No Man's Sky

[Husar]

It sounds a lot like you'll just hop around a lot of colourful planets for no good reason until you get bored or discover the disappointment in the center of the galaxy.
If there is actually a game to play that could be cool, but procedurally generated everything seems a bit like what Beskar said. There may be some "missions" or "things to explore" that are placed on the planets randomly but they are unlikely to be very unique or carefully crafted if they have to be adaptable to the randomness of the procedural generation. From the video it looks more like some artsy exploration thing that you just play until you inevitably get bored after 20-30 minutes or feel like you're a real arts connosieur and get drunk on wine or bourbon. There's some hope that the video just doesn't show everything but what it does show is actually not all that promising IMO.

[I of the Storm]

Might be it falls short in terms of actual gameplay and long term motivation, but tackling the procedural generated universe sounds interesting at least from a technical point of view. Maybe something to build upon?

[Papewaio]

If it allowed mods like minecraft then it could be something to behold.

Some of the MC mods take the game from sandbox to adventure mission orientated.

To paraphrase Carl Sagan there are more stars in the sky then sand grains on all the earths beaches. So this could be a giant sandbox or starbox if you will. Or it could turn into another Peter Molyneux bull...frog.

[rickinator9]

Does anyone remember the Space stage of Spore? It was a boring mess that had no point from a gameplay perspective. This sounds just like it.

Also, I doubt anyone would actually be able to visit that many planets. Nobody would be able to visit that many in a lifetime and I doubt RAM memory would actually support that many planets(Of course they only get generated when necessary, but eventually you have too many planets in memory). I'm pretty sure that this isn't just a number for hype, since it corresponds to the maximum value of a unsigned 64-bit integer.

[Husar]

I doubt RAM memory would actually support that many planets(Of course they only get generated when necessary, but eventually you have too many planets in memory). I'm pretty sure that this isn't just a number for hype, since it corresponds to the maximum value of a unsigned 64-bit integer.

Come on, that doesn't have to be the case at all. The entire game world of Skyrim or GTA would already make your 8 or 16 GB RAM explode, that's why these worlds are usually streamed and not everything is tracked. If a car in GTA disappears from your view or a certain distance around you and is not important, then it does not get tracked any further and is just deleted from memory. The changes that need to be saved can be saved to the HDD when required and loaded only when you go there again etc. Gothic already provided a pretty open world like that in 1999 or 2000, with day and night cycles and so on. There is no need to save everything in your main memory and depending on how the planets are generated it is possible that only a certain hash key or so has to be saved to generate the planet again when you decide to travel there again. The other possibility is not to save the way the planet is or was changed at all, like in Far Cry 2, where you could leave a checkpoint after killing everyone, return once it was barely out of sight and it would be fully staffed again as though nothing ever happened. Given that most players would probably not travel to all planets anyway as you say, the RAM should be even less of an issue.

[easytarget]

They have this running already so technical considerations are rather pointless. All this is a procedural generated universe only in the direction you happen to be looking at. Everything you're not looking at for any given gaming moment doesn't exist and therefore takes up no resources.

If you want to raise a flag, jump in line with everyone else who are all asking will this even be a game I want to play. Spore I suspect in hindsight will prove a poor comparison, that was a trainwreck created by a guy past his creative 15 minutes of air time. The question for me is: have they tackled whether a walking simulator in space has a point inside it worth the journey. I'm intrigued enough to start the thread on it, so you know I'll be watching and listening what the PS4 console mouthbreathers have to say about it later this year.

[easytarget]

Waited for a release date forever, one came out today, not particularly great news given how much time Sean has wasted running demos for the last couple of years hyping it up, it's still 8 months out: June 2016