This game's been getting a lot of hype lately.
I suspect it's going to be rather boring in practice, but the concept is pretty fascinating. The universe is procedurally generated and contains, theoretically, some number of quintillions of planets. Whether those planets actually exist if no one ever visits them, is an interesting question itself.
It looks like the inputs into the universe-generating model are largely static but those that are dynamic are common to everyone who's synced via internet. So if you go to some planet and exterminate some species, any other visitors to that planet won't find that species there anymore (I don't know if that's actually true, just an example).
Game universes have been procedurally generated in the past, but this looks to be the most ambitious example, perhaps by a huge margin. We'll see for sure when it releases (as you can probably tell it does seem to have some issues regarding the relative scale of things, possibly just to make it more playable). IMO procedural universe generation deserves to be a field of science and be pushed to its limit. The same techniques can be (and are) used for modeling weather, election results, etc. As we learn to generate coherent universes with finer detail they will become commensurately more useful.
Or maybe we're already unwittingly all too familiar with the concept.
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