Most people won't play NMS longer than maybe 100 hours. If it has 100 or 100 billion planets doesn't really change much for most people. There will be some thousand people who will play the game 1000+ hours but no developer has to follow this way just to satisfy a few thousand who want it that extreme...

A game like The Witcher 3 is already so big that most people won't see everything. You don't need The Witcher 4 to be 10000x as big to be big enough except maybe for a few percent of players...10x as big would be already way too big for most people, they would maybe get bored after a while or they wouldn't have time to see everything. 

And to talk about really huge games, it's not as if NMS is the first to be really huge and the other games didn't really change much either. 

It will be praised for how huge it is but that doesn't really change that even a 15 hours game will still have the right to exist. 

The thing is, with open world games that have huge team and what they are able to accomplish (Witcher 3, Fallout, Grand Theft etc) I would be very surprised at the amount of content No Man has. If you do any type of development, you would know that time is a precious resource and a small team can only do so much. Even procedural produced worlds would still need to build enough realistic content before it all blend together and become repetitive. So the way I see it, it would be awesome if the developer is able to do 50% of what they promise

Hm, reading the title I thought your point was that NMS would have kept people playing for so long due to it's enormous world that it would have ended up hurting the sales of many games to come. Anyway the answers remains that Imho people will get bored at some point from NMS and they'll end up not asking for an experience as big as the one of NMS...

Very well said. I couldn't have put it any better.

This is also the reason I'm not too excited for the game. I need goals and benchmarks to really enjoy an action-adventure game like this. While No Man's Sky seems ambitious and rich in ideas, it doesn't seem to have a strong sense of purpose or direction.

I've never been one to believe this sort of thinking. No game has to follow and aim to beat the most recent big title game, otherwise we may be seeing other similar type games trying to outdo the last, or follow the trend, and we don't really see that happening too much currently. The industry is plenty diverse now.

What matters is a game achieves what it's aiming for, does it well, and is... just good. Any game can be successful if it's done well. It doesn't have to follow whatever 'high standards' is going on at the moment.

No. I don't think any single game could hurt the industry at this point. The only one that maybe, maybe ever did was E.T. However, there was a lot more going on that just a single shitty game coming out that lead to the first, and only crash. As for your specific reasoning on No Man's Sky? No way. It doesn't make sense to me. If it's good/great, and a sales success, it may spawn a clone or two. If the inverse is true, it's highly unlikely it will be followed down the trail it blazes.

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.

Well, I hope you're right. It's clearly a labor of love for the team at Hello Games. I wish the best for them.

I just don't see this game taking off in the way describe. I think No Man's Sky will be more Spore than Minecraft.

Hm, Spore is a fair point. We'll have to wait and see.

I feel No Man Sky is gonna such a niche game that it won't matter really.

In a any case, everygame is different. Not every game has to be like NMS, or open world, or whatever is the trend.