That's pretty much the perfect description of NMS. Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way. Oh look...this planet has 4 legged animals that are green and bumpy and the last one they were brown and spiky...but they move the same and act the same. Yawn.

I haven't played it myself, but surely an article written one month after the game's release doesn't do it justice, considering there have been multiple major updates attempting to address the gripes players initially had with the game in the 10 years since then (And review trends on steam indicate that these attempts were successful)

   > you must ask yourself a single tough question: 
   > How much do you value technological wonder over everyday, solid, smart game design?

One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity.

It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.

I vaguely recall an episode of the Triple Click podcast around 2023 where they had a serious AI fanboy who was rah rah-ing about future procedural generation in games. It might have been Casey Anthony, but I'm unable to re-listen while at work.

The fanboy started saying how they could have endless different levels in Destiny 2... which is absurdly off-base since the entire game is just running through the same 9 sandboxes and 12 raids over and over and over again

He then went on to talk about AI creating an album as perfect as OK Computer on-demand, which was gently putdown by Kirk (who is an exceptional musician but also chill enough to suffer fools)

This is something I realized about game design: if you have a procedurally generated world like XCOM, almost every playthrough (or "dungeon") has to produce something new to the player. Something like 10% of each run should actually have something new and unique. That's what makes games like Enter the Gungeon and XCOM 2 work and games like early No Man's Sky fail.

> A procedural universe may be technically impressive but it is also bland, empty, purposeless.

Why doesn't this apply to Minecraft? People love Minecraft even though it's equally purposeless and arguably bland and empty.

That article is 10 years old. NMS then versus now are two very different games.

even as someone who enjoyed NMS as a nightly bowl of oatmeal, a second screen game while I listened to a podcast or a documentary, I can't dispute the accuracy of this metaphor. After a while it became brain off semitainment, and when paired with hands off semitainment I ended up with a full experience, but years later it still costs $70 to become nearly entertained and its become obvious that there are limits to how much you can make procedural generation not such as the core, heart and soul of a gaming experience.

Totally agree. But I'm still wondering why was Escape Velocity so fun yet NMS is a nothing burger? They are very similar, except EV was goofier.