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No Man's Sky Cosmos

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Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#261

Post by andybak »

eclipticplane wrote: post #203
asdff wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My hot take on why these games get popular (including some like PowerWash Simulator that are 'press x, then x again' type games): it gives people satisfaction of completing something in a world that it is increasingly harder to accomplish what the prior generation did.

I find incremental (clicker) games fascinating because they are like crack for certain brains (myself included if I let them).

There's something interesting going on with certain kinds of activity - exponential progression and incessant busy-ness. It tickles something that shouldn't be tickled.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#262

Post by andybak »

kjs3 wrote: post #167
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

Noone said it was empty. Noone said there wasn't a lot of 'stuff' in NMS. What many of us are saying is that all that stuff doesn't make the game fun.

Different people find different things fun. I've never been grabbed by multiplayer FPS (I never git gud) - or souls-likes (same). I do sometimes get sucked into some Bethesda games but I need to get over the initial hump. I had a serious Minecraft problem (solo play - not groups) and had a big Beat Saber phase. I still play OG Doom but never liked Quake. I usually hate games with narratives except when I don't. Journey nearly made me weep with joy and sadness but I don't tend to go for slow, arty games in general... And - in general I want to like games, find them fascinating as a medium - but find most of them tedious when I sit down to play.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#263

Post by jasonjmcghee »

ghostly_s wrote: post #228
fxwin wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't played it myself, but surely an article written one month after the game's release doesn't do it justice, considering there have been multiple major updates attempting to address the gripes players initially had with the game in the 10 years since then (And review trends on steam indicate that these attempts were successful)

Indeed, I remember it being pilloried after release but the Steam reviews now are generally quite positive from players who've logged tons of hours.

The original massive controversy was the founder of the studio claiming it had multiplayer when it very clearly didn't which was such an odd thing to claim and easy to prove false.

That and the trailer was very different than the released game.

They apologized IIRC and then continued to work on it for like a decade - adding multiplayer and many large changes to the game

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#264

Post by analog8374 »

schnevets wrote: post #120
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I vaguely recall an episode of the Triple Click podcast around 2023 where they had a serious AI fanboy who was rah rah-ing about future procedural generation in games. It might have been Casey Anthony, but I'm unable to re-listen while at work. The fanboy started saying how they could have endless different levels in Destiny 2... which is absurdly off-base since the entire game is just running through the same 9 sand…

I'm listening to OK Computer right now. Came upon this reply half way through "Let Down". Hmm.

In my own procedural explorations, the solution to the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem is to manually curate them and give the user only the exceptionally good ones. It's a tedious lot of work.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#265

Post by andybak »

heggy wrote: post #197
simoncion wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Same. I really want to play it but - I feel I need to skip the first hour to do so?

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#266

Post by fwip »

c7b wrote: post #226
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 remember first hearing about NMS' concept and wishing that they would take the general idea but downsize it by at least 10 orders of magnitude. A universe with 1-100 millions of planets would still feel absolutely massive and way more than individual players would be able to exhaust, yet it would allow the creators to do a bit better curation, allow players to actually meet, maybe add more hand-crafted experiences.…

They added real multiplayer several years ago. If you go to the same system another player is in, they'll be there. (As well as everything anybody has ever built there).

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#267

Post by andybak »

pkilgore wrote: post #246

NMS is an amazing game with no soul. A metaverse. A monument to technology without the depth or people or narrative (prewritten or emergent) that makes it interesting. I'm certain there are some people whose brain is wired exactly right to love it. But I have more fun playing the n100th Call of Duty clone hearing real voices on the headset in a tight, fun game loop. But the company behind it deserves to be applauded.…

Ironically less so as they've added more to do but:

> NMS is an amazing game with no soul.

I found the game in the early days to be incredibly soulful - it was almost an interactive poem. Full of emptiness and loss. I loved it back then.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#268

Post by andybak »

Raicuparta wrote: post #207
karlgrz wrote: post #193

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.

Outer Wilds (not The Other Worlds) gives you a very similar feeling on that first flight. It's not a VR game, but I made a VR mod for it a few years ago.

I both love you and curse you for that mod.

I still haven't got around to playing Outer Wilds despite knowing enough to know I should. Because I keep thinking "I can only play it once - I should play it in VR" and then never getting around to it.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#269

Post by analog8374 »

in a roguelike game, my incentive for playing is the discovery of weird new stuff. this might be the opposite of procedural. because procedural is just the same old stuff in new combinations. right?

how would we get a procedural thing or an AI thing to spit out truly new weird cool stuff? connect it to a good random number generator?

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#270

Post by fwip »

actusual wrote: post #9
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 the same. I want Rust in space, where there are constant stakes. NMS either takes too long to get to a part of the game where stakes become relevant, or doesn't have any. If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.

EVE online?
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