> Damn. The negativity in here is weird. What is it with gamer's that they just want to shit all over things?

> Remember, you can always go play another muddy-poo-brown cover based first person shooter. There will be 10 published by the time you finish reading this comment.

I see what you did there. Point taken.

> Damn. The negativity in here is weird. What is it with gamer's that they just want to shit all over things?

What is the proper reaction when someone spends years promising things they almost certainly can't deliver? The game that they're describing sounds amazing, but it also sounds beyond the ability of a large team to deliver, let alone a tiny one. As others have mentioned, this isn't the first time that we've been down this road, nor the second, nor the third. So it's hard to get excited when we know what's most likely at the other end.

Maybe someday we'll be able to develop the game that they're advertising, and that they're going to charge people real money for. But 2015 is probably not that year.

Most of the hype comes from features that I'll believe when I see.

I've been Molyneux'd too many times. Is this your first big game launch?

"The negativity in here is weird. What is it with gamer's that they just want to shit all over things?"

This is not the first time we've seen this pattern before. Somebody promises The Ubergame, the all-singing, all-dancing Game of Games to End All Other Games, generated by writing down the wishlist of all possible features of a game in some genre and promising at least half of them. The appearance of "procedural content" and the resulting large numbers is not the first time we've seen this, either.

The result, up to this point, is rather uniform... what actually gets delivered is a "meh" game, in some sense because while all the endless list of features were getting checked off nobody took any time to put a game in there.

Here's one historical example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD

Many of them never even get released.

I rather fully expect that No Man's Sky gets released, gets reviewed well, and then about a month in, people start realizing there isn't much "there" there.

One problem is that people don't understand how to think about procedural generation. Quadrillions of planets nothing... why not octillions? The number of possible outcomes of the procedural system is irrelevant. The sum total of all possible Minecraft seeds and all possible spaces within those seeds is within spitting distance of the number of orders of magnitude of what you'd need to pave over the entire Milky Way galaxy, but nevertheless one can pretty much explore Minecraft and see just about everything there is to offer from the landscape generator in a month... and I'm being generous. The proper measure of procedural generation is not the raw number of combinations, but how many truly distinct things can be generated, and whether or not the parameters can interact to produce unexpected things. For instance, my favorite thing I've seen in Minecraft was an island with a cave that happened to cut right through the outside of the island, producing a space within it where the ocean was basically one of the walls of the cave. Unrealistic, but cool, and a credit to the ways things interacted with each other.

Anyways, to sum up, if this isn't your first time around the hype cycle on a game like this, it's hard not to see similarities to things we've already seen before, draw comparisons, and want to deflate the hype bubble. The end result of this may be a good game, it probably won't be a great game, it has a decent chance of still being a bad game to play even if sometimes pretty to look at, and odds are extremely high that it won't actually match the expectations that anybody has for it.

If those predictions are wrong, I won't have problems saying so. Maybe this is the one. No sarcasm. It's possible. But don't, you know, pour thousands of dollars into preordered goods on it or anything, like apparently some have for Star Citizen, one of the other Everything Games currently out there. http://www.reaxxion.com/10195/why-star-citizen-is-likely-goi... (Kickstarting an Everything Game is unfortunately quite simple... even approximately finishing it is quite another.)

See also: Spore, Fable and most of the latter half of Peter Molyneux's career (Black and White too), all of the iterations of Elite past the first one. Some of these turned out OK (at best), none so much as resembled their hype.

Actually the devs have promised no such thing. In fact they have stated they designed it to be a niche game that will only appeal to a certain demographic.

> In fact they have stated they designed it to be a niche game that will only appeal to a certain demographic.

I believe them if they say it'll only appeal to a certain demographic, but so far the game they've been advertising seems designed to appeal to as large a demographic as possible. From their interviews, if you like space exploration or combat or walking with dinosaurs or any number of other things, then this game has them. So what do they know, that they're not saying, that will lead this game not to appeal to all of these groups of people they've been advertising to?

It's a procedural game. By its pedigree, it's bound to attract realistic commentary -- and realistic commentary on proposed procedural games will inevitably be negative.