I was watching Digital Foundry's video explaining some of the technology behind the game last night and the same basic thing struck me.
They created all these cool worlds and new animals and you can fly between worlds! The harvesting resources doesn't really bother me, that's common in games.
But how do you harvest resources? You shoot it with a laser gun. You shoot the environment. You shoot the animals. They flop around.
Why does everything have to include shooting? Why not some other mechanic that doesn't look like 'killing' everything. Even if the gun just had sort of a cone like beam instead of the generic laser that seems to explode things it would feel different.
To be fair, a game that included (say) developing new forms of consciousness and levelling up the entire civilisation after contact with aliens would have been a bit harder to bring to market.
Well, Civilization included alternative ways of creating a dominating society: war, trade/diplomacy, technology. And this was in favor of fun! You had diversity in strategic decisions, you had to consider different approachs to a problem.
Yup. Quite a few sneak-em-ups and multiparadigm first-person games offer mostly- or wholly- pacifist routes through too - Thief, Deus Ex, Dishonored etc.
The precursor for No Man's Sky is Minecraft, which utilizes Axes/Picks to collect resources/fight enemies. I don't think there's much difference between using a melee weapon and a ranged weapon for the genre.
Probably because its cheap/easy to animate and code. I suspect NMS is something of a con by Sony and Hello Games, where we're presented with what's supposed to be a AAA game that costs $60, but is in fact an indie game that should sell for about $20. Thus all the corner cutting, lack of hand-made content, and Spore-like complaints.
Imagine if Minecraft was initially partnered up with EA and sold for $60 instead of staying indie and having a modest pricing scheme. That's exactly what's going on with NMS.
There's nothing wrong with charging 3x product worth if people are willing to pay for it, which was the case as NMS sold out at retailers.
Granted, the backlash would be much less if the game was priced apropriately, and it's likely that the game will have weaker legs now that more information is known about it.
I'm not sure about this 'it should cost x amount' argument.
Even if someone only got 10 hours of play from the game it cost them 6 bucks per hour - the day after launch I was reading about people who stayed up exploring all night and didn't even leave their starting planet
If you switched the tool you have to look like something than a laser gun, the effect to not look like a loser beam, and changed the documentation to refer to it that way (I honestly don't know what the game calls it) how much more would that cost for a AAA title?
A few thousand? Twenty thousand with all the languages? How many millions did the game take?
Mostly, gun interfaces are popular because a gun in its crudest form is simple to control. Its operating controls are (1) point in a direction (2) press fire.
Ture, but as I said they could make it look different and explain it differently.
It just sort of feels like people come up with cool new ideas for worlds for games, and then slap a gun/FPS interface on it because it's well understood and some sort of default.
They put so much thought into making No Man's Sky.... except using a weapon as the main interface.
lack of imagination. People generally only imagine variations of things they've recently seen and since most computer games are FPS (copied all the way back to Doom and before) that's what they do. People just copy what they've seen before.
I remember a webcomic about this trope in a game many years ago. Interaction with the world was via hitting things with a sword. Last panel culminated with the character knitting a sweater (by hitting it with a sword), IIRC.
The core problem is that for all the games look pretty in graphical terms, they've got major fundamental limitations in other ways.
One of the biggest is that you don't have hands. You have a laser pointer and perhaps even several dozen verbs for that laser pointer, but no hands. You can not pick up two things and do anything useful with them like you can in the real world. We can navigate around in 3D environments OK, but we have terrible interaction with them. Shooting is not the only thing that we have, but once you start seeing how limited the palette is, it becomes obvious that it's one of the more popular choices for a reason. In fact, even "melee" combat, under the hood, is generally "shooting" with a short range and an animation utterly disconnected from the underlying mechanics, hence things like the silliness of swinging your sword cleanly through someone's torso, something that in the real world would cleave them in twain, for zero damage. See also the absurdity of what passed for "speech" in games, as you attempt one of the most complicated activities there is by pointing with a laser pointer and grunting at what you want to "say".
You have no significant AI, so while No Man's Sky may have world upon world of fantastic-looking creatures, you can't do much of anything with them. You can't pet them. You can't raise them. You sure as hell can't communicate with them. What else are you going to do but point a laser pointer at them and grunt? And what other grunts are there that are of any value other than "Shoot"? The advantage shooting has is that both damage and death are relatively easy to make the target respond to. (Death in particular; once animated once you don't even have to animate on an ongoing basis.) Yes, you can come up with some other options, but they tend to peter out fast.
So, basically, you can't interact with the world very richly, and the world can't even correctly respond to those limited interactions. The graphics in modern games deceive you. By being nearly realistic they convince a good chunk of your brain that the game must be realistic. But the graphics are not representative of what's really going on; instead they are the bizarrely advanced spike sticking out above a landscape of much more modest design means. You've got games where the landscapes are almost photorealistic, but your ability to "speak" is walking up to a person and tapping them, which we saw 30+ years ago.
While I credit No Man's Sky for making it to release where many of its peers have had significant trouble making it that far, I've never been excited about it, because I've already played the "big universe of nothing much to do" game with things like Frontier: Elite II. Unfortunately, what procedural generation tends to produce is the stuff that was already easy in the first place. Writing a story that transcends the manifest limitations of the medium, or writing tight levels that require you to exploit certain mechanics, or creating creative puzzles based on a slowly-increasing set of mechanics, and so on, that's the hard stuff.
I'm not saying nobody will have fun, or that it's a bad game, or that you shouldn't try it. I'm saying that these limitations are pretty fundamental to the medium, and whenever somebody promises implicitly or explicitly to overcome them, you should be really skeptical. There's a long, long line of this sort of thing, Black and White, Spore, Fable, endless lines of procedurally generated games, things that even if the end result was not always "bad" are things that could not transcend the limitations of the medium.
It's interesting that you have mentioned Black & White. You have a creature that you can pet and train. Frankly, that creature is way more interesting than the rest of the game put together.
I still have fond memories of my brother trying to teach the creature to pick up rocks, and then throw them. The intention was to bombard the other villages.
Training it to pick up was easy. Leash it, pick up the rock in front of it, repeat. Put the rock next to it. Did it pick it up? If so, pet it. Repeat.
Getting it to throw the rock was more involved. Even after watching my brother doing it, the creature would pick up the rock, then put it down again. He must have spent at least half an hour trying.
Then, all of a sudden, the creature starts throwing rocks! Success! Well, except that it was also picking up feces. And throwing them. And picking up friendly villagers, and throwing them. Repeatedly.
That was the funniest thing I've seen in a game, by far. That, and watching my brother scolding the creature for the behavior.
The underlying creature model appears to have been somewhat simplistic. Creature needs were manually coded with first order logic. Not sure how training was actually done, but it was unlikely to be too complicated.
Now, more than a decade later, one should expect one "creature" that's even more advanced, specially considering the renewed interest in AI. Or that the creatures that one encounters in an RPG to be at least as advanced as the B&W one. Instead, they are not actually much more advanced than Pacman ghosts, no matter how pretty they look.
"The underlying creature model appears to have been somewhat simplistic. Creature needs were manually coded with first order logic. Not sure how training was actually done, but it was unlikely to be too complicated."
Black and White was one of the reasons I tried to carefully write that so it was clear that not all the things I listed were "bad". What I recall is that Black and White failed its promises; the creature is nowhere near as smart as what was promised. But many people still had fun with the game that resulted.
I find the failures of AI are often quite entertaining; they have a different character of failure than other sorts. I also frequently enjoy the errors that word-based AI makes, because there's often some bizarre, twisted sense behind it that our brains can pick up on and enjoy. Markov Chain babble generators are the simplest example of that, but the serious work can generate a lot of great stuff too.
I get that 'point and shoot', as an interface, works very well. I have no qualms with that. But why does it look like a gun that destroys things? They could make it seem more like a Tricorder from Star Trek (that doesn't emit a laser beam that blows things up) and it would make a big tonal difference.
I'm amazed at what they accomplished. My issue here is more of a graphic choice. Why does the thing you use to kill and animal to defend yourself look exactly like the thing you use to harvest plants for resources look exactly like the thing you use to destroy terrain?
It feels almost like it was just assumed and no one ever thought about it.
I dare not estimate the minutes (hours?) of my life I've wasted while my Skyrim character hit the ground with a pickaxe or chopped some wood. Many games suffer from additional realism. A magic space gun that mines resources sounds just fine for a video game world.
I got this game because I like games I can play and let my son watch a little bit of. Which is great for mining, building, crafting games. You wouldn't think it but Fallout 4 is actually good if you stick just to base building. And avoid anything else.
So I picked up this game with the intention of letting him watch a little bit and talking to him about space.
After he went to bed and I was a few hours into the game I realized this same thing though... All I'm doing is going to a planet, consuming their resources and leaving. The only nice thing I can do is with other aliens and I can feed some animals but not all of them. You don't build anything on the planet and you end up destroying a lot of resources.
It's still a fun game, don't get me wrong, but the idea that after the game is over (which I'm not at yet) all that will follow my character is a gouge in every planet he came across just seems... sad.
I compare this to something like Minecraft where at least you leave structures and buildings behind, and just feel like it's kind of a sad game as well as an exploratory game. Which may have been the point behind it as well. Maybe that's the deeper meaning the developers want you to get.
Could have been an interesting learning experience had they brought up a scorecard after you've been playing a while (or at the end of the game), tabulating all the death and destruction you caused. But that really only works once, otherwise you'll come into the game with the intention of death and destruction.
I'm writing this comment from a tech conference, which seems oddly fitting.
I find exactly the same problem with modern tech tooling (especially on the frontend). We, the tech community, celebrate tool builders and so we all try to build tools. We end up with a fantastic ecosystem of many diverse ideas pinging off of each other. In this situation we all win - sorta.
I write a bunch of Angular 1. React and Angular 2 are both superb libraries that allow me to build a great frontend UI. There are four React talks and a full-day workshop all communicating the _How_ of React [0]. We're building tools for the sake of tools - continually answering the 'how' with the latest framework without consideration for the end purpose, our 'why'.
> If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.
The current state of tech as I see it is that we're pumping out endless tutorials on logging [1] but never teaching devs to yearn for the endless sea.
[0] I'm picking on React here but this is just one example out of many.
Futurism is how you get there. It's unfortunate that most popular future imaginings are post-apoc or dystopian. But we were once there with the idyllic old star trek universe - one where humanity used tech to utopian ends.
We can get there again. We just need new visionaries. Maybe games are the best place to envision such futures?
Do you have any recommendations on modern scifi that fits the futurism bill? There's lots of great stuff (Expanse is my current favorite) that seems to be summed up as "And then things got worse"
I think it's arguable Bank's Culture is essentially utopian. Most of the books tend to be about edge cases, because "and they lived their lives and contributed to society" doesn't make for great plot. But the vast majority seems to be using technology to realize their hopes and dreams.
I still can't decide which book to tell people to start with. Excession was my favorite, since it features the hilariously snarky interactions between the Minds so much more than the other books. Hydrogen Sonata was also really good for all the backstory about the Culture and the Sublime, which was only hinted at in other stories. And then there's Use of Weapons, since Zakalwe is arguable the most interesting character in the series, and the mind-blowing ending. I could go on. :) I guess my only advice to first time readers is to pick any novel and even if you don't love it immediately, read another one. The series really grows on you.
I picked up Player of Games on a recommendation here on HN and devoured every Banks book I could get my hands on for the next six months. If Banks had written a phone book I'd read it. I was so depressed when I finally finished all of them (he passed from a brain tumor in his prime, a terrible loss). The Culture novels are some of the few books I've read that really expanded my perception of humanity. Also the best thought experiment on human sexuality I've ever encountered.
Suppose everyone on earth had to vote to either live in Star Trek's world or ours. I don't know how many would say yes, but I suspect far to many people would say yes to call it dystopian.
Compare that with say Star Wars, where even fan's might have second thoughts. Or a 1984 where only the fringe would even think about it.
You're getting some downvotes, but it raises a question about the basic concept of utopia as it's been explored by many, many authors. All the ones I can think of achieve peace through homogenity and comformity, often with quite restrictive rules on how you can dress, where you can live, who you can live with, what you do for work, how you spend your leisure time… and these are legitimate attempts at exploring the qualities of potential utopias, not just setting the stage for "then it all fell down" narratives.
Perhaps the area Star Trek does better than most (if one goes with the premise that it's a utopia, and really quite contradictory to it) is how humane and permissive it is with those who break the rules or fail to match the ideal (utopias don't tend to survive this kind of behavioral diversity). It might be big government, but there's still quite a bit of freedom in individual lives despite the militarized hierarchy and silly outfits.
The impression I got of Star Trek is outside of Starfleet was the utopia. Much like how Special Circumstances was the Culture outlet for specific kinds of people. Large segments of the population in both universes live the bohemian artist lifestyle even if they are not great artists and that's considered completely ok. But, well they don't live the kind of lives that you want to read about.
In the Culture novels you could live a hundred years as a dolphin, a decade contemplating Zen as house plant, and then decide you want to stop navel gazing and do something. Star Trek lacks immortality, but people still tend to live the kind of lives they chose to.
I'm not sure if it applies, but in later series like DS9/enterprise we see another side of the federation in regards to section 31 which is effectively a three letter agency that is responsible for all the dirty work of keeping the utopia afloat.
We also see that they are really willing to do whatever is necessary to citizens as well. I'm not sure we can consider the world of Star Trek a utopia, at least I can't, but it definitely is a case of overall better in life outcomes for most of the people within its grasp.
Because I had to know where that quote was from: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/08/25/sea/ (summary: probably paraphrased French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
The perhaps original inspiration is equally beautiful (rendered from French):
One will weave the canvas; another will fell a tree by the light of his ax. Yet another will forge nails, and there will be others who observe the stars to learn how to navigate. And yet all will be as one. Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see nothing contradictory but rather a community of love.
I'm not sure you think why "we" (who?) need to teach devs to "yearn for the endless sea". We're literally talking about the endless sea some dev made, and we're unhappy because we wanted an endless critique of capitalism instead.
Surprised Kuchera, who's been around a minute, doesn't mention the analogy with JRPGs and random home invasion / looting.
Sure some of them included witty triggers on a minority of chests, but by and large the "visit new place, steal everything that's not nailed down, profit" trope persisted and continues to persist.
PS Edit: On the going-to-Africa-to-kill-a-lion comment, for a more nuanced take, I would highly recommend this RadioLab episode. It's an amazingly balanced treatment of an emotional topic from a multitude of perspectives. Corey Knowlton (who paid to kill a black rhino and did so) makes an incredibly clear, realistic, and essentially Roosevelt-ian argument for game management near the end.
Agreed to some extent (I think exploration is not boring, or at least it shouldn't be). To be fair, it seems like the dev team has already put out a big update, and plans to continue to add things. I just don't know what the scope/scale of those future updates will be though, aside that they'll all be free.
I was hoping that we'd be able to build buildings and colonize planets. It'd make particular planets feel more special and give you more incentive to stick around. And if they ever got around to doing this, it'd be great if we could build things wall by wall in great detail instead of just "ok, plop down prefabricated factory here".
For me the biggest problem is that there's no reason to explore. For the first few planets, when I saw a cave, I was enticed and wanted to see what I could find.
Now I don't even bother going in them. Chances are my inventory is close to capacity, and I know there's not going to be anything exciting down there because it would be marked on my map.
Is that the point though: how does that make you reflect on your own existence outside the game?
I've been playing Civ5 recently: first run I played warrior-like, then realised I could have played differently, then realise that the diplomacy mechanic was really lacking that it made the game too one-dimensional, then realised that diplomacy is harder to model because it's harder to do.
I realized that what they should have done is make a platform for other games to exist within instead of trying to make a game. Similarly to minecraft, but more vast.
I personally thought of Minetest, which is also a game engine and game, but quite a bit closer to Minecraft, i.e. you might not even be able to tell the difference.
I've played a bit with Minetest, and used it to introduce my 12-year-old to modding with Lua. The look on his face when he got his first mod working and used it in-game was priceless.
The survival feedback loop is a well-trodden trope in game design. Punch a tree. NMS actually succeeds here by constantly draining resources in order to survive... the same resources needed for many crafting recipes. You also can't carry a mountain's worth of resources in your back pocket. The severely limited (at first) inventory space is a subtle resource as well.
Thematically it makes sense enough to immerse oneself in the game. Space, for all its wonders, is incredibly hostile to soft, squishy meat bags. It's tougher than the sea on our equipment... and the sea destroys everything eventually. So of course it takes resources to survive and travel to new worlds.
The narrative framework of these mechanics is not built on one of harmonious living on a single patch of land with a zero-carbon footprint.
And you don't have to kill the animals at all to catalog them (tiny, fast moving birds not-with-standing).
Thematically I don't see this as the "biggest problem."
Frankly, I don't see the point of the article as to what is particular in NMS. I've had that exact feeling about pretty much every game I've played in the last 20 years. Let's see a few examples...
Tomb Raider: as Lara Croft, in game, you basically assumes that everyone you encounter in the game is out there to kill you, so you kill them off pre-emptively. You kill every living species you meet to craft better weapons and eat.
Torchlight: explore, find lizard village, exterminate them all. Presumably, they mate and have children so even though it's not explicitly depicted, you kill women and children too.
Rocket League: you go the extreme of sometimes blowing up your opposing team players to score a goal in a televised game.
All RPG: the world is a loot, just for you.
Frankly, I've found that abstract games and games with less realistic back-story have been the only ones presenting stories and game mechanics that are not first-degree unethical and amoral.
> We're capable of creating endless numbers of worlds and species, but we can't think of new things to do with them.
> What's sad is despite all our ingenuity, so many of our mechanics reinforce ideas and behaviors we know to be harmful.
Reality Check: You are a lifeform that feeds on the transition of matter from low entropy to high entropy states. We very literally consume worlds. We should try and do that in a way that doesn't undermine our own survival chances, and, as long as that doesn't interfer with the previous point in a way that minimises harm to other lifeforms that we consider useful or beautiful. No amount of virtue signalling and related posturing is going to change that fundamental reality.
It's very typical of Kuchera and Polygon to produce such badly thought-through moralising on videogames, but considering how closely the theme of the game runs to a fundamental physical truth of the human condition I find the criticism rather crass.
Not just humans, all life. Life is taking the chaos of the universe and imposing order on it. Holding that sort of structure causes entropy; the chaos of the universe causes entropy. The universe is going to fill up with entropy no matter what. It might as well be ordered, so that something can experience it, rather than chaotic, with nothing to experience it.
>>> You are a lifeform that feeds on the transition of matter from low entropy to high entropy states
This is a video game. You could be anything, do anything. Introduce mechanics that do not require the consumption of worlds. Lots of games have mechanics that don't require stripmining planets.
I read the tweets more as disappointment that we can't do something different in our creation. Just because the real world is built on consumption doesn't mean all art has to be.
If it's art, perhaps that's exactly the point the artist is trying to make. I think I tend to agree with critics of the article, because rather than explore that point, they use it as a chance to generate pageviews by an incredibly shallow moralizing of something that could be considered art.
Any transgressive or satirical piece of art could have this exact same critique leveled at it, but generally they don't because critics in other media have a more nuanced understand of the relationship between art and the artists intentions.
> Just because the real world is built on consumption doesn't mean all art has to be.
Correct. But because the real world is built on consumption, criticising creative expression for exploring that is at best invalid. What's going on with Polygon is that they're making this invalid criticism to further their political narratives.
Whichever shallow ideologies and narratives happen to be trendy. The sort that frequently spring forth from the rich vein of cultural authoritarianism that runs though most journalism these days.
While I agree with you in general on the subject of Polygon's political bent, I don't think the criticism is invalid because of it. The crux of the issue is this:
> There is no way to create on these worlds
You needn't look at anyone's politics, pro or con, to wonder: in a world where the second best selling game of all time is Minecraft, how much sense is there in a galaxy-sized sandbox where you can't build anything?
But Humans and their actions are also a part of the natural course of the universe, so Richards was just acting according to the natural drive for survival of himself and his species.
The difference between NMS and a game like Minecraft is, that although the latter also has the same resource-consuming and animal-killing type of exploration and exploitation, it also allows for sustainable practices like planting trees and breeding animals, and doing other things that increase utility and lowers in-game entropy. Even Spore has this. There's nothing wrong with expressing a wish for a game to go beyond some perceived harsh reality of invasive consumption with just minimizing harm. Reality and the human condition is more than just that.
The sustainability practices that you mention are needed when the demand on resources exceeds the ability of the resources to otherwise replenish: a conservation problem. It sounds like in NMS it would be sustainable for a single explorer to attempt to strip mine the planet and nuke the whales since the influence a single player could exert is insignificant on a planetary scale.
And if you've walked around one of these simulated planets it's unreal insignificant you are!
In fact I find my brain tends to do the common human ego-centric thing and compartmentalizes the entire planet to only that which I've experienced.
Yet if I just land on a planet and tape the joystick to move my avatar forward... well I could go walk away and come back in six months to a year and see if I made it back to my starting position... and even if I recorded it to watch it at my leisure, my FOV will only cover a small fraction of the total surface area.
It's a gross exaggeration to suggest a single, lone character could "strip mine" an entire planet by themselves.
You need to gather enough radioactive isotopes to power your magical space plane and keep you alive and a few other elements to manufacture upgrades and that's about it. It's not like you're managing a global conglomerate with trillions of dollars of capital invested in machinery to extract every last mineral from the surface.
update
I think it says more about the people who interpret the mechanics this way than any statement Hello Games could be making by utilizing these mechanics.
"Reality Check: You are a lifeform that feeds on the transition of matter from low entropy to high entropy states. We very literally consume worlds. We should try and do that in a way that doesn't undermine our own survival chances, and, as long as that doesn't interfer with the previous point in a way that minimises harm to other lifeforms that we consider useful or beautiful. No amount of virtue signalling and related posturing is going to change that fundamental reality."
>We're capable of creating endless numbers of worlds and species, but we can't think of new things to do with them.
At least in terms of species, we don't do that because it's a game that is designed to appeal to members of _our_ species.
There are well known psychological hooks that can be employed to make a game interesting to play or even addictive.
For example the slight delay as all the blocks fall down in angry birds was a carefully chosen interval that makes the player more likely to continue playing.[1]
If a game attempted to have the player embody a creature with a completely alien psychology, it probably wouldn't be playable by humans.
Its a cool game. I played it for 3 hours, up until 3am, because I wanted to get off of the planet (side note: my son got off of the planet in 20 mins) and I'm not a "gamer" by any means. It held my interests.
I hope that they do more with what they currently have because it is a damn impressive platform for a v1. The planets, space ships, animals, plants, etc. are all great. It just needs "humanity." Imagine finding a planet full of advanced life with culture and government and a military. or one where people simply battle. Or one where you bring your mined resources for the greater good/evil. There are so many possibilities.
I dunno what the extensiblity features are of this game, it would be cool if you could write scripts for a planet's creatures. Try to build ecosystems. And then you can share those online with others. Kinda like those AI competitions but with no end goal
> But the uncomfortable subtext of No Man’s Sky is that the galaxy exists for your benefit, that it’s OK to blindly consume and profit from everything you see.
There is nothing uncomfortable about this, unless you somehow have trouble distinguishing this fantasy world from reality, or believe this game for some reason should teach you life lessons and influence your personal values.
I personally am sick of this kind of hand-wringing, navel-gazing writing online. Especially as regards games, of all things. This isn't thoughtful critique or meaningful introspection. The original tweets are good critique. This writer's article is simply melodrama, false-intellectualism, and pseudo-ethics.
In terms of videogame critique, there is no doubt a lot to say about No Man's Sky. Including that it is disappointing that a game which is so creative, innovative, and envelope-pushing in so many ways reverts to rote mechanics like point-and-shoot and a trite explore-collect-upgrade-expand core loop design. I personally would have loved to see NMS' core loop be about discovery and improvement -- leaving planets better than you found them, perhaps. (Though "better" on what dimensions and metrics would be an interesting question.) And one could actually write a meaningful article on philosophy, culture, or even sci-fi and futurism based on the universe NMS presents for consideration. Unfortunately, this article does none of this and is a lazy aping of more thoughtful tweets.
As much as the article critiques NMS for relying on the tropes of shooting, and extracting+expanding in games, it leans entirely on its own tropes of online "journalism" today, with shallow thinking, false moral criticism, and pointless hand-wringing for the sake of attention.
> I personally am sick of this kind of hand-wringing, navel-gazing writing online.
Ditto, it's happening whenever anyone writes about media of any kind these days. Sometimes I think people can't remove themselves from the events of the world. Another example I read is in the upcoming Deus Ex game there was a poster where a character in the background had an "Aug Lives Matter" poster. Apparently that's reason to get enraged these days. Disregard that the games themes are metaphorical about racism, lets just call that offensive.
Man these guys are not playing the same game I am. I come to a new planet, I wander around looking at how pretty it is, I scan animals and give them names that amuse me. Visit artifacts and outposts, learn some words. Move on.
I feed the animals. I don't shoot them. If one comes after me I run. Shoot a bird from the sky to identify it? Hell no. How about accepting that you'll never name that, or trying to find a way to get close enough to peacefully lock the scanner onto it?
I run from space pirates. I'm not here for combat. I paid $50 for a giant, endless painting of a cool alien world that I can wander through for as long as I LIFE SUPPORT GETTING LOW crap I guess I should pick some zinc fruits.
No Man's Sky is at its best when it embraces being bored. There's nothing to do for vast stretches. Detach from the need to be Interacting with something, to be Engaged by a Game Mechanic, and enjoy the world's most expansive walking simulator ever built, with a side dish of Alien Petting Simulator.
And then go outside and sit under a tree for a half hour, lying on your back and watching the sun move over the insane complexity of just that one tree. And think about nothing.
This adequately sums up my approach to the game, as well. It is absolutely stunning and beautiful and utterly serene. I feel calmed by my endless wandering, keeping my ship within a 10-minute walk away, and wondering what I'll find next.
I see what you're saying but I'm honestly kind of unclear at this point on what I'd be getting for my $50 that I can't get for free if I just, you know, go for a walk.
That probably sounds really dismissive, but I don't intend it to be. I mean, I live in a city and there was a deer hanging out behind my apartment building the other day, and a half dozen Cooper's hawks decided to stop for lunch at the pond behind where I work not long ago. I feel like maybe spending money on the game and the hardware to run it is a little bit missing the point of something? Maybe I've just been very fortunate in my choice of environment.
Last night I landed on an inhabitable moon with giant blobs of nickel ore floating above bright red ground. I wandered around, fed some cat-weasels, and nearly got killed by a radiation storm that swept up unexpectedly. All while lounging on the beanbag chair in my living room, with my SO sitting next to me getting some work done and occasionally commenting. I ended up naming the moon "No Man's Meat" because it all looked, well, like meat, and it made us both laugh.
It's a fifty dollar ticket to a hike through a lurid 1970s sci-fi book cover. If that sounds appealing to you, then great. If not? Hey, that's cool too.
Oh, come on. I was expecting to see something related to the procedural generation, how it made for artificial and boring worlds or somesuch (which I disagree, btw).
Instead, I read some diatribe about consumption. There are 18 quintillion planets! Surely one can find a way to grab whatever resources are needed and not bother the locals much.
This new political correctness trend is bothersome. It is just a game.
Now, just out of spite, I want to make a game where you are a sentient AI and can use organics (sentient or otherwise) in whichever way appeals to you. Friends, food, fuel, building materials. Looking forward for the reviews.
Factorio is about mining, industrializing, polluting, and slaughtering the locals. It's probably in my top 3 of all time. I have exactly zero need for my fictional entertainment to reflect the values that I align with IRL.
Strip mining planets once you're in space is pretty wasteful given gravity well overhead. Just harvest Asteroids, Moons, and comets, and planets are mostly for tourism.
Having made a similar game over the last decade [1], i suspect that if NMS didn't have all the marketing and polish, no one would have known what to do in it.
The most asked question about Spaceway i got is what to do in this infinite universe with no goals and challenges. Most feature requests and feedback were along the lines of making this or that gameplay mechanics or story that would use up a few stars in one galaxy, and leave the remaining quadrillions of them unused.
I've thought for years about what to make of it, but there is simply no ideas for an infinite world better than what NMS did - explore and consume.
I think that it was clear from the beginning that the basic architecture of the universe -- the generated planets and landscapes -- would completely prohibit the enjoyment that is found in Minecraft: that of making and changing.
You can't build huge monoliths to yourself for others to find, you can't make things together, you can't leave your mark on the universe in any way except for meaningless additions to a catalog of species.
You can't even meet each other, and has been made clear now despite hemming and hawing from the developer.
This should have been clear from the mechanics of the universe, but I think players are just now starting to realize how empty that might make the game.
I grant that there is probably still a lot of fun just gathering materials, and gawking and beautiful landscapes, but I don't see how that will maintain people's attention the way games that allow you to make and change the universe do.
Games should be like this. The point of (social) sci-fi is to explore and consider situations. To learn pitfalls before we actually confront these situations.
Of course, must of us don't pay any attention to these lessons.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadJeez, what a depressing, existential kick in the nuts.
They created all these cool worlds and new animals and you can fly between worlds! The harvesting resources doesn't really bother me, that's common in games.
But how do you harvest resources? You shoot it with a laser gun. You shoot the environment. You shoot the animals. They flop around.
Why does everything have to include shooting? Why not some other mechanic that doesn't look like 'killing' everything. Even if the gun just had sort of a cone like beam instead of the generic laser that seems to explode things it would feel different.
Imagine if Minecraft was initially partnered up with EA and sold for $60 instead of staying indie and having a modest pricing scheme. That's exactly what's going on with NMS.
Granted, the backlash would be much less if the game was priced apropriately, and it's likely that the game will have weaker legs now that more information is known about it.
Even if someone only got 10 hours of play from the game it cost them 6 bucks per hour - the day after launch I was reading about people who stayed up exploring all night and didn't even leave their starting planet
A few thousand? Twenty thousand with all the languages? How many millions did the game take?
It would never triple the price of the game.
It just sort of feels like people come up with cool new ideas for worlds for games, and then slap a gun/FPS interface on it because it's well understood and some sort of default.
They put so much thought into making No Man's Sky.... except using a weapon as the main interface.
I definitely would like to see some evidence to support this - if you have any.
Yes, FPS is massively popular, but there is also a massive amount of less known titles that are not FPS games
No luck finding it again.
The core problem is that for all the games look pretty in graphical terms, they've got major fundamental limitations in other ways.
One of the biggest is that you don't have hands. You have a laser pointer and perhaps even several dozen verbs for that laser pointer, but no hands. You can not pick up two things and do anything useful with them like you can in the real world. We can navigate around in 3D environments OK, but we have terrible interaction with them. Shooting is not the only thing that we have, but once you start seeing how limited the palette is, it becomes obvious that it's one of the more popular choices for a reason. In fact, even "melee" combat, under the hood, is generally "shooting" with a short range and an animation utterly disconnected from the underlying mechanics, hence things like the silliness of swinging your sword cleanly through someone's torso, something that in the real world would cleave them in twain, for zero damage. See also the absurdity of what passed for "speech" in games, as you attempt one of the most complicated activities there is by pointing with a laser pointer and grunting at what you want to "say".
You have no significant AI, so while No Man's Sky may have world upon world of fantastic-looking creatures, you can't do much of anything with them. You can't pet them. You can't raise them. You sure as hell can't communicate with them. What else are you going to do but point a laser pointer at them and grunt? And what other grunts are there that are of any value other than "Shoot"? The advantage shooting has is that both damage and death are relatively easy to make the target respond to. (Death in particular; once animated once you don't even have to animate on an ongoing basis.) Yes, you can come up with some other options, but they tend to peter out fast.
So, basically, you can't interact with the world very richly, and the world can't even correctly respond to those limited interactions. The graphics in modern games deceive you. By being nearly realistic they convince a good chunk of your brain that the game must be realistic. But the graphics are not representative of what's really going on; instead they are the bizarrely advanced spike sticking out above a landscape of much more modest design means. You've got games where the landscapes are almost photorealistic, but your ability to "speak" is walking up to a person and tapping them, which we saw 30+ years ago.
While I credit No Man's Sky for making it to release where many of its peers have had significant trouble making it that far, I've never been excited about it, because I've already played the "big universe of nothing much to do" game with things like Frontier: Elite II. Unfortunately, what procedural generation tends to produce is the stuff that was already easy in the first place. Writing a story that transcends the manifest limitations of the medium, or writing tight levels that require you to exploit certain mechanics, or creating creative puzzles based on a slowly-increasing set of mechanics, and so on, that's the hard stuff.
I'm not saying nobody will have fun, or that it's a bad game, or that you shouldn't try it. I'm saying that these limitations are pretty fundamental to the medium, and whenever somebody promises implicitly or explicitly to overcome them, you should be really skeptical. There's a long, long line of this sort of thing, Black and White, Spore, Fable, endless lines of procedurally generated games, things that even if the end result was not always "bad" are things that could not transcend the limitations of the medium.
I still have fond memories of my brother trying to teach the creature to pick up rocks, and then throw them. The intention was to bombard the other villages.
Training it to pick up was easy. Leash it, pick up the rock in front of it, repeat. Put the rock next to it. Did it pick it up? If so, pet it. Repeat.
Getting it to throw the rock was more involved. Even after watching my brother doing it, the creature would pick up the rock, then put it down again. He must have spent at least half an hour trying.
Then, all of a sudden, the creature starts throwing rocks! Success! Well, except that it was also picking up feces. And throwing them. And picking up friendly villagers, and throwing them. Repeatedly.
That was the funniest thing I've seen in a game, by far. That, and watching my brother scolding the creature for the behavior.
The underlying creature model appears to have been somewhat simplistic. Creature needs were manually coded with first order logic. Not sure how training was actually done, but it was unlikely to be too complicated.
Now, more than a decade later, one should expect one "creature" that's even more advanced, specially considering the renewed interest in AI. Or that the creatures that one encounters in an RPG to be at least as advanced as the B&W one. Instead, they are not actually much more advanced than Pacman ghosts, no matter how pretty they look.
Black and White was one of the reasons I tried to carefully write that so it was clear that not all the things I listed were "bad". What I recall is that Black and White failed its promises; the creature is nowhere near as smart as what was promised. But many people still had fun with the game that resulted.
I find the failures of AI are often quite entertaining; they have a different character of failure than other sorts. I also frequently enjoy the errors that word-based AI makes, because there's often some bizarre, twisted sense behind it that our brains can pick up on and enjoy. Markov Chain babble generators are the simplest example of that, but the serious work can generate a lot of great stuff too.
I'm amazed at what they accomplished. My issue here is more of a graphic choice. Why does the thing you use to kill and animal to defend yourself look exactly like the thing you use to harvest plants for resources look exactly like the thing you use to destroy terrain?
It feels almost like it was just assumed and no one ever thought about it.
So I picked up this game with the intention of letting him watch a little bit and talking to him about space.
After he went to bed and I was a few hours into the game I realized this same thing though... All I'm doing is going to a planet, consuming their resources and leaving. The only nice thing I can do is with other aliens and I can feed some animals but not all of them. You don't build anything on the planet and you end up destroying a lot of resources.
It's still a fun game, don't get me wrong, but the idea that after the game is over (which I'm not at yet) all that will follow my character is a gouge in every planet he came across just seems... sad.
I compare this to something like Minecraft where at least you leave structures and buildings behind, and just feel like it's kind of a sad game as well as an exploratory game. Which may have been the point behind it as well. Maybe that's the deeper meaning the developers want you to get.
I find exactly the same problem with modern tech tooling (especially on the frontend). We, the tech community, celebrate tool builders and so we all try to build tools. We end up with a fantastic ecosystem of many diverse ideas pinging off of each other. In this situation we all win - sorta.
I write a bunch of Angular 1. React and Angular 2 are both superb libraries that allow me to build a great frontend UI. There are four React talks and a full-day workshop all communicating the _How_ of React [0]. We're building tools for the sake of tools - continually answering the 'how' with the latest framework without consideration for the end purpose, our 'why'.
> If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.
The current state of tech as I see it is that we're pumping out endless tutorials on logging [1] but never teaching devs to yearn for the endless sea.
[0] I'm picking on React here but this is just one example out of many.
[1] Pun intended
We can get there again. We just need new visionaries. Maybe games are the best place to envision such futures?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
The series has been on my to-read list, I'll bump it up in priority.
If that's what you are after, I can really recommend Peter Watts. Fair warning, though: don't expect to enjoy him.
Compare that with say Star Wars, where even fan's might have second thoughts. Or a 1984 where only the fringe would even think about it.
Perhaps the area Star Trek does better than most (if one goes with the premise that it's a utopia, and really quite contradictory to it) is how humane and permissive it is with those who break the rules or fail to match the ideal (utopias don't tend to survive this kind of behavioral diversity). It might be big government, but there's still quite a bit of freedom in individual lives despite the militarized hierarchy and silly outfits.
There's a great book on humanity's grasping attempts at the ideal called Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson: https://www.amazon.com/Imaginary-Cities-Darran-Anderson/dp/0...
In the Culture novels you could live a hundred years as a dolphin, a decade contemplating Zen as house plant, and then decide you want to stop navel gazing and do something. Star Trek lacks immortality, but people still tend to live the kind of lives they chose to.
We also see that they are really willing to do whatever is necessary to citizens as well. I'm not sure we can consider the world of Star Trek a utopia, at least I can't, but it definitely is a case of overall better in life outcomes for most of the people within its grasp.
The perhaps original inspiration is equally beautiful (rendered from French): One will weave the canvas; another will fell a tree by the light of his ax. Yet another will forge nails, and there will be others who observe the stars to learn how to navigate. And yet all will be as one. Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see nothing contradictory but rather a community of love.
That being said, the endless catalog of frameworks becomes incredibly tiresome.
Sure some of them included witty triggers on a minority of chests, but by and large the "visit new place, steal everything that's not nailed down, profit" trope persisted and continues to persist.
PS Edit: On the going-to-Africa-to-kill-a-lion comment, for a more nuanced take, I would highly recommend this RadioLab episode. It's an amazingly balanced treatment of an emotional topic from a multitude of perspectives. Corey Knowlton (who paid to kill a black rhino and did so) makes an incredibly clear, realistic, and essentially Roosevelt-ian argument for game management near the end.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/rhino-hunter/
I was hoping that we'd be able to build buildings and colonize planets. It'd make particular planets feel more special and give you more incentive to stick around. And if they ever got around to doing this, it'd be great if we could build things wall by wall in great detail instead of just "ok, plop down prefabricated factory here".
Now I don't even bother going in them. Chances are my inventory is close to capacity, and I know there's not going to be anything exciting down there because it would be marked on my map.
I've been playing Civ5 recently: first run I played warrior-like, then realised I could have played differently, then realise that the diplomacy mechanic was really lacking that it made the game too one-dimensional, then realised that diplomacy is harder to model because it's harder to do.
http://www.minetest.net/
The survival feedback loop is a well-trodden trope in game design. Punch a tree. NMS actually succeeds here by constantly draining resources in order to survive... the same resources needed for many crafting recipes. You also can't carry a mountain's worth of resources in your back pocket. The severely limited (at first) inventory space is a subtle resource as well.
Thematically it makes sense enough to immerse oneself in the game. Space, for all its wonders, is incredibly hostile to soft, squishy meat bags. It's tougher than the sea on our equipment... and the sea destroys everything eventually. So of course it takes resources to survive and travel to new worlds.
The narrative framework of these mechanics is not built on one of harmonious living on a single patch of land with a zero-carbon footprint.
And you don't have to kill the animals at all to catalog them (tiny, fast moving birds not-with-standing).
Thematically I don't see this as the "biggest problem."
Tomb Raider: as Lara Croft, in game, you basically assumes that everyone you encounter in the game is out there to kill you, so you kill them off pre-emptively. You kill every living species you meet to craft better weapons and eat.
Torchlight: explore, find lizard village, exterminate them all. Presumably, they mate and have children so even though it's not explicitly depicted, you kill women and children too.
Rocket League: you go the extreme of sometimes blowing up your opposing team players to score a goal in a televised game.
All RPG: the world is a loot, just for you.
Frankly, I've found that abstract games and games with less realistic back-story have been the only ones presenting stories and game mechanics that are not first-degree unethical and amoral.
(I say this as someone with Steam open, waiting 12 minutes to finally be able to play...)
> What's sad is despite all our ingenuity, so many of our mechanics reinforce ideas and behaviors we know to be harmful.
Reality Check: You are a lifeform that feeds on the transition of matter from low entropy to high entropy states. We very literally consume worlds. We should try and do that in a way that doesn't undermine our own survival chances, and, as long as that doesn't interfer with the previous point in a way that minimises harm to other lifeforms that we consider useful or beautiful. No amount of virtue signalling and related posturing is going to change that fundamental reality.
It's very typical of Kuchera and Polygon to produce such badly thought-through moralising on videogames, but considering how closely the theme of the game runs to a fundamental physical truth of the human condition I find the criticism rather crass.
This is a video game. You could be anything, do anything. Introduce mechanics that do not require the consumption of worlds. Lots of games have mechanics that don't require stripmining planets.
I read the tweets more as disappointment that we can't do something different in our creation. Just because the real world is built on consumption doesn't mean all art has to be.
Any transgressive or satirical piece of art could have this exact same critique leveled at it, but generally they don't because critics in other media have a more nuanced understand of the relationship between art and the artists intentions.
Correct. But because the real world is built on consumption, criticising creative expression for exploring that is at best invalid. What's going on with Polygon is that they're making this invalid criticism to further their political narratives.
> There is no way to create on these worlds
You needn't look at anyone's politics, pro or con, to wonder: in a world where the second best selling game of all time is Minecraft, how much sense is there in a galaxy-sized sandbox where you can't build anything?
Richards intentions were selfish, but completely understandable and relatable.
In fact I find my brain tends to do the common human ego-centric thing and compartmentalizes the entire planet to only that which I've experienced.
Yet if I just land on a planet and tape the joystick to move my avatar forward... well I could go walk away and come back in six months to a year and see if I made it back to my starting position... and even if I recorded it to watch it at my leisure, my FOV will only cover a small fraction of the total surface area.
It's a gross exaggeration to suggest a single, lone character could "strip mine" an entire planet by themselves.
You need to gather enough radioactive isotopes to power your magical space plane and keep you alive and a few other elements to manufacture upgrades and that's about it. It's not like you're managing a global conglomerate with trillions of dollars of capital invested in machinery to extract every last mineral from the surface.
update
I think it says more about the people who interpret the mechanics this way than any statement Hello Games could be making by utilizing these mechanics.
Joseph Campbell said it most succinctly:
"(All) life lives on life".[1]
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/801710-life-lives-on-life-th...
At least in terms of species, we don't do that because it's a game that is designed to appeal to members of _our_ species.
There are well known psychological hooks that can be employed to make a game interesting to play or even addictive.
For example the slight delay as all the blocks fall down in angry birds was a carefully chosen interval that makes the player more likely to continue playing.[1]
If a game attempted to have the player embody a creature with a completely alien psychology, it probably wouldn't be playable by humans.
[1] See: https://web.archive.org/web/20120310214952/http://www.mauron...
I hope that they do more with what they currently have because it is a damn impressive platform for a v1. The planets, space ships, animals, plants, etc. are all great. It just needs "humanity." Imagine finding a planet full of advanced life with culture and government and a military. or one where people simply battle. Or one where you bring your mined resources for the greater good/evil. There are so many possibilities.
There is nothing uncomfortable about this, unless you somehow have trouble distinguishing this fantasy world from reality, or believe this game for some reason should teach you life lessons and influence your personal values.
I personally am sick of this kind of hand-wringing, navel-gazing writing online. Especially as regards games, of all things. This isn't thoughtful critique or meaningful introspection. The original tweets are good critique. This writer's article is simply melodrama, false-intellectualism, and pseudo-ethics.
In terms of videogame critique, there is no doubt a lot to say about No Man's Sky. Including that it is disappointing that a game which is so creative, innovative, and envelope-pushing in so many ways reverts to rote mechanics like point-and-shoot and a trite explore-collect-upgrade-expand core loop design. I personally would have loved to see NMS' core loop be about discovery and improvement -- leaving planets better than you found them, perhaps. (Though "better" on what dimensions and metrics would be an interesting question.) And one could actually write a meaningful article on philosophy, culture, or even sci-fi and futurism based on the universe NMS presents for consideration. Unfortunately, this article does none of this and is a lazy aping of more thoughtful tweets.
As much as the article critiques NMS for relying on the tropes of shooting, and extracting+expanding in games, it leans entirely on its own tropes of online "journalism" today, with shallow thinking, false moral criticism, and pointless hand-wringing for the sake of attention.
Ditto, it's happening whenever anyone writes about media of any kind these days. Sometimes I think people can't remove themselves from the events of the world. Another example I read is in the upcoming Deus Ex game there was a poster where a character in the background had an "Aug Lives Matter" poster. Apparently that's reason to get enraged these days. Disregard that the games themes are metaphorical about racism, lets just call that offensive.
From what I've read, they're planning future content that includes the ability to build things. Though as you say, "better" is open to definition.
I feed the animals. I don't shoot them. If one comes after me I run. Shoot a bird from the sky to identify it? Hell no. How about accepting that you'll never name that, or trying to find a way to get close enough to peacefully lock the scanner onto it?
I run from space pirates. I'm not here for combat. I paid $50 for a giant, endless painting of a cool alien world that I can wander through for as long as I LIFE SUPPORT GETTING LOW crap I guess I should pick some zinc fruits.
No Man's Sky is at its best when it embraces being bored. There's nothing to do for vast stretches. Detach from the need to be Interacting with something, to be Engaged by a Game Mechanic, and enjoy the world's most expansive walking simulator ever built, with a side dish of Alien Petting Simulator.
And then go outside and sit under a tree for a half hour, lying on your back and watching the sun move over the insane complexity of just that one tree. And think about nothing.
That probably sounds really dismissive, but I don't intend it to be. I mean, I live in a city and there was a deer hanging out behind my apartment building the other day, and a half dozen Cooper's hawks decided to stop for lunch at the pond behind where I work not long ago. I feel like maybe spending money on the game and the hardware to run it is a little bit missing the point of something? Maybe I've just been very fortunate in my choice of environment.
It's a fifty dollar ticket to a hike through a lurid 1970s sci-fi book cover. If that sounds appealing to you, then great. If not? Hey, that's cool too.
And now you're speaking my language!
Instead, I read some diatribe about consumption. There are 18 quintillion planets! Surely one can find a way to grab whatever resources are needed and not bother the locals much.
This new political correctness trend is bothersome. It is just a game.
Now, just out of spite, I want to make a game where you are a sentient AI and can use organics (sentient or otherwise) in whichever way appeals to you. Friends, food, fuel, building materials. Looking forward for the reviews.
The most asked question about Spaceway i got is what to do in this infinite universe with no goals and challenges. Most feature requests and feedback were along the lines of making this or that gameplay mechanics or story that would use up a few stars in one galaxy, and leave the remaining quadrillions of them unused.
I've thought for years about what to make of it, but there is simply no ideas for an infinite world better than what NMS did - explore and consume.
Might just be a genre failure.
[1] http://www.thespaceway.org/
You can't build huge monoliths to yourself for others to find, you can't make things together, you can't leave your mark on the universe in any way except for meaningless additions to a catalog of species.
You can't even meet each other, and has been made clear now despite hemming and hawing from the developer.
This should have been clear from the mechanics of the universe, but I think players are just now starting to realize how empty that might make the game.
I grant that there is probably still a lot of fun just gathering materials, and gawking and beautiful landscapes, but I don't see how that will maintain people's attention the way games that allow you to make and change the universe do.
Of course, must of us don't pay any attention to these lessons.
Nah, Neither do I.