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No Man’s Sky One Year Later

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Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later

#81

Post by zzalpha »

newforice wrote: post #66
zzalpha wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but every open world game includes a gameplay loop of some kind. Virtually every open world game has the same basic loop: collect, craft/buy/sell, build. After that, it's just a question of how you motivate players to go through the loop: quests (Elder Scrolls), randomly generated threats (Minecraft, Terraria), multiplayer PC threats (WoW, EVE), etc. Sounds like this author feels NMS fails to justify itself in…

> Virtually every open world game has the same basic loop: collect, craft/buy/sell, build. That is a massive loop though, huge, world size, not confined to a specific path. I choose my path through the world. > After that, it's just a question of how you motivate players to go through the loop Open World is about ... openness. The player gets to decide, specific motivation not required; the journey is the motivation.

The player gets to decide, specific motivation not required; the journey is the motivation.

But you still need gameplay mechanics to support the user's activities.

If the user is motivated by quests, you need good quests.

If the user is motivated by conflict, then you need good fighting mechanics, etc.

If the user is motivated by building/construction, you need strong mechanics to support that.

Unfortunately, I suspect you'll find very few user's who are motivated over the long term by just wandering around seeing cool stuff.

Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later

#82

Post by bllguo »

rxhernandez wrote: post #59
Nursie wrote: post #34

I found with NMS that I couldn't really see a game in it. The planets were lovely, the creatures fascinating, but other than grind fuel and occasionally get eaten by something, there wasn't much gameplay. With the later addition of base-building I was able to ... build a base. W00t. Lovely tech, pretty planets and stuff... not much compelling to actually do.

> Lovely x, y and z... not much compelling to actually do. This is pokemon go in a nutshell yet it seemed to work for niantic.

The deception aside, people have different expectations of mobile games..

Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later

#83

Post by Jiig »

rxhernandez wrote: post #59
Nursie wrote: post #34

I found with NMS that I couldn't really see a game in it. The planets were lovely, the creatures fascinating, but other than grind fuel and occasionally get eaten by something, there wasn't much gameplay. With the later addition of base-building I was able to ... build a base. W00t. Lovely tech, pretty planets and stuff... not much compelling to actually do.

> Lovely x, y and z... not much compelling to actually do. This is pokemon go in a nutshell yet it seemed to work for niantic.

I think the compelling part of pokemon go is not the game its self, but the social interactions it created.

Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later

#84

Post by LeoNatan25 »

ghurtado wrote: post #76
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. He was lying up until the last weeks to release, where no practical development on the game was taking place. I’d see your point if promises were made years before release and the company was unable to deliver. But there was clear malice here.

> But there was clear malice here. Do not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

I don't believe this was the case here. Maybe the stupidity was underestimating the reaction of people who would be disappointed, but that's different.

Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later

#85

Post by enraged_camel »

crispyambulance wrote: post #51
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn millennials are too harsh, expecting developers to be honest! It’s just a game after all! /s It’s because of such ridiculous attitude and low expectation that the gaming industry is at the state that it is—terrible.

Well, it is "just a game"... an innovative, highly creative game with some really interesting features. I suspect the real creative talent behind the game got used and pressured by product-manager types to ship far before it was ready because of all the money and promises involved. Throwing a fit because of "honesty" in game pre-marketing is sort of like asking for your money back because a movie didn't fulfill the e…

>>Well, it is "just a game"... an innovative, highly creative game with some really interesting features.

My understanding is that the developer either outright lied about the features pre-release, or they strongly hinted at them and misled people, or a mix of two.

Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later

#86

Post by shepardrtc »

I followed the game for years before buying it on launch and being completely and utterly disappointed. Every single time they spoke about the game and showed videos, they promised a fleshed out universe with real consequences for your actions. They promised factions that had goals and would act independent of you. They promised a deep system of crafting. They promised multiplayer. What they didn't mention was that they had scrapped all those ideas a long time before and had turned the game into a grind-fest while they tried to hack things in there. The play-throughs they showed were hand-made areas with automated entities, but they never mentioned that. There was a promise of multiplayer, but it never happened. And probably worst of all, they never mentioned that it wasn't truly open-world, it was all essentially "levels" with little freedom to fly around and explore. They never mentioned that it turned into an almost on-rails flying game when you got close to the surface. You couldn't crash, you couldn't maneuver, you couldn't land on your own. Flying around was made even worse because you run out of fuel every few minutes because of the forced autopilot landings/takeoffs. That's not open world, that's a half-assed game with training wheels permanently glued on.

The whole "Not Evil, Just Bungling" that the author says simply isn't the case. But I'm not saying they're evil. They definitely wanted to make the game they were promising. They had a passion for it. But they knew well ahead of time that it wasn't happening and they kept up the charade.

I'm not disappointed about losing out on my money, I'm disappointed that I lost out on the game they promised.

Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later

#87

Post by JKCalhoun »

dcolgan wrote: post #35

As a former amateur Twitch.tv streamer, I've always been fascinated by the rise and fall of internet personalities, and some of the biggest personalities seem to be game developers that found themselves in the spotlight. Someone made this very in-depth video about the fall from grace of Phil Fish, the creator of Fez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w It seems to me that the combo of high pressure and a guy…

> Inexperience plus overpromising and really high expectations created the current situation.

And yet I'm surprised how, again and again, gamers fall for it. You should always reserve your top-shelf skepticism for not-yet-shipped-games.

Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later

#88

Post by enraged_camel »

dexwiz wrote: post #7

Open world games are notoriously disappointing. "What is this game supposed to be?" is a great question. Are you trying to explore? collect resources and upgrade grind? build things? combat (ground or space)? By being all these things, they became nothing. All encompassing space games (for example EVE) take years to build, usually in the form of updates after release. As for the UI. It looks like its designed so the…

>>Open world games are notoriously disappointing.

You should play Witcher 3. It's an open-world game that gives you tremendous freedom in a very large, detailed world while also driving you forward with a long, well-written story.

It definitely became the gold standard for open-world games for me. Easily the best game I've played in over a decade.

Re: No Man’s Sky One Year Later

#90

Post by fao_ »

arprocter wrote: post #26
fao_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, and the FOV on the PS4 version is horrific Eh? There's an option for that.

It was recently added in an update

"The game is now what it could have been"

The commentator was talking about one of the latest NMS releases. I was simply stating that their idea of "latest" is not what it is right now.

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