Well, I have to agree in principle.
On the other hand, it’s never been stated - or even hinted - that any of the characters in No Man’s Sky actually is human. There isn’t much to go on, but such evidence as there is suggests otherwise.
Looking at the HD pics from the trailer, you can see the avatars have varied heads. Some animal, some humanoid. One guy looks to have a beard.
I’ve been saying for a long time that Hello Games were using the NMS updates to testbed material and programming techniques for the new game. A lot of people argued against the idea, but it looks as if I was right. As @MacForADay has suggested, what I’ve seen so far appears to be a re-skinning of existing NMS mechanics and models.
I find it hard to believe this is the great leap forward that Sean talked about a few years ago - “Considered impossible with a team of any size”. It looks to me like they’ve either abandoned the new project, or severely scaled it back - or perhaps this is just a pot-boiler to keep people interested for the present. There certainly doesn’t seem to be anything ground-breaking, innovative, or particularly impressive about it.
This game does have the advantage of being designed from the ground up around all these elements they’ve been toying around with, and while it now seems in retrospect that expeditions have been fun stress tests for player load and network code for their new game, what they’re aiming to do is still quite impressive if it is how it sounds.
A large playerbase across multiple platforms all playing on the same instance of a single earth sized planet is not something really on offer anywhere else I’ve looked, most places are seperated by regions with multiple virtual servers.
NMS is a game that offers a shared instance of a universe but the key to it not crapping itself with player load is the scale of the universe keeps us all very far away at most times (nexus changed that a little once they had the infra in place)
What remains to be seen is just how varied the worlds lore and story/exploration content will be to keep solo players engaged, how it will expand and how large will our floating lobbies be? Honestly even just seeing up to 32 players at a time is more than I’d need to feel immersed in whatever mad community built city I’m wandering around '
Is anyone else thinkign maybe someone will absolutely definitely use this to make machinima adaptations of fantasy books? Them dragons and boats, people might get the GOT ending they never got, with added Badger Lads and Frog Fellas.
I can’t find the article now, maybe it was PC Gamer, stated they spoke to SM. They mentioned that we will be limited in how many players we see at one time.
That sounds incredibly great, but the lure of newer, bigger, better, more boundary-stretching game development might well dampen that desire. There will come a financial break point where enhancements are not paying for themselves.
The new game does seem to take the ProcGen experience they are getting from No Man’s Sky into one large world.
I’m psyched to see what they can do.
Yeah, I’m worried that only people who like No Man’s Sky will buy it. Since people know this new game is a lot like NMS, they will play NMS while they wait for it to release. If they don’t like NMS, they won’t get Light No Fire.
I think many of us also agreed(whether directly, or indirectly) that NMS started becoming a sort of testbed but at the same time I think, in part, HG is just adding whatever that interests them personally and using what they learned on their new game.
I do have to say that seeing a reskinned NMS was a bit of a shock initially. It even made me feel like “what the heck is this? Is this going to be another Atlas(a reskinned Ark: Survival Evolved cash grab game)?”
But then I realised that its two different ways a reskinned game was approached. Atlas(the game) was a shameless and lazy reskin. A true embarasement. But LNF uses the same procgen tech and refocuses all their biomes to a single planet. It looks like the characters walk at the same pace and have a similar silhouette but it appears that several staples were removed such as the jetpack, the near-infinite storage and spaceships(along with everything in space). “Hunting” looks like its going to be a thing while in No Mans Sky there’s no combat on foot that isn’t completely avoidable with a jetpack. However, im not sure how I feel about the flyers in the game, its really odd how they takeoff and fly, it looks a lot like a reskinned NMS ship and that’s pulling me out of the immersion already. They need to make it fly and land and steer COMPLETELY different than a ship.
While its too soon to tell, my initial thoughts and feelings are teetering between, “this is going to be really lame” and “this might actually be a really cool exploration game”.
But, just like NMS, LNF REALLY needs a set story to follow, preferably one that isn’t just text you read at the same terminal but in different locations.
I think it is very important that flying mounts be a late-game accomplishment. You should have to fight and subdue them before taming them or complete a long storyline before they are unlocked. If tossing a food pellet at them gets you a flying mount at the start of the game, it will be very bad
I love the idea of being stuck walking on foot or using ground mounts or boats for a long time, but once you get flying mounts, all those modes of transportation become pointless.
Yea, as someone who enjoys playing Ark(non-official server with close friends), ive learned that flying tames takes away from the adventure and exploration part of the game because fliers make you skip everything and get strait to the destination. Like starting a movie and skipping to the end of the movie. They are cool, but it makes the gigantic maps feel tiny when you can shoot across the map in a wyvern or maewing in about a minute. NMS suffers from this too where when you need to go somewhere, you fly to the spot you need to go and land right next to it, get out for 15 seconds to grab the “thing” at point A, and then jump right back in your ship to go to point B to get out of your ship for 15 seconds to drop off the “thing”. Wish it would be that you have to land and trek on foot due to some set of rules such as a “no fly zone” near some settlements that will shoot if you come near, or a storm in a particular area that prevents you from flying into it but you can walk through it. Or some invisible alien interference that makes your ship
crash. Things that give videogame legs a purpose. 
That’s a lot of people, though…
https://x.com/lightnofire?t=VorfCcw8fXM9B6TauHZpIQ&s=09
For the few of us still on X Twitter
Kash Karoon pointed out the sign next to the building reads ‘Home’
Customizable signs?
But if this game is the ‘actual size of earth’, no boat or bird is going to be very fast. And it is possible, the birds tire out. In NMS we must carry extra fuel. In LNF it would make sense we have to let the birds and dragons ‘refuel’ by allowing them to eat. I can’t see carrying enough feed for an animal that size.
So many ways this can go.
Swallows might disagree with that assessment.
However, while it might be an interesting game in and of itself to wrestle with the logistics of a heavy bird flying for thousands of miles, I doubt it would make for a fun game to actually fly thousands of miles in real time (unless you’re a hard-core flight simmer, in which case you won’t be riding dragons in a fantasy game, due to a serious lack of switches). So I’m still somewhat sceptical about the “real scale earth” approach without some form of map-travel system or time acceleration (which kinda kills multiplayer).
Here is a close up of the dial in one screenshot.
Looks like season, or elemental type, temp, recharge or power remaining with a compass perhaps?
More hi-res screens
And that water reflection…
Previous MMO games’ worlds were all hand crafted, and making an Earth sized world isn’t possible with a team that size (and not even done by larger teams). I assumed he meant creating a procedural generator / game engine that is so good that they can generate a satisfactory “Earth” was the big ongoing project (which started with NMS’ engine).
(Sean was joking on xwitter that someone is telling him “Do not overpromise again!” and he announces “I made Earth! … F***.”)
Did they say single instance?
I don’t know what options exist for multiplayer servers. Aren’t there games, where players that are outside each others’ viewing range are shifted to separate servers (without them noticing), and when they meet up somewhere, they don’t have to do anything to be placed back on the same server, did I understand that right? (And chatting is done on a chosen shared channel anyway.) It would feel like one instance but would still be calculated separately as much as possible to spread the load.
Hm, shared quest progress would need to be shared somehow as well. Not sure. While it’s not out yet, we can chat about different server implementations, I guess. 
So one write up said there is currently only one other team attempting this right now. That is Project Artemis