Procedural generation after 1000 hours

[Andos]

One thing that I'm really interested in is procedural generation and how it looks after 1000 hours.

Does it get repetitive? Or, is there always something new to be discovered?

[ZombieHunter]

It gets repetitive for sure. The core issue is one biome per planet. If it was not limited to that I don't think the repetitive assets and fauna and flora would be as noticeable. Probably still would eventually but it would make each planet a little less linear.

If they ever do a NMS 2 I would like to see more than one per planet and perhaps diff species that only survive in those climates, etc. So instead of picking from a huge pool of species and splattering them about randomly (as well as fauna and vegetation) they would pick from a set of species than can survive cold, hot, radiated, toxic or mixtures therein. You could also move from a snowy area where it was snowing to a hot area with firestorms all on the same planet. The transition zones would be interesting to program for but not impossible. Also would like to see the tree placement algorithm improve a bit. There are known algorithms for creating forests and tree lines and they do pretty well. I still feel like NMS pretty much feels too random in this regard. Natural processes are not random.

[SaD-82]

Some people will say: It's always the same.
Some people will say: It's same-y-ish.
Some people will say: You will always be able to find new things - new combinations, new landscapes, new things to discover.

It depends on their eye for detail and aesthetics.
For me, I'm in the third group.
In which group you would reside? This you would need to test.

[periurban]

There's probably a mathematical formula to do with inverse rewards against time, but the long and short is that Hello Games will probably update the game before you run out of new things to see, BUT plant and animal types are repeated endlessly. You'll just see them in different circumstances. So, yes it is repetitive and, yes, there is always something new to be discovered.
A bit like real life.

[Andos]

Originally posted by SaD-82:

Some people will say: It's always the same.
Some people will say: It's same-y-ish.
Some people will say: You will always be able to find new things - new combinations, new landscapes, new things to discover.

It depends on their eye for detail and aesthetics.
For me, I'm in the third group.
In which group you would reside? This you would need to test.

I've got near 30 hours in and I agree with all your points... I can notice the repetitiveness, but I do have an eye for detail and when I look close enough I can see things are different.

[ZombieHunter]

Originally posted by periurban:

There's probably a mathematical formula to do with inverse rewards against time, but the long and short is that Hello Games will probably update the game before you run out of new things to see, BUT plant and animal types are repeated endlessly. You'll just see them in different circumstances. So, yes it is repetitive and, yes, there is always something new to be discovered.
A bit like real life.

Well it would depend on how many assets there are and how many planets you have been on. If there are 1000 animal types (and since they all can be on any planet) and you have been on 1000 planets there is a good chance you have seen some repetition. If there are 1000 set pieces for flora and you have been on 10 planets it is likely you will be able to visit a lot more planets before you notice repetition....depending on whether or not specific flora are assigned for different types of planets. I do not know if they are or if they just pick at random which ones to put on the planet. The terrain is a much different story. There seems to be a few well defined algorithms they are using and the terrain 'type' on the planet is clearly distinguishable after visiting about 20 planets. That being said they do use assets like rocks and other very large structures to mix it up a bit b/c the voxel approach simply cannot render some of the more complicated types of terrain features.

[Dewi Morgan]

Something which makes repetitiveness much more obvious is encounters being entirely non-random and scripted.

Encounters initially appear to be "random", but seem in fact to be sequential, and the last one repeats forever, so as soon as you've had, for example, all "emergency beacon" encounters, every single one you get after that will be the exact same one. Same with abandoned buildings; every single console in them will have the same final text.

And similarly, if you start a new save, each encounter type will give you the same encounters, in the same order, as the last game you played, wherever in the universe you make those encounters.

I asked a similar question (what keeps people coming back?) and the answer seems to be that people set themselves their own goals (finding the perfect planet, ship, weapon, etc). Few responded that exploration continues to be interesting and worthwhile in and of itself, once you've understood the basic pattern. As Dereknor put it in another thread:

Originally posted by Dereknor:

Originally posted by Dewi Morgan:

How does it manage to avoid being as dull as exploring a Mandelbrot set?

That is a very great comparison! Yes, you understand the pattern in No Mans Sky pretty fast. There are like 5 buildings, 10 planets, 12 animals, 20 plants, 20 stones, 3 races. All mixed up a bit and recolored. You dont go and explore something, you just visit a system and "roll the dice" to see if you found a planet with your favourit color, your favourit animals and good resources.
Its all about rolling the dices again and again, not in hope to find something new, but in hope to find something with better stats.

So, no, after 1k hours there won't be much novelty left (I'm around 200, there's still a fair bit, but I play slow!); but there'll still remain the appeal of opening a new unexplored gift with each new planet explored.

[japp_02]

The fundamental essence of procedural generation is repetition not in the detail, but in the overall picture and that's what NMS delivers. The formula for planets must be retrained to little changes otherwise the landscape would be a total mess if leaved to the PG, there must be some guidelines in the formula (certain plants always present in Biome X etc.)
As for animals, we have seen in the first releases how pitiful and mediocre the resuts were if we leave PG to build them alone...Flying cows, creeping dinosaurs and other horrible misformations...So HG needs to take out of the formula a lot of things like animals, buildings, ship shapes, main textures etc, not all elements can be done with PG.

[Wile E Coyote, Super Genius]

Yes.

[Dirak2012]

Originally posted by Dewi Morgan:

Something which makes repetitiveness much more obvious is encounters being entirely non-random and scripted.

Encounters initially appear to be "random", but seem in fact to be sequential, and the last one repeats forever, so as soon as you've had, for example, all "emergency beacon" encounters, every single one you get after that will be the exact same one. Same with abandoned buildings; every single console in them will have the same final text.

And similarly, if you start a new save, each encounter type will give you the same encounters, in the same order, as the last game you played, wherever in the universe you make those encounters.

Those aren't meant to be random, they are trying to tell a story that it's already set in stone. Why would they be random?

[Mr. Bufferlow]

The game started out with a much more liberal procedural generation. HG got a lot of complaints that it was super unrealistic and some of the critters were phallic among other complaints.

So they toned things down a lot and added more realistic animals and behaviors. They sort of went back the other direction with Origins, but it is much more stylized. The assets were assigned to specific planet types and now they can be found randomly on almost any planet type.

Unless they spent all their time making new assets, at some point you will hit the wall on what is available. Surprisingly, still have seen new things after 4,000 hours but it is rare.

[Foxglovez]

The problem with the generation of plants, minerals and critters for me is that ea biome has their set group that are pretty much unchanging. Luckily with animals there are a few treasures sprinkled around. It would be lovely if they had two or three different setups to generate from or maybe just increased the overall pieces.
Planets actually have more interest and lately more diversity in terrain. There are some very unusual planets that are very fun to discover. Krash Megaddo has a thread on their favorite.

So the answer really is how your mind works, and what feels like monotony vs maybe something interesting will show up, just hasn't yet. this is a sandbox game at heart. Your imagination is as important as the dev teams.

[DennisM the Diligent]

I sum it up as theme and variation. Some basics are the same, but there's plenty of variety. I have more than 2000 hours and I still find new things, even though the overall framework is consistent and reasonably familiar.

[Erei]

It is repetitive. Each planet and animals follows patterns, essentially. While there are a certain number of them, eventually you'll reach a point of "been there seen that" but yellow instead of blue.
I don't mean it as an insult or something toward the game. Every game get to a point it's repetitive, after all.

Honestly, I consider this game to be more an adventure game than an exploration one. Play the quests, make a base, or several. Tame creatures, play with friends (or not), hunt for exotic ships.... Or simply log in once in a while to do an expedition (which is special time limited game mode).

[Krash Megiddo]

Originally posted by Terd_snap:

One thing that I'm really interested in is procedural generation and how it looks after 1000 hours.

Does it get repetitive? Or, is there always something new to be discovered?

I've been told it can get repetitive after 50 hours, depending on how much exploration one does.

[Dewi Morgan]

Originally posted by Dirak2012:

Those aren't meant to be random, they are trying to tell a story that it's already set in stone. Why would they be random?

As a game developer. I do understand the rationale for this game design decision: linear narrative was either felt to be more important, or at least easier for QA to test, than procedural quest generation.

In a procedural game, I'd hoped for procedural encounter generation, too, and was mildly disappointed because that seemed like it would have been a fun challenge for them to have overcome. But I admit, they've already overcome some staggering challenges, so maybe I shouldn't b wishing more on them? :D

So I'm not saying HG was "bad" or "wrong" - just that the result will make for more repetitiveness and less randomness, so warning that new players should not expect that.

How *could* they have done it? In the understanding that this would have been more work, across multiple specializations (not just coding, but things like writing and testing, too), that is?

One way would be to interleave random with linear-story items. Now, this already means at least TWICE the work on the part of the writers, to generate a whole bunch of events that don't need to be read in sequential order as well! Once the linear story was over, you could keep the existing "last item repeats" that they have, but interleave those with with the random ones. That's because existing system makes it very clear to the user once they have "finished" the main narrative of this event type, and that's a feature that feels worth preserving. Another downside other than the extra work, is that it'd take people more work to experience the "story" part - since most players are unlikely to finish the story already, that would likely be a poor design decision.

Another way would be to have only switch to random-ordered events once the narrative was over. Once again more work, and this time you don't get a benefit from it until they've got through the whole story, and I suspect that most people never get that far with most encounter types anyway.

And if people *do* complete the story for an encounter type, it's reasonable that the game encourages them to consider grinding something else instead, and one way is for the one they're grinding to get boring and repetitive.

So yeah, I get the design reasons: the extra randomness would only be a benefit to people who either completed the narratives, or who were playing a second time, and that is not really worth the extra work.

But having a sensible design rationale doesn't mean it isn't repetitive.