461–470 of 473 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also what was it when the game released? It was waaay negative. yeah, it was. and now it isn't. this is known as a "turnaround".
Yeah, but who cares. Most of the people buy a game when it gets released.
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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is that not enough? what else do people want? I've bounced off NMS several times, despite having tried quite hard to get into it. So, my take is based on ~20 hours of early game, from 2025ish. Probably the best parallel I can draw is to Elite: Dangerous, which I played for several hundred ours before getting bored of it. What I find lacking in both games is that there's no _meaningful_ emergent gameplay that spawns…
I've looked at videos of Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld, neither looks interesting to me at all. Yet I've spent hundreds to thousands of hours in Minecraft, No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous. > However, it doesn't scratch my "hardcore simulation / mastery" itch Elite Dangerous is the most hardcore space game I'm aware of any I play several space games. I wish it did more fun stuff like No Man's Sky actually. It sounds li…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've thought about it a bunch over the years and my advice is to follow a few principles: procedural elements should almost always impact how the player plays, procedural elements should cross-interact with each other as much as possible, and procedural elements should be understandable to the player. As an example in No Man's Sky the player immediately starts with a jetpack. It makes it so the terrain is approached…
Very good points. Weird question: do you have any tips on how one might apply these principles to a semi-stochastic synth plugin for musicians? (I have several ideas, but I'd be curious to hear yours, independently.)
I think "make it observable" is a good principle for a lot of software, but also is useful here. Like if you have something changing in how it operates think about perceptual clues that are unobtrusive but give the user a sense of what's going on. Think a car engine sounding weird, a laptop getting hot, or a water bottle being filled up rising in pitch.
Being able to rapidly clue in to how something is running in a bunch of different ways is useful. In synth plugin systems I've seen with node graphs I think having some sort of perception of data traveling that you can assess at a glance could be useful. I can see both color and perhaps the "texture" (dotted, dashed, etc.) of the connections being mapped to some important property of what's being transmitted.
On the "cross interactions" thing perhaps there's a design opportunity to find interesting properties of different components you wouldn't normally expose that you can feed into other systems. Perhaps if audio were to clip that is both something you don't want but also a control signal that can feed into something that self-corrects, or even entirely changes the composition. With that you might have some sort of dynamic gain that as it approaches clipping it steps into a new composition creating a strange "ecosystem" of sound.
In general there's some interesting opportunities to try to create real systemic components that try to make mechanisms with interesting properties rather than precisely controlled things. Perhaps you add an input that pulls the current moon phase, astrological signs, time of day, or weather. Then your composition could change and be a sort of live work each time, but not in a totally arbitrary way. If you wanted to extend the idea of "observability" all the way to the user you could by convention add some brief narration at the start describing the conditions of the composition "It is Wednesday. Rain is forecasted. The following composition has been changed accordingly."
It also may be interesting to weave in more sophisticated mathematical systems, or physics simulations, and then feed them into other components. It'd be quite odd but I can imagine like a bunch of balls on ice floating around and when they touch that creates a signal output, but you could have an input that's like "table shake". It'd be fun to see a program triggering these sort of rube goldberg-esque chain of things to create some sort of interesting sound scape.
No idea if that's helpful!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very good points. Weird question: do you have any tips on how one might apply these principles to a semi-stochastic synth plugin for musicians? (I have several ideas, but I'd be curious to hear yours, independently.)
I'm far outside the music creation space so you're basically asking me to spitball something, but I'll try! I think "make it observable" is a good principle for a lot of software, but also is useful here. Like if you have something changing in how it operates think about perceptual clues that are unobtrusive but give the user a sense of what's going on. Think a car engine sounding weird, a laptop getting hot, or a wa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unpopular opinion, but for me, no amount of puzzles/story can offset the utter obnoxious frustration of the time loop.
In case you want to enjoy it anyway, I've got a recommendation: there are quite a few mods for the game, including one which quadruples the time limit, essentially making the time between major events 4 times as long. In that configuration, the mechanic is still there but you aren't feeling on a clock anymore and can explore and play around with stuff at your own pace. As someone hating any kind of timed missions in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but who cares. Most of the people buy a game when it gets released.
Not necessarily. Both NMS and Minecraft are still selling quite well a decade or more after release. Not to mention things like WoW (22 years and still millions of daily players).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah...I played it for probably a couple of hundred hours...and it wasn't that fun. In fact, it's boring. And I've come back a too many times because someone (like some of the commenters here) said "no, man...get the new update! It's a Totally Different Game!". So I jump back in, and it's different to varying degrees...and still boring. Just because there's "lots to do! new quests! rare items to find!", doesn't mean…
What made you play a game for a couple of hundred hours to then conclude that it is boring? I played the first release and put in roughly 100 hours. The first 90 hours were wonderful. Eventually I realized that I wasn't enjoying it as much so I put it down. But I would never call those 90 hours boring. I felt like I got a lot of value out of it, and have fond memories of discovering interesting planets. I really view…
Because I really wanted to like it? Because it didn't get boring immediately? Because the updates kept promising to make it better? I dunno, does that justify my actions enough to satisfy you, or are my observations somehow invalid because I kept beating my head against the thing for what we apparently both agree was far too long?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its notable that you dichotomise using the promises of another unreleased game from the same people. Depth was part of the original NMS promise. Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.
> Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people. I don't think they intentionally misled people. It's not that different to how Spore was marketed during development - a wildly-overconfident dev team promised a living breathing simulated universe, and at some point they had to actually ship the portion they had managed to ge…