A pretty reasonable assumption, actually.
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So Potential Spoilers has become Potential Economics 101, 
Hopefully, their Hello Labs venture will begin to generate a positive flow of cash. With the feud just starting between Steam and Epic and the painfully slow pace of game approval through Tencent, I would be a bit concerned. Does anyone know if NMS has made the approval list for Tencent or are they having to go through the agonizing wait period?
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As far as I know, NEXT launched on Tencent roughly at the same time as everywhere else.
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It is articles like this that make me ask. Nothing happens in China without governmental approval…
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/12/29/18160136/china-lifts-video-game-ban-not-tencent-fortnite-pubg-league
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Huh. To be honest, I have no idea, but the launch on Tencent was announced to be at the same time, and nothing was ever communicated that said something different…
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Honestly, if they just go radio silent again and then drop a big update for the anniversary, I’m going to be a bit pissed. Not because it’s too long to wait for an update, they have to move them at their own schedule, but keep bloody talking, HG! You were doing so great in that regard!
If this is the plan, at least they could have said something along the lines of “This concludes our regularly scheduled updates and community events, we’ll now retreat for a couple of months to get the next big thing ready” or somesuch. All fine and well.
But don’t have active, regular engagement with your community and then suddenly play dead again without as much as a single word. This should be so painfully obvious, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry… 
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Vote vote vote Hurry hurry hurry
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Voted for NMS. waves hello
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Hint, sweet hint…
Maybe there’s a chance we’ll have these gorgeous forests or cities or even bigger buildings on the next big update.
The same way the created bigger trees, why not bigger buildings or forests? I’m not an expert on procedural games and I don’t even nnow which engine they’re using and what is the limit for HG about inplementing things.
It is kinda hard knowing about it any I let you guys tell me what is the best we can expect, but these are my questions:
Ok, Atlas Rises was mindblowing, and I won’t even talking about the Next extension BUT.
As long as these extensions are really great, the planets didn’t really change. I mean (please don’t get me wrong because I am in love with the game since day1) but we still have that, always the same pattern, of grass or sand or trees or clifs etc. There’s not a single planet where you say to yourself … wow, this is absolutely different!
I know HG implemented new kind of planets, with different colors, or bigger trees etc. But at the end I don’t feel that the planets are really that different between them.
Could HG with the tools they are using, create very different planets? I know he retweeted art works, and art works always looks better.
But could they transform the land into what we see on those pictures according to the tools they are using?
Sorry if I didn’t post on the good topic, I was just answering to Sheralmyst on Sean’s Tweets haha
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They’re using their own engine. As to the limits of what they can do, like e.g. how dense they can make the forests, it is mostly a question of performance. Since the capability of the hardware they’re running the game on won’t be improved, this again is mostly a question of optimisation. And estimating how much faster they can make their generation is pure speculation, so it’s impossible to say how much they can still improve on that.
New features and mechanics are another matter, here it’s just a question of what they want to do, because they could do almost anything.
That is inherent to a procedural system. Essentially, an unconstrained procedural system like the one of NMS is a post-scarcity situation for content. Meaning there cannot be anything truly unique. They could put something in manually, but then the probability of anybody actually finding it is way too small to justify the effort.
Try breaking it down to the abstract level. They’re planets. How can they not be similar? Let’s say there was just one planet of each type in the game… would you still say that there is no difference between them? That the lush planet with vibrant trees and oceans is the same as the dead planet with its eerily empty landscape, and that this is the same planet as the exotic planet with pillars of light all over the place, and that this is the same planet as the toxic planet with mushrooms growing all over the place, etc? You probably wouldn’t. What you are perceiving as “no real difference” is the inflation of the currency “content” in a post-scarcity economy. There’s just so much of everything that theycan only set themselves apart by tiny details.
That is not to say that HG could not improve on the variety. They can always do that, and have been doing so relentlessly. What I’m trying to show is that no matter how much variety is added, things will never feel truly varied. The criticism is aplicaple to every procedural system ever. Repetition is in the very nature of infinity.
Theoretically, yes. But it wouldn’t solve the problem. After seeing the hundreth fallen tree across a chasm, or the umpteenth tower on a rocky island, you’ll arrive at the same conclusion: That there is nothing truly unique, nothing really different. And that conclusion isn’t wrong, either. What is wrong is the assumption that this could ever change by just adding more variety. The only way it could ever change is by regulating quantity.
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Before NEXT, the colour palette was very varied with some of the most astounding planets being because of the unusual colour contrasts. Even though it was easy to quickly recognise a planet type, it was the striking colours that kept me exploring.
Eg: Burning hot planet with a vibrant red landscape and briliant yellow-orange skies.
or
A green verdant planet with purple and white trees and oceans.
or
An empty planet with dark grey land and a dark crimson sky.
The variation was almost endless.
NMS had a unique look that no other game had.
After NEXT, everything became more ‘normal’ and the weird colour variations were gone. Yes, they introduced an astounding number of new and interesting things to see and do but for some reason they considerably reduced the vibrancy. Had they added the new things AND retained the original colour styling I think it would have been nicer and have helped keep the NMS ‘look’ we’d all grown to love. The mechanics are better and there is so much more to do now but it was the vibrant bizzareness that kept me addicted.
I am a bit confused as to why the unique colour and style was dropped. It greatly added to the variation.
I still miss the glistening towers of heridium. It marked the NMS universe as something unique. The game now has an almost generic open-world-game look and in this it kind of became dull.
But of course I’m still playing… 
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Indeed, that was a bit puzzling.
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Thanks guys for these excellent answers! I’m not trying to hate anything, don’t get me wrong. I am deeply in love with the game, I was just wondering how far could they go according to the art works Sean re-tweeted (engine and procedural system).
At least now I know a little more. I am dreaming of vast deep forests where the sun can’t reach (
These artworks… grrr having this inside the game wow imagine (:
Again, they were just naive question, not trying to upset anyone here (: Hello Games are just kncredibly talented on how they improved the game, at this point it is aready outstanding!!
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No worries, I wasn’t upset. I just thought I’d point out that it is a fallacy to think that one could ever be truly satisfied with a procedural system. There’s always more that could be added.
I too hope they keep adding variety, but I also know that they’ll stop at some point, and that no matter where that point will be it will feel arbitrary and “too early”.
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That’s where the modders step in. I still have not tried one. The one by @Redmas looks very nice.
I have not tried one because of all the updating. As you stated, that will come to an end.
Mods are the reason I moved to PC.
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Yeah I think people think that a spectrum of stuff that makes no sense is better than something you remember as being like something else but that once you become very familiar with it becomes a special place. It is like not being Chinese and looking at the diversity of the Billion of Chinese People. You would think none of them look different but if you lived there long enough you would start to see the differences. Play on a world in NMS for a few months and you will start to see the very unique features of that world.
One of the greatest features of NMS is the fact that you can familiarize yourself with a place in a near Infinite Universe
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