No Man's Sky - Worlds Pt. 1

I am really enjoying the new Worlds patch overall, although it is slightly disappointing in the fact that it didn't really affect ALL worlds. I was kind of hoping that we'd see a refresh of all the general environments so that old environments would be a little more varied in flora and fauna, but that seems largely not the case. Most planets you visit, are the same as what they have always been, which in manyh respects is fine. To be fair, they did refresh colors of planets, but largely it's set that every now and then, you run into a planet with the new features.

It actually kind of feels like that the way that Hello Games has made their randomization engine is they created templates. Which we all kinda knew given that we had Paradise planets and Toxic planets and so forth. But I think it's a little more specific than that. I think within each Biome they have templates as well. That gets you like "this planet chooses from these flora and fauna, and has this chance for these type of features." And with Worlds, they added a few new templates to the pool, they may have given previous biomes some updates, like including the new color variations and/or a new plant or animal every now and then, but really they just added a couple new templates to each biome. And then when they turned around and refreshed the universe, what they did was repopulated the biomes based, adding the new ones in so that the percentages are essentially correct for all. (My Suspician here is that the newer templates have a lower percentage than the old ones so that they are more rare.)

Honestly, I can't fault this technique. It allows the universe to not be truly random and allows some amount of variation within each biome. My suspcian is that at launch, this biome template thing wasn't around and they just had "biome" as the template. So you went to a Paradise planet and it just made a template based off the paradise biome. And then in Visions one of the big thing they did was created the templates within each biome which is why they had to reset the universe. Since then, they haven't added a ton of new templates within each biome. They added the "alien," "divergent," "volcanic," and "Mechanic?" which are the only new ones that I can think of. And really I think they may not even been true templates, but new properties to existing templates that made them also have these new properties, not really sure, could be a little of both honestly.

This kinda got me thinking about the rest of the generation. One of my bigger disappointments is the lack of variety of flora and fauna, and I think that has been a sticking point since launch with a lot of fans and probably the last remaining thing that they never truly fixed. And I think this has been a problem that maybe they just couldn't really fixed. I knew from get go that they basically made a universe where they just take graphical parts and stick them togetgher. But I think after some of the more recent updates, the alarming thing aboutg it is how few pieces there actually are in any particular thing in the universe.

Each object in the game, weather it be weapon, or starship, or freighter, or space station (at least the old space station but it's probably true for the new ones too), or animal. Is created by pushing togetgher just *3* pieces. I think I originally thought there were 6, but I think that's incorrect, I think it's 3. But I think the pool of objects they can pull from is huge. And it's huge because those pieces are varied a little bit. For instance, they have one piece that is a beak nose. They have another that is a hog nose, they have a third with a hog nose and a single horn, a forth with a hog nose and 2 horns. Etc. They basically got a bunch of pieces, and generated variations using those pieces together. I originally thought they did this all dynamically, but I think they prebuilt them in order to verify that any particular combination doesn't look too weird. And it also makes it easier to build stuff by the engine later.

This also works into the template system pretty well. For instance their head with a beak could potentially be used by their little goblin creature as well as bird and bef fine, but the hog nose wouldn't be on the birds. I actually think this whole template system may be part of the reason why they had such a difficult time with adding new variation in existing animals (which was always needed and we never really got, instead they just introduced new animals, which generally had LESS variation than the original ones had!). The reason I say this is that they couldn't just add a new type of horn that would automatically get added into the feline template. They would have to apply that horn to all the heads (this was probably easy as they have a program do it) and then review them and decide what pools get what and what stays. This actually means it probably takes more effort to adjust the existing templates than it would to just create new ones. And that's kinda what they did. Instead of adding parts to felines that had mechanical parts, they just created a new mechanial predator template.

And you really see this problem carry over all over the place. Instead of creating new variation of Paradise planets, they just go out and create new Exotic planets that have far fewer variations between them, so you make them super rare. (The exotics only have color differences!). Instead of giving us new fighters, we got Alien ships and solar sails, and sentinels. They were all more or less great, but every single time, the new variation that has, has less variation than what the old ones had and so don't really give a lot of long term help. I would have been more happy if they added new parts to the original pool.

In a way, Worlds took a bit of a turn from their normal ways because of this. In some ways, they did what they always did, but they did add new variations within. The plant animals were added to the general pools, I see them on old worlds. New plants are mostly in the new worlds, but I'm sure will show up periodically in old worlds too. But even the fact that they just created new Paradise templates waas different than what they had done previously.

I have thoughts as to why they have taken a change in tactics recently with the game that I'm probably going to talk about more in the future. But for now, I'm just enjoying it. I wonder what Part 2 brings us. The natural inclination is to say that they probably will go through the exotics and give those a refresh, but I kinda hope that we see more creatures and I'd also like to see a building refresh on the planet. I sort of feel like they've given up on the buildings, but I still kinda hope that they find something to make them look better and be more useful (The usefulness of buildings, like exocrafts, has gone down as the game continued on. I remember early in the game if you found one of those buildings that had NPC seller in it, it was a big deal because they sold you recipes that you couldn't really get elsewhere and you needed race rank to get them. What a great mechanic that has been rendered almost useless now.)