NMS: BEYOND pre-release August 14

Can a PS4 save file be extracted and edited?

Yes you’re quite right, terrible for NMS, great for me :stuck_out_tongue:

that i don’t know. NMS Save Editor is for the PC. :frowning_face:

I’m with all of you who feel that the first 2 parts of Beyond (online and VR) are niche additions. I’m sure HG knows this and that may be why they let on about them so early. I believe the last pill- errrr umm, sorry … the last part of Beyond will be something we can all sink our teeth into. :crossed_fingers:

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I hope they add Lore (I know, I keep saying the same over and over…).
As Vr and Multiplayer improvement are nice, I really hope we’ll be able to experience these trough new things to do/read/discover.

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Oh, they’re certainly not niche. They’re all but niche. They’re probably the most requested features out there.
However, I am niche, so those mainstream features don’t have much appeal to me :smile:

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tis about BLODDY HELL time HG says something lol

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Ziggy, by now you should know how things are with HG. They won’t announce something unless they’re absolutely 100% certain they can deliver it. They’ve had their fingers badly burned that way in the past, and they’re not about to repeat the experience.

The fact that they’re not saying means they’re not completely sure they can make it work. Which, to me, suggests something they’ve never done before.

Just off the top of my head, how about fully mobile, fully interactive NPCs joining you (or opposing you) in procedurally generated story lines?

How about NPC space fighter fleets that you can actually command, fight alongside, and actually do real damage?

Just a few thoughts - I know HG have considered these things in the past, but felt they would put too much strain on the game engine. But with enough optimisation - who knows?

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lol, no problem i just was using the word BLOODY for them!

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Right, (Right), you’re bloody well right
You got a bloody right to say
Right, you’re bloody well right
You know you got a right to say

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It’s possible that they’re not quite sure if some things will make it in time, but the core features will be running by now. They could talk about those.
They don’t, because they never do. They didn’t talk much more about Atlas or NEXT before launch either, we just weren’t so busy noticing because we were too busy playing WT… :wink:

We know they walk. I do hope they make the most of that, but by this point have kind of given up hoping they’ll ever get into procedural narrative.

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Yes, i’m hoping it’s more than a point to point animated sequence. That would stink, actually.

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The animals have a range of behaviours and reactions, and they can act in groups. The various grades of sentinel have even more complex behaviours. It can’t be beyond the wit of man (person?) to imbue Vy’Keen, Gek, and Korvax with something even more complex. They can already produce text reactions to procedural tasks. It seems all the necessary elements already exist.

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It depends on what you have in mind when you say “procedurally generated story lines”. Something like involving them in a quest system like e.g. daggerfall (or radiant quests in skyrim, if anybody’s more familiar with that) or something along the lines of side missions from the first mass effect is within reasonable limits. Also other things from open world games like sites that you can attack and loot, or things like escort quests etc. The real question here is how far they have developed the AI. They had the animations since the launch of next, it would technically have been trivial even back then to just let them randomly move around their local area a bit, but navigation of less constrained world spaces or combat is a bit more involved. It would get somewhat simplified if they did indeed come up with a dungeon kind of generator, since that could generate optimised pathing nodes and things like clearly identifiable cover and flanking routes a lot more easily than the open terrain.
Anything in that sort of direction would be a lot of fun, highly welcome, and within possibility.

However, that is not what I think when I hear “procedural storylines”. That is a higher-order generator that uses some kind of generative quest system for representation, but goes far beyond just generating a few random characters, objects and locations and slapping them into a pre-defined quest template, and is more occupied with giving them meaning inside the game world.
Only very few games have ever tried to venture there. It had been my hope from even before day 1 of NMS that HG would eventually venture into that territory, but there has been no indication of any inclination towards that kind of content generation so far, so I don’t think it’ll be happening.

On the plus side, the sore absence of development in that direction in the gaming industry as a whole has finally prompted me to start my own experiment a few months ago. On the down side, I barely have time to play games now… :smile:

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Would this be more like a proc gen RPG that you are referring to? RPG’s are my favorite type of game. Mass Effect was a game I could really sink myself into. It also led to an ‘attachment’ to the characters. The closest we get to this in NMS is the missions from our different base terminal characters. I would be happy if they were more animated and had more random snippets of conversation. They help give my otherwise lonely base some ‘life’.
It would be nice, when a ship lands at my base, to see the pilot walk in and conduct business at the Trade Terminal or with my Weapon’s Specialist, etc…or have a proc gen task I could help out with. However, rather than sending me to fetch something, I would like for them to look for a place to set up base. Maybe I could help them build a base or find them a place to move into, like the different empty structures that are scattered around the planet…but, I am probably asking for too much. :smile:

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The term of an RPG is somewhat muddy in computer games nowadays. The concept is not really bound to a certain genre, however any game employing them needs a large, malleable world so the generator can actually find places to populate with stories without worrying too much about messing up predefined content, and representation accross the whole game would have to be relatively simple, otherwise the gap between handcrafted content and procedurally generated content becomes too jarring.
P&P RPGs are built around these concepts to enable a human DM to do these things, and since many CRPGs have origins going back to P&P many would be a natural fit, but they are certainly not the only ones.
In fact, NMS would fulfill the criteria perfectly. But it’s an area of game development that even Dwarf Fortress is starting to really explore only just now, and it literally has a decade heads-start on the rest of the industry where procedurally generated history is concerned, so I’m not expecting any movement in that direction by anybody in the foreseeable future. For now, the archetypal genre that toys with these concepts the most are roguelikes, which is why most research and PoCs are to be found there.

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Agreed, just tempering expectations.

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Your comparison with P&P RPGs is very apt. Modern MMOs are absolutely stuffed with procedurally generated content. The procedural generator is, however, the other players.

Granted, it’s something of a task to ensure this doesn’t interfere too much with the scripted gameplay, but it can be, and is, done.

Whether current AI is capable of replicating this sort of complexity, particularly within the overhead of the game, is a moot point. However, both Planet Explorers and The Signal From Tolva made brave attempts.

It should be noted, of course, that both those games were partly (even largely) scripted. Still…

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Thought it would be good to link this thread here too. It seems big 300 player multi-play could be true. Exciting times.

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BEYOND UPDATE GETS A RATING RELEASE IN AUSTRALIA

https://pureplaystation.com/no-mans-sky-beyond-has-been-rated-for-release-in-australia/2019/07/

and another link to the Australian classification page if interested:

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