I think procedural dungeons attached to waypoint buildings would address the variety. The buildings themselves could stay as they are now, but have a loading hallway or ladder connecting to a dungeon. Could be combat encounters, puzzle encounters, or npc encounters, depending on the building type.
I've always wanted more procedural dungeons! Planetary ones especially! I'm still hoping we might see them someday. I'm sure they have something of the sort under development for Light No Fire, so it's possible they could transfer those techniques to NMS. That's purely speculation on my part though. Thanks for commenting!
Yeah, they could take what they learned from the spaceborne derelicts and expand on that, maybe. Add a meta trait, like some are collapsing so you have to get in and get out within a time limit (that can be extended with certain found items), some that have resources that those on the surface will reward, some with portals to other locations, special species to find and maybe befriend? Ones that maybe take those ancient keys or convert artifacts into resources or other unique things that make the resource system more interconnected?
@@Kanaju My thoughts on potential procedural dungeons: -Underwater Korvax Prime Fragment -Vy'keen Planetary Temple Ruin -Gek First Spawn Space Rubble -Boundary Failure to the World of Glass (Travellers) -"Grave of the Ocean King" Abandoned Mining Site
Deuterium. One way to make exploration more varied would be to make what is not procedural procedural. The moments that I felt most like venturing into an unknown world were in pre-programmed moments (the larvae of the infested worlds, exotic planets, "that" fish) basically, instead of all the abyssal horrors being identical, they could be part of the the planet's own fauna, finding them hidden in caves and closed places. Exotic planets could have more elements that mix, like regular planets, basically combinations of elements. And so on
honestly as much as NMS is my favorite game at least in a sentimental sense, i find it hard to come back to it because i feel like ive genuinely seen almost all there is to see. sure maybe not literally, but once youve seen every biome, every terrain variation, every color a planet can be, you generally know what to expect. sure nowadays its harder to predict, but generally you can still guess "is it gonna be normal terrain, canyons, or super high mountains with no mix ups". it is honestly odd how for a game centered around exploration and proc gen only 2 updates have been dedicated to that and only 1 was really a major update. NMS desperately needs a variation and exploration overhaul. Genuinely think uncharted planets having more natural pois than inhabited worlds would be a great way to actually encourage going to said systems
I sympathize with this, it's hard for me to go back too. I don't tend to feel motivated to do expeditions so it takes big feature releases to really inspire me, but it feels like there needs to be extra layers or something, and more connective tissue between systems since they all seem to be branching in different directions. One planetary generation idea I've had for a while is a city world, something that fended off sentinels, where you just land in a place and can find procgen markets or housing or whatever, like a slightly oppressive sprawl with its own style of underground complexes to delve, maybe sentinel incursions underground trying to gnaw at the roots of the city, maybe? I wonder if world generation stuff like from the old Traveller RPGs might be a way to bring more variety...
@@nutherefurlong city worlds would be cool, but i have no clue how that would run on a PS4 plus idt it would fit what nms is going for. ruined 'city' worlds however i think would work perfectly if possible or at least worlds covered in ruins
@@waterbears9874 Yeah... like dense city worlds would probably be too much, but I thought about just replacing, y'know, rocks and trees for simple buildings, not all of them enterable. Not sure how low poly it might look if there were too many compromises, though. Ruins with different kinds of survivor settlements would probably make more sense
i Know this is 2 months old but they just drop a update increasing variety and now the forums are filled with people whining about losting their good planet, that's why we can't have nice things people don't seen to understand how procedural works and if you fiddle with a minor thing it can change everything so thats my guess to why they don't really mess with this things too much anymore
Wow! You certainly put a ton of thought into this subject to say the least. Planetary exploration would feel AMAZING if all of these were implemented. I'll die on this hill but Origins went about variation in a wrong way where they just added a bunch of new stuff with nothing to do with them. You could say all the updates since 2022 have been slowly adding variation to the game but with gameplay and purpose to them. One idea I have is actual destructible buildings, so you either can't hide from sentinels in buildings or there's a consequence to pirate attacks. And it'd be cool to see NPCs actually mine resources and use multitools to slowly repair destroyed outposts, maybe you could help them out too! (I know the buildings can't permanently stay ruined and they'd have to reset, so NPCs repairing them could be a cool way to contextualize that process so it doesn't feel like an engine limitation) Hell, pirate stations could give you a new mission type where you have to destroy buildings or something. Oh yeah, *Deuterium!* (I hope I spelled it right huehue)
I actually think Origins did a good job of starting to mix biome assets. It also introduced universal weather events like lightning and tornadoes. However, it did stop short of really setting biomes apart in gameplay. I love your idea! Destructible buildings that NPCs repair sound pretty cool. Much like the destructible terrain, it would make firefights more dynamic. Also, I think it's spelled correctly! Probably... lol Thanks for watching!
Great list! I like that you recommend branching into new variety instead of just adding new assets to existing already varied systems. For example, in my experience, adding 10 more first names to a random name list would increase name possibilities linearly, but adding a new middle name category or suffixes at the end increases the variety exponentially! So adding 10 new creature skin textures for example would make 1000 more unique planets combos, but adding new ocean variety would add 10,000,000. (Numbers are not exact just orders of magnitude different)
Right! At a technical level, I think adding options to any area increases variants by the same amount, but adding new areas of variation into the equation lead to more interesting variety. At least that's what I think. 🤷♂️ Thanks for watching, man!
It would be cool if users could populate a planet with "curated" new flora and fauna from the genetic synthizers. it would instantly create a lot more variety.
@@lilliesupreme9767pretty sure you can rollback updates on steam. Just gotta make a backup of your savefile. If youre on console im not sure if there would be a way to save it
#22 Procedural sound design: Every sound type in the game is identical. Flying fauna? Same squeaking call. Every planet. Every system. Every galaxy. Same wind sounds, same animal calls, same floral destruction. I'm sure there's some way to have a system to say, at the bare minimum, pitch certain sound effects up or down on different planets. At most, some sort of program that generates some sort of procedural sound. I have zero programming and sound design experience, here, so what I'm suggesting may be ridiculous
It's actually a good idea. Most of the suggestions that are impossible are actually because there is no technology to solve the problem yet. And programming is problem solving in the core sense. It may not be easy, but it is possible.
Thank you for a great list! 👍 What I'd add(not about planets) is like I mentioned before - making space station interiors different from one another. For example, they could use low economy systems for the stations we had from 2018 till 2024, while medium and highly developed systems could have the new, fancier designs. It just feels like we lost those inbetween forever. Of course, bringing back the backrooms with corridors would add to exploration, adding more floors inside of the stations, more things to explore. That would be amazing.
These all sound fun to me. Some of these make me think that even if they never show up in No Man’s Sky, they might be likely features to look forward to in Light No Fire. E.g., more sophisticated weather, animal behavior, and natural points of interest. Since you asked, I think they had a hail weather effect in Subnautica: Below Zero. I don’t recall it being functionally different from any other cold weather effect, but it had a decent visual aspect, with bouncing hailstones and all. Due terry um
4# basic resources are soft lock prevention mechanic. Thats why they are everywhere. Overall.. vid is good compilation of ideas that are circulating in the community since years ago and it shows how much potential game still has.
imo, variety should be action based, not visual based. For example there should be planets with no knowledge stones, or konwledge stones, which do different things. That's the variety.
There do exist planets without knowledge stones. Although, to be fair, those planets also lack any other kind of structure, so your point does still stand. Also, with those harmonic camps, we know that it is possible to have planet-specific structures. So I imagine that it should be possible to exclude an x type of structure and/or include a y type. Might not even be that huge of a change!
Coming here after Worlds Part 1, it's interesting to see what in this video got addressed. Colour variety and atmospheric effects are obvious, but I've also gotten an Atlas word from a knowledge stone since the update. Some of my own personal ideas to throw on the pile, now that we are seemingly partway into the long awaited exploration variety updates: -You mentioned nights making planets blue, but you know what else makes everything blue? The analysis visor! The analysis visor IMO should look more like the version showcased in the early demos, that was less obtrusive and gave you space to actually admire the things you're scanning. Even the simple change of removing the blue filter would be a great step. -One common resource besides knowledge stones and common element plants you didn't mention; I really don't understand why those salvage pods you can get Nanites from only have one model, despite being so commonplace. -A rare chance for minerals/flora to have unusual resources and/or more resources than normal. Running into a surface plant that drops Cobalt, or a mineral that gives you Di Hydrogen, Oxygen and Condensed Carbon at the same time, could be a reason to remember a planet, in the same way some people seek out good resource node distribution to set up mining bases. -Multi hazard planets. Right now, desert planets are really the only type to play with this. I'd like frozen planets with boiling hot spring oceans, volcano planets with toxic rain, or lush planets with toxic fallout dust storms.
Better terrain Generation within a reasonable walking distance. Foundation had beautiful terrain generation all around within steps that would draw you to explore. In the current build you have to get into an exocraft or a ship to see any difference in the terrain. Many players just land, spin around, get back into their ship, and onto the next planet. The multiple sliders instead of fixed biomes stuff they talked about before the game released sounds amazing.
Its kinda funny, Hello Games have apparently tried the knowledge stone thing at some point in development already because there is an unused procedural knowledge stone model in the files with four or five different variations to it. The variations are almost exactly as described in the video, and they match some of the monolith designs. They've been there since launch and it only takes like three file changes to get them working in the game so no idea why they aren't used.
Thanks for watching and the incredible support! And I know what you mean. For me it was the opposite. I didn't know you could get oxygen from the fly trap plants until well after they were added. Makes you wonder what other little interactions we've missed! Thanks again!
The biggest fix to planetary Variety would be to fix the shop. When we can by everything there is no point to visit farm resourses and every planet feels exactly the same.
They did add some of these ideas to the game in worlds part 1 like the new clouds but man hello games needs to see this video as some of your ideas are just sooo cool and everyone would love to see them in game!
They could add more biome types such as dune, glacial, crystalline, gas, or destroyed, however it’s ultimately terrain formations that need an expansion.
Part of it for me is the expectation that you tend to reduce a planet to its available resources, so you see yet-another-mushroom-planet from an orbital scan and decide you don't need what those tend to have and skip it. For me, I tend to like to scan for lifeforms and put settlements in extreme weather locations so I have some incentives to land even though I might not need resources, but I'd still like something that makes each planet a bit less of an encompassing class and more of its own thing. The extreme height worlds were a big step up, they were fun to explore and think about, and there seem to be an increasing amount of things you can find that make exploration more rewarding beyond the class... but then there are classes that seem dominated by their type, like anomaly worlds (as cool as hexworlds are, I don't feel like I need to see any of the anomalies more than once unless I'm collecting placeable pieces). Letting a survey reveal that X planet has a specific core type, or a hidden base, or a special creature (like a large rare creature that has to be tracked), corrupted sentinel towers that need to be blown up, regional headquarter worlds with a little independent town, other things like that that tell little stories by just being there. I dunno. Was terrain generation more varied before? I seem to remember finding way more strange landscapes years ago, like some twisty barriers in an extreme ice world that felt like cells or cages that was very Science Fiction Short Story, and I actually used the cells to escape predators! The extreme elevation worlds were a welcome reminder of what the terrain can become and I sort of wish there could be more of that. Also wish oceans were more varied, like having several types, and maybe certain caves reveal special underground locations if you explore them well enough. Maybe a place where you're guaranteed to find the elusive cave-dwelling species during surveys :)
we've come a long way since the beginning in 2016. there's still a long way to go to make the multiverse feel truly alive. I wanted to rant, but you pretty well hit the nail on the head. shout out to hurricanes and waterfalls not mentioned here
You know, if you just take a little LSD before you start playing you can get a lot of these effects, and more, without any coding changes! (Of course, you might also hallucinate No Man's Sky while driving.)
I am very glad that I have subscribed to you and have been watching you for a very long time, and I really like your thoughts on improving the game. Thank you for an exciting hour.But no matter how the planets improve, space also needs fresh ideas. It would be interesting to see and listen to ideas for improving outer space. It would also be interesting to see puzzles in the game, simple tasks with good rewards - it would be very cool. Happy Birthday to you.
The easiest thing that I can think of when it comes to planets is to mix it up more with weather types. There can be multiple environmental effects in the game, theoretically you could have toxic, radioactive, and temperature hazards active at the same time. Also, there already are (desert) planets with a different environmental hazard effect at night than during the day. So, why not cold during the night but radioactive and hot during the day? Or Any combination, really. Probably wouldn't require a lot of code change either, the components are already there, after all.
randomized cities and civilization structure would help add to the diversity of the universe's life I feel beyond the disparity where alien life is either animalistic and primitive, or already fellow space travelers condensed hive cities, human skyscraper cities, golden aztec inspired wide cities and the decay would determine the type a living city would have Cyberpunk Night City-esque atmosphere, where you have some randomized quest and storylines, stores, crime, etc while a dead city would be like those zombie apocalypse cities skeletons of their former glory where you mostly scavenge the dead city for artifacts
I imagined slight chance of player's ship getting picked up by tornado and tossed aside with probable needs of repeir. Only in cases when it wasn't on a landing platform, and maybe with haulers being immune to the whole situation χD And then I imagined a hauler immediately falling through ice and slowly sinking while swearing at the player with it's sirens 🤣
NMS suffers from the "bowl of cereal" issue with procedural generation. In a bowl of cereal, every single piece of cereal is definitely different from each other, but the variation between them is so smooth and uniform that they blend together into a continuum. So, the generation needs more salience. Features that fall out of the normal distribution. And the distribution itself, ideally, shouldn't be isotropic, but not entirely a binary situation either. So, while robotic wild-life being almost entirely restricted to uncharted planets is cool, maybevery, extremely rarely we should see some robotic wildlife in normal planets. While the vast majority of moons are dry, some extremely rare moons have oceans. So on and so forth. Another aspect is tying more of the generation systems together in ways that make them feel more intentional/causative. While that would reduce local variety, the outliers would stand out more. Your example of gravity: if you have varying gravities for each planet, and flora/fauna sizes vary with gravity, when you get a somehow lush planet with a completely out of distribution extremely low gravity, now you have a lush planet with massive flora and fauna.
Hey, to other players running into acm_79 at the anomaly: Don't take my ignoring/avoiding you personally. It's just that gaming has taught me to abhor any form of multiplayer.
More cliffs, canyons where you can climb or jump down a waterfall to a cave, deep in the earth. The atmosphere should be at least three times larger to increase the variety of landmasses. Metroid Prime-style dungeons or subway gameplay. Also, darker environments, better physics for jumping, parkour, gliding or diving, parachuting, and finally by 2025, AI-assisted NPCs doing competitions, traveling in groups or fighting to conquer ultra-secure fortresses.
I think that there are two reasons why this will not be implemented fully. First would be console limitations and second one is that they need to implement changes that will bring new players. Or start making DLCs (but that for world variety would not make sense). Solution for this would be to allow players to create content that they could submit to teh game and when approved would be added to the world. But that wont be so easy too.
Id love to see an actual weather system, not just a dark cloud that follows the player. I think thats the reason why we don’t see much interaction with the weather.
Oh wow I had no idea you could reap those little buds off of the gasbags! I thought I had figured NMS out but there's always something surprising around the corner, even if it is a little thing like that. On my last survival save I struggled a bit with oxygen in the beginning so this is lowkey useful aswell.
Howdy..I'm a programmer with zero experience industrially but have plenty of language experience since the age of 9(now I'm 49 :) )..Recently I'm exploring python and I'm loving your content for such a long time. You give this community such in-depth content which is amazing.. Personally I love your ideas and wish to come aboard to produce some actual DLC content with your guidance ..hopefully with intrigue Hello Games will notice this contribution..RSVP .. Leon B
It was well worth the wait. Plenty of good ideas, some can be implemented through mods, some need coding. Just using AI generated content HG could add thousands of assets in no time by the way. They don't need artists almost, very low effort thing. Also, deuterium. And i will watch it multiple times and make sure key parts are seen by modders because some ideas can be implemented 100% today.
50:18 Oceans formed by various substances is a realistic thing, it should perhaps supercharge certain technologies, while it may cause damage to other technologies equipped in the suit over time. It would also be good to place hidden treasures in this type of environment, like a storm cristal equivalent.
Why I really do enjoy the game, about 40 hours in - and it already feels like not much can surprise me anymore. I love the game, so I keep playing, but yeah in terms of actual 'exploration' it stops feeling as good around this time mark. I've seen a few mods that change the variables a bunch, some even have custom models added in, but really even a good variable mix would help out a ton already. A couple of new atmosphere shaders, gravity variety would help out A TON, more variables for crazy flora and fauna spawns would be awesome too. I am no gamedesigner, but these things don't seem like Too much to ask, that's old content revision, and not a radically new production. Love all of your suggestions too, and thank you for trying to consider the implementation cost. It's hard to try to keep your fantasies grounded, especially with a game like NMS, and most of your suggestions seem like little adjustments that can make the life of players much more interesting, without too much resource cost.
I want truly deep seas to explore, as well as complex cave systems, maybe even planets dedicated to those things. I want The Abyss vibes from deep seas and The Descent vibes from caves. I hope they do something with these next, and with scary monsters in each as well
Varying biomes and landscapes. The hills, mountains, and plateaus get old after awhile and I think having cliffs, and canyons could help along with different colors throughout the planets
The things I'd love to see is some underground structures (like cities or towns.) and some general structure variation. Thought they'd at least update some stuff like the trading outpost in that station update. I'd say that the game mostly struggles with points of interest. Maybe you could turn your base into a city or town of its own instead of the specific premade towns. Along with that, I think more random encounters would help. For example a pilot may land near you and offer banned tech. Why not more things like that? Maybe have a sentinel team escorting something that may be of value to the player? I know that possibly wanting to keep the old layout for nostalgia sake would be cool, but I think that's what the abandoned systems are for. (Those systems without an economy but listed life form.) Some more exotic tech would be nice, maybe Atlas or Atlantid specific missions for unique tech? Similar player specific paths they can take just being part of the main game. Maybe have Atlantid having their own path akin to the Atlas.
1:03 NOPE!!! Your title is right on!! (Combo)Planetary variety is broken to the point of a "procedurally generated" universe being 90% predictable!!! ex: Protea trees = no glowing grass 100% of the time!!
1:04:45 An easy solution is to place a structure with a certain probability of being generated, like 0.01% or less. Rare things are common things, but with a lower chance of being generated, if you know what I mean.
Deuterium :D I would love to see some storms and various "ocean" planes, like the desert or lava ones, that'd be badass. That being said, I know HG don't really want players to get stuck anywhere, so that's why we don't get endless empty deserts, but damn I'd love to build a base in one.
The only cool thing in starfield i would like to see in nms is the unique regions based on location on a planet, but if they couldn't do that i still think nms is superior.
I would like to see them build on some of the things already in game like if your purple plant poisoned you but you could only cure it by cooking the right food. Would give more reason to have animal breeding for food items too.
I have very little complaints with No Man’s Sky. The scope of what they have accomplished is amazing. But I do agree with you. It can be repetitive.. until it’s not and you come across something you have never seen before. I would love to have fog. This was a developer trick back in the day to hide pop up. But as the technology got better they dropped it. I still remember bow hunting a dinosaur. You could hear something. And then charging of the fog it comes running. But that only works if they fix my one pet peeve. The animal animations. Walking around they are fine but nothing really changes when they attack you. They walk around you looking forward and not at you then turn and walk toward you and. Ouch! Did he just attack me?? I am more afraid of the plants than the animals.
I like the procedural plant effects idea, but I think it could go further, like being able to dig them up with the terrain manipulator so you can cultivate them. Maybe even do something similar to making companion eggs where you can use materials to change the effect the plant will give.
I think the great fix, if HG doesn't want to create new biomes, would be multibiome planets (up to 3 biomes per planets). They obviously have multibiome tech for Light No Fire, so it would be great if NMS also got multibiome planets. That way, each planet, instead of being stuck with a single boring biome would have multiple different biomes, making it more varied in appearance and giving a reason to actually explore planets as even with more interesting generators such as exotics or infested worlds, it gets boring to see the same stuff over and over again as you explore the planet.
All of that would be great i think you're on point. I wish theyed amp up the bite beat daws. Cleaner. More variety of instruments. More creation slots. Id like to see melee weapons but not with too much focus on that.
I want two main things: multi biome planets and new landscape generation{ larger scale, less smooth landscape, larger flat areas, deep seas and tall mountains. Sand dunes etc.}
I will never not love the geysers and pools of something ideas! It would be nice to see. You ever thought of making a list of most "extreme" planets? A combo of extreme sentinel, weather and infested might do it.
Great video bro. I tried some better planet generation. And honestly it's almost too much. It could be a lot better but I've seen some crazy crap without mods. I'd love deeper almost subnautica like oceans, multiple biomes, more creatures etc. This game is my fav of all time right behind ark. Which I don't play anymore cause dev team is trash. The mods made my nms very juttery and laggy. I think I'll stick to game fixes rather than terrain gen. Do you only play vanilla nms? I hope and pray HG stays with it and continues to update this masterpiece. Id gladly play full price for another big content drop. I know im not the only one.
Thanks! And yeah, I only play vanilla, though I have seen molded gameplay before. I agree that sometimes just turning all the dials up often only leads to messier planets. They look different, but they don't feel immersive because they've lost their balance between scale and detail. I hope HG stick with it too! I imagine they will as long as people keep buying it. Thanks for watching and commenting!
@@Kanaju for sure fellow traveler! I will keep experimenting with slight alteration mods. Keep it immersive and make it more variety. I love this game! The best mod is quick text dialogue and faster or instant actions. But the overhaul mod "fantasy" by redmas is freaking crazy. It almost adds too much. I saw a tree the size of ghidorah and it only gave me reg amount of carbon. Makes the game too juttery. I've got a decent system. I9-13000k processor, 32 gigs, and 3070 nvidia. Soon I want a 3090 ti (found one for under 1,000) and 64 gigs of ram. I must have overkill. Lol I cannot play any game not maxed out graphically.
I hope we get at least one last big planet variety update before No Man's Sky updates slow to a crawl or a stop with Light No Fire's release. :'( Thats what I want out of an update above anything else.
Deuterium. But I have constructive criticism about how the content is made on the channel. There are very long sections that do not provide enough information about the content of the video, like the outro and some sections between the segments. There are minutes and minutes of free talk, most of the viewers usually don't have time or the patience for this. I wouldn't be surprised if some sections of the video are skipped because of off topic. I really liked the video, but the parts that were on topic obviously. I hope Hello Games considers many of these suggestions for future updates.
I think the player base will crash once the new game is released. I'm surprised they still update this and would be very surprised if they put much more into it after they focus on the new one. Unless...they use this as a base test platform before adding it to the new one.
When you talk about gravity, you talk about fauna and say "high gravity=small fauna" and "low gravity = large fauna". I just want to signal that, paradoxally, based on the simulations made by several scientific labs, on bigger planets with higher gravity, we'd have... bigger animals... and more flying animals than on earth. Why ? -Bigger animals because in order to survive such a gravity you need very thick bones and a large reserve of fat. -Flying animals because, except some particular bodies like Titan, most high gravity planets would have a very dense atmosphere, allowing an awesome lift for winged beings or gaz-based flying beings (like living balloons) which would allow whale-sized animals to fly, and even never land.
