I bought Heart & Slash the other day. I've already had my fill supporting small teams that have given everything they had to produce a game made out of love and passion. Since you probably haven't bought that game, it's only fair that you'd be the one supporting No Man Sky instead of me.

I'm just willing to support a small team that's worked for 4 years, had their work destroyed by a flood and their lead designer sold his house to fullfil his dream. This is a labour of love and I think it's worth $60. If you don't, that's fine.

Interesting stuff. I'm actually surprised that they don't store the data of generated planets, instead calculations will keep generating the planet exactly in the same way no matter how many times you or other people visit it.

I love the fact that planets are generated taking into consideration how close they are to their Sun. So if they are the right distance away from their Sun it will be a "Goldilocks" planet with liquid lakes, clouds and atmosphere. To close it will be burnt to a crisp and further away it will be cold. It's not randomly generated and a lot of thought has been put into how everything is created on the fly.

It's pretty much the same as how Elite Dangerous generates the galaxy (apart from the sectors with real stars added) That has led to several meta games for exploration, for example http://universalcartographics.org/records/ Earth like planets around a neutron star are a hot commodity.

Elite dangerous is a mix of procedural generation and some random elements. Every single rock on a planet surface is the same for everyone visiting there, however ship wrecks etc are player or instance dependent. NMS might not be multiplayer yet the community around it can potentially become as invested and even bigger than that around Elite Dangerous' exploration. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/forumdisplay.php/117-Elite-Exploration
For over a year exploration was a very solitary affair in ED as well, still is most of the time. At the start of the year the community organized a 3 month expedition with over a 1000 members to the other side of the galaxy. Who knows where NMS might go after the center has been reached.

Many people love to explore, make maps and share things like the biggest canyon run, tallest mountain, best tripple sunset opportunities, largest moon/star/gas giant in the sky, fastest orbit. That's the appeal of a procedural generated world, it's unknown, yet persistant. Once discovered it will always be there to revisit or share with others. In a sense NMS is already cross platform MMO, you just can't see others (yet)

I actually used sort of procedural generation for a simple motion controlled 2D pitfall like game a long time ago. The tunnel was procedurally generated using the random function with different seeds for different levels. The same sequence of 'random' numbers defined the twists, turns and splits in the mine shaft by affecting the amplitude and period of several sine functions interacting together. A very short piece of hidden code (it was an easter egg I added in a work related project) would generate an in theory endless pre-defined challenge so you could learn the course. (It also sped up and narrowed over time, high score chase)
Then somebody recompiled the linux kernel to randomize the random function based on the current time. Bye bye carefully selected seeds that worked with tuned parameters, suddenly it was a randomized mess every time! Procedural generation is not supposed to be fully random and requires a lot of care to get acceptable and interesting results.

It's pretty much the same as how Elite Dangerous generates the galaxy (apart from the sectors with real stars added) That has led to several meta games for exploration, for example http://universalcartographics.org/records/ Earth like planets around a neutron star are a hot commodity.

Elite dangerous is a mix of procedural generation and some random elements. Every single rock on a planet surface is the same for everyone visiting there, however ship wrecks etc are player or instance dependent. NMS might not be multiplayer yet the community around it can potentially become as invested and even bigger than that around Elite Dangerous' exploration. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/forumdisplay.php/117-Elite-Exploration
For over a year exploration was a very solitary affair in ED as well, still is most of the time. At the start of the year the community organized a 3 month expedition with over a 1000 members to the other side of the galaxy. Who knows where NMS might go after the center has been reached.