This might be an unpopular opinion, but I'm enjoying the new planets so far. To a point, with caveats, and of course there's always room for improvement no matter how good it is (or isn't).
Initially I was disappointed, like many others, since it looked like all of the bodies were the same boring little dust balls. But now that I've had some time with it, I'm noticing some more variety. And I'm not going out of my way to find the repeating patterns, because I know I won't be able to un-see them.
Using layered and tiled assets comes with several advantages and disadvantages of course, which I know have been discussed pretty thoroughly here.
I think from my perspective, there are several points that are either trade-offs, or just unfortunate. This is excluding technical merits (such as performance, and what structures can be constructed entirely from noise generators / heightmap algorithms), but rather more of a "look and feel" kind of thing:
- I enjoyed the variety of colors in the Horizons/Beyond era (after the beigification was fixed). There seems to be a much more narrow range of colors now, at least partly in an effort to add more realism.
- Mountains and deep canyons or valleys are more rare. They exist, but I don't see anything (so far) at a scale comparable to what we had before. I think realism is part of the motivation here again. Smaller, low-gravity bodies can support larger structures, but would also tend to lack some of the geological processes needed to create them, for instance, which I think is part of the reason we see fewer of these structures. I'm torn on this, because having things that are more rare also makes them more special when you find them. But if they're rare enough that they might not even exist, as far as your own perspective is concerned? Hmm.
- These realism choices are areas in which I think it's OK to fudge things for artistic purposes. But where to draw that line is a complex question, because there are many different opinions on this.
- Some of the specific places that had interesting features have now become boring dust balls.
And I still think it's potentially a bug that so many of the craters are applied to the height map before finer details are applied, as if most of the local geology formed after the crater.
I haven't read the whole thread, but I know I'm not saying anything new.
Anyway, despite all of this, I think a handful of places actually got more interesting. The planet that I used for my SRV circumnavigation looks better now, IMHO.
Horizons:
Odyssey:
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