Post
Wed Mar 09, 2016 1:34 pm
#496
Re: No Man's Sky
Yeah, Victor. I play to get lost from reality. Getting lost in the game is like a 2x achievement
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...Victor Tombs wrote:Getting lost is half the fun.
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.wizaerd wrote: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...Victor Tombs wrote:Getting lost is half the fun.
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.Victor Tombs wrote:Either that or use the horse whistle. *chuckle*
I wasn't really joking, Mistycica, and you outlined what I was thinking rather well.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 heard on a random NMS vid that you can play marker buoy's as you walk away from your ship, ala breadcrumbs.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*
Thanks for that, FormalMoss. I enjoyed the video. It certainly raised my level of interest in the game.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 )
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..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.
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.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.
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.Vartul wrote: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.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.
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?
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'.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.
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