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Re: No Man's Sky

#499
Victor Tombs wrote:Getting lost is half the fun. :mrgreen:
Sorry, I just cannot agree with this. Getting lost in a game is the epitome of "sucks" for me... If I continuously get lost, and am truly lost where I get all turned around and cannot find my way, I will drop the game faster than a hot potato... Especially if it's in a maze or a cave... Getting lost on the surface will be close to impossible because there will be a compass on the HUD... but not so in a cave...
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Re: No Man's Sky

#500
wizaerd wrote:
Victor Tombs wrote:Getting lost is half the fun. :mrgreen:
Sorry, I just cannot agree with this. Getting lost in a game is the epitome of "sucks" for me... If I continuously get lost, and am truly lost where I get all turned around and cannot find my way, I will drop the game faster than a hot potato... Especially if it's in a maze or a cave... Getting lost on the surface will be close to impossible because there will be a compass on the HUD... but not so in a cave...
We all have our likes and dislikes, wizaerd. In your case It may be worth waiting to see how everything pans out on release before making a purchase. :angel:
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Re: No Man's Sky

#501
Victor Tombs wrote:Either that or use the horse whistle. *chuckle*
No joke, thought that would be included in the game. Just a little button to call the ship to join you and get the hell outta dodge. Horse whistling is great! One of the big caveats I have with E:D, actually, having to ferry my own stuff.
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Re: No Man's Sky

#502
Mistycica wrote:No joke, thought that would be included in the game. Just a little button to call the ship to join you and get the hell outta dodge. Horse whistling is great! One of the big caveats I have with E:D, actually, having to ferry my own stuff.
I wasn't really joking, Mistycica, and you outlined what I was thinking rather well. ;) :thumbup: :angel:
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Re: No Man's Sky

#503
Victor Tombs wrote:But can any of us be sure that will be the case, Nathan? I don't intend straying far from my ship anyway. If I need to explore I will move my ship as I go. Either that or use the horse whistle. *chuckle*
I heard on a random NMS vid that you can play marker buoy's as you walk away from your ship, ala breadcrumbs.
Also, you can press a button to have your ship fly to you - but it is breakable (as is your shield, if you find yourself on planets with a temperature of -165 celsius).

This guy explains quite a bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzAFFvG729g
(It is only 7 mins long, and came out 4 days ago :D )
YAY PYTHON \o/

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Re: No Man's Sky

#504
FormalMoss wrote:I heard on a random NMS vid that you can play marker buoy's as you walk away from your ship, ala breadcrumbs.
Also, you can press a button to have your ship fly to you - but it is breakable (as is your shield, if you find yourself on planets with a temperature of -165 celsius).

This guy explains quite a bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzAFFvG729g
(It is only 7 mins long, and came out 4 days ago )
Thanks for that, FormalMoss. :thumbup: I enjoyed the video. It certainly raised my level of interest in the game. :D
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Re: No Man's Sky

#505
I was away for lack of Internet and now I'm back, and it surprises me to find so much, I don't want to call it "negativity", about NMS. If that article from RPS made something was making me think that I may have been wrong about this game and it may actually be better than I thought. :thumbup:

I usually don't use mini-maps in games, and the option to disable the damn thing is always welcome (like in GTA 5 and The Witcher 3). And some of my best experiences playing ArmA 2 were when I found myself completely lost driving some vehicle in the desert, thinking: "Civilization is only behind that next mountain", to find out only more sand. :lol:

Besides, the idea of interacting with NPC and finding puzzles are good news.

Talking about how much you can play this game before getting bored is pointless. Who says that games should last more than a few hours, or even less? But even so, I don't think that this game will be short in anyway, but certainty doesn't need to have any particularly longevity. A game needs to be as long as it needs to be, and that's about it. Regarding the price, well, that's always a concern, yes, but it's possible that the creators of this game deserve the money more than those greedy companies that are willing to ask more than $100 for the same old crap.
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"Playing" is not simply a pastime, it is the primordial basis of imagination and creation. - Hideo Kojima
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Re: No Man's Sky

#506
My issue is that many people don't have dozens upon dozens of hours to pour into games while they search for "an actually fun planet that's surely just one more jump away by now". The definition of a game is an activity - often with rules - engaged in for enjoyment and recreation rather than for practical purposes. If a game fails to give its target audience any enjoyment, then it has failed as a game.

If I wander around on a planet and die repeatedly because the RNG is screwed up enough to permit the generation of home planets it is impossible to leave, then I am a frustrated player - with good reason - and the game has failed me.

If I only have a few hours on a weekend to spend doing recreational activities and I select this game hoping it will provide me with enjoyment - which the developers do indeed promise, I might add - and I leave utterly bored because "it's a game that needs to be played for at least five hours" - then the game has failed me.

If I can get trapped in a cave, die due to guardians killing me, lose all the progress I've made and have to start over after hours of play and the developers actually wanted that, then the game would naturally be quite frustrating and has failed me.



My problem isn't so much with the game itself. I haven't played the game. It wouldn't even run on my computer. My problem is with the developers who are trying to create their vision of a bland, sadistic universe sparsely populated by oases of enjoyment. There's nothing fun in having to search for five hours to find something that makes the game worth playing - and this is not so much a flaw of the game itself as it is of the standpoint of the designers.



Of course, I could be completely wrong. Perhaps the developers simply aren't good at wording things, or are being misquoted. If they are, that's fine. I really want No Man's Sky to succeed and be an awesome game. I'm behind any fun game that could get more people to move towards the science fiction genre... but only if it's fun and pulls players in rather than pushing them away. I fear this game may do the latter.
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Re: No Man's Sky

#507
Talvieno wrote:If I wander around on a planet and die repeatedly because the RNG is screwed up enough to permit the generation of home planets it is impossible to leave, then I am a frustrated player - with good reason - and the game has failed me.

If I only have a few hours on a weekend to spend doing recreational activities and I select this game hoping it will provide me with enjoyment - which the developers do indeed promise, I might add - and I leave utterly bored because "it's a game that needs to be played for at least five hours" - then the game has failed me.
Reminds me of the reason I hate Elite Dangerous.. it really needs hours and hours of "work" till you start to enjoy it.. well at least for me.. and yet I can boot up OOlite, with it's much worse graphics, less game mechanics and start enjoying it almost immediately.. ED is a failed game in my view..

I really hope that NMS is able to be a casual game as much as a long-term game.. I'll be buying it in June like everyone else.
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Re: No Man's Sky

#508
Mistycica wrote: Good interface and sufficient information is not handholding; the lack of those is not difficulty, it's design oversight, it's artificial frustration. Having an objective is not handholding; not having an objective does not necessarily equal freedom and being able to do 'what you want'. If there is no emergent gameplay behind mining for resources and taking pictures of brightly colored Space Cows, there is no point to the grind. E:D is bland because it doesn't have any sustainable excitement behind pressing the scan button and a long grind of combat or trading or mining and buying new ships. DF and Minecraft work, because they don't only have a randomly generated world to explore, but they also grant the player a lot of agency over it - yet they don't have clear cut objective either. Sort of the same with KSP or X3 in a static universe. They supply the player with tools that can actually do a lot with a sprinkle of creativity, and pop up new branches of gameplay via their application. Be it building a gigantic golden knob with an elevator, landing on a gas giant, or circumventing Nividium import restrictions, they allow players to actually pick from a wide array of self-defined goals, and then provide the tools for reaching and perfecting them.

The tools in NMS being 'mining', 'scanning', and 'dogfighting' are not enough to make a sandbox, and they limit the amount of self-imposed challenges you can set for yourself. Your options are summed up by exploring generated content, and collecting resources for buying better equipment. If anything, it holds you hand tightly by the gameplay elements available to you, because you aren't allowed to do more than consume. 'Do what you want', 'find your own fun', and 'no handholding' are way too often used as lazy excuses for bad design and a lack of content.
Okay, before I start, all comments as to gameplay, whether mine or someone else's, are mostly speculation as of now. However, all information I rely on has been previously mentioned in interviews by the devs of NMS.

Any game can be made to sound boring by clinical categorization of its gameplay elements. So let's look at a few games from steam's top sellers list and the "tools" available in these games to interact with the world-

The Division- shooting, shooting, shooting..
Stardew valley- Sprinkling seeds (ugh), fighting
Counter Strike GO- Shooting, shooting, more shooting (God this must be the most boring game of all time)
Universe sandbox- watching balls go round and round, manipulating balls to crash into other balls.

Nevermind, this is what happens when we rely on populist conceptions of what constitutes a good game. Let's find something closer home.
Limit Theory! The game that excites all of us, and keeps bringing us back to these forums.
Limit Theory is a game about about 'mining', 'scanning' and 'dogfighting'. So much better than the games above, as instead of one or two, it offers three modes of interaction with its world! Oh wait.

I strongly believe we should do away with this dispassionate, clinical examination of games. What are the modes of interaction? What are the gameplay pillars? Where is the minimap? Where's the content?
Does it matter? The questions I would ask you (after you've played) would be- Did you have fun? Did it make you feel something new? Wonder? Excitement? Are you aching to go back?
When you play it and say no to these, you're welcome to criticize the lack of fun as stemming from weak modes of interaction or artificial difficulty.

No Man's sky is about the sheer joy of exploration and discovery, it's about escaping an angered alien fleet while being almost sucked in by a black hole, about the wonder and loneliness of being the first and last person to see binary stars rise above the horizon of a planet, lighting up its snowy surface, it's about learning new languages and communicating with alien races, and about finding out what's at the center of the galaxy.

Again, no one knows what it'll actually be like. Maybe it will be flawed and shoddy and riddled with gameplay issues. Maybe it won't turn out to be your dream space game. But what if it does?
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Re: No Man's Sky

#509
I'm so on the fence here.

The procedural generation aspects sound great, including the production of different varieties of flora and fauna based on generative rules. I'd like to see that.

Nor do I mind getting lost. I got lost in Minecraft all the time. Start a new world? Why? I just went into Gopher Mode; I dug my way to the surface, popped my head up, looked around, built a tall tower with torches on it to mark a new cave entrance, and went back to exploring. Why shouldn't getting lost on/in a new world in NMS be similarly about what you, the player, do to reorient yourself? I wouldn't freak out if there was a minimap, but I see no reason to be irritated that there's not one.

I also like some of the aspects of exploration described for NMS. "Walking simulators" such as Proteus aren't for everyone, but I happen to enjoy just puttering around a place, as long as that place is complex enough to be interesting. The same goes for systems in general. To the extent that NMS will have dynamic, interacting systems (including places), I'm curious to travel among them, maybe for hours at a time, without needing some external "story" or "game" element constantly sticking its hand in my back to nudge me to the next shiny thing.

And that's where NMS starts to sound wrong to me. The descriptions of the world of the game sound interesting... but then the developers speak. Why does everything they (primarily Sean Murray) say sound like they've decided what shall be the "right" way to play the game, and no deviation from the approved behaviors will be tolerated? It's as though they're deliberately either making it utterly boring, or penalizing you for playing the "wrong" way, until you discard this dangerous notion that the game is about your enjoyment. If that description is close to accurate, I see no reason to reward that attitude with my money.

And I haven't even started guessing whether the PC port will be more open, and more welcoming to actual exploration-loving gamers. I assume not, since the developers are from console backgrounds and refuse to trust players to decide for themselves how to play by implementing a manual savegame feature.

All of which makes NMS frustrating. I want to like it. But I don't know if I can, based on what's been confirmed about it.

So I'll wait to read thoughtful opinions about this game after its released from people who've played it who respect the Explorer style of play.
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Re: No Man's Sky

#510
Vartul wrote:
Mistycica wrote: Good interface and sufficient information is not handholding; the lack of those is not difficulty, it's design oversight, it's artificial frustration. Having an objective is not handholding; not having an objective does not necessarily equal freedom and being able to do 'what you want'. If there is no emergent gameplay behind mining for resources and taking pictures of brightly colored Space Cows, there is no point to the grind. E:D is bland because it doesn't have any sustainable excitement behind pressing the scan button and a long grind of combat or trading or mining and buying new ships. DF and Minecraft work, because they don't only have a randomly generated world to explore, but they also grant the player a lot of agency over it - yet they don't have clear cut objective either. Sort of the same with KSP or X3 in a static universe. They supply the player with tools that can actually do a lot with a sprinkle of creativity, and pop up new branches of gameplay via their application. Be it building a gigantic golden knob with an elevator, landing on a gas giant, or circumventing Nividium import restrictions, they allow players to actually pick from a wide array of self-defined goals, and then provide the tools for reaching and perfecting them.

The tools in NMS being 'mining', 'scanning', and 'dogfighting' are not enough to make a sandbox, and they limit the amount of self-imposed challenges you can set for yourself. Your options are summed up by exploring generated content, and collecting resources for buying better equipment. If anything, it holds you hand tightly by the gameplay elements available to you, because you aren't allowed to do more than consume. 'Do what you want', 'find your own fun', and 'no handholding' are way too often used as lazy excuses for bad design and a lack of content.
Okay, before I start, all comments as to gameplay, whether mine or someone else's, are mostly speculation as of now. However, all information I rely on has been previously mentioned in interviews by the devs of NMS.

Any game can be made to sound boring by clinical categorization of its gameplay elements. So let's look at a few games from steam's top sellers list and the "tools" available in these games to interact with the world-

The Division- shooting, shooting, shooting..
Stardew valley- Sprinkling seeds (ugh), fighting
Counter Strike GO- Shooting, shooting, more shooting (God this must be the most boring game of all time)
Universe sandbox- watching balls go round and round, manipulating balls to crash into other balls.

Nevermind, this is what happens when we rely on populist conceptions of what constitutes a good game. Let's find something closer home.
Limit Theory! The game that excites all of us, and keeps bringing us back to these forums.
Limit Theory is a game about about 'mining', 'scanning' and 'dogfighting'. So much better than the games above, as instead of one or two, it offers three modes of interaction with its world! Oh wait.

I strongly believe we should do away with this dispassionate, clinical examination of games. What are the modes of interaction? What are the gameplay pillars? Where is the minimap? Where's the content?
Does it matter? The questions I would ask you (after you've played) would be- Did you have fun? Did it make you feel something new? Wonder? Excitement? Are you aching to go back?
When you play it and say no to these, you're welcome to criticize the lack of fun as stemming from weak modes of interaction or artificial difficulty.

No Man's sky is about the sheer joy of exploration and discovery, it's about escaping an angered alien fleet while being almost sucked in by a black hole, about the wonder and loneliness of being the first and last person to see binary stars rise above the horizon of a planet, lighting up its snowy surface, it's about learning new languages and communicating with alien races, and about finding out what's at the center of the galaxy.

Again, no one knows what it'll actually be like. Maybe it will be flawed and shoddy and riddled with gameplay issues. Maybe it won't turn out to be your dream space game. But what if it does?
I do like analyzing my games, and theorycrafting. Takes nothing away from the enjoyment for me, and I do believe that it has just as much place in the world as literary analysis and movie troping - they help us understand what we like and dislike, instead of just waving in the air and 'well I like x because it's -fun-'. I want to know how and why things work, or don't work. Science doesn't kill the wonder in the Universe either, it's the same with art.
NMS might still very well be an amazing game, and I hope it will be! But I am going to theorize about it, because it's fun and interesting to do that, and in the process I'll better understand what I'm looking for in a game.

It's not the lack of stylized gameplay elements that concern me, it's the tight control over them and the degree of 'freedom' you are allowed, citing that freedom as a reason for no objectives and detailed in-depth features, which in turn reduce the goals you are able to set for yourself. Why do I have to keep moving, for example, if I want to set up shop in a distant corner of the universe? There could be features to make this viable, but they deliberately make it clunky. E:D has a very similar premise, and it's extremely bland after the novelty of jumping into suns wears off. Exploration has only so much milage before it gets old. Sure, seeing a binary rise behind the horizon will make you feel like a moisture farmer once - but how soon will that fade? An hour, ten? After you've seen everything and the epic vistas no longer faze you, what's left? Discovery isn't about writing 'lol first' on one rock out of way too many for humanity to ever explore, that's just the first step. It's not about grinding an arbitrary amount of time until the game decides 'you've been good, you can have the secret cinematic and the +1 item'. Discovery is... attachment. And you are not allowed to form an attachment to anything, on the premise of 'you have to keep exploring', and that makes everything extremely impersonal and cold.
Flatfingers wrote:And that's where NMS starts to sound wrong to me. The descriptions of the world of the game sound interesting... but then the developers speak. Why does everything they (primarily Sean Murray) say sound like they've decided what shall be the "right" way to play the game, and no deviation from the approved behaviors will be tolerated? It's as though they're deliberately either making it utterly boring, or penalizing you for playing the "wrong" way, until you discard this dangerous notion that the game is about your enjoyment. If that description is close to accurate, I see no reason to reward that attitude with my money.
This is exactly how I feel. That 'do what you want' only applies as long as you do what you -should- want. Having been so long in the tabletop RPG community, I quickly learned that the main rule of GMing is 'forget the word 'no''. And that is what they are not doing here, not because of the limitations of the game itself, but because they spite the player who doesn't play 'correctly'.
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