I want that game to be good, but I somehow doubt it will be.
I remember watching a video from IGN, I think it was called "IGN First", about No Man's Sky. I'm not sure if it was a modified demo for the cameras but the version that was shown had me worrying about the "exploration" aspect of the game. You could see Sean Murray playing it, and with the press of one button (on the controller) he scanned an entire planet's worth of "points of interests". I know that I'll see a lot of disagreement on this but so be it. In exploration-based games, Points of Interests are a bane and it needs to die, or at the very least needs to be dramatically decreased.
Having PoIs on your compass/radar or just blatantly "being there" on-screen up to the horizon telling you "Look, there's something over there!" is essentially the developers doing the actual exploration work (and fun) for you. All you have to do is hop on your ship, "go there" because you already know there's something to be "discovered", land, "discover" whatever it is that the PoI was so gentle in doing for you, go back in your ship, rinse and repeat until you clear the planet's PoIs.
It didn't start with No Man's Sky, it's quite an old concept in gaming, but I always disliked it, especially starting (well, starting for me) with Oblivion, but it lasts to this day, up to The Witcher 3 to Fallout 4. Another example indeed, in the The Witcher 3, at first the map is empty of PoIs, good, right? You'll get to actually explore to actually discover things on your own, right? Nope. If you dare reading notes on the notice boards of various villages you'll magically have interrogation points (Points of Interests) appearing on your map. Sure, you don't know what exactly is there, but you now have the coordinates, screw exploration (side note, I still adore Witcher 3, don't get me wrong here, it's overall definitely a masterpiece in my book). Now, at least, Witcher 3 is story-driven, so I can tolerate PoIs to a degree.
In a game like No Man's Sky, however, there's going to be no sense of direction except your own. There's going to be no cut scenes, no scripts, no dialogue, etc. The only thing that No Man's Sky truly offers (on paper) is pure infinite exploration (literally). The problem is that PoIs in that game specifically is the highest contradiction that could have happened. If ALL I have to do is literally make my space jump to spawn next to a planet in high orbit and press A on my controller to reveal every locations with things to discover then what's the ultimate point? It will become a "chase the PoIs on every planet" game and I sincerely don't want that. What I want is to land on an unknown planet with absolutely zero indication of what actually is on that planet, much less receiving directions as to where to go. If I land next to a lake I DON'T want to know ahead of time that there's actually nothing in it or around me on land for another 55 kilometers. And if I decide to take off and leave that planet behind and in doing so "missing" a couple of artifacts and whatnot because I didn't explore it enough then so be it, like true explorers.
But anyway, as I said... perhaps they only had a specific version to show for the guys of IGN and the mass of gamers waiting for it. And maybe the final version of the game will be very different when it comes to PoIs (maybe they will be very limited, maybe the type of scanners you have will yield different scanning results, maybe scans won't be global, etc). Time will tell. I just don't want the devs to do the exploration work for me.
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