So my laptop died very unexpectedly of... I'm not exactly sure what, but the fan and power led are the only things I can say with any certainty are still working. Meaning I currently can't code and much less play No Man's Sky, because I don't want to swamp my wife's Laptop with a few Gigabytes of dev-tools, and gaming is just simply off the table on this thing.

So I'm a bit bored at times right now, and I thought "if you can't play No Man's Sky, why not write a bit more about...

No Man's Sky carries all the signs of a product that was assembled out of great ideas at the last possible moments with way too little time. In effect, I think the devs stumbled over the same problem that everybody that tried to make a procedurally generated game has stumbled over: They couldn't figure out how to put a constrained game into an unconstrained universe.

The No Man's Sky we got has some decent gameplay here and there, but it's all but disconnected from the generative...

In this penultimate post, I'll go a bit into the technical aspects of the game, what it achieves and doesn't achieve.

The procedural engine, and planetary graphic in general:
Of course this is the most important thing to discuss, it's the heart of the game. Set the gameplay of NMS onto any kind of limited map like a minecraft "level" or so, and you end up with a catastrophe. Not because all the gameplay would be terrible in itself, but because all the gameplay is...

Looking at NMS solely as a representative of the genre of space exploration games, it pretty much goes the usual way. Space is there to segregate things, eat up your precious fuel and allow occasional space battles. Starflight made it a bit more exciting because space was also usually the place where first contact with unknown species happened. In NMS, there isn't really such a thing as first contact. You're a lone traveler, not a representative of a political entity, and while you don't seem to...

As mentioned in the previous post, No Man's Sky falls squarely into the long dead genre of space exploration games. And already the first misunderstanding of that genre has poped up in the comments, and I see that I need to be more precise:

Elite is not a member of this genre. The classical Elite predates Starflight by 2 years, and has fathered its own (more popular and longer enduring) genre, traditionally refered to as "Space trading games".

So I find myself...