going to name them "Planet Piss" or "CockRing VII". I think that cheapens what seems otherwise like a really rich exploration experience.

@hayt: I was being facetious with the last part (obviously you enjoy games, or you wouldn't be here). Still, I honestly can't wrap my head around your issue with seeing peoples usernames. They are creating a procedural multiplayer game where people who discover things within a universe are marked as the founder and given some control over naming it.

Doesn't that sound like a cool idea? I think it does. Now that I've established it's a cool idea, how else would they accomplish this? I guess instead of automatically marking a discovery with the discoverers username, they could make it so the user/founder can input any name they want, but (like you said) people will write stupid shit.

Honestly, there's no way getting around this issue with what they are trying to create, so you have to decide if it's really that catastrophically experience breaking. To me it isn't; it's inherent with what they're are trying to accomplish. Based on what I know about this world, things are random and often stupid; people name dogs flapdoodle and make jokes about pooping. They are trying to create a literal universe, so things are going to be... stupid and random at some point. Within this scope, there is the potential for both the wildly absurd, and world shaking profound. People are going to name their planets stupid shit, but you're going to be flying around a fucking universe, free to explore and discover at your hearts content. The potential for discovery and wonder is astounding.

So, again, is it really that big of a deal? If so, then okay. It's not for you. I, for one, am excited for the possibilities regardless of the potential absurdity.

I'm fine with the usernames, but I hope people can't name the actual planet they discovered. I don't want to travel all the way to the other side of the galaxy to visit "Dickville" or "Urmommasuxcox".

Is it wrong that I really, really want that to happen?

If it is, I don't wanna be right.

I don't think you quite understand the scale and scope of the game they're attempting to do. This shit is supposedly being as big, if not bigger than, the Milky Way. Even if every human on Earth would discover 100 planets, there'd still be countless more for you to explore. In fact, you'd probably have to go out of your way to retrace the footsteps of somebody else.

If the game plays as well as it demos that I don't really care if a few planets have obnoxious usernames associated with them.

I just worry about how much fun it will actually be to play. It could go wrong in a lot of ways, from feeling empty and sterile, to a janky repetitive mess. But their hearts seem to be in the right place.

I'm more interested in the "roleplaying" aspects of it, as in taking on the role of a space pilot, interacting with other players and AI, if there will be intelligent alien races and what not.

Also, I really really hope Solaris is in there some where, and I want to find it.

I think I read somewhere that in actuality everyone starts at a randomly generated unique point so you should never actually be plopped at the same place anyone else is. It is the universe after all, it is pretty big. Of course that also means the odds of someone finding something you discovered is fairly low. Truthfully this game looks more and more like the indie hip better graphics version of minecraft, a game I have no interest in playing at all. It needs to get some legit gameplay beyond "fly around and name things".

@hayt: You don't think that kiddie demographic is going to be turned off once they hear the word "procedurally"?

I can't quite wrap my head around the complaint here. Everything is also named procedurally, just watch the footage. The universe is apparently meant to be so large it's incredibly unlikely you'll encounter other players, and you can see what has or hasn't been discovered from the second you get into the game. If you want to avoid looking at peoples dumb usernames then go out into the unknown frontier and just avoid it. It's likely you'll have to make quite a bit of headway before you even find routes that have been explored already anyway.

What a lame complaint though. I'm sorry, but I actually like peoples dumb usernames.

@seppli: No offense intended, but you also don't seem to understand the proposed scale of this game either. Sean Murray has said multiple times that the universe is infinite, so anything (even the Milky Way) compared to infinity is close to nothing. It's large enough that no single player will ever see everything, most will only see a small fraction of what's out there. Another thing that has been said is that everything is at a 1:1 scale, so planets are the size of actual planets and the distances between celestial bodies are realistic, a planet the size of the Earth would therefore be considered to be fairly small. If everyone who owns a PS4 played this game and all went to a single planet the size of the earth, it would be hard for a single player to find other players at all unless they all coordinated somehow. People who aren't into astronomy probably will have a hard time imagining how vast a single galaxy is, let alone infinity, it's a concept that the human mind can't fully comprehend; but even in an average galaxy there would be somewhere around 400 billion stars, so even if it took you only a single second to discover each new star, it would still take an individual 10,000 years of non-stop playing to find all of those 400 billion stars, and that's still close to nothing compared to infinity.

There's no promise that each star and planet will feature completely unique ecology or people-like beings (for lack of better terms), but the actual geographical features of the planets could have enough variance to feel realistic, since that would all be generated using fractals which is how realistic terrain has been modelled in 3D space for some time now, it's also how almost everything in nature forms in the real world. In fact, from what i've read, even the ecology could have enough variance to feel realistic and not as predictable and repetitive as many other procedurally generated games have been in the past; they've said that they use a template of a certain animal or plant that's modeled by hand and that object is given a large number of parameters that can be adjusted by the software, similar to the way you create a character in a sports game. So instead of modeling different legs, arms, or heads, etc like most procedurally generated animals in previous games, instead they model certain whole types of creatures or plants, which can then be molded into almost anything like a piece of clay. Furthermore, they've said that certain combinations and formations of things can only occur under certain conditions, mostly based on the atomic make-up of a planet, so we theoretically shouldn't be left with lions with zebra legs, or hippos with turtle shells, or rainbow colored grass or trees, because that sort of thing may not fit within the rules set in this universe.

A lot of the individual features that has been talked about has mostly been done before, just never all together, and i think that's really what makes this so impressive. There's no single thing in particular that seems impossible to me, it's just very impressive that they've seemingly managed to write code that's efficient, yet exact enough to be able to execute all of this in a single game.

This is of course what's being claimed, whether it's true or not is yet to be seen by the general public, but i don't find it too impossible and i'm hoping they pull it off.

To be more on topic, i think if they assigned a randomized name to each player so that instead of seeing their username you see a name that befits some sort of alien being, then that would help with keeping immersed in the experience. As the player, you would still see your own username, but wouldn't have to look at ridiculous usernames. Maybe that could even be made as an option to be turned on and off. I would prefer not to see usernames myself.

To get a better understanding of how the game is going to generate the content you should watch the GameSpot interview Danny had set up. The No Man's Sky dude (can't remember his name) goes into great detail on how each planet's ecology is going to get set up and how exploration is going to work. You can avoid all discovered worlds if you want.

@golguin: I don't think the game will be designed to fully ignore other planets that people have discovered. It's been mentioned that there is a star map, this is where all the collective data of every player gets stored, and it's how you see what's been discovered. One would assume that in the star map, you would see the usernames of the people who discovered each location. Even if this were possible to ignore, that would mean missing out on a lot of the game, at least i would think.

The issues of not wanting to see other usernames, but still wanting to see other people's discoveries is a valid issue in my opinion, i'm not sure if anything will be done with it, but it doesn't seem like something you could just ignore, since part of making this game so big is to work with the idea that the collective discoveries of all the players will uncover the universe.

I've never understood how people get so immersed in a game that these ruinous "OMG this isn't a game" moments pop up. How do you get immersed in something on a tv that you're controlling with a controller?

xXBongSlayerXx is a nice person and he worked really hard on that name so pay him some damn respect and read his damn name when you visit his planet!

@curse_hawking: whatever they say about the size, it literally cannot be infinite if they're storing information about discovered planets. They only have a finite number of bytes of storage, after all. Its actual size will depend on how much information they are storing about each planet and how much physical storage they can afford to devote to it.

Well, they intend to create one galaxy, not infinite galaxies. Since in a way the players create the universe by exploring it (the seeds are there, but only get fully generated as players explore it), obviously it's not going to be infinite. It will be a finite Galaxy, probably lots smaller than the Milky Way. You are talking of its potential, and I'm talking of its reality. Given how both players and time are a limited commodity, it's likely even going to be a lot smaller than Milky Way, but it sure as hell is the most fitting example of what scope and scale Hello Games is shooting for with No Man's Sky. The potential is infinite, the reality is more Milky Wayish - which already is outlandish enough a claim.

We agree in-so-far that they're shooting for a way too vast a gameworld for the concerns in the OP to matter at all.

The same way you let yourself get immersed into a great movie or book, no one tricks themselves into thinking its absolutely real but if it's good enough you can get absolutely absorbed into the moment of what you are seeing or reading or playing. And if you're really into it an annoying distraction can take you out of it when for that moment all you gave a shit about was the media you were interacting with.

So I get where the OP is coming from, I actually think it's kind of a cool think and am looking forward to seeing who discovered what first, but maybe there will be a way to toggle that on and off so it doesn't have to be there.

It cannot be infinite because even a massively complex random number generator mixed with number of combinations has an upper limit, it just may be a number past consideration. It is not objectively infinite because it couldn't be, but it could easily be practically infinite in use. Also remember, the key to this being infinite is not the amount of data it can ultimately store, but the diversity of the random generation to create new things to store.

In a sense you're right, but because the seed is there for it to continue generating, in another sense it is infinite. Just because the hardware isn't capable of storing that data doesn't mean that it doesn't exist in some form. The algorithm used to create what you actually see and interact with is what the universe actually is, and since that algorithm is theoretically capable of infinitely generating content, it's therefore theoretically an infinite universe, whether or not it will ever been seen or not doesn't change that.

However to say that it will be smaller than the Milky Way from the start is assuming too much, there's no reason to believe it will be any particular size, other than large. It could be several orders of magnitude larger than the Milky Way for all we know. I've never read or heard of the devs say that you would start on a single galaxy either, this particular point is quite important since one of the key things mentioned when talking about progression is that there's something at the center of the universe. So the point at which you start relative to the center of the universe would play a large role in how difficult or time consuming completing that goal would be. If their idea of a "universe" is a single galaxy, then that's a bit off to say the least. I hope that's not actually the case.

As said above, because the hardware isn't capable of actually storing the data, doesn't necessarily make it finite, because the algorithm used is what is essentially the essence of the universe that they've created, it doesn't really matter if anyone ever sees it or not because it potentially does exist in some way. The very concept of infinity is very philosophical and can be interpreted in many ways with no right or wrong answer, so for the sake of this thread, i'll just agree that it is definitely not going to be infinitely generated or rendered due to the physical limitations.

That would only apply to unique variations of something. There's nothing impossible about a piece of software continuously generating some form of data, even a string of the same exact number can theoretically repeat infinitely, so long as the physical hardware is capable of keeping up with that, just because an exact duplicate is created doesn't mean that only one or the other can exist. The physical plane of existence is most likely not the only one that exists, when talking about infinity you have to consider the possibilities beyond the physical world that everyone understands, since the theory is inherently impossible physically, yet the theory exists in our minds as a possibility.

OBJECTION! The planets in the E3 demo/trailer are actually very tiny, and so is the distance between them. Also asteroid fields don't exist and space isn't purple.

People shouldn't expect this game to be Space Engine: The Game. It won't be.

@curse_hawking: At the point where the unique variations have been exhausted (which seems highly impractical and unlikely), there is little reason to play that game. No one wants to find the second galactic instance of tursiops truncatis or whatever. Or perhaps they want to find the first instance of a second instance but after that the thrill is gone, babe.

Yeah, from the looks of the planets at E3 it looked like you could easily walk a full 360 degrees around them if you wanted. They were also super close together (at least that cluster of planets were).

They talked about it on the bombcast. I think it was Danny who said that the developers are trying to be semi realistic but if something is cool they're not opposed to allowing it.

Didn't they say once someone reaches the center there would be some kind of reset?

I think the odd dumb username would add a bit of charm to the game. It's all about attitude going into the game for sure but if a minority of planets are occasionally "This planet was discovered by 'Buttman Jones'." That could be alright. I think on it's face it's a valid concern but if we mix a bit of that immersion into it, then it's a bit of ridiculousness on them, not on you, that they affixed a dumb name to the planet. This makes me very curious to play MirrorMoon EP because that game did something similar and it should be a good proxy for how it works out in practice.

I'm sure they can add in an option to replace gamertags with more immersive alternatives--generated fractally, of course.

This is based on what, assumption? I'm going off of what the developer said. I doubt he would blatantly lie about such a key feature of the game.

There's nothing unrealistic about gases in space which could appear to be purple, and there's also nothing unrealistic about binary companion planets. That said, i don't think those were binary planets, since Sean mentioned that the second body they went to in the trailer was a moon several times. I never claimed that it would be a realistic space simulator, i'm simply repeating information that's already been put out by the devs.

The devs have specifically said that everything is at a 1:1 scale, Sean has used the analogy i used above about putting everyone on a single planet himself. Obviously floating islands on a planet aren't realistic either but that doesn't mean that moon/planet isn't of a realistic size. When Sean mentioned that he didn't want it to be too realistic, he was referring to ignoring things like the limitations of the speed of light, this is probably why the planets appear so near to each other and escaping the atmosphere wasn't a challenge.

The debate was about the claims of an infinite universe, just because it can't continue to infinitely create entertaining new features doesn't make the generation finite, infinity doesn't care about anyone's entertainment.

Here's my theory.
You enter the ship.
Select hyperdrive (or warpspeed, or whatever they choose to call it)
Ship asks for co-ordinates, a friend can give you the co-ordinates to their galaxy, or you can select random (you can opt out of being random'd by other players).
Zoom off.

I just want to remind everyone that this game is called "No Man's Sky". Getting hung up on dumb user names may be missing the forest for the trees.

@curse_hawking: I believe it was mentioned somewhere that things were so tight in that E3 demo because they had so little time, etc and just wanted to show more stuff rather than having to do all the travel, etc.

xXsm0ked@wg420blazitXx is the greatest explorer of our time, you're just not ready for the crazy ass shit that man has seen.

If you could simply turn off the "discovered by" notification, would that be enough?

Does anyone know what this game is yet? I'm hopeful that it will be great, but the more I see and hear about it, the more it looks and sounds like a tech demo. Am I missing something?

That's possible, however it would contradict what they said, which is that they had to spend a lot of time flying around the universe before they found that particular planet. From everything they've said so far, the universe that they've generated is likely already there, they're just trying to make sure it's a good working universe where all of their rules and parameters work as intended. Which would explain why they said they've created simple AI to fly from planet to planet making animated .gif images of various scenes which get saved onto some separate machine where they can later comb through it all by hand.

Gas and dust in space indeed exist, but never that densly packed. You don't fly through clouds of gas in space. Nebulae appear dense to us because we see them in long exposure photographs taken from very far away, and on a very large scale. One pixel in a typical Hubble picture of a nebula is like 5 times as large as the entire solar system, at least.

Binary planets also exist, what I'm saying is that the two planets shown in the trailer are too small and too close to each other to be realistic. That's not an assumption, you just have to look at the trailer. I mean, you can see individual rock formations from space, and even from the surface of the first planet. It's pretty obvious.

You didn't say it would be a space sim, but you did say the galaxy would be 1:1 and no matter what the devs said I think that expectation is unreasonable based on what has been shown so far. I am personally super excited to play this game but I'm just saying people shouldn't expect it to look real.

BongSlayer is a hell of a guy. Really knows his way around a Bong.

The dust clouds are a bit unrealistic, i'll give you that, i re-watched the trailer and i originally didn't realize that the gas was actually in space, i assumed that was still part of the atmosphere. That said, you're making conclusions about one feature based on a completely different feature. You also don't know how large the second body in the trailer is supposed to be, it could be completely realistic to have such a small moon, although that's still entirely based on your perspective of what you're seeing. Unless you're saying you've played the game and have definitive evidence to show that that planet or moon is far too small to be considered realistic. It's easily possible to see individual rock formations on our very own moon with a telescope, so i don't see how that's a problem.

I'm not one of the devs, if you don't believe the devs then that's fine, but what i'm saying isn't from my own personal opinion or my assumptions, it's what the devs have said. The fact is that i'm simply repeating information that the people who are making this game has put out; what you're doing is the equivalent of arguing with a book, the information is just there and your opinions can't change that. I feel like you're arguing for the sake of argument at this point.