Is SaaS and YC, it's ship early and ship often, right? Is that absolutely not the case in games? Also, how true is it in SaaS? Genuinely curious here.
Stuff like this, it's why I often avoid big releases for the first year or two then go play it when it's on sale.
For another perfect game example - Star Wars Outlaws. Terrible, buggy release with obnoxious gameplay loops. They fixed it, now it's one of the better games I've played recently. You can go look up gameplay reviews from the last year to see people shocked at its reputation, it's a very good game now and arguably would have been a candidate for GOTY if it had released in its current form.
I feel like the same thing happens to other sandbox games too. Minecraft is one of my favorite games of all time and I could easily spend a thousand hours in a vanilla world and still find things to do, however the game gets constantly shit on by the community no matter what it does. They speedrun through the progression and then lack any creativity to do anything else in the game.
I personally love building bases and customizing and collecting things, which is a large part of the gameplay in NMS. I could spend hundreds of hours doing that but I guess some people just need a constant sense of progression and the game telling you what to do because they aren't capable of setting their own goals. Anyone who says NMS lacks content or things to do has barely touched the game.
i also happen to enjoy the game itself.
They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.
I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.
why scare quotes around for free? they were free.
>haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it.
i went from hating it to really enjoying it. i am not the only one.
>based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.
my comment comes from my opinion and my experience, not social media. i think its a good game, and i would say it's absolutely worth the money.
The gameplay is completely engaging and this update looks like it fills in even more spaces than were hoped for.
Early access, early release, beta, whatever is just an euphemism of becoming a backer. You thought you buy something final, and in the end you become a financier. You lend your money upfront. All this because a group of pampered kids can't keep a deadline. And think that the world is a playground and they can keep their game 5 years in early access. Get a grip.
Sorry. You release your shit, it gets evaluated, end of story. Nobody cares the rest. Gaming space is already half dead because people think that sitting at a game company means you get to have knitting lessons during workhours, and you can daydream and chitchat all day long. Ridiculous.
1. Total Revenue - ~$500m-$700m
2. Copies Sold - ~15-20m
3. Steam Review Score: 84.36%
4. 40 Free Major Updates
I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
NMS is a great example of a developer who was devoted to their customer base, kept updating the game for free, and saw great market success in return.
This is a story to be celebrated.
The problem is the game itself, gameplay wise. It's just boring for many (including me)
While several people are complaining about a one-time-cost game with an absurd amount of updates that had a rough launch, thousands of people are continuously happy, the subreddit expresses joy. It’s okay to “not get it”; but at some level, this much hate and dogpiling over a game that’s not harmful and not fostering a toxic community is … embarrassing for those participating in the hate.
I really wish they would just focus 100% on Light No Fire.
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
https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...
Compare it to even our own solar system where even so much as a new high-res photo of the hexagon storm on Saturn comes with stunning new and specific detail, or the "heart" on Pluto, we're practically ambushed with novel configurations of atmospheric dynamics and geology. It's frustratingly rare for games to truly activate that feeling of wonder.
I think NMS is still an unbeatable deal for what it is as a game but it's a frustrating near miss flyby of what I think people want a true space exploration game to feel like.
It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.
Spelunky uses handcrafted chunks that are connected together like a puzzle. Each generation feels interesting because each chunk is interesting and they are just strung together into a unique maze.
Terraria does a similar thing, where all the things that matter are hand-crafted. Bosses, items, layer details, progression. The map and cave system is generated but the caves tend to string together hand-crafted experiences and hand-crafted monsters. Many areas are generated, but in a unique style for variety. And there was still a fixed progression in the background (ore and boss progression). I think its in a big contrast to a similar game like Starbound, where all the weapons and creatures and maps were procgen at first, and it felt very '10000 bowls of oatmeal'. Terraria vs Starbound is the most like-for-like comparison I've seen for "procgen done right vs wrong"
1) is the really hard part, I think: it's a challenge to come up with enough meaningful variations that also work from a gameplay point of view.
I think the opposite. The more dimensions you have, the more "invalid space" there should be. Otherwise you end up with giant dinosaurs with tiny feet and fairy wings. You end up with a yellow kitchen with a barrel full of arrows next to a blue dungeon with a giant dresser. You end up with nothing making sense, and everything feeling random in the same way. Trying to spot the differences between 100100111101011110110001001011101 and 1101101110111010000100111001011101 is exactly the "bowl of oatmeal" problem. The vast majority of possible combinations of values should be invalid and impossible, otherwise the choices actually don't matter.
The actual geography doesn't vary that wildly most of the time ( if you've seen one lightly forested river valley, you've seen them all), but players generate a relatively low number of worlds, and in each world probably only see a handful of sites, where dwarf-scale world gen actually matters. Unlike NMS, though, the details of world gen matter to gameplay a lot. Trade caravans and invading armies can't traverse mountain ranges and ocean, so a mountainous peninsula can be extremely isolated. At the site level, you'll probably want to design your fortress to take advantage of local geography to help fortify your fortress and provide resources, so terrain and features like rivers, volcanoes, etc. placement matters a lot.
In contrast, No Man's Sky world gen feels pretty tangent to the actual gameplay. The game does a good enough job incentivizing you to explore lots of planets, but in terms of the survival/base-building aspects, there's a pretty short list of resources that matter to deciding where to setup, and geography hardly matters in terms of how you build.
> 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).
I think video games are art, so take my opinion in context of if this is right up your alley and you really love it, then keep on keepin on!
Space operas are closer to fantasy than hard science fiction: they are about extraordinary people and their extraordinary interactions, you aren't supposed to think hard about the physics.
Procedural generation, on the other hand, is all about emergent behavior, which is closer to hard science fiction: tweak the rules and see what happens. You have to build some deep core physics that are robust, make all the other systems interact in sensible ways over a wide range of conditions, and not worry when balance goes completely off the rails in some cases (in fact, that's the fun part).
No man's sky is a space opera. You could imagine it being hard science fiction: digging into the ground could be deadly (as opposed to a reliable shelter), water / atmosphere mechanics could change (as opposed to just... water and air), etc.
All procedural games feel like this to me at least. I've been playing Diablo / POE recently. Same deal, once you're at the endgame - the goal just becomes bigger numbers. The maps have different themes, the monsters are different, but you sorta just look past that part as you're gathering generated gear with bigger numbers. It's why I typically get about 10% into the endgame and eventually stop playing.
Minecraft is also a decent example, at some point you stop exploring, build a base and focus on the progression rather than seeing what the system generates in the next biome.
There's a fixed set of biomes and notable geographical features designed by the devs, so there's no incentive to keep finding unseen ones, but each world gets its own layout and landmarks, so you get to explore the details of that specific generation for days without carrying over your knowledge of the previous one.
In the long term it might get repetitive too, but it does at the same rate as one gets tired of any other game I think.
A good start is not to try and build an entire galaxy. Procgen that focuses on the fine detail of a relatively small world have a big leg up over these "everything generators" (i.e. think of something more on the scale of Tiny Glade or Bad North)
There are enough hand built things that you don't quickly start running into repeats, and they are just melded into the generated terrain.
This sounds like it would be a great mod for Factorio. Adds other players factories but in a dilapidated and decayed state.
I think it's due to the fact that there is a fair bit of content, but the interface drip-feeds them very slowly, combined with the difficulty of the game itself that prevents users from finding all possible ways to interact with all content.
Shame that it just languished to a point where I think Microsoft completely lost both interest and control over that feature, where in Horizon 6 it just gives you the exact same few driveatars every race, and somehow no one at Playground Games is interested in fixing this. At this point I strongly suspect that they literally don't know how to, the knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode.
Iirc it used a voxel engine so would have been late 90's.
The game is also too unrealistic for me: the planets are too close, you shoot asteroids just like you could 47 years ago, you can't dig very deep at all, your ship follow you wherever you jump to.
The trailer was beautiful, the actual game is really nice for a short while, but it's too simplistic and repetitive.
And maybe it has, but the first 60 minutes of the game still feel like enough of a slog that I have yet to get to any of the good stuff.
I found a barren planet in a black hole system where the vibe was all dark and shadowy with the light being tinted purple, and just some crystals or something on the surface, alongside a damaged robot that you could interact with.
There was also a world that had high Sentinel activity where I founded a settlement (well, more like took over managing it), however as it turns out it’d have those gravity storms often during which you could soar through the air.
There was also a world where the surface was toxic and you couldn’t stay on it for long, so I excavated a base underground, like something out of Red Faction.
For what it’s worth, a lot of it can feel samey (most of the scanning) and kinda boring, but while there aren’t that many insanely huge and cinematic moments, sometimes RNG hits just right and you get something nice.
I wish somehow the complexity of eve could meet a game like this. I would sell a kidney for that
It's a weird mix of amazingly well done and absolute garbage. And pay to win. Don't forget about the pay to win bullshit.
To say everything in this game is half baked is giving it too much credit. It's 10% baked at best. This isn't a game; it's an underwhelming tech demo. The only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.
Everything else is baaaad: the quests have less logic than entry MMO quests, and are mainly fetch missions. The planets are randomly generated slop. The economy of building up your ship/fleet isn't fun (you just sell your ships over and over again). Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that are clearly just trying to trick folks into buying an elaborate space game tech demo. Can we move on from this "game"?
i have an idea for it,
Let users populate the universe with custom quests. Scriptable quests with dialog and multipart structure. You need a custom script language and some limitations on it. Example quests:
- "Bandits have occupied our town", but actually bandits are tax collectors. You instead may help them document the goods.
- "Our star is dying", instead a huge starhip is recharging and refusing to move without some condition.
also add a rumor system to lead players to quests.
you can use my idea Hello Games, you have my permission.
The RNG space is part of the problem - planets and biomes kinda start to repeat after while and it is not really important any more on which weird planet or station you are.
It is actually interesting how many games with much smaller RNG generated world maps work just fine because you don't travel so much like in NMS & kinda learn to know the landscape and also shape it yourself or with your friends. Like you know there is a lake next to you base and that deserted town, then there is that forested mountain where you got ambushed by zombies once & built a secondary mining base later, etc.
In NMS you land on a random planet, build a base on it and - like, what is it good for, if there are millions of similar planets & coop multiplayer is almost non-existent.
If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.
It's a completely different game, it just doesn't look like it if you picked back up where you left off. Without the right context, you have a tendency to just repeat what you were doing before, and it feels like nothing changed.
But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.
This game just doesn't scale well from mid game on - it's way too easy, even on permadeath + hardest difficulty. Like, making money is way too easy, combat is way too easy, everything is too forgiving. And the entire loop is centered on like, 3 things to do that are all variants of the same exact thing. Really hope they do a much better job in Light No Fire.
To the guy who replied to me: Our genius overlord moderators rate limited my responses so I'll post here.
> I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding
You and I have very different ideas of what forgiving means. A reasonably intelligent 7 year old that enjoys and has experience playing video games could play this game on max difficulty settings and not have any issues. And while I never had an issue finding anything (shit is literally everywhere), resource scarcity doesn't equally an unforgiving game mechanic unless it's gated by some sort of difficult fight or something, which this game doesn't have. Combat is laughably easy and repetitive. I've got a couple hundred hours in the game, and at one point I was running the same bounty missions over and over again for some outrageous amount of money - the mission took 7 minutes round trip, the combat encounter was literally the exact same every time, same number of enemies just with different names. And that was the most efficient way I could make money in late game on the permadeath server on max settings. If that's the best economy loop a game can come up with, a 100% brainless combat encounter, then the developer has done something very wrong.
you spend most of your time finding/farming resources and unlocking builds
most of your time is traveling between planets/systems/galaxies for different resources
I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding, which is the core gameplay, you can easily miss it if you don't play for 40+ hours but there are entire varieties of star systems you can't access initially, an entire race you literally can't see without completing some strings of missions, etc