Don't you just love the answer :lol:
I did watch the Gamescom demo. It also had one quest, just like the procedural planet video I linked, and a bunch of things that could eventually be shops if they were actually interactable. But there was no actual interaction with them - the presenter walked by and looked at them while he talked about what they would be someday. There were a few NPCs standing around that weren’t interacted with but they did bark out the occasional prerecorded lines of dialogue, probably triggered by entering a trigger volume. The presenter promised they would be populated eventually. I believe him too - that’s not something you can ship without. But it’s not in there yet, and it certainly isn’t ready for showing off. If it were, they would have shown it.
That’s the thing with these demos - I’m judging based on what they actually have in the demo, and extrapolating from that based on my years of experience. Talk is cheap. I’ve worked on enough demo builds and the resulting products to know this very well. This is exactly the sort of thing you put into a tech demo - look at our base technology, here’s what we want to happen in the future, imagine what we could do. But as an actual demo of gameplay, it’s lacking because they are still not showing several core systems. If it were to be a vertical slice, it would need to have all of these core elements in the game - shops, quests, locations, leveling up, modifying ships, equipment and stats, UI, and so on. This is not an indictment of the quality of the game itself, but it does show how far they are in the development process… and that is not all that far, given the scope of the game. This sort of demo is more indicative of being in the preproduction phase than production (i.e. when they have their [vertical slice] with all major gameplay systems working and are working to populate the game with content built on those core systems), which suggests that it will be a very long time before they can actually ship this game. This is why I said in the last post what’s important is sometimes what isn’t there, and not what is. Demos at shows are part real and part smoke and mirrors, and it’s my experience in development that helps me differentiate between the two.
If the plan is to use procedural generation to create planet surfaces, then that’s fine. It would save some time from a level design perspective at the cost of having the planetary surface areas that aren’t hand-made look generic. But the general problems with procedural generation stand - if everything is to be populated by hand, then you’re going to have a lot of planetary surface area that just isn’t very interesting because they won’t have the manpower to populate that much surface area with content. 32 million square kilometers of explorable terrain per planet isn’t very fun if you only have enough development resources (design, engineering, QA, etc.) to populate and test 300 square kilometers of it. If you populate it with procedural quests and points of interest, that content will tend to blend together because it’s generating them from a template. There’s only so much work that can be done (and paid for) before the game has to ship.
