Thought i’d make a fun new topic regarding Light No Fire. With the game appearing to be coming soon, I thought it would be stimulating to throw out some theories on what the game is going to be about. And then we can look back at this topic to see how many theories we got right.
Note: This is not to be confused as a wishlist or to set up false hopes for things that may never come. Its just throwing out some theories for the fun of it with expectations kept in check.
What do you think Light No Fire will be like?
What do you think the story is going to be about?
Will it be connected to No Man’s Sky?
Do you think it will play out just like No Mans Sky?
I think if we want to imagine it is an iteration of the Atlas, we will be able to.
A balanced combat and exploration gameplay.
Hoping it has a definite story and feels very old. I love history and digging into myth and legend.
What I think it will be and feel like is a reskinned NMS but with better exploration and story mainly.
-I think exploration will feel a little more like Ark in a way.
One of the main things about NMS that I wish was better(and apparently a few others feel the same way)was having more reasons to stay on a planet longer. LNF will be forcing us all to stay on a single planet so that may solve that issue there but having those dragons/birds to get around might make it feel more like mid-late game Ark where, once you get to the point that you can craft a saddle for a flier, you stop exploring the beautifully crafted map and start skipping all the scenery to go strait to a resource your looking for. They could do something to balance that, but this is what im expecting initially.
-Story and Lore
I think it will have a clearer story line and have a much more clear lore than NMS because thats one of the areas that I think 99% of players feel that NMS could work on. The lore is great, but much of it is scattered around and you get it in no particular order in most cases.
-Connected to NMS?
I also think its going to be connected to No Mans Sky. Maybe just a loose connection but I think theres going to be some crossover story.
-whats it about?
I think its going to have parallels to No Mans Sky but still be its own thing.
I have a feeling that it will have something to do with something destroying nature and we are there trying to preserve/save nature and/or the planet. My big theory is that the Atlas supercomputer will reside somewhere on the LNF planet. I think it will be the abandoned planet that the atlas was left on and several thousands, maybe millions of years passed by and all these human/hybrid people eventually filled the earth.
I absolutely love this <3 The Atlas outer sensors must have been on the fritz. It wasn’t a black hole coming to spaghettify it’s home, just some giant birds pulling on its wires. 16 seconds until a cute egg is laid in you, Atlas.
I don’t expect any story connection to NMS, if they said that I missed it. You think the red glowing thing is the Atlas ? Perhaps. It would be fine of course, it’s just not my expectation.
I assume the engine will be very similar to NMS - proc gen’ed biomes/weather, animals and people, plants and rocks, out of recombined templates. And similar base building mechanics and NPC settlements with quest givers.
I hope interactions are more fluid/fluent? than in NMS, without the constant immersion disruptions by the user interface. (I don’t like being frozen, with my camera moved into a hillside, clicking through 5 speech bubbles while a sentinel or the weather kills me. ) I prefer super fast UI dialogs how the are e.g. in Minecraft.
The trailer showed many cool non-traditional fantasy races and mounts! I expect they will be as different as players and ships in NMS? That is, players being not restricted, and able to “upgrade” their properties independent of face and looks; and mounts being possibly limited to the fantasy equivalent of “fighter/explorer/hauler”?
I have no imagination what the story could be… Why are we a dozen fantasy races, exploring a planet?
Rewatching the video, at 1:17 we see the point of view of a character carrying fire (torch), possibly at night or in a spooky place next to sleeping giants. And he sees sad Enderman ghosties staring at him. So if you want random unbased speculation to check off the list later: I randomly claim that people stopped lighting fires because the fire makes the spooky ghosties visible.
I thought when the morning came I’d have a better chance at giving my own theories or tempered expectations but every time I watch the trailer and I see there’s a Badger character my brain instantly turns to mush and goes Badger Badger Badger for the next 48 hours… AAH MUSHROOM MUSHROOOOM.
I’m torn between been a Badger or a fox. Or a frog. Or a hare…
I had the wind and the willows and Animals of Farthing Wood recorded back to back on a VHS so all those woodland creatures in this game is doing all sorts of things to my inner child
Mostly conjuring up the trauma from that kids show and it’s multiple character deaths.
I have a feeling that those shadow creatures are just going to stand there but not actually do anything. Perhaps they appear as you near something your going to interact with.
Im also wondering how the fliers are going to effect gameplay the more I think about it they aren’t NMS ships, but they seem to be close in size to one. However, they are biological creatures and not machines… in theory, they wont need launch fuel… or warp drives… maybe food instead?
And our ship has 1 major use in that it acts as a very large storage space for cargo. But there’s only 2 places you can put things in a dragon and I dont think you want to put things in any one of those places… Maybe we have to “upgrade” our cargo carrying capacity with saddle pockets?
I imagine the creatures saddles will have storage space, side bags and satchels etc.
Though I hope it’s not restricted to that. Having a giant bird that keeps all yr stuff in a sack it holds in it’s beak, occasionally dropping it to groom it’s own plumage is something I would love to have.
I’m hoping for a variety of mountable creatures similar to nms in how you can just feed em and hop on, but I hope the “ship” variety of creatures are seperate in steps taken etc.
Maybe similar to how you stumble on to crashed ship sites, you might find a nest or an injured creature, and have to nurse it back to health, similar to repairing a ship. This healing/caring moment will be the only bond you’ll ever need.
I could even see the game giving you your starting mount similar to how nms gives you a ship.
The basic tutorial at start up will most likely follow the usual here’s how to harvest, here’s how to heal, here’s how to attack; now follow the cries of an injured animal and mend it back to health. Now head to the stars and warp to another system, I er, mean, move to the next province.
There could even be a variety in the injury’s and animations. Giant bird stuck in a thorn thicket with a damaged wing? Big ol drago with a thorn in its paw… I said variety but all I can think of are thickets and thorns hahaha.
The one thing I expect is for Light No Fire to have genuinely procedurally generated sound.
No Man’s Sky has kind of semi-procedural sound and music, based on shuffling pre-recorded samples. I expect Light No Fire to have fully procedural sound and music, mathematically generated on the fly, and played in real time. I expect each piece to be original, and I expect the scheme to include such things as sound effects and alien speech.
Why do I think this? Because Bytebeat.
Why else would Hello Games go to such effort to integrate a fully polyphonic synthesiser and sequencer into their game engine?
I think at the time they framed it as “someone made this in their own time and we decided to share it as a christmas gift before we break for the new year”, major paraphrasing on my part but it uses the same system they use to make the creature noises if I recall.
Edit: Tracked down the quote.
Over the last few weeks one of our coders got obsessed with making an audio creation tool for the community, we were so excited about it we thought it’d be a nice surprise to release it.
Of course they could be using half truths back then to conceal the fact they’re working on LNF
In fact the more I read that last line “we were so excited about it we decided to release it.”, I have to wonder…
At the time I would have thought, oh release it early before the next update.
But it could also mean, “we were so excited about it we decided to put it in no mans sky”
At the time, Hello Games were gradually working through a list of things that fans had suggested should be included in the game. Suggestions which, I suspect, Hello Games took as a guide to things that should be included in any game. “Give the people what they want”, and all that.
Crucially, I don’t recall anybody suggesting that the one thing No Man’s Sky was really lacking was a polyphonic synthesiser and sequencer. Why would anyone be obsessed with making a community audio creation tool, if nobody has asked for one?
I think it’s far more likely that Hello Games wanted to experiment with the synthesiser on a live audience, and check that it worked, and didn’t cause too much of a performance hit.
I agree with this. I can see a greater implementation for procedural music in LNF. If they do use it to a greater extent, I think that they are going to use procedural ambient music generation for each biome/area we go to to make those areas feel even more diverse/unique. Perhaps have some local villagers sing a specific tune that no other village sings.
Also interesting was how HG hired a guy who specialised in making procedural cities.
And yet, he never made a single procedural city.
Other team members got to work on things that interested them, but did he? Im not sure if he had a hand in the settlements, but im wondering if he has been focusing more on LNF. If I remember correctly, SM did say that most of the team was working on the other game now. So I cant imagine this guy getting hired just to stay working on NMS and not work on what he specialises in. I dont want to get anyone’s hopes up, but I wonder if that area with that giant from the trailer was procedurally generated? It was only a small space we see, but I wonder just how far you had to walk in that village/town/settlement/city to get there?
Maybe their first job was trying to get Settlements to work on the Switch and the poor soul lost their mind and is now wandering Guildford feeding pigeons and screaming about cities in our pockets.
If you look at the way No Man’s Sky currently works, the planetary landscape is entirely procedurally generated. Buildings and installations, however, are not. For buildings, the game assembles a structure from pre-designed parts - then it cuts a circular plug out of the procedual landscape. and drops the building into the hole.
In early versions of the game, player bases worked the same way - they were predetermined sites within a defined circular area.
The newer version of bases has changed that. There’s much more freedom to work within the landscape, and extend beyond the boundaries - but it is not without problems. There are real limits to the number of base parts that can be placed, and disturbed landscape tends to grow back. There are real limits to the placement of structures within the landscape, and I suspect these are inherent to the memory allocation of the game engine.
I believe that procedural cities would require much more resource allocation than the current game engine allows. Hello Games must have known this from their experience with base design - therefore any implementation of procedural cities must be for the future.
Less a new engine as the nms engine seems quite scalable considering what they’ve done with it, and more dropping the weight of older gen support.
No mans sky could probably become a lot more than it currently is if they weren’t aiming for parity across all platforms, I imagine settlements is a ghost that still haunts them and they want to avoid as much of that as possible.
That’s the edge that LNF has over NMS, it can step on the gas a little harder.
Did we ever get any concrete evidence of stuff that came out of Hello Games Labs? Any time I see a new small studio appear making a proc gen game I wonder, did they do a stint in HG labs?
I tried looking into that a few times when I was trying to figure out how they were making money still but I couldn’t find anything on it. I really wonder what came of that.
Thats a good point. I wonder if we’ll be able to manipulate the landscape in LNF. It would be beneficial for the engine if we DIDNT have the ability to manipulate the terrain anywhere we liked. It would be better if only specific areas allow for terrain manipulation such as a dedicated mining area and other places have to leave the terrain alone. This could allow for much greater sized buildings. In addition, if LNF doesnt aim to be on Switch… Or ANY of the old gen consoles for that matter… I imagine that the structure placement limit could be drastically increased.
I reference Ark a lot here but it does give an idea of what COULD be done with building limits/cities because the sheer size of structures you can build in that game(the older version, I cant speak on the newer UE5 version) with such beautiful graphical fidelity while simultaneously having hoards of of AI creatures roaming the area AND you have health and hit boxes for each and every structure piece with a server of up to 70 players is very impressive. And the game was made in a very old version of Unreal Engine too(but the game can easily reach 400gb+)
So I see no reason why large procedural cities wont be in LNF. Or atleast being able to build structures next to other player’s structures to create our own cities.
Edit:
In case anyone wants to see an example of what im talking about, here is one. Just skip to the end to see a huge castle with several interior rooms(but no furniture in this one). It runs fairly well even on some dated PCs.
I agree. I want an entirely seperate game. It is time for something new. But, I do believe it will feel very familiar, and therefore, people will see connections even if none exists.
) I prefer super fast UI dialogs how the are e.g. in Minecraft. 
I expect they will be as different as players and ships in NMS? That is, players being not restricted, and able to “upgrade” their properties independent of face and looks; and mounts being possibly limited to the fantasy equivalent of “fighter/explorer/hauler”? 
they aren’t NMS ships, but they seem to be close in size to one. However, they are biological creatures and not machines… in theory, they wont need launch fuel… or warp drives… maybe food instead?
Maybe we have to “upgrade” our cargo carrying capacity with saddle pockets?