And that’s great! Me personally, I enjoy that I have all of those things in a single game that has a really cool setting that I enjoy. I can hop from one thing to another to another, or intermingle them as much as I’d like. You prefer to have immeasurable depth in each of your areas, preferring specialized games instead of a more generalized yet vast experience.

That doesn’t mean NMS is a bad game. It just means it’s not your game, and that’s totally fine. I have zero interest in any of the games you mentioned, but I still see the appeal to them and accept that they’re probably great games in their own right.

There’s a disconnect there though. People have dedicated their time to this, and without at least a decent amount of depth it wouldn’t be able up keep their attention that long. If you’re not able to find the depth, or it’s just not your style of game, that’s totally fine. But clearly many people have.

Look at corvette building, as an example. If you just take it as surface level, you can bust out a ship and come up with a pretty okay design in an hour or 2. So that a few times and you’ve pretty much done everything you can. However, if you start messing around with glitch building and really diving into the excitement of recreating your favorite ships from sci-fi, or just seeing how far you can push things, you can spend dozens upon dozens of hours just building ships.

This same thing goes for base building, farm building, settlement development. And this is all on top of the story, expeditions, daily quests, etc. So yeah, it’s a sandbox game without one specific thing driving it, but that’s what a LOT of people really like about the game (including myself).

The important thing for me is that they didn’t just shrug and move on to something else. The devs take the issues and suggestions and work towards a better game each time. What other company has completely overhauled a game like this?

The great thing is that you don’t have to interact with it if you don’t want to. And I’m not sure you can call a game who people have played for over a thousand hours shallow.

Looks like. Board games are pretty awesome. Heck, you could become a game designer/developer!

It’s not a bubble though. That’s like waiting for the internet bubble to pop back in the 90s. AI will be around from now on, just not as such an in your face way. It will eventually become ubiquitous, just like many other pieces of tech.

There were no artists who would have been paid to create placeholder textures. They would have used textures from open source sources, or from previously used textures.

I agree that AI should never replace the job a person could do, but in this instance the user of AI caused no loss of income.

The reason they didn’t disclose it as being used in the creation of the game is probably because no AI was used in the ultimate development. It’s an artist who uses AI to generate concepts and inspiration using AI in their artwork, even if everything in the end is hand crafted and doesn’t resemble any of the generated images?

One thing we need to take into account going forward too is that AI will inevitably be used for things like texture maps and environmental generation. Things that have been randomly generated with algorithms. In a year it’s going to be nearly impossible to say no game can have any AI used at all, unless you want the pool of potential to be incredibly small.

I’ve been using Scribus for layout design for years. It works well, but there’s a huge learning curve. Being able to have another option would at least be welcomed.