No Man's Sky will take 5 billion years to explore

So that means no one will ever see everything, seing how the sun will run out of fuel in 4.6 billion years

man, this is gonna be one AWESOME game. getting it when i get my PS4.

Since the game will be constantly generating new planets, I wouldn't be surprised if that's an accurate estimate. Question is how are they going to prevent most of those planets from being too similar to one another. Not much point in trying to see everything if there's not enough unique content, after all.

I'll say the same thing I said when I saw the news on Twitter. How in God's name did they test the game?

@c_rakestraw: even when you get the game, it will still be generating new planets?

Procedurally regenerated. lol, that ends it right there. Even the planet shown in the video looked pretty darn boring.

It took two weeks of real time to cross Daggerfall. And only takes like half an hour to cross Oblivion and Skyrim.

Quality >>> Quantity

Always.

Every player is supposed to start on a undiscovered planet, so yes. As I understand it, the developers have something set up to monitor every new planet it makes as they appear so they can tweak variables on the fly. Pretty wild stuff.

I anticipate this game greatly. I hope Hello Games is able to achieve what they've stated because I truly believe the technology will change the way design limitations are handled. It's one of those games that if it does nothing else it will create an Asimovian spectacle for future technology, whether that future technology is obtainable is yet to be seen.

Elite: Dangerous will be even bigger:

Both games are shaping up to be great. I can't wait to play them.

So Infinte Discovery ?

But how many of these worlds will actually have meaningfull differences ?

Will it be like Mass Effect where you actually only have one world thats just reskinned 12 times ?

Why don't they let the players and gaming community design these worlds instead ?

Procedural Generation may churn out infinite worlds but UGC will have more meaningfull worlds.

This game would be the perfect framework for the ultimate game years from now with every game made so far combined into it. Each game would be set on its own planet or planets which would depend on its original story. No Man's Sky is potentially amazing. When traversing through space, the game would control like No Man's Sky and then the control scheme would change for a specific game within the universe of No Man's Sky. Access to each game would require an internet connection as they would be streamed from cloud servers. NMS would be on a hard drive of a powerful computing device.

I'm still interested, but I just wonder how unique these planets will be. I know they are all technically going to be different in some way, but I'm wondering if I will still want to continue exploring planets after my first 100, let alone my first 10 or so. Also, I like the idea of running into a random person while exploring, but even if that was possible, it would be virtually impossible by the looks of it. Anyway, still keeping an eye on this game. I don't want to get too excited, but there's definitely great potential.

Procedural generation. Infinite cycling of the basic content. I'd love to see that since each experience should be totally unique (in terms of environment), but the devs should not rely on this to claim unique content - they should still be developing DLC's , new ship types, new species, enemies, etc.

Well, considering that its procedural generated its not actually news and its only limited by the size of the hardware. Also the real problem is the content i would like to see how they deal with this.

i agree on this. there will be 10-15 planet and creature types and they will be mixed with different colors. Meh.. but i think it will be exciting few hours before it gets boring

I don't know what's all the fuss about with this game to be honest. It seems like a really boring space simulator with little variety and now I learn that it has procedural generated maps. Elite dangerous isn't much different either. The only space simulator I'm getting is star citizen.

Sounds to me like it will get old in 18 billion microseconds. That's about 5 hours, in case you were wondering.

Still a really interesting game though.

True, but it's huge!

They still haven't explained what there is to do on these planets. They've hinted at things, like stating there will be some force/presence/entity in the universe that will kind of unify the experience for players and compel them to certain goals, but I don't recall seeing anything explaining that in more detail. I'm pretty sure I heard that they're trying to make it so that people on your friendslist start in nearby regions...or maybe that was one of the other two big star sims coming out in the future.

I won't.......I can't believe it until I play it.

When is this coming out and how much will it cost?

It's coming in 2015 and probably 30 bucks perhaps

Yeah, but what's there to do between going from place to place to make moment-to-moment gameplay interesting.

The more info that's being released for this game, the more I am being reminded of the hype from Spore all those years ago.

Well it's the exploration and i believe there is space combat

Interesting

Thanks! :D

@The_Last_Ride: I thought is was coming out sooner, but it's okay. I can wait. 30 bucks seems a bit deep for an downloadable game, but I bet (hope) it will be all worth it.

I dunno. We pay $60 right now for 10 hour games. What's 5 billion years in hours? *calculates* About 4.38 x 10^13 hours. Thirty bucks sounds like a good deal.

Lol. I guess.

So full of reused planets with minimal changes and probably barren, nice!

@Krelian-co

just like your posts. :)

@Krelian-co

just like your posts. :)

flagged for disruptive posting.

Then previews should focus on space combat and exploration itself.

I'm getting sick and tired of previews that make a note of "See those mountains" or "See those stars". Those are really not worth showing unless the journey there is actually intersting, filled with activities to do.

@Krelian-co

Again.... Just like you.... ! :p

This video goes in to some detail as to what you can do on planets. In short, if I remember right since I don't feel like watching the whole thing again, you can do things like mine and collective resources, explore underwater, and I think there might be hostile creatures to kill or something. Or maybe you can just kill them anyway. But yes, what you can actually do on these planets will probably be vital in whether or not it's worth exploring so many of them. If there's only a few repetitive things to do, things could get boring pretty quickly.

@SoNin360

But will these worlds be Structured and not Random. Can they procedurally generate clever design, item placements, dangerous hazard placements, and stuff like that ? I think we can all agree we don't want things to feel like Skyrims Dungeons.

I wonder if the ratio of habitable planets will be as minimal as in realistic conditions. Encountering barren and empty planets all the time could end up boring while constantly coming across populated and filled with life ones would be unrealistic. They should keep a nice balance there. Every new populated planet discovered should infuse feelings of excitement about the unknown, if they accomplish this along with meaningful activities like combat, quests etc it'll be a success.

Just because a game's content is procedurally generated does not mean it is immune from repetitive gameplay. The procedures are still based on a finite set of rules and conditions for generating content. There may be virtually infinite combinations of colors, shapes, and sizes of things you see. But the number of types of things and what they do are still going to be limited of course. Look at the classic game Diablo; its levels were procedurally generated. But that didn't do much from preventing many of levels from feeling the same after playing the game for hours. Still was loads of fun though.

True, but it's still a ways off. They have to show it before release

It's an indie game, i don't see it being a full price retail game

Wait so what your saying is that using FTL [faster-then-light] is limited in No Man's Sky? I mean did Hello Games said anything about FTL?

I'm sure there's liberal usage of FTL travel. It'd be impossible to explore the game without it. They're just saying there's a lot of planets to visit and this estimate is just based on spending 1 second on each planet.

exactly and it would take 5 billion years to explore them all

Is it worth it?

We don't know, the game is far from being released

I meant the exploring bit. It reminds of the Farlands of Minecraft.