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No Man's Sky Cosmos

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Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#191

Post by simoncion »

flavionm wrote: post #185
simoncion wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates. Yeah. Back in the day, those would almost always be paid expansions... if not whole-ass sequels. There's a subset of video game players these days who expect years and years of substantial changes to a game. Why, back in my day you had to pay for anything more than a game-breaking bug fix... and you counted yourself lucky if you even got…

Back in the day, they had to ship complete working games, because the cost to fix it later was too high. Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time, but the punishment for messing up was severe. And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves. Those are a lot of value, and there's nothing wrong with them. They even still exist today, though rarer. Maybe the NMS's updates did amount to one or tw…

> Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time...

Sounds like being required to ship a "complete working game" didn't matter much. Weird.

> And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves.

And many were not. Plus, if we ignore shovelware -both past and present- most games these days are way larger than they were back in the day.

Have you ever gone back and played those old games you fuzzily remember through a haze of nostalgia? Many of them [0] would be derided as low-effort asset flips [1] these days. Many of the NMS updates (and tragically many updates to other games) definitely would qualify as "expansion pack"-sized. Some updates are big enough to be whole-ass overhauls. It's _nuts_ how much work some industrious indie game devs put into their games.

It's fine to be angry at how the circumstances of NMS's launch, and be sore that Hello Games is getting any praise after all that. But it's dishonest to refuse to recognize both that a very vocal subset of gamers expects that games will come with months and years of substantial post-release changes provided free-of-charge and that many devs -for better or worse- provide what these folks are demanding.

[0] ...but definitely not all of them...

[1] Granted, all sorts of things get called "asset flips", so the "low-effort" part is the important bit here.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#192

Post by asdff »

IceDane wrote: post #171
beloch wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NMS's art-style is low-detail, but highly aesthetic. It can look amazing at times, but only when you're looking at grand cinematic vistas. It rarely looks good in closeups. This parallels the game's systems in many ways. NMS is a technically impressive game. You can build a custom-spaceship, either with the in-game editor or by importing one from outside the game, dogfight in it, land on alien worlds, etc. and that's…

It's been years since I last played it, but when I did I finally did so for a while until I finally found myself at a space station with other players and whatnot. And some random dude just gives me something like tens and tens of millions in cash. And my friend. And a bunch of other people in the same station. At that point I was still rather new to the game. I had little money, few resources, understood little - wh…

If its any consolation you would have otherwise gone from where you were to pretty much end game resources/money/ran out of stuff to do in like 2 weeks anyhow.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#193

Post by karlgrz »

The first time flying a ship in the game in VR was a pretty cool feeling. If you have a headset and this game (and you're not prone to motion sickness) it's worth the trip.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#194

Post by asdff »

big-chungus4 wrote: post #29

What are people on about, there is tons to do in NMS, tons of missions, expeditions, build bases, build a corvet, hunt rate parts, ships, rifles, creatures, manage a settlement, automate crafting chains, find a lucrative trading route, and this new update apps even more things. I'd never consider NMS anything close to empty, there is so much variety in the content

And all of it is like, run around, press x. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. load stuff in processor. take stuff out of processor. wait. oh your crops are ready. pres x, x, x, x, x, x, x. go to sales terminal, sell crops, go to processor, take stuff out of processor load in processor again. oh hey crops are ready again, x, x, x, x.....

Missions: fly to randomly chosen planet in solar system and to same generated structure and find the object in the same spot as it always is in this generated structure. fly back. your crops are ready again for harvest, press x, x, x, x, x, x...

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#195

Post by ratelimitsteve »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #11
helle253 wrote: post #5

It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing. It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game

A big name in proc gen is Kate Compton who coined the term "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" to describe this phenomenon of technically unique but not different enough to matter - I googled "10000 bowls of oatmeal" to see if there was a good article and the second link was about it and nms https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...

even as someone who enjoyed NMS as a nightly bowl of oatmeal, a second screen game while I listened to a podcast or a documentary, I can't dispute the accuracy of this metaphor. After a while it became brain off semitainment, and when paired with hands off semitainment I ended up with a full experience, but years later it still costs $70 to become nearly entertained and its become obvious that there are limits to how much you can make procedural generation not such as the core, heart and soul of a gaming experience.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#196

Post by flir »

raincole wrote: post #39
helle253 wrote: post #5

It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing. It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game

It more or less reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode. They were playing an asteroid shooting. > Morty: it's boring. crank up the realism slider to max > Rick: why does it get even more empty? Wait, I got it... because the universe is empty. At the end, I think there is little point in simulating the vastness of the universe in a video game (even just a fraction of it).

That's the problem every Elite after the first one had.

The first one was dogfighting in space, all the others were so. much. space.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#197

Post by heggy »

simoncion wrote: post #170
BrokenCogs wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat of an aside but, personally, I also found GTA V and Red dead redemption 2 to be boring because these games didn't respect my time. I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".

> I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world". Two hours is like three or twelve story missions, depending on where in the story you are. Did you spend most of that time farting around doing stuff that wasn't main story [0], or are you just not really into the stories being told? IME, Rockstar's 3D games have always been not-all-that-great third-person…

RDR2's intro absolutely did not respect my time. I sat down with an hour free to play it, and in that time, I did not reach a save point. There was some story, but it was very slow, and I had precisely zero interest in repeating it. I ran out of time, turned it off and never came back.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#198

Post by flavionm »

simoncion wrote: post #191
flavionm wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day, they had to ship complete working games, because the cost to fix it later was too high. Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time, but the punishment for messing up was severe. And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves. Those are a lot of value, and there's nothing wrong with them. They even still exist today, though rarer. Maybe the NMS's updates did amount to one or tw…

> Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time... Sounds like being required to ship a "complete working game" didn't matter much . Weird. > And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves. And many were not. Plus, if we ignore shovelware -both past and present- most games these days are way larger than they were back in the day. Have you ever gone back and played those old games you fuzzily reme…

Always having some instance of someone messing up is still substantially different from more instances than not being messed up. So it did actually matter quite a lot.

Now, as someone who is an avid retro gamer, I play plenty of those old games you're talking about. In the very old days, games were definitely shorter, but by the 5th and 6th gen, the gap isn't quite as big. If anything, they're often too large now, but that's neither here nor there. Budgets are bigger, teams are bigger, and most importantly, the consumer base is bigger. So size of games and expansions needs to be looked at relatively.

Regardless, for non-early access (of which NMS is an example of in all but name) and non-live service games, there mostly isn't an expectation that content will be added, only that updates will be made that improve and fix what's there. The exceptions are mostly when there's a pattern of content uodates happening before, or when something is clearly incomplete compared to what's usual for a series. See the Monster Hunter series as an example for both the latter ones.

Overall, it's natural for customers to want things that are at least as good or better than before when technology improves. It's the opposite that should not be happening.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#199

Post by ch4s3 »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #169
john_strinlai wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no such thing as a turnaround. this is very obviously untrue, as evidenced by no man's sky.

Doesn't matter, people move on. Those who stay, who funneled money into the endeavour want it to succeed. That's all.

It keeps selling well by all accounts. New people are buying it and playing it.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#200

Post by ratelimitsteve »

Avicebron wrote: post #17
helle253 wrote: post #5

It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing. It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game

I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse". A thought that comes to me as I type this is what if you try to co-evolve the ecosystems so it doesn't feel like it's just a mix of the same base components in different quantities.

I think you're on to something here. The problem with procgen is hard because the various things in an environment have to interface with one another and in NMS they don't really meaningfully interface. The geography is generated, and the animals are generated, and the mineral deposits are generated, but the geography never affects the animals or the mineral deposits. You don't see, as an example, vast highland regions with animals adapted for living in the cold and huge mineral veins exposed in cliffs at high altitudes. You also don't see older mountains where the average mineral deposit would sit lower in altitude but be smaller due to erosion, with more cave systems and more critters evolved specifically for caves (colorless, blind, chemautotrophic, specializations like that). There's a range of ways the landscape can be, there's a range of ways animals can be, there's a range of ways resource distribution can be, but they don't affect one another and it makes it feel bland and same-y.
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