No Man's Sky Release...

Shame.

I liked minecraft's map generator, even though it had the same biomes, I always had fun exploring, and most worlds had some weird features that made them very memorable. It doesn't beat Dwarf Fortress' gen but that's kind of unfair.

I think in the desktop version it's still technically endless, it just doesn't work... properly after ~30 million blocks in either direction.
So how big is the actual galaxy? I remember reading xy quintillion, is that true? I think it's really hard to make procedurally generated worlds actually interesting. Okay yeah, this one looks blue and this one is green, this one has 29% nitrogen and this one has 28.2%, but even though they are 'unique', to the player they are basically the same... (I'm just talking about procedural generation in general, I'm not dissing the game)

I think part of the problem is that we mostly got what we were told we'd get; an exploration game. The people with hype were thinking "procedurally-generated space MMO with epic adventures." These people, who preferred hopping from system to system in hopes of something non-copied rather than thoroughly exploring each system's planets, proceeded to swarm the Steam reviews and other places en masse with negativity over their own expectations.

In short, disappointment brought by hype, not by lies.

(Coming from someone who hasn't gotten the game yet)

I was really excited for this following the E3 previews, but for some reason now it just seems meh, even excluding everyone's usual criticisms. Maybe I was won over by the dinosaur.

Some of the mistakes in its development do have a worrying similarity to Thrive, though. Developers promised things they couldn't deliver and its main draw was the vague declaration that it would be a procedurally generated universe. I just hope we don't fall into the same traps.

All we need to do is keep our heads and not make wild promises. We'll just do the best we can and see how it turns out. Play it cool.

In my opinion Thrive's greatest weakness is also its greatest strength, the fact that it's free, non-profit, and open-source. Budgets, deadlines, work schedules and the likes are the reasons professional paid studios can't always deliver on their promises and ultimately have to release their game and stop development. Thrive never has to stop development because all the code and assets are online for everyone to access.

I like to think of Thrive as a bunch of roommates who watched a cooking show and suggested that a pizza sandwich cake wrap roll lasagna that tastes good and is good for you would be really awesome. Then some of the roommates decided to hit the kitchen and try and tackle the beast. The other roommates watched and complained that it was taking too long and it wasn't looking good, but if they want it to be made faster or look better they can damn well get off the couch and come help make the thing. I can't just get up and go start working on Spore to make it a better game, but I very much can do my part to help Thrive whenever and however I can, and that's what sets it apart from other games. So I don't think it can really become a disappointment, because unless the Earth explodes, everyone is always free to keep adding more to the game and making it better.

A little bit of hyperbole but you get the picture.

Oh really?

The open-source come and go as you please thing could be a blessing or a curse, but we don't know yet. Unlike No Man's Sky, our main worry (at the moment) isn't that the game will be bad, but that it won't happen at all. It's arguable that's one of the worst ways to think when making a game, since it's still completely possible for the game be complete garbage in the end no matter what happens. I don't think that will be the case, because if someone finds a fault they can either fix it themselves or give instant feedback to the developers. Thrive is in a kind of perpetual QA with a potentially large group of testers, so over time I hope feedback from that process can sculpt it into something worthwhile. Although, a tip for QA testing: players are always right when they think something doesn't work, but they're usually wrong about how to fix it or what to replace it with.

And about your point, I don't know about anyone else, but my motivation now is to get the game to a place where I can feel satisfied leaving it alone knowing it can continue into the future. As it stands it's still on shaky footing, and I want to do all I can to fix that, but I don't want to be attached to the game forever. I do intend to leave at some point in the future. That's a bit difficult when you've grown a following purely from one thing (see: my YouTube channel, which only gets attention because of Thrive). But I've realised recently I can't focus on Thrive much longer, since I have a life to attend to elsewhere. I do intend to watch from the sidelines eventually. Maybe I'll still have some involvement in music, but right now I feel like I'm doing too much and have been for a while. But hey, Wikis, websites and Devblogs don't write and maintain themselves.

EDIT: This thread has gone a bit off-topic. Not sure where to cut it though.

Have you heard of Space Engine? It's the same principle as No Man's Sky, but free and with no animals. It is absolutely beautiful though and completely to scale from what I understand.

EDIT: I've spent countless hours in Space Engine and it never gets old