Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle. They keep releasing new expansions for free which is definitely admirable, but I can’t help but feel like they’re trying to build a castle on the foundations of a shack. Maybe it’s because procedural generation doesn’t mean the things that are procedurally generated will be interesting, or that the different game mechanics still feel pretty disjointed to me?
In any case, the options they added a year or two ago to fine tune the difficulty definitely made it more playable- not as punishing as a survival mode but not as lacking in impact as a creative mode.
It doesn’t help that all biomes are basically the same. A wide open landscape with the occasional PoI dotted about. Where are the mega-cities? Factory planets? Planets strip-mined to the core? Why is every space station basically the same?
Procedural generation’s philosophy is “work smart, not hard”. If you have a truly clever generation alg then you are creating gold from vacuum and it is miraculous. But, speaking as a guy who spent 10 years inventing a clever generative alg, you really do need to give your whole soul to the project. And only the insane do that.
Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle. They keep releasing new expansions for free which is definitely admirable, but I can’t help but feel like they’re trying to build a castle on the foundations of a shack. Maybe it’s because procedural generation doesn’t mean the things that are procedurally generated will be interesting, or that the different game mechanics still feel pretty disjointed to me?
In any case, the options they added a year or two ago to fine tune the difficulty definitely made it more playable- not as punishing as a survival mode but not as lacking in impact as a creative mode.
It doesn’t help that all biomes are basically the same. A wide open landscape with the occasional PoI dotted about. Where are the mega-cities? Factory planets? Planets strip-mined to the core? Why is every space station basically the same?
Procedural generation’s philosophy is “work smart, not hard”. If you have a truly clever generation alg then you are creating gold from vacuum and it is miraculous. But, speaking as a guy who spent 10 years inventing a clever generative alg, you really do need to give your whole soul to the project. And only the insane do that.