Anti-Indie'ers are giving me cancer!

[Zanten]

Goatseye said:
What happened to small 3D platformer or action/adventure games?
Can't they emulate games from N64 era?
Why the eff, No Man Sky devs (10 members) can make that game and devs backed by big 3 and EA/Ubisoft can't produce something with that much content and quality?
Where are sports titles, worthwhile Driving and Flight Sim titles, JRPGs, TPS, etc...
That's why I'm fed up because they mostly offer games with similar mechanics as others already in the market.

I can answer that tooo! =D (I am such a busybody.) By the look of things, No Man's Sky is being developed via the creation of what could be the most complex and detailed procedural generation engine ever made. Whereas AAA developers focus on making content 'by hand,' (placing individual trees and painting the rocks, as it were, which gobbles up time and money) the engine that the NMS devs created will cause the COMPUTER to create an absolutely massive game universe. An example they gave was they design the 'bare bones' for, say, a cat, and the engine will start producing everything from panthers to housecats to giant mutant purple-furred death cats, without any further work by the dev. So trees, bushes, dinosaurs, ships, all of them

In addition, each planet follows a set of 'rules,' where its mineral composition, and what kind of gasses are in the atmosphere, will decide how the ground looks, how the sky looks, and even whether there is life present, or how much. A planet far from the sun, or with no water, may have little to no life, and be a barren rock. While a planet in the Goldilocks zone, with plentiful water, will have plenty of plant and animal life.

The engine is so complex, the developers have made it clear that even they don't know everything in the universe that they themselves built.

 

TLDR; Technically, they aren't making a GAME, not in the traditional sense. They're making an engine that makes the game. A super cool, really complicated engine that might help revolutionize game development.

Oh, for JRPGs at least, check out Project Phoenix; an RTS JRPG that was kickstarted, but is being developed by veterans in the industry, including Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu. Last I checked, release plans, I believe, are PC and PS4, as when the game was initially funded, Microsoft hadn't begun their new indie policy, and so there were literally zilch plans to EVER bring it to Xbox platforms. That might have changed since then, obviously.