Yep, I had my fun on it, but without true PVE it's just another exploration/building game.

True, i put something between 100 - 200 hours into it and while they repeatedly add "special stuff" i cant really motivate myself to go back, exploring feels boring after some time and the pve is ok but not good enough to be a motivation in it self, but to be fair im also not the collector type of guy and there may be a dedicated fanbase who enjoys this.

On the other hand not every game has to life for ever and if the average player has 50-100 hour of fun and than never again touches the game than that is also totally fine.

To be fair, I think most of the more recent changes are just backporting engine upgrades and stuff from the new game they're working in. That's still a lot more effort than just saying that, but it's not like they're developing explicitly for NMS anymore.

It also let's them test the upgrades in a real environment before the new game launches, preventing another mess at launch. It's a smart use of resources, keeping people discussing how well you maintain the old game going into the new game. It's free press, along with probably more sales.

if all it takes to keep a developer improving their game is to hype it to the moon and then turn it into a meme when it releases then maybe we should do that more often /s

forreal forreal though these game devs are the shit and I'm grateful for all the work they keep putting into this

Close, proceduraly generated so psuedo-randomly to ensure that no planets are exactly alike. If you spend enough time in game it does begin to feel a bit like more of the same. Within 24 hours of this update I had already found a few things I had never seen anything similar to in the game.

To be fair, what this really means is that it adds more options for proc-gen. This means planets will be more diverse, which is good. The actual number of them is totally pointless, but it's easier to report in than the tangible effect.

I write a planet generator. All of the planets are the same to begin with, so realistically I can only generate "1" planet. Then I add one toggle which is random, if it's on the planet will be completely water. I now have "2" planets. Now I add another toggle for one huge mountain, I can now generate "4" planets (dry,water,dry-mountain,water-mountain). Keep adding toggles, sliders and parameters until you have "trillions" of possible planets and you're done.

The funny thing is that the changes are cumulative, so if I release a game that can generate X planets and I add a binary toggle I can now claim I added X planets to the game. If I add a slider from 0-9 then I added 10X planets. So since No Man's Sky already had a giant number of planets, adding trillions of them could mean something as stupid as they added a new resource to the game so now every planet can have that resource in different amounts.

It’s a procedurally generated universe(s). These systems haven’t all been pre-generated, but will rather be generated to explore when a player visits a system for the first time.