"The negativity in here is weird. What is it with gamer's that they just want to shit all over things?"

This is not the first time we've seen this pattern before. Somebody promises The Ubergame, the all-singing, all-dancing Game of Games to End All Other Games, generated by writing down the wishlist of all possible features of a game in some genre and promising at least half of them. The appearance of "procedural content" and the resulting large numbers is not the first time we've seen this, either.

The result, up to this point, is rather uniform... what actually gets delivered is a "meh" game, in some sense because while all the endless list of features were getting checked off nobody took any time to put a game in there.

Here's one historical example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD

Many of them never even get released.

I rather fully expect that No Man's Sky gets released, gets reviewed well, and then about a month in, people start realizing there isn't much "there" there.

One problem is that people don't understand how to think about procedural generation. Quadrillions of planets nothing... why not octillions? The number of possible outcomes of the procedural system is irrelevant. The sum total of all possible Minecraft seeds and all possible spaces within those seeds is within spitting distance of the number of orders of magnitude of what you'd need to pave over the entire Milky Way galaxy, but nevertheless one can pretty much explore Minecraft and see just about everything there is to offer from the landscape generator in a month... and I'm being generous. The proper measure of procedural generation is not the raw number of combinations, but how many truly distinct things can be generated, and whether or not the parameters can interact to produce unexpected things. For instance, my favorite thing I've seen in Minecraft was an island with a cave that happened to cut right through the outside of the island, producing a space within it where the ocean was basically one of the walls of the cave. Unrealistic, but cool, and a credit to the ways things interacted with each other.

Anyways, to sum up, if this isn't your first time around the hype cycle on a game like this, it's hard not to see similarities to things we've already seen before, draw comparisons, and want to deflate the hype bubble. The end result of this may be a good game, it probably won't be a great game, it has a decent chance of still being a bad game to play even if sometimes pretty to look at, and odds are extremely high that it won't actually match the expectations that anybody has for it.

If those predictions are wrong, I won't have problems saying so. Maybe this is the one. No sarcasm. It's possible. But don't, you know, pour thousands of dollars into preordered goods on it or anything, like apparently some have for Star Citizen, one of the other Everything Games currently out there. http://www.reaxxion.com/10195/why-star-citizen-is-likely-goi... (Kickstarting an Everything Game is unfortunately quite simple... even approximately finishing it is quite another.)

See also: Spore, Fable and most of the latter half of Peter Molyneux's career (Black and White too), all of the iterations of Elite past the first one. Some of these turned out OK (at best), none so much as resembled their hype.