While it does really suck to get burned by false game advertising, it is a bad long term strategy for your company. Hello Games' reputation is beyond tarnished, it's pretty much destroyed to the point where I believe that they may not be able to make another game. They may have profited from their lie now, but going forward consumers will not trust them and other studios may not want people who worked there either.
I worry about the health of the procedural "genre" (if you can really call it that) because of the actions of Hello Games. Any other game with the word procedural tied to it will likely be lumped in with NMS unfortunately, but hopefully this will also have the positive effect of more thorough investigation of procedural games by gaming journalists before release to get a more accurate depiction of the game prior to release.
Post
Sun Oct 16, 2016 12:40 am
#17
Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games
Well the "first big seller" that used procedural generation was Minecraft. If you want to talk about biomes, entire environments, along with cliffs and content being generated in specific areas for specific reasons then I think Minecraft should be the game everyone goes back to. There have been lots of failures or little heard of games that use procedural generation. Getting it right isn't easy, and when you are talking about something as complex as Limit Theory there is going to naturally be some fear about how the end user will react to the content.
If the gameplay is solid the user will be more forgiving of the graphical content. So while Josh may feel like he needs awesome star-ships at launch the real challenge should be getting the non-procedural content working. These being the systems which drive the game mechanics.
In summary, I'm not concerned about 'procedural generation' receiving a bad reputation based off of recent failures. A look at Star Citizen and Minecraft can show players what is possible. The problem is that most of the games which use this technology have failed game mechanics. Game mechanics make or break the game.
If the gameplay is solid the user will be more forgiving of the graphical content. So while Josh may feel like he needs awesome star-ships at launch the real challenge should be getting the non-procedural content working. These being the systems which drive the game mechanics.
In summary, I'm not concerned about 'procedural generation' receiving a bad reputation based off of recent failures. A look at Star Citizen and Minecraft can show players what is possible. The problem is that most of the games which use this technology have failed game mechanics. Game mechanics make or break the game.
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Sun Oct 16, 2016 2:23 am
#18
So offering LT with a standard seed as default setting is a good idea, and anything that comes up with that seed would be OK to use in marketing. Just add a small hint that says "from default game seed" .
Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games
As far as I know, yes, that is possible. I don't have much experience with random number generators, but the same seed always giving the same sequence of numbers is a well known property.FormalMoss wrote: Is it possible to have a seed, that generates the "as advertised" universe of LT?
The one where all the fly-bys have been performed for the ads that appear online for LT.. that way, you merely dial into that seed and see everything that you heard/knew about from reviewers/ ads.
Then, safe in the knowledge it's there, I could generate a new seed, and play the game whatever way I want to..
Maybe this should be the default setting for the runtime of LT?
So offering LT with a standard seed as default setting is a good idea, and anything that comes up with that seed would be OK to use in marketing. Just add a small hint that says "from default game seed" .
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Sun Oct 16, 2016 3:06 am
#19
Maybe they intended to deliver what was promised but performance constraints killed the idea and instead of coming out clean and say it, they took the f**k-y'all-way and said nothing.
Seeing how the game performes with creatures no larger than 5-ish units and how it would perform using giant dinosaurs or sandworms... *shrugs*
Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games
Didn't know about that, but I guess that's one more of their lies.DigitalDuck wrote:Lum wrote:Well, that we can't know for sure.Yes, we can.DigitalDuck wrote:The files for the E3 demo (which was used for promoting and advertising the final game) were discovered in the game files as being separate and not procedurally generated, and yet during the demo he said he's jumping into a level nobody's seen before and that he has no idea what's in it.
Maybe they intended to deliver what was promised but performance constraints killed the idea and instead of coming out clean and say it, they took the f**k-y'all-way and said nothing.
Seeing how the game performes with creatures no larger than 5-ish units and how it would perform using giant dinosaurs or sandworms... *shrugs*
Post
Sun Oct 16, 2016 12:04 pm
#20
It's very tempting to want to promote PCG as the key selling point. It's somewhat new, which helps to distinguish a game from others that rely on human artists to handcraft a limited amount of content. PCG is also arguably a critical technology for extremely open-world games that emphasize exploration as a primary playstyle.
But maybe BFett is right, and selling a game based on its dynamics is just too abstract for most people. Maybe that makes exploration too hard to sell, and developers should just stick to talking about rules and mechanics -- specific, concrete actions that players can perform, which are either in the game or not and are thus less subject to interpretation.
Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games
Focusing on "how to accurately advertise games that rely on procedural content generation," *cough*, this may be one of the better suggestions.BFett wrote:In summary, I'm not concerned about 'procedural generation' receiving a bad reputation based off of recent failures. A look at Star Citizen and Minecraft can show players what is possible. The problem is that most of the games which use this technology have failed game mechanics. Game mechanics make or break the game.
It's very tempting to want to promote PCG as the key selling point. It's somewhat new, which helps to distinguish a game from others that rely on human artists to handcraft a limited amount of content. PCG is also arguably a critical technology for extremely open-world games that emphasize exploration as a primary playstyle.
But maybe BFett is right, and selling a game based on its dynamics is just too abstract for most people. Maybe that makes exploration too hard to sell, and developers should just stick to talking about rules and mechanics -- specific, concrete actions that players can perform, which are either in the game or not and are thus less subject to interpretation.
Post
Mon Oct 17, 2016 4:06 pm
#21
Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games
So why haven't NMS players seen the diplodocus from the E3 trailer?
Greg at 3dgamedevblog thinks he knows... because he's opened up the graphics files and figured out how they work.
He's put together a fantastic blog post describing his findings in the areas of Geometry, Texture, and Animation, what they imply for what players can reasonably expect to see from the procgen of NMS, and what might be done.
Great nuts-and-bolts stuff!
Greg at 3dgamedevblog thinks he knows... because he's opened up the graphics files and figured out how they work.
He's put together a fantastic blog post describing his findings in the areas of Geometry, Texture, and Animation, what they imply for what players can reasonably expect to see from the procgen of NMS, and what might be done.
Great nuts-and-bolts stuff!
Post
Tue Oct 18, 2016 2:24 am
#22
Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games
That was very insightful, tahnks FF!
As I told before, the tech is there, the game was rushed into release (I wonder by *cough*sony*cough*) and the PC version was rushed the most. That doesn't exempt them from their lies, but at least give us some hope regarding future game updates...
As I told before, the tech is there, the game was rushed into release (I wonder by *cough*
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Tue Oct 18, 2016 2:36 pm
#23
Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games
And that's maybe another point about advertising a game, isn't it?
Sell a game on what will definitely ship (as in, you can't launch until that's done), not on what some players *might* see after some post-launch data additions.
I suppose that means no ads showing player-controlled factions in Limit Theory.
Sell a game on what will definitely ship (as in, you can't launch until that's done), not on what some players *might* see after some post-launch data additions.
I suppose that means no ads showing player-controlled factions in Limit Theory.
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Tue Oct 18, 2016 2:41 pm
#24
Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games
There's definitive proof that everything in the E3 trailer/demo was hand-designed and scripted, as was everything for the other trailers.Flatfingers wrote:So why haven't NMS players seen the diplodocus from the E3 trailer?
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Post
Tue Oct 18, 2016 2:42 pm
#25
Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games
Aye. Well, somehow I'd think Josh wouldn't put something in a trailer he hadn't actually coded anyway.
Warning: do not ask about physics unless you really want to know about physics.
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Post
Tue Oct 18, 2016 2:47 pm
#26
Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games
I feel the same way. After all, the stuff in the dev videos was clearly procedural, right down to stuff he hadn't expected or accounted for... and him searching for something interesting to show.
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