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Re: No Man's Sky

#31
positron wrote:Did I miss something? Where is the kick starter link?
I wanna pledge so I won't miss it like LT.
still waiting for the day I see LT on steam..dear god that's gonna be one hell of a glorious day.
There is no Kickstarter or any sort of fundraiser for No Man's Sky at this point. Hello Games is a four man studio based in England and they made their name and achieved a measure of financial independence with their first game, Joe Danger. In the VGX interview developer Sean Murray revealed little as far as financing or release. Whether seriously or not, he did mention consulting with Tim Schaefer regarding the type of distribution the studio might use, regardless I suspect that NMS is currently rather far from even alpha, much less final release.

Given that Joe Danger is a console/tablet game I am not at all surprised that Hello Games is aiming for cross-platform support. I do see potentially significant negative fallout from the MMO format (that has been suggested by the developer) as asinine behavior from even a small percentage of players could really negatively impact the enjoyment by a vast majority in an open-ended exploration game.

Given that the game is likely more than a year from release there is no need to get too caught up in worries just yet. I am rather curious though to see the type of game No Man's Sky will be in the end.
I know not what life is, nor death.
Year in year out-all but a dream.
Both Heaven and Hell are left behind;
I stand in the moonlit dawn,
Free from clouds of attachment.
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Re: No Man's Sky

#32
I have to say this years VGX was my first time watching Spike TV's video game awards show and overall I thought it was horrible. No Man's Sky is the only thing that made the show not a complete waste of time in my opinion. I have no idea how they could possibly pull it off but I don't want to be one of the naysayers so I just hope that they do.

What impressed me is that you can go apparently seamlessly from underwater (with sea life!) to walking around on the surface to flying your ship into space. (getting into the cockpit's animation needs to be slowed down a bit IMHO). As if that wasn't impressive enough though when the developer said if you see a mountain in the distance you can go to it, if you see a moon/planet you can go to it, that was impressive enough but then my mind was totally blown when he said if you see a star in the sky then it represents an actual system with it's own planets you can visit!

My concerns are with the MMO aspect and it supporting consoles. For MMO I just don't see how a 4 man team can maintain and MMO but besides that people tend to act stupid and ruin my experience. I just prefer a good open world single player game over a MMO any day. My concerns with consoles used to be hardware in part but if this is next-gen only then they shouldn't hold back the game too much from a hardware perspective. This leaves my console concern with just the controls. Supporting consoles typically means the controls/UI have to be vastly simplified to work with a gamepad on a TV across the room. Hopefully they figure out how to resolve this or just release different control/UI systems for consoles and PC.

All in all I'm super excited about hearing more news on this game. I imagine it will be some time before we get our hands on it though, I seriously doubt it will be out before 2015 but we'll see.
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Re: No Man's Sky

#35
I must be the only one, but I didn't like it. Graphics don't look so good, and it seems you don't have free view from the cockpit, an essential feature in any driving/piloting game, in my opinion; it seems you're always looking directly forward, which is very uncomfortable. Maybe they change this in the future, or simply it's a feature that was not shown in the video.

Besides, if this is going to be multiplayer only, that's a problem for me. I don't play multiplayer games. I have not decided if I'm going to play Star Citizen yet, but I'm considering that possibility. On the other hand, I don't think make a good MMO easier to create AI. Star Citizen sounds like a great idea, but I think it will be very hard to get it right. (They will have to take into account how different players could try to play the game.)

About the "fun" part... I don't think every game has to be "fun". It's just one possibility, but need not be the only one. I don't think The Walking Dead from Telltale is a "fun" game. It's exceptionally good, but definitely not fun, not even a bit.
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"Playing" is not simply a pastime, it is the primordial basis of imagination and creation. - Hideo Kojima
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Re: No Man's Sky

#36
I just saw the RPS comments based on Graham Smith's interview of Hello Games's Sean Murray, lead developer of No Man's Sky.

I think they are trying to make my brain explode.

I really, really do not like designed-for-consoles or online-required. But nearly everything else described about NMS sounds exactly like the kinds of things I like in computer games.

Examples from the RPS story:
RPS wrote:Any planet you discover on your journey is marked on your galactic map, along with its name, its atmosphere and what resources you found there. If you choose to, you can then share that information with every other player, uploading it so that it’s shared across everyone’s galactic map.

You’ll get credit for discovering it. You’ll also, if the materials there are valuable, attract players to come visit. No Man’s Sky isn’t a multiplayer game, in as much as you’ll never see another player. But the galaxy is the same between everyone and actions of “significance” will be shared. If you kill a single bird, that won’t be shared. If you make an entire species of bird extinct, then those creatures will blink out of existence for everyone.
So it's not people being jerks directly to each other; it's much closer to Spore in that players will share some data that affects their gameworld. That's better than conventional multiplayer (for me), but it's still online-required.
RPS wrote:“We are designing a set of rules, not designing a game, and I think when I talk about DayZ that’s how those feel to me. Your experience in DayZ is your experience, and there’s a set of rules in that 200km square that you then go out and experience and make stories in. And that is what we want.”

Those systems-driven experiences begin with the way the galaxy is constructed – “Every Atom Procedural” – but extend to every part of the game design. “If there’s a crashed ship, it’s there because a ship has crashed. If there is a trading outpost, those things are there for real reasons, and the way the creatures behave around those, and the type of creatures you see are there for real reasons.”

It’s about moving the design away from strictly authored experiences, in which your actions are tightly scripted and controlled, in favour of something more expressive.
YES. That is the beauty of the Looking Glass games such as System Shock and Thief. Systemic games are not about intense sensations, they're about thinking and feeling. Instead of leading players by the nose through prepackaged linear content, systemic games create an ecosystem in which personal stories evolve through interactions among complex systems.

To the extent that No Man's Sky does that, I could love it.
RPS wrote:“How it is at the moment, is that you can’t die, but you can lose everything,” explains Murray. “There is no saved game. Your game will be saved, your progress is saved all the time as you go along, but if your ship is destroyed then you go back to a lifepod and you’ve lost that ship, and that is your everything.”
And now its developers want me to hate it again. Instant loss of your personal history is completely antagonistic to exploration. Yes, you can still explore, but permageardeath tells you no, don't do that, it's too dangerous. It makes NMS back into an "intense sensations" survival game instead of a game that delights in seeing what's around the next star.

So I'm back to I'll watch it, but I just don't know about playing it.

Sigh.
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Re: No Man's Sky

#37
Flatfingers wrote: And now its developers want me to hate it again. Instant loss of your personal history is completely antagonistic to exploration. Yes, you can still explore, but permageardeath tells you no, don't do that, it's too dangerous. It makes NMS back into an "intense sensations" survival game instead of a game that delights in seeing what's around the next star.
I don't think that means a complete loss of your personal history. If your ship blows up you'll land on a nearby planet with a lifeboat. You'll have lost your ship and everything on it but you'll still have credit for all your discoveries and such. I wouldn't even be surprised if you retained all your upgrades on your person (skills? weapons/armor? etc.). But your ship and all it's upgrades and cargo would be destroyed. Heck you may even be able to find your own crash site and recover some more of your stuff. You'll then need to around gathering resources and such and rebuilding your ship. If that's how it works I'm fine with that much but that just covers the ship part. If you can't die what happens when you are outside your ship? In the trailer you started out outside the ship underwater, then went to the beach, then got in the ship, etc. If you're underwater and you get attacked by a shark can you not die? Do you respawn at your ship maybe and in this case you keep your ship but lose any items you had on your person (weapons/armor/etc.) in kind of the opposite effect as the ship being destroyed? That's actually a kind of cool approach if you ask me but then again I could be completely misunderstanding it. The game seems very interesting to me though.
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Re: No Man's Sky

#38
"[Y]ou can’t die, but you can lose everything" seems pretty unambiguous to me. If you're adventurous or just unlucky, you take a substantial loss to the gear that allows you to explore more effectively. Hence my term "permageardeath."

I think that works directly against exploration as gameplay, and I believe it is almost always a wrong choice when it's done. The desire for "Sensation" and the desire for "Knowledge" are two different motivations that people have, and two different ways they like to play games. (As I discuss in detail in this article.) You can mix those kinds of experiences in one game, but when you do you water down both of them -- you make each one less fun than it could be -- because their necessary features oppose each other. (Minecraft has both, but it specifically offers a "peaceful" mode for exploration without being attacked.)

If you want lizard-brain survival scares (to produce feelings of intense sensations, which can be a lot of fun), then design your game to emphasize that and not exploration, which calls for higher-level thinking. If you want the pleasure of discovery (that lets players feel the satisfaction of creatively perceiving patterns), then emphasize that in your design; don't punish the player for being curious about the world by taking away their exploratory tools.

Harrumph. :)
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Re: No Man's Sky

#40
Flatfingers wrote:"[Y]ou can’t die, but you can lose everything" seems pretty unambiguous to me. If you're adventurous or just unlucky, you take a substantial loss to the gear that allows you to explore more effectively. Hence my term "permageardeath."

I think that works directly against exploration as gameplay, and I believe it is almost always a wrong choice when it's done. The desire for "Sensation" and the desire for "Knowledge" are two different motivations that people have, and two different ways they like to play games. (As I discuss in detail in this article.) You can mix those kinds of experiences in one game, but when you do you water down both of them -- you make each one less fun than it could be -- because their necessary features oppose each other. (Minecraft has both, but it specifically offers a "peaceful" mode for exploration without being attacked.)

If you want lizard-brain survival scares (to produce feelings of intense sensations, which can be a lot of fun), then design your game to emphasize that and not exploration, which calls for higher-level thinking. If you want the pleasure of discovery (that lets players feel the satisfaction of creatively perceiving patterns), then emphasize that in your design; don't punish the player for being curious about the world by taking away their exploratory tools.

Harrumph. :)
Well, i think threat (or any obstacles) and exploration helps each other out. It forces players to think about exploration and adds more meaning and context to discovery. Of course freedom will be more restricted, but when systems push back it adds a whole lot to immersion, IMO.

Just an observation game with free camera flying around universe may be interesting for a few hours or a week, however being part of it is way more satisfying and could last months.

Also, people are driven by stories and if we have to compare these simplistic stories:
a) "flew to a very beautiful alien world."
b) "Barely survived a crash-landing on planet while trying to escape from pirates. And it turns that the planet is a very beautiful, but potentially dangerous alien place".

Which one of these stories feels more interesting? :)
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Re: No Man's Sky

#41
mcsven wrote:This game looked great, until I read "MMO".

It really does look like LT is in a category of its own purely because of the single-player focus. A good plan, really; always do the opposite of what the crowd are doing.
You never got to see another player. Only minor side-effects, such as naming systems/planets or changed eco-systems. To me it seems like a trivial issue.
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Re: No Man's Sky

#42
It seems like (much similar to Squadron 42) they're taking a "Dark Souls" approach to the multiplayer system. Everyone is indirectly connected to each other without actually being playing together. (The only persistent thing that people shared were the player written comments system which was interesting... "Praise the sun!")

I think this is cool, and i think we can afford to have more of this semi-multiplayer gameplay in games. I pretty much need to be online to play most of my games anyways (Steam) so it has become less than a problem to need to be internet connected to play.

I agree with Flat though that being immortal but being able to lose all your stuff sort of takes away... Death penalty is an all or nothing kind of thing.. if you take away the Death all you've got is a random and uninvited penalty.
This is where the cat is from and yes you should definitely watch that.
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Re: No Man's Sky

#43
Not long ago I've been complaining about the industry being somewhat stuck in a situation where AAA titles are mostly linear, heavily scripted, rollercoaster rides, combining a hollywood-style cinematic presentation with archaic gameplay mechanics. And where indie titles are too limited in scope to really push the limits and advance the state of the art in any significant way. I even made a long rambling blogpost about it, because it sucks to devote a major part of your life to something just to find out that as you grow older passion is turning into indifference or even contempt.

Now it seems that tide is turning. Both Limit Theory and No Man's Sky take a totally different approach, using the powerful computers or consoles they target not only to display but to generate content, instead of depending on an army of "creative" people to create gigabytes of assets as part of the game's production. The "No Man's Sky" team seams to consists of 3 coders and one artist... and I haven't seen screenshots that beautiful in a long while. Even the big players do exciting stuff: SOE with their Everquest Landmark/Next? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjvYIV4B5jg) Not only are they going to put powerful building tools into the hand of the player to populate the game with unique, usergenerated content. They also licensed an engine that was developed by an single coder who happens to have experimented with procedural generation for years. (http://procworld.blogspot.de/)

I wouldn't have expected it myself, but I'm *realy* excited about all those cool projects currently in the making. This almost smells like the paradigm shift towards emergence and player-generated content that I was hoping to see for years!

I'm just not sure what caused the change. Is it Minecraft? Kickstarter? The hardware finally powerful enough to make different approaches feasable? And a little more ontopic: What does inspire all those people to turn towards making or crowdfunding Space Sims (after so many years of barely anything worth playing in that genre)? Why now? And 35.000.000$ for Star Citizen? WTF...
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Re: No Man's Sky

#44
lithander wrote:Even the big players do exciting stuff: SOE with their Everquest Landmark/Next? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjvYIV4B5jg) Not only are they going to put powerful building tools into the hand of the player to populate the game with unique, usergenerated content. They also licensed an engine that was developed by an single coder who happens to have experimented with procedural generation for years. (http://procworld.blogspot.de/)
Hey, don't forget about the awesome AI -- for much more than just pathfinding and "aggro management" -- that Storybricks is providing SOE. ;)
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Re: No Man's Sky

#45
Fives wrote:I realize that this is an incredibly dubious statement: However, does anyone else feel a little like Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous and now this "No Man's Sky" are sidestepping independently functioning simulations by assuming: "It's online! The players will do it!" Artificial intelligence is an incredibly difficult aspect to get just right. Rather than tackle the prospect of an actually functionally reasoning AI they are able to shovel "gamey AI" (I.E. Freelancer) and assume the dynamism will be the result of player activity alone. Again I am not accusing or belittling them (it is simply a feeling I've gotten and frankly it has been proven to work very well int he past (I.E. Freelancer)).
I remember that it has worked quite well in some MMOs. But it brings its own challenges and design constraints. Just to name a few:
  • Your shards need to be large enough in terms of simultaneous logins that players can populate the world. You also need to attract enough players.
  • If crafting is expected to be worthwhile, your game needs significant item decay. Else market saturation will kill crafting.
  • Balancing is even more important than in single player games. If you fail that, you will get a monoculture of The Best Ship.
  • Cheaters and hackers are a potential problem.
Overall it is probably still less difficult than creating good AI, but I'd not call it easy by any means ;) .

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