Idle Thumbs 276: Hype and Anticipation

[Jake]

A wild Vanaman appears...

Idle Thumbs 276:

Hype and Anticipation

With tens of thousands descending on Seattle's Key Arena to bathe in the spectacle and drama of The International 6, and hundreds of thousands more barreling towards the uncertain center of No Man's Sky, ears are ringing and plugged in equal measure as hype, anticipation, uncertainty, and excitement fight to drown each other out. We are joined by Sean "Famous" Vanaman to try and talk it all through, to figure out what we think.

Discussed: The International, Dota 2, No Man's Sky, RimWorld, Wakeboarding Unleashed Featuring Shaun Murray

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[Johnny Driggs]

GET HYPE FOR SEAN.

[sclpls]

OMG SEAN CAST <3 <3 <3

[Gormongous]

Sean cast! The energy's so great for this one.

[Atlantic]

[Jutranjo]

Famous is back!

[Badfinger]

A Clue reference in the first minute of the podcast means It's A Good One.

[Patrick R]

Sean's "That's a really good point, Chris." was totally wonderful. Everything I missed in one moment.

[Twig]

so when will sean start a d&d actual play podcast

[Jake]

so when will sean start a d&d actual play podcast

I would be so happy to watch a stream of a Sean-DM'd D&D campaign. Man.

[Paul Smith]

I would be so happy to watch a stream of a Sean-DM'd D&D campaign. Man.

 

De-lurking to +1 this.

[pyide]

Journey was actually referenced when they were originally talking about the multiplayer aspects, so is Dark Souls. They mention preferring multiplayer to be restricted to a lobby of sorts around the player (I suppose like an instanced bubble), and limited to only a few others at the most who could enter this area at a time. And that there would be no nameplates or anything so you wouldn't be sure if they were AI or human (like Journey). They mention most of this and more in a lot of ifs and maybes and theoreticals as you can read in the interview. So it seems they wanted to do something with genuine multiplayer from the jump, and people seeing bits like this and the Colbert thing and more assumed it would have something like that, but it ended up not making the cut along the way for whatever reasons. Possibly because of the difficulty of implementing it and making it work along with the continual insistence that 2 players would never meet regardless. Yet that did not stop Sean Murray from being real cagey and vague about these multiplayer elements and so much more right up to the release.

 

I don't think the game needs multiplayer, but some of that stuff they talked about in the past could have been neat.

[Flay]

Sean is back YES!

 

Here's the Zarya/weightlifter drawing that was referenced

[Spenny]

Sean and memes? I'm in podcast heaven.

[Twig]

I would be so happy to watch a stream of a Sean-DM'd D&D campaign. Man.

Do itttt seannnnnnnn

[mhiggy]

Welcome back Sean!

[tberton]

Hooray Sean!

 

Regarding the brief Captain Olimar aside: Captain Olimar does not have a mustache.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Hooray Sean!

 

Regarding the brief Captain Olimar aside: Captain Olimar does not have a mustache.

 

They were probably thinking of Captain Walimar.

[DocRandal]

Seancast! The Vanahype is real.

[eot]

Yet that did not stop Sean Murray from being real cagey and vague about these multiplayer elements and so much more right up to the release.

If you are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, then the vagueness could be what they talked about on the cast; the game simply being hard to describe. I get why the thumbs crew would be willing to grant him that, but I find it hard to in the face of all the other stuff. Why go on stage at E3 and explicitly say, unprompted, that you're picking a planet at random when in fact it is pre-made? Why? Why put your not at all representative trailer from two years ago on the front of your Steam store page? I can neither understand nor stand that kind of lying. Maybe it's just a personal hang up I have about lies.

Anyway, I also think the ways in which they talked about the game being a simulation seem disingenuous in retrospect. I find it hard to believe that they were actually ever making the game where the planets' orbits are simulated, where each star in the night sky is a solar system you can fly to, where the warp drive isn't just a loading screen but actually simulated traversal etc. If you're making a simulation then even if you end up having to strip some things out, there will still be signs that you were making a simulation because it's a pretty different approach to making a game. This is game with static planets and where the sun is part of the skybox. Now that might not matter all that much in terms of the play experience, but don't try to tell me it was ever anything but that. The reason I think it matters is because of the possibility space that deeply simulated games have, and that is what they were trying to sell people on. If they simulated planetary motion someone would at some point see a solar eclipse, they'd put that shit on youtube and just knowing that it could happen would increase other people's appreciation of the game.

[Twig]

Here's my input, as a game developer!

 

Obviously I can't guarantee this is what happened, but it's definitely unequivocally 100% possible that the game had simulated orbital physics at one point in time, as well as stars being a physical object rather than a skybox, but they opted to take it out for whatever reason. Games change drastically throughout development, often many times, often without restarting from scratch, and often mere months, or even weeks, from launch. It's definitely not out of the question that even multiplayer existed, but they couldn't get it working right, or whatever. Everything they quote-unquote promised but didn't deliver is realistically achievable but arguably difficult, and thus could've been planned or even implemented before being cut for budget or time or desperate performance requirement reasons.

 

Disclaimer: the lack of orbital physics is, bar none, my biggest disappointment with the game. I was so fucking super stoked about that idea, just seeing other planets or moons slowly moving around relative to each other sounded so fucking cool!

[Gormongous]

If you are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, then the vagueness could be what they talked about on the cast; the game simply being hard to describe. I get why the thumbs crew would be willing to grant him that, but I find it hard to in the face of all the other stuff. Why go on stage at E3 and explicitly say, unprompted, that you're picking a planet at random when in fact it is pre-made? Why? Why put your not at all representative trailer from two years ago on the front of your Steam store page? I can neither understand nor stand that kind of lying. Maybe it's just a personal hang up I have about lies.

 

For me, I understand being excited about the game you're making and not feeling able to walk back the statements that you've made in that excitement, particularly if you have a huge corporation at your back pushing to make your game into a tentpole release, but Hello Games' actions leading up to and following release are really an excellent example of Hanlon's Razor in games marketing. For years, they were deliberately vague about the game's possibility space, emphasizing the extensibility of the bedrock tech instead, but in the six or so months before No Man's Sky launched, they began to be more concrete about gameplay while still choosing not to discount any explanations of what the game wasn't going to be. Now, afterwards, they're totally silent. It just smacks of the idealism of having your product speak for itself, rather than having a real comms strategy, and forgetting that there's no built-in mechanism, even in the best product, for reconciling expectations and reality (ideally, the person to do that is the one who's been going around saying that multiplayer is technically possible and so on). It also smacks of a willingness to have your cake and eat it, moving units of your game on misunderstandings and hype as much as its inherent qualities, but I just brought up Hanlon's Razor, so... Anyway, furthermore, I think the selective vagueness of the marketing, especially Murray's off-the-cuff comments, was invariably going to be picked up the most by people who were most likely to have their imagination first captured and then disappointed. If you aren't willing to speak about your game only in concrete terms, you have to choose either to say nothing at all or to say that things have changed later, else people are going to get let down.

 

Also, I also miss the experience of going into a game blind as a child and feeling excited that it could be anything, but I think the nostalgia of the Thumbs misses the obverse of that experience: going into a game blind, having a handful of underwhelming interactions, and dumping the game because I thought that was all there was to it. I left the original Fallout in the dust as a kid because I loaded it up, went to Shady Sands, got in a fight where I had to kill the entire town, and then I didn't know where to go. "Weird game," I thought, and didn't actually play through again until college.

[tberton]

They were probably thinking of Captain Walimar.

 

Damn you.

[Nappi]

Yes yes yes, to Sean DM'd D&D!

[Vasari]

Speaking of being the No Man's Sky Coastguard, there's actually a group in Elite Dangerous called The Fuel Rats who assist players who get stranded with no fuel and can't make it to a space station. That sounds simple enough but they're really serious about it! I won't quote the whole thing because it's quite long but that typical IRC log is incredible.