131–140 of 144 posts
Not a particularly well-researched post. Sony did not publish the game, they provided marketing budget. This means that they were not in creative control.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cosmo was shunned because he went looney tunes in a very short timespan. For those who don't really watch speedruns, what happened to him was really fucked up. - Lost in very important tournament. - Got depressed because of it. - Girlfriend left him. - More depressed. - Suddenly, "I'm actually a girl". I feel really really sorry for Cosmo, so much went wrong in his life in a very short timespan and he snapped.
This account has been violating the guidelines a lot in its short life. Please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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…
> No Man’s Sky inhabits this frustrating space alongside games like the nu Deus Ex games, the original X-Com, or the Mass Effect series. It offers something you just can’t get anywhere else, but it does so in a deeply flawed and annoying way. This really resonated with me. I have a whole pile of Steam games which have fascinating, unique traits, but are 'objectively' bad in that they failed to deliver a solid story,…
Could you elaborate on the sorts of things you'd like to see in terms of game modes, and AI? I ask because I've been working for the past 5 years on an open source linux game that has the same basic premise as Artemis called Space Nerds In Space, so I'm always on the lookout for good ideas for this type of game.
> No Man’s Sky inhabits this frustrating space alongside games like the nu Deus Ex games, the original X-Com, or the Mass Effect series. It offers something you just can’t get anywhere else, but it does so in a deeply flawed and annoying way. This really resonated with me. I have a whole pile of Steam games which have fascinating, unique traits, but are 'objectively' bad in that they failed to deliver a solid story,…
The AI is generally pretty good, although you might see some questionable behaviour from time to time. Balance is another matter though, for the most part the games try to at least start with some historic accuracy so you'll find some nations are just straight up hard to play. For example, if you start WW2 as Poland in HoI, you're gonna have a bad time.
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…
Wait, let’s not conflate the cases you describe, where the trolling may have been and probably was malicious, with the case of No Man’s Land, where lead director flat out lied about the content of the game, and people who couldn’t control their hype fell for it and late raged. In the latter case, any professional shaming—which is the only shaming of Murray I’ve seen—is justified.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want strong direction, then open world is the wrong end of the spectrum. Give me a large world with lots of complexity and I'll entertain myself for hundreds of hours. Give me a directed plot and I'll probably stop caring in about 4 hours. It seems to me there are two very different views of story telling in games. One camp wants games to be strongly directed minimal choice stories with a very specific narrati…
I don't think either camp is wrong, just different ways to tell a story. I really favor the later, and I really hate when my agency is abridged as a player because some writer wants to tell a story I don't care about. At the same time, I'm sure plenty of folks have the opposite viewpoint. This is a false dichotomy. Skyrim, for example, is absolutely both of these things, offering a strongly directed central narrative…
I would consider Fallout 4 to be much more directed. You have to be the survivor, you have to save the patriots, you have to ultimately destroy one of the three powers. Sure you can ignore the plot for a bit, but you can't advance any storyline. You can't play PI or explore vaults unless you've advanced the story.
> No Man’s Sky inhabits this frustrating space alongside games like the nu Deus Ex games, the original X-Com, or the Mass Effect series. It offers something you just can’t get anywhere else, but it does so in a deeply flawed and annoying way. This really resonated with me. I have a whole pile of Steam games which have fascinating, unique traits, but are 'objectively' bad in that they failed to deliver a solid story,…
Just on Civ, if you like it I'd highly recommend checking out any of Paradox's grand strategy games like Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis. The AI is generally pretty good, although you might see some questionable behaviour from time to time. Balance is another matter though, for the most part the games try to at least start with some historic accuracy so you'll find some nations are just straight up hard to play.…
I definitely don't mind bad balance if the game isn't trying for it; Rome: Total War did something very similar with certain nations starting in terrible positions.
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…
This video bugs me. I don't disagree with it. In fact, the first time I watched it, I found it quite similar to my own take on Fish. Maybe just a few degrees off of how I feel.
Watching it for the first time in ~three years made me realize why it bugged me. The differences between the video and my opinions are the set of changes I'd make if I wanted to publish the strong argument for my perspective on the topic and be taken seriously. Fish is an interesting case study of internet-rando-turned-celebrity that doesn't adapt well to the fact people now care what he's saying.
The rough edges sanded and convenient omissions made by this video are the exact same tweaks I'd make to my perspective to hold onto my own credibility in the games echo chamber.
> No Man’s Sky inhabits this frustrating space alongside games like the nu Deus Ex games, the original X-Com, or the Mass Effect series. It offers something you just can’t get anywhere else, but it does so in a deeply flawed and annoying way. X-Com flawed and annoying? Them's fighting words! The game is a masterpiece. It didn't feel frustrating back then; it felt like it belonged in my top 5 most engaging and enjoyab…
X-Com shipped with a broken difficulty selector, so that all games were played on "Easy" regardless of your setting. The gameplay could be slow and ponderous at the best of times, and at the worst of times (chasing down the one last alien) could be quite maddeningly slow, literally at times 10-30 minutes of nothing. (Then the last alien gets the drop on you and your dude dies.) Some of the mechanics are pretty opaque…
You already mentioned the pace: that was one of its strong points, not a weakness. I -- and most of its fans, I'd guess -- liked the game because of its deliberately slow pace, not in spite of it. Why, I remember about 15-20 years ago I debated with someone about real-time vs turn-based games, and why I preferred the latter, and used X-Com as an example!.
Like you also mentioned, I don't think most people realized about the "Easy" setting bug back then (I certainly didn't!). "Easy" was difficult enough anyway, so I think this criticism doesn't apply. We're not talking about bugs here (which happen in every game), but about "flawed" gameplay, and how you experienced the game back when you played it. Nobody complained about the broken difficulty setting, so this couldn't cause a frustrating experience.
To me, picking X-Com as an example of a flawed game is like picking a movie everyone considers a classic masterpiece and declaring it flawed because there is a scene which is somewhat out of focus: it's an act of snobbery.