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Chris

Idle Weekend August 27, 2016: Sci-Fi's Sky

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Idle Weekend August 27, 2016:

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Sci-Fi's Sky
It's an all-sci-fi extravaganza this weekend, as your hosts ponder the curious hype of No Man's Sky, the smaller scale of corporate space exploration depression sim Corpse of Discovery, and the beautiful weirdness of The Order: 1886. And enjoy a massive Alien-loving discussion of Aliens, the second-greatest movie in one of cinema's darkest and most beloved series. I'm ready, man, check it out!

Discussed: No Man's Sky, Corpse of Discovery, Mass Effect, Elite: Dangerous, The Order: 1886, Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, Ghostbusters (1984), Ghostbusters (2016)

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Hooooooo boy I think you two are doing a huge disservice to the intent of these so-called elitist articles. If you look at the consumer reaction to No Man's Sky, there's a significantly loud portion of the community (or anti-community?) who are attacking Sean and demanding he apologize for his LIES and accusing him of being a CON MAN.

 

Granted, I haven't read every article written by the press or every blog post by other devs, but those I have read are responding to the more absurd reactions of absurd people. The people I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't made up of a significant percentage of people who were decrying No Man's Sky from day one of its initial reveal, people who were so sure it would fail, who probably wanted it to fail, and now have the opportunity to scream I TOLD YOU SO.

 

Those people are unreasonable. No one's being smug at people being in general disappointed with the game. I love the game, and I'm still somewhat disappointed with certain aspects. There's plenty of valid issues with the game, and you can't even say "well it's just not for you" because often those flaws get in the way of what are ostensibly the actual goals of the game. (See: Danielle wanting to explore (the ultimate goal of the game, I think we can all agree) but being put off by the survival elements.) Being disappointed is okay.

 

What's not okay is calling for Sean's head because he talked about things that ultimately ended up being cut during the development process. And in my experience, that's what the smug articles are responding to.

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My wife was super amused by your discussion of her Liara-bashing. A little follow-up/explanation: 

 

She actually didn't care much for Kaiden or Ashley either, but tolerated their presence and spared Ashley simply because her abilities complemented her own.

 

She actually hated Liara mostly because of her scientific approach. Since she's a scientist herself, she simply could not abide Liara's shoddy methodology. It was a grudge that lasted two-thirds of the series.

 

Also she shacked up with Garrus, because obviously.

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I agree with Twig but I'd go a little further.  I think the reason you see other devs "circling the wagons" is that there was constant "analysis" by "fans" critiquing No Man's Sky and it's missing features.  One example was the guy on reddit that came out and said that he could put multi player functionality in the game in a week.  That's nonsense, but it got repeated enough that it got legs and spiraled out of control.  I think that a lot of devs were specifically pushing back against that kind of ignorant babble. 

 

Also, in a similar vein, all I want from the gaming media to stop listing the horrible conduct and commentary of kids and anti social loudmouths as news.   If 100 dudes that have a half dozen free to play fps games and garry's mod listed on their steam profile are raising a stink about the horrible lies put forth by Hello Games, it's not news, it's not a movement, it's a bunch of anonymous loudmouths.  Good commentary and criticism is vital and important (this show being a fabulous example), but the spewing of uninformed vitriol from these sort of users isn't news and it isn't important.  But then again, why would I expect games journalism to act any different than  the media covering the national news.

 

I got the game and bounced off it pretty hard in spite of the fact that it's definitely my kind of game.  I'm hoping there will be some good mods to make the inventory more bearable so I'll come back.  I didn't ever think I was being ripped off or conned or taken advantage of.  I'm the goofball that ordered it based on commercials and hype. 

 

I'm an old dude.  Get off of my lawn :-)  Love the show.

 

Randy

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Sorry but when the conversation is basically "all game developers are liars and scam-artists trying to con brave consumers out of their precious dollars with their evil trailers and promises" or "I could totally code multiplayer for this game in like 3 weeks, lazy devs" those are not valid concerns worth addressing.

I think the relationship between a certain small but loud subset of gamers and game developers turned sour around Mass Effect 3 (afaik the first instance of a game not meeting expectations resulting in 'fans' attacking developers, calling them liars, etc) and hasn't improved since, with the absolute lowest point of course being everything in 2014. When certain groups become actively hostile to the developers who work their asses off trying to create something cool at some point you stop giving the angry mob the benefit of the doubt, and just go: well I guess I'm not making games for those people.

 

You can't fault developers for, as you put it, "circling the wagons" when everything they say and do is interpreted in the worst possible way and people who don't know the first thing about game development talk nonsense about how easy it would be to do X or Y and how lazy and terrible and clearly malicious the developers are for not doing all those things, or for *gasp* occasionally changing their minds or altering design decisions over the course of development in order to ship a working game in time for the holidays.

 

Latest baffling development: according to reddit some are now getting refunds for No Man's Sky after as much as 72 hours of playtime (!) and painting that as a totally reasonable thing to do. Personally if someone is going to play my game without paying for it I would prefer they just pirate it instead of pretending to be a customer, then getting a refund once they're done with.

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Just to be entirely clear: by "the conversation" I mean the larger conversation in the games community on social media, reddit, etc... not the one on the cast, which was rather more thoughtful as per usual. Though I agree with Twig and Weary that you guys were not being entirely fair to developers and press in general and Hello Games specifically in this case for reasons cited above.

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Sorry but when the conversation is basically "all game developers are liars and scam-artists trying to con brave consumers out of their precious dollars with their evil trailers and promises" or "I could totally code multiplayer for this game in like 3 weeks, lazy devs" those are not valid concerns worth addressing.

 

Agreed entirely. I'd almost rather people just not talk about it. Giving them attention is giving them satisfaction.

 

But I can understand the urge to stand up to people like that. It really fucking sucks as a developer (and I am one) to see another developer get attacked with such vitriol for daring to dream. I engaged with some of these people and got a wide variety of "well if he just did THIS we'd all forgive him" where THIS was, of course, different for everyone. People compare Murray to Molyneux because he didn't deliver on the hype. Molyneux! Eesh. (To be clear, I also don't like the way people treat Molyneux, but I acknowledge he's got serious problems with how he talks to press. I just think they're on entirely different levels as far as this particular issue goes.)

 

---

 

In other news, I've never seen an Alien movie besides Prometheus. My friends like to mock me for this. I should watch the movies, I know, but at this point it's almost a badge of honor??

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I think the thing that disappoints me the most in discussions of No Man's Sky is that its rare to find one that acknowledges the flaws of the game as it was delivered and the difficulties for the procedural exploration genre while also acknowledging the potential for that genre and the reason people are so drawn to it in the first place. It's clearly bad to dismiss complaints about No Man's Sky on the grounds that developers or the media know better than consumers, but it's equally irritating to me to see people jumping on the chance to tear down an easy target and to validate their biases against a genre of gaming.

 

I can understand why reviewers would feel the need to focus on the game as it was sold to give consumers guidance. However, the conversation about No Man's Sky is about more than No Man's Sky, in the same way that the release or failure of early Kickstarter projects was about more than the successes and flaws of those games themselves. For better or worse, these games are seen as tests for how games should be made in the future. The technology Spore had eight years ago was incredible and incredibly unlike anything else out there, and yet that concept and the technology supporting it was never further developed. Are games that use procedural content generation heavily just a bad idea? Well, given that Spore has "very positive" reviews on Steam now and that it did not benefit from the decades of iteration that established game genres have had, I very much doubt that that the concept itself is fundamentally doomed. Even No Man's Sky, seems to fail mostly on completely mundane details such as bizarrely awkward UI, poor inventory system design, and underwhelming authored content (!) including the game ending. These things are totally worthy of complaint, but to imply that there's no way the game could have been good and people were foolish to believe that it was possible is, I think, simply wrong.

 

I'm roughly ten billion times more interested in experimental games than tightly polished iterations of decades-old mechanics, but I'd still love to see those experiments compete with the amount of content AAA games can churn out. Procedural generation is the only way that's remotely possible, where the size of the team does not correlate with the number of paths a player can take. To me, that's the real story here, and the fact that this particular game is not that great is worth discussing, and even discussing in the context of what that means for the limitations of procedural technology, but I would not be quick to dismiss the hype as unsubstantiated or tech-illiterate.

 

On an unrelated note, I hope we do get a Stranger Things discussion some day. It's nice to have seen a show that everyone is talking about for once.

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I suppose I'm an Alien 3 apologist, but I really take umbrage with the idea that the death of Newt and Hicks invalidates the previous film. While it's true that it's a let-down to see the characters you cared about in the previous film dying, the Alien universe, or at least the little part of it that the films are all about, are marked by cruelty and the potential for pointlessness in death. The inevitability of death doesn't negate the value of life, of all the sacrifices and triumphs that make up a life. The fact that Newt, Hicks and Ripley are all human and therefore will die eventually, sooner or later, doesn't mean everything they did is meaningless. 

 

I think there is a certain amount of cheapness to just offing them, but I understand the narrative reasoning behind it (a trio dealing with and surviving the xenos twice feels untrue in the context of this universe), it feels weirdly pessimistic or fatalistic to say the reason the film is wrong for making that choice is that it retroactively invalidates or squashes the previous one. I think there's something risky and unique about what that film does throughout when it comes to mortality and the idea of sacrifice as a way of finding meaning in death (cut to Charles S. Dutton's "I ain't much for begging" speech). 

 

Also, regarding your talk of the erasure of the average, blue-collar kinda characters in media, I've been very slowly rewatching The Simpsons. I'm about three quarters of the way into Season Three, and it's crazy how much of that show is observational and about the fear of poverty. Money, and the lack of it, is pretty frequently a theme of these early episodes. There's no way Homer could exist in 2016 like he does in 1992. Whenever I see new episodes, I'm shocked how everybody has smart phones and all this shit. That's not the show I know at all. 

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Latest baffling development: according to reddit some are now getting refunds for No Man's Sky after as much as 72 hours of playtime (!) and painting that as a totally reasonable thing to do. Personally if someone is going to play my game without paying for it I would prefer they just pirate it instead of pretending to be a customer, then getting a refund once they're done with.

 

This isn't really a typical situation though. Steam, Amazon and even Sony granting "no questions asked" refunds points to a possible larger issue with the game we might not know about. To me this might just be more of an Arkham Knight situation rather than a "we're so pissed off at Sean Murray we're going to sabotage his game" kind of deal. 

 

I took the L on No Man's Sky a week ago. I don't even care about the refund because I'd rather not have money just sitting in my PSN wallet. I will personally take the blame for falling for the pre-order hype machine. I knew that full well when I pre-ordered the NMS Limited Edition, canceled it to pre-order the standard edition, then canceled that to pre-order a digital version so that I could play it at midnight. I had three chances to talk myself out of it but I chose to go that route. I do agree when Rob says that the game has to stand on its own merit. As cold as it sounds I don't really care the amount of people that made the game or if Sean Murray is a dreamer. The game doesn't stand by itself as a $60 product for most people and there's a mountain of evidence, some of it as recent as a few months ago, that points to an inability by HG and Sony to temper expectations. Developer and publisher failed to engage in nuance discussion of the product so why are we surprised when consumers follow suit?

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The featured image from the episode reminded me of Orchids to Dusk, a tiny little indie game which involves an astronaut walking around a planet while his oxygen is running out. It has an interesting twist at the end, which provides food for thought and made me feel... connected? I can't say more without spoiling this nice, existential experience, but I thought I'd share it. You can find it here on itch.io. 

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Something I kept thinking about during the NMS/sci-fi discussion was the first Mass Effect, and its generally empty planets. Sure the same structure maps could get tedious, but there was something I liked about the prefabs in aggregate.

It made a (probably unintentional) kind of sense that there would be a few basic drop units companies would use, particularly for planets with very limited resource diversity.(which itself seems like a design shortfall that makes a kind of narrative sense)

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The end of the socks advertisement cracks me up. "At least I'm not a crypto-fascist." "wut?!"

 

To speak to the appeal of Alien. "Alien" is so significant as a trope-defining movie for so much sci-fi. The scenes where the crew discovers the alien nest, the crazy huge room full of eggs, and the pilot-alien that is imbedded into his telescope-chair. These are iconic and often repeated scenes. 

 

Plus, the Alien pilot-room scene was filmed using children stand-ins wearing space suits, to push the scale further. How great.

Alien_filming_tumblr_m1df18gvqi1r8oqq3o1

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The backlash sounds like toxic gamer culture rearing its ugly head again. There's criticism, and there's spittle-flecked screeds about LIES.

Danielle mentioned that the crafting was getting in the way of the core game. I think the point of the warp cell mechanic is to make you wander round looking for the resources, so that you're more likely to find the weird, beautiful vistas. Otherwise there'd be gamers who rushed to the end and missed what the game was about, then they'd complain it was short and it "sucks!"

Agree with Rob on the need for deeper, fleshed out worlds. If the game is about exploring, give us a reason to - history, places to go (ruins, mountains, cities...), let us see detailed behaviour of the flora and fauna. More than that, I want a game with proper ecosystems - creatures that prey on each other, fight for territory, munch on the plant life, etc. NMS isn't that game. It's broad but not deep.

This great vid from Eurogamer sums up my feelings about the flaws with NMS's worlds:



On Mass Effect:

Mass Effect 3 was already mentioned, the outcry over it was is similar ("lies" - in this case about the ending not being just "A, B or C") although I think there are differences. Complaints about NMS seem to revolve around gameplay expectations, whereas ME3's controversy was about the bizarre writing in the final chapter - gameplay was still top-notch.

Broshep has his place. He's there to represent some of the audience that needs him (Inclusiveness!)
Y'all are wrong about Kaidan and Ashley though...

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---

In other news, I've never seen an Alien movie besides Prometheus. My friends like to mock me for this. I should watch the movies, I know, but at this point it's almost a badge of honor??

Speaking as someone who hasn't seen lots of core cultural touchstones, and who can trend toward the badge of honour attitude, Alien is one of those movies you should make an exception for. It's amazing, and there's nothing like it.

I'd watch it secretly and just not tell anyone.

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"Are there any games that capture the feeling of loneliness really well?"

- Cut to me, screaming "THE WITNESS" over and over again.

 

The Witness is the single loneliest experience I've ever had in a game space.

 

There's no human touch in The Witness. There's chairs, but you can't sit on them.

There's apples, but you can't pick them up and take a bite.

There's broken branches, but you can't push past them.

You are a silent, touchless ghost. You cast a shadow, but you don't have a form.

 

You don't even get to touch the panels. You don't even leave fingerprints.

 

There's not one single living person on the island. Not even you.

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Some other "more thoughtful" youtubers:

Innuendo Studios: https://youtube.com/user/mrskimps

Noah Caldwell Gervais: https://youtube.com/user/broadcaststsatic

Satchell Drakes: https://youtube.com/user/satchbags

Does anyone know which other YouTubers Danielle mentioned? I know she mentioned Errant Signal, but she mentioned one other (I think it was a group of people) and I can't remember who.

 

 

I think everyone in this thread is right that the backlash over NMS was way more toxic and so on than is justified by anything, let alone how the game turned out, but I mean come on, when the guy goes on Colbert and says "you can meet other people and they can tell you what your character looks like" and the game comes out and no, you can't, everyone is invisible and in fact nobody can even see the changes you make in the world, surely people have a point if they say "I thought this game was going to be different than the game that I got." Ditto for those huge snake creatures in the E3 trailer and all the other stuff. I mean I had no idea what the hell kind of a game NMS was going to be, and all I had to go on were those trailers and what the developers said, and some of that turned out to be false, so isn't that kind of weird? 

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90% of the things people claim are not in the game are totally in there if you play more than five minutes. The thing with procedural generation that people don't understand and perhaps Hello Games failed to adequately explain is if you have 18 quintillion planets, not every planet is going to be interesting.

If you've got anything like a broad range of generation possibilities 50% is going to be kind of generic, 10% kinda broken, 30% pretty interesting and 10% will be AMAZING (roughly speaking). I've seen some pretty great planets with some really interesting creatures and frankly stunning landscapes but I've also seen some seriously wonky abominations and some barren empty wastelands. You can't expect every planet to be like that E3 trailer.

I'm not sure what happened with the concept of seeing other players, whether it was cut for any number of reasons, or perhaps still in there but just not working properly and soon to be patched, but as the Mode 7 video pointed out Hello Games have on multiple occasions explained that it was always intended to be a solitary exploration game, not an MMO.

If you ask me, all game previews should just come with the following disclaimer:


"This game is in development and all features are subject to change. Elements may be changed or removed over the course of development for any reason including but not limited to design changes, technical issues, time, budget and development priorities."

 

Problem solved.

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