Deconceptualist
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Happy birthday! I actually just started playing Journey for the first time yesterday, less than an hour I’d say (on Steam). The visuals and fluidity of controls are nice, nothing spectacular by today’s standards but I’m sure they were great back in the PS3 era. The beginning felt a little slow trudging through the sand until I understood how the scarf upgrades work. But then when I encountered another player it really started to click and go more smoothly. I like how the game encourages cooperation by pinging and refilling each other’s scarf energy, though I feel like progress might go slow again if I get stuck going solo next session. The puzzles are very simple but I was feeling sick so having a ‘cozy’ game was actually pretty nice.
BuzzKill is great for wrangling your notifications. Match a word or phrase and group them, snooze them, set special vibration patterns, whatever.
I wish I was as brave and well-spoken as this young man.
When I was 17-18 I scored really well on a test and the US Air Force tried to recruit me. It was tempting because I was fascinated with aerospace and it would have kickstarted my career and possibly meant no student loans. I’d easily be $100k better off today if I went down that path.
But I couldn’t imagine myself dropping bombs on potentially innocent people at the behest of some smug politician, or even loading ordinance for someone else to do it. The thought made me sick to my stomach. So I figured out my own path. But that was easy for me, because there was no major conflict at the time, no one threatening me with jail, and no social repercussions from that decision. I have to wonder if I would have made the same decision if it was under Tal Mitnick’s conditions.
EA, Activision, Ubisoft… their BS is on another level entirely and I generally don’t play their games because if it.
For NMS / Hello Games it’s more that I really want to like the game but find it immensely frustrating that after years and years of updates, they still haven’t fixed some of the most basic elements.
Like when your character sprints, the tiniest bump in terrain cancels the sprinting. This even happens in the Nexus where it looks like flat ground. Why?
Again for the alien languages… there’s no dictionary in this universe? I’m supposed to believe interstellar travel is commonplace, but they don’t have an app to translate the 3 ubiquitous languages? I have a device in my hand right now that can do that.
Space combat still isn’t balanced. If you alternate between the phase beam with the shield absorb upgrade and any other weapon, you can basically wear down any threat and win.
What has actually been improved about the core game of NMS? People keep telling me that in vague terms without saying what specifically was improved. I know the inventory system is better (but still kind of a mess IMO), but what else? Don’t say multiplayer because they promised that at the beginning.
Yeah I like the “go anywhere” feel and was happy when I found a dinosaur planet too. But it still all feels 2 inches deep in so many ways.
I’ve come back to it a bunch of times because people keep insisting it’s good or “no you just need to try X” or “but the latest update added so much”. Steam says over 300 hours now but a decent portion of that was standing around trade hubs waiting for ships I wanted in S or A class, or literally just walking away from my PC while refiners ran.
I’m not usually the type of player to use cheats/exploits but I actually had more fun when I started using a duplication glitch. No more limited inventory, money, or resources, I could just pick one ship and one multitool and max them out with all the storage and weapons and whatnot. I don’t enjoy grinding so this was a relief. But it still didn’t make up for all the bad underlying mechanics.
Playing the game felt like satire. Basic questions I would expect other devs of sci-fi games to ask themselves seemingly either went unanswered or got super lazy answers.
e.g. “Should we let players customize their spaceships?” to which HG apparently thinks their system of solely generating ships from a random permutation of parts is plenty. Or “Do you think different planets and galaxies would have different hostile flora?”, to which they decided “nah, the same 3 are fine everywhere”. “Should planets have biomes of any kind, at least ice caps maybe?”… “nah, players don’t care if planets are basically uniform.”
I really wanted to like NMS. The core concept is 100% up my alley, it looks pretty good, and it’s a neat sandbox. I suppose it’s not bad if you’re the kind of player who is happy mindlessly gathering resources so you can craft an ornate base. Hell, I played quite a bit because I was determined to collect one of every type of spaceship.
But I really do think the gameplay is objectively bad by almost any possible measure. The on-foot traversal is terrible, waiting around for refiners sucks (though at least they had the sense to give a backpack refiner), trying to get the actual spaceship you want is awful, flying towards the galactic center is a chore, and I could go on. I guess the gunplay is serviceable, but the enemies aren’t the least bit interesting aside from maybe the largest walker bots.
What are you talking about? The player literally learns nothing about the alien languages. All you do is walk up to a NPC, button mash through absolutely inconsequential filler text, and pick the option that says “teach me a word”. Then a popup says “You now know the Korvax word for ‘THE’”, except it doesn’t even tell you which alien word was translated or explain any grammar or context or conjugation or anything. Your character just does a magical substitution from that point forward.
Or you can do the same thing by walking up to the black pillars if you’d rather trudge around a planet surface for macguffins.
How in any way is that a good system? There’s zero skill or challenge or reward or even real gameplay here. A word search puzzle would have 100x more depth.
Unless they’ve fired the absolute moron(s) who designed the crafting and alien language system in NMS, I say stay far away.
I mean, combining dihydrogen and oxygen yields… NaCl? And you learn alien words literally one at a time? Oh but they have procedural generation! Except every single space station looks identical.
IMO This is a developer who does not respect their players. And somehow they’ve convinced a lot of people that periodically adding more shallow grindy fetch quests means the core gameplay isn’t garbage.
Meh. I’m seeing a lot of prices that aren’t even that close to historical lows. e.g. Mass Effect Legendary was $10 somewhere recently but now it’s $12 on Steam (though I’m not giving EA any money for it until they fix the stupid launcher for good on Steam Deck).
Prototype is like $4 though, might snag that if I don’t already own a copy elsewhere.
Islanders is only a few bucks and very serene. You get a random island and a small palette of buildings at a time. The buildings can only go certain places (farm on a plain, quarry near stone, hunting lodge near forest). You get points for putting certain buildings together, or certain ones further apart (mostly in ways that make sense). And that’s about it. When you use up the buildings on your palette you get a new set. There’s no timer, just try to get points. When you reach the goal you can start over on a new island.
It’s very simple. You can’t move or demolish buildings, you don’t worry about roads or infrastructure of any kind, there’s no citizen happiness or disasters or money or anything. Just relax and place little buildings on islands.
I keep trying NMS hoping to find a good game in there somewhere. I’m over 100 hours now, mostly because I’m a dork who likes collecting spaceships.
But all the mechanics – the crafting and movement and languages and even the terrain generation – are frankly pretty terrible. It’s like Hello Games intentionally hired people who don’t know how to design these things.
Why do all the space stations look identical inside? Why do I have to learn one single alien word at a time, including “a” and “the”? Why are there no rivers or waterfalls or glaciers or swamp basins? And why can’t I customize my ship appearance when the game itself can clearly generate one from a dozen random parts?
You’re saying that doesn’t describe the current state of No Man’s Sky? The only notable buildings I’ve found are the same 3 tiny cookie-cutter outposts dotted randomly all across most planets. Oh sorry, 4 now if you count the camps from the Interceptor update and happen to be on a dissonant planet.
I feel like it wouldn’t take much effort to do better so that’s sad if Starfield hasn’t.
I want a remake with visuals done by the artist who illustrated the instruction manual, that would be amazing.
http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/images/c/c7/Final_Fantasy_VI_-_SNES_-_Manual.pdf
I was actually being facetious. Maybe it seems like a throwback or whatever now, but back when DNF finally released, the “tiny player, big world” idea was rather played out. Duke Burger felt very dated and out-of-place in a game where you’re supposed to be this big macho badass because suddenly you can get stomped on or crushed by small kitchen objects. The level itself is a maze of almost entirely platform jumping puzzles and totally overstays its welcome. But I guess it looks kinda cool and does sort of break the monotony of a bad game.
Other games (and especially player-made maps) in the late 90’s did it much better. I especially remember custom levels for its predecessor, Duke Nukem 3D, that had a lot of fun with the shrunken player concept. HL and Quake too like you mention. Folks here also said de_rats in Counter Strike which might’ve been the pinnacle.
Yeah but like any successful politician he’ll readily compromise his principles in order to hold onto power.