Neat, but are all the planets chock-a-block full of life? If so, that's using a kind of math seriously divorced from our own experience with planets. Yes, it would be insanely boring if all the planets were either barren rocky planetoids (with the occasional microbial life) or gas giants. It reminds me a bit of when I returned to Minecraft six months ago, after not playing for a year or more. The new biomes made me want to pick a direction and walk and walk and walk, but after a while, it became monotonous.

Not sure I want to find anything named by people on the Internets...

Is this Spore?

Remains to be seen if EVERY star system contains life or if he just didn't properly describe the systems. More than likely, like similar games where you explore the universe, you will have a sustainability of life detector.

Also, you do realize that the exploration of a planet is one aspect fo the game? Assuming this is a sim, there will be city creation, ship creation, etc. I mean, really think about all the aspects of things in the actual universe and those things may all be possible.

I don't know anything about their plans for creativity, but if it's anything like Minecraft, you can do a youtube search to see the endless possibilities of that game. Now imagine it in an entire universe?

Or an entire planet's worth of ecology, ranging from desert to tundras to barrier reefs to Himalayanesque mountain ranges -- That's amazing.

But only as amazing as our imaginations can project. Not as limiting as we only see in the small space of time allowed to air on Colbert.

It's pretty, the math behind it looks impressive, the scale is amazing, but every demo I see I still have no idea what the 'game' part of it is. i'm not expecting much for such a small team.

Maybe this will be something that gets built on or modded heavily but my guess is the initial experience is going to be pretty bare bones.

So much overhype. Kinda matches spore in that respect as well.

Oh yuck. Hear that audience clap for all those words. Yeesh.

Quite.

At least they seem to have stepped back a bit from some of their earliest hype where they were talking up their use of procedural generation in a way that implied it was a completely groundbreaking new concept that no other game has used before.

In fairness, I don't think these guys are quite like a certain other British game dev who is famous for hugely over-hyping his games. I think it's just the nature of their game that people can see how expansive it is...but not necessarily determine if there is really much going on beneath the skin. Ultimately I'm not sure its their fault people can't manage their expectations.

Either way I am super glad that they will probably make a tidy sum given that their studio got badly flooded a few years ago.

They may have ditched some arrogance, but they're still talking about this as though it is procedurally generated. This game is not procedurally generated in the sense that most people consider the use of the term. You could better describe it as 'over-reliance on randomization in place of design'. It doesn't help that they've deferred the rest of their game design to player participation, instead of actually constructing a game.