No Man's Sky Controversially Wins Innovation Award at GDC 2017

"Games' divisive adventure may be about as interesting as flavourless jelly"
Your bias amazes me I think like many think the game was a lot of fun !

More likely they skipped it because they knew if they won, eventually someone would've cornered them to ask questions about when they'll actually, you know, make it a playable game?

I thought it was a solid game.

That said I went in knowing what I was getting in to. I think a lot of people jumped on the hype train having no idea what they signed up for.

The technology in no man sky is really innovative, the gameplay loop of the game is just okay though. I think it's better if the game minimize it's scope, make a couple of planets thats big and varied rather than a lot of fully procedurally generated planet thats empty.

Pokemon go can't win at innovative awards because it's a reskinned google game, Ingress.

Well, if nothing else, it was an interesting experiment.

The Witness seems more like a marvel of game design.

I enjoyed the game for a good 15-20 hours but then it all became a bit samey. I loved the idea of the game but after that amount of time playing there was just no point to the game anymore in my opinion.

@Splat exactly.
Good game, just too much hype

Yes, this will upset screaming children that didn't get multiplayer maps and micro transactions.

...what's innovative?
Nothing in this game hasn't been done before...
I hate awards shows.

Its a procedurally generated galaxy, not a universe. Upon reaching the center of the galaxy you're just taken too a different one. IMO that isn't really a true procedurally generated universe, just a series of galaxies. Also Spore (a similarly lackluster game) already implemented that procedural generation idea years ago.

no man's sky is the one game that every games store here has more than a dozen copies of on shelves...

@namazuros and Elite in 1984.

@get2sammyb 1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_%28video_game%28

I read the title a couple of hours ago and have only just stopped laughing. On topic I don't think procedural generation is that innovative, games have been doing it for decades now and the rest of the game was more a poorman's mix of a few other games that came before it.

@themcnoisy blast! You beat me to it!
Too many people don't know their computing history.
"Oh, but you can land in NMS!" So then it's Minecraft.
"You can walk around the planet!" Not actually that different, and it's not the first game with spherical maps.

NMS has nothing new in it.

@Ralizah well, it looks very carefully crafted, but like Braid he took an existing games ideas (Mario then, Myst now) and added more mechanics.
The Witness is unquestionably superior in mechanics to Myst. So is... just about anything. Plot unfolds the same way.
I can't say first hand how close it gets, because I'm rubbish at puzzles, but i hear it has a 20 min fmv cutscene that makes no sense. Sounds like Myst right here. ;p

I'm not saying it's bad, but I think it's good to distinguish innovation, quality and actual design. I don't see it as innovative. It's just well made.

Yawn, innovation doesn't exist then. All books are trash because all words have already been written. Fall off a high horse and crawl away.

@Bad-MuthaAdebisi Maybe its the way its been heralded as innovative, when it isn't.

Maybe its innovative, in as much as they were browsing kickstarter, Saw elite dangerous hit a million quid and went. Come on lads put trials ahem I mean Joe danger away and lets make space clones instead.

@themcnoisy I'm pretty confused because ever since I first played centipede on Atari I've never thought any other game since "well that's mind blowing innovation, throw them an award" it's always been a gradual progression to more complex games. I'm not sure how anyone can suggest they definitely don't deserve it. May as well not bother with an innovation award at all.

GDC seems to get get crazier each year, this does not convince me otherwise.

@Bad-MuthaAdebisi I think the games its competing against as well as the swell of VR games at the reason. Elite actually curtailed its universe / galaxy back in 84 as the publishers said that it needs to be more focused, they had a fully working prototype with hundreds of thousands of places to go, but rightfully common sense prevailed to make it the best game of its type until the 90s.

The issue I found was this 18 quintillion planets meants that every single planet I landed on or even saw was either green blue or red, because of the statistical liklihood of that happenening was fairly high.

This in turn made everything feel exactly the same to me.
Right down to the fact I saw two "different" species of animal that were amost identical, save for one being a slightly darker brown.

The idea and complexity was a great concept but in the end having that many possibilities was inevitibly going to fail.

I mean, I took a screenshot of 20 planets in a row that I landed on and they are all the exact same red hue, it would be easy to assume they are all just one planet.

Technically a great game but like bread it went stale after a short while...shame but yeah for pushing the boundaries of game building it deserved an award.