Exactly. It’s like denying the difference between indie cinema and blockbusters (or at least intended blockbusters). It’s okay to generally prefer the output of indies, whether game or cinema, but you can’t deny the budget and manpower differences.
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I can authoritatively mention that their word filter does not trigger on “dong”.
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Its more like denying blockbusters/tentpoles exist at all, because the “soviet system” of equally shared credit for all involved is slightly less bullshit than auteur theory.
There’s really no connection between the two things.
Has it been duly tested against things that might offend computers? Exotic unicode, SQL statements, HTML formatting, that sort of thing?
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I was getting Peter Molyneux vibes off this project /very/ early on.
The devs were super sketchy and evasive about various topics, or just talking around them, while being quite detailed about other aspects. Everything that came out of their collective mouth was hype. Like, they didn’t even really talk about the gameplay so much as the systems surrounding the gameplay.
Tech problems aside, most of the flak they’re taking right now wouldn’t be happening if they’d just cleared up what the game actually was, rather than feeding the hype-monster a constant diet of half-truths and mystery.
It doesn’t help that even a lot of the people who rather like the game at first find it boring after a fairly short while, due to the fact that while there’s functionally infinite space to explore, there’s nothing to /do/ in it. It has no depth or substance. You basically spend your time wandering around, exploiting easily-accessed substances in order to facilitate wandering around, exploiting easily-accessed substances.
There’s a sort of plot, but if you blink you can miss it, and if you don’t miss it, you may wish you had because while it provides some direction, it doesn’t do so in a way that anyone has commented on finding remotely compelling.
The biggest problem though is that all of the gameplay looks like they never actually played the popular games they were riffing on, so just implemented the most obvious bits of each in the most cursory of ways.
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The thing is, something like Dwarf Fortress (I game I just cant penetrate, but will happily read stories about other people that do) ends up being a perfect sandbox because it ends up being about your story. Yes, everything else can be generated by the algorithms, but it is your story. You decided to build there. You decided to built what you built. You decided to put the traps there. You dediced to care about the mental state of your dwarfs, or not. You decided what to do when shit hit the fan.
You read anything like Boatmurdered and the sense that the random crap the game generated got to tell a story because you make it being about your story.
Here, all the cleverness of generation is to give you something to look at, that you will look at, then move to another place where you will look at the next bit of generated context, then you will move… The universe may be generated (and of course even with all that it ends up being repetitive). Your story is not being generated by anybody - you cant make it your story in any sense but “what random crap did I choose to see”, and the game doestn really have an history you can affect (it is all flashbacks to stuff that happened).
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It doesn’t like Turdrock though for a fairly obvious shaped outcropping, possibly a plant.
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I’ve played NMS daily since launch, and I would imagine it’s a shoo-in for happy mutants everywhere; the game generates an entire freakin’ planet for you, and if you don’t like it you can just blast off and try another one, and you can do that until the day you die, regardless of any progressions in longevity technology that might happen along the way.
The core ‘gameplay’ will get repetitive quickly enough (of course, that might be patched), but it’s not about collecting minerals or shooting robots, it’s about seeing what unexplored combination of landscape and wildlife you’re going to encounter next, and then wandering around that world until you’ve taken the optimal 70s sci-fi book cover shot.
I recall a Rucker column in the print BB days about a friend who was enthusing over a video game, which Rudy proclaims depressing. “Wait, you haven’t seen how they do water” was the punchline. I think NMS is the game where that becomes a legitimate argument, although the water isn’t actually much to write home about.
The complaints are pretty funny - if you’ve followed them from the start, a) God help you, and b) you’ll probably have noticed that most of the unhappy people are so invested in being unhappy that they will unhappily shift their goalposts to ensure they remain ‘in the zone’. It’s an object lesson in reality tunnels, so NMS’ release really is win/win for futants.
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