kalron: You missed my point entirely. You are thinking that I am wanting a "story" generated for me, but I was specifically talking about the world build in games like Gothic II and how it becomes a character in it's own right. What I asked was how a procedural world, or universe in NMS case, can have that same feel. Because right now, it doesn't, but it can be "improved". There are many upon many different generated worlds, but after awhile you can start to see what drives the generation. Whereas with Gothic, every tree is placed by hand, crafted to fit the story being told, creating the world that is Gothic. These two games are totally comparable, because in the end they are both about exploration, regardless of the size of the world or universe you can explore.

Also, I'm not re-starting the hate train, as obviously stated in my replies in this thread. This is purely a discussion about the two and how they can become one. If you read some of the replies you would understand that, there are some highly intelligent concepts put forth that could inspire someone to push the genera further. Please reread the thread again before making another comment and insulting my original post. This is a discussion thread in the end, and I'm discussing possibilities for the future, not trolling or rehashing some stupid hyped "it's good/it sucks" mentality.

BTW, I'm about 30 hrs into the game and loving it...so no hate here.

zerebrush: One reason (perhaps "THE" one) that I started about a certain RPG approach is that HG already started to put "some" kind of RPG element (a background story) into NMS.

Seeing that, and trying to follow this rudimentary plot I had to see that it had been only very poorly done.

For me the question was: why add something only maybe 10% of the way?
If I want to play something without plot, I'll get me an arkade game (or play Diabolo :) ).

Well, I do not keep track of the hours I spend in NMS, but my dear wife (best of all) already talks of "... bad things to come!" if I do not change, so ...