Could No Man's Sky hurt the industry?

[Frogger]

vivster said:

spemanig said:

Yeah, but neither does Minecraft.

I'm suprised there's so much doubt of the viability of a game like this in a post-Minecraft world. Many people don't need that sense of direction. NMS is being positioned as a toolbox of mechanics for a community to discover together. It takes a look a why Minecraft and Dark Souls are so successful, and makes a game out of that. NMS is a game about community, and I'm sure that's going to resonate with tens of millions of people.

Minecraft is a completely different beast. It's not about exploration. The end goal is creativity and self expression. That's why it's so popular. You can present yourself to the world.

In NMS there is no self expression. Everything is pre calculated, nothing your own. You can not go and say "Hey look what I discovered" because it's just plain luck and circumstance. You can't have a lasting effect since there is no consistency in the world other than the named planets and species which are ultimately pointless because for every planet and creature there are a million that are very similar.

It will be fun for the first few weeks and then again when someone reaches the center first. And that's it.

Well that's why I mentioned Dark Souls.

I think the goal for NMS is the journey. A lot of the "game" of games like this come from things like the Wiki and channels like Vaatividya. There is self expression - it's just not the same kind that Minecraft has. NMS is more personal, the way DS has. But it also is meant to have a lore that is peiced together, and Hello Games expressly said that this lore is designed to be pieced together by the community, the same way DS is. But is also has the procedural generation and endlessness of minecraft, where the goal on that side is kind of up to the player. Calling self expression the "end goal" of minecraft is sort of a miscatagorization. There is no end goal. You don't express yourself and then finish minecraft.