Hi,
This isn't really a post aimed to reach the devs at all. Rather, I'm thinking about ourselves. I'm an Explorer, but I'm also a Trader. These two things work well together since the latter supports the former. Having forgotten this week is a holiday in the US I've been enjoying an expected day off from anything. Looking for inspiration for some art drawings I'm doing I came across Obsidian Ant's videos on No Man's Sky. Immediately following was a review of the game and what had gone wrong. Of the review - I can't find it again. Here's Obsidian's video though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N38YLnIqrQ
Obsidian has an incredibly sobering voice that really helps when he moves through a sensitive discussion. I thought he did a good job of talking about the game without really needing to become entrapped in trying subjective details. However, the Review video brought up some points I hadn't heard before.
Now, I haven't played No Man's Sky myself. I very much told everyone I knew not to buy it. There are things about modeling I don't think many people appreciate. Even a friend who is a very good computer programmer bought the game despite knowing this. It was kind of interesting to watch and sad because people's faith in something can really outrun their admittance of its accepted limits.
For me, watching this was a real eye opener. I've played sooo many games. Most of them are pretty much just a math puzzle. "Play this many hours, do this many handstands, kill five rats, discover why only 1 in a 1000 boars have livers, and then mash this all together with a black lotus flower which only blooms in the icy north of forever ago (yes forever ago: now you have to do time travel too). If you do all this as intended it should take you ten months. Just in time for the next thing you need that was exactly like this thing with five more points of whatever on it." Now we're up to 20 months and you've been played. That's largely gaming in a nutshell if you're doing anything online.
Elite is different, but this is hard to grasp and most people will inevitably get caught in the witch's-brew of tasking themselves to death for no fun, little profit, and no real sense they gained anything.
So what's the deal? How does this happen?
Further, what can we learn from other games that shows Elite has a difference?
Well, first: Let's look at Planets. Specifically, planetary landings. EVE Online added this in so much as you buy a separate game and play on a console. So, if you enjoy being completely sold out by a company you'd supported for ages EVE is a great choice. Then there is Star Citizen which seems to succeed in advertising the same environments, character models, and animations for ...years ...showing no signs of advancing towards even one of the initial goals in its entirety. Remember the whale from Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Remember sound it made upon hitting the ground? Yep. There's that.
This all comes down to understanding a tiny something that has kind of blown my mind as I really can't say I had a clue about it despite nearly having a degree in what should have educated me about it. This would be Modeling. I've done all kinds of modeling. CAD, Auto Desk, 3Ds Max, CS6 Extended, and some other odd things for a geometry/astronomy class I'm not sure they have names for it. Probably someone built those just for our campus. Anyway, for every kind of modeling with you have limitations. For example, it's easy to make an 8 sided object. On the other hand, knowing just how many possible combinations you can make given the area and angles? That's tricky. It also requires you assign a conditional boundary so that some clever person doesn't get philosophical and warp everyone's brains.
Here we come back to No Man's Sky. No Man's Sky had a claim of some trillions of star systems if I'm not mistaken. However, only a few hundred of these are actually ...different. And of those only a few hand fulls of flora, fauna, and geographies actually occur. In other words, its like Elder Scrolls games with voxels. Yippee... Wait. There's Subnautica. That's the same thing and its all hand made.
So here's the deal. Remember back up top? What's the deal? Well, the deal is that procedural generation isn't the end-all be-all it could be yet. Oh yes, it can do some spectacular things, but it can't yet make Thessia different from Rannoch. That's where the developer comes in.
Just to over-emphasize this point here's a lecture on how far modeling HAS NOT come: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk_R55O24t4
- These are the people trying to imagine alien life based on our own. The truth is we can't model much more than a few miliseconds of complex life. This even with the vest best of modern super computers trying.
What does this mean? Well, it means that even though we can look down on Ammonia worlds right now the reason we can't see the complex like there is because Frontier Developments grasped something No Man's Sky's developers didn't: complex life is a pain unimaginably hard to model. Just give some idea... when you are born your brain has twice the number of neural connections as there are stars in the Milky Way. Now, if that's true for your brain then the modeling of just one planet is basically conditionally the same as modeling one universe.
So, how does Elite end up appearing to be this long trudging grind. Well, first of all it is. Again, games don't change much. If you're going to play an online game you can expect a good 100 hours just to start to have a clue. If you're a business major then perhaps you have a big clue. Therefore you start playing the auction house. This, by the way, is probably the single greatest reason we don't have guilds and we don't have item storage. If I could I'd be storing all kinds of things right now just because someone else's rainy day is my vacation, so to speak.
However, Elite has been made in a very smart way.
Some day watch a Galnet post. Perhaps a CG one. Make note of how long it lasts. Now, watch player-made events: Expeditions, Races, etc. Very 'strangely' these things all seem to 'work out' without too much overlap. That'd be your developers going, "Eh, let's keep this fair." When Jacques was to go to Beagle Point WE (at least some players) were bombing it. Therefore it had a little detour. The devs swapped out wherever their plans were to react to ours. We complain a lot about the way FD handled the CGs because the first-responders to Jacques had basically already come-and-gone with those things by the time the CGs came through. However, this is a sign FD is actually learning. That's forgivable. They reacted to us. They could have bulled through with their own plans not caring a wit what we do. On the other hand there are things like the Permits Locks coming down on areas planned for an Exploration Expedition. I think we all understand that it was necessary if they're adding things to those regions for whatever the story is heading into shortly. Still, people get upset because they do schedule time aside usually to be able to do certain things. Overall it does not matter and that's gaming life, but what we can take away from is that FD is pretty respondent to us rather than all reactive. And sometimes odd tings happens that don't work out for anyone.
One of these odd things is the "grind". No matter how you want to say it the RNG to Engineers is a Korean style MMO game mechanic. It can only ever be grindy. However, other things are avoidable currently. There ARE ways to get out of throwing away your summer to grind Naval Ranks. There ARE ways to recover the near-zero monetary gains from being an Explorer. Smugglers could probably use some serious love right now since a lot of the heat mechanics have been reworked such than NPCs seem not to care about that anymore. Miners just seem to want a less dumb interfacing and functionalities.
Now, I say the word dumb so let me de-mystify that meaning.
Idiotic, stupid, dumb, smart...
An idiotic thing is something done that is knowingly ignorant.
To say, "that was dumb" is a misuse of the word: dumb thing is a state of being ignorant.
Stupid is an action from ignorance which one was not formerly aware had some element of ignorance driving impelling it.
Smart is to act in such a way that one is aware of their ignorances, but can use them in conjunction with their wisdom (experience) to positive and practical outcomes.
Lastly, Intelligence is anything which is conceived having foreknowledge or pre-cognizance of what would otherwise (explicitly this is the case where experience - wisdom - has not yet taken place)
No Man's Sky is a lesson, therefore, in our own ignorance in the capacities of swift and easy computer generation. It's not yet possible. Probably not even going to be possible in our lifetime.
This is why FD has a 'road map', but also why they MUST take time aside to DEVELOP things. There's no computer-code that will 'mold' the new stuff for the game: whatever we want. In short, imagination really isn't the limit yet. Patience might be, but that's a social game I'm not talking about in this post.
I realize this is a bit wandering, but eh... the point is simple. The pace this game develops at is almost as at-pace as we have the technology to do it and the staffing FD can hire with technology really being the more limiting factor right now.
This isn't really a post aimed to reach the devs at all. Rather, I'm thinking about ourselves. I'm an Explorer, but I'm also a Trader. These two things work well together since the latter supports the former. Having forgotten this week is a holiday in the US I've been enjoying an expected day off from anything. Looking for inspiration for some art drawings I'm doing I came across Obsidian Ant's videos on No Man's Sky. Immediately following was a review of the game and what had gone wrong. Of the review - I can't find it again. Here's Obsidian's video though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N38YLnIqrQ
Obsidian has an incredibly sobering voice that really helps when he moves through a sensitive discussion. I thought he did a good job of talking about the game without really needing to become entrapped in trying subjective details. However, the Review video brought up some points I hadn't heard before.
Now, I haven't played No Man's Sky myself. I very much told everyone I knew not to buy it. There are things about modeling I don't think many people appreciate. Even a friend who is a very good computer programmer bought the game despite knowing this. It was kind of interesting to watch and sad because people's faith in something can really outrun their admittance of its accepted limits.
For me, watching this was a real eye opener. I've played sooo many games. Most of them are pretty much just a math puzzle. "Play this many hours, do this many handstands, kill five rats, discover why only 1 in a 1000 boars have livers, and then mash this all together with a black lotus flower which only blooms in the icy north of forever ago (yes forever ago: now you have to do time travel too). If you do all this as intended it should take you ten months. Just in time for the next thing you need that was exactly like this thing with five more points of whatever on it." Now we're up to 20 months and you've been played. That's largely gaming in a nutshell if you're doing anything online.
Elite is different, but this is hard to grasp and most people will inevitably get caught in the witch's-brew of tasking themselves to death for no fun, little profit, and no real sense they gained anything.
So what's the deal? How does this happen?
Further, what can we learn from other games that shows Elite has a difference?
Well, first: Let's look at Planets. Specifically, planetary landings. EVE Online added this in so much as you buy a separate game and play on a console. So, if you enjoy being completely sold out by a company you'd supported for ages EVE is a great choice. Then there is Star Citizen which seems to succeed in advertising the same environments, character models, and animations for ...years ...showing no signs of advancing towards even one of the initial goals in its entirety. Remember the whale from Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Remember sound it made upon hitting the ground? Yep. There's that.
This all comes down to understanding a tiny something that has kind of blown my mind as I really can't say I had a clue about it despite nearly having a degree in what should have educated me about it. This would be Modeling. I've done all kinds of modeling. CAD, Auto Desk, 3Ds Max, CS6 Extended, and some other odd things for a geometry/astronomy class I'm not sure they have names for it. Probably someone built those just for our campus. Anyway, for every kind of modeling with you have limitations. For example, it's easy to make an 8 sided object. On the other hand, knowing just how many possible combinations you can make given the area and angles? That's tricky. It also requires you assign a conditional boundary so that some clever person doesn't get philosophical and warp everyone's brains.
Here we come back to No Man's Sky. No Man's Sky had a claim of some trillions of star systems if I'm not mistaken. However, only a few hundred of these are actually ...different. And of those only a few hand fulls of flora, fauna, and geographies actually occur. In other words, its like Elder Scrolls games with voxels. Yippee... Wait. There's Subnautica. That's the same thing and its all hand made.
So here's the deal. Remember back up top? What's the deal? Well, the deal is that procedural generation isn't the end-all be-all it could be yet. Oh yes, it can do some spectacular things, but it can't yet make Thessia different from Rannoch. That's where the developer comes in.
Just to over-emphasize this point here's a lecture on how far modeling HAS NOT come: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk_R55O24t4
- These are the people trying to imagine alien life based on our own. The truth is we can't model much more than a few miliseconds of complex life. This even with the vest best of modern super computers trying.
What does this mean? Well, it means that even though we can look down on Ammonia worlds right now the reason we can't see the complex like there is because Frontier Developments grasped something No Man's Sky's developers didn't: complex life is a pain unimaginably hard to model. Just give some idea... when you are born your brain has twice the number of neural connections as there are stars in the Milky Way. Now, if that's true for your brain then the modeling of just one planet is basically conditionally the same as modeling one universe.
So, how does Elite end up appearing to be this long trudging grind. Well, first of all it is. Again, games don't change much. If you're going to play an online game you can expect a good 100 hours just to start to have a clue. If you're a business major then perhaps you have a big clue. Therefore you start playing the auction house. This, by the way, is probably the single greatest reason we don't have guilds and we don't have item storage. If I could I'd be storing all kinds of things right now just because someone else's rainy day is my vacation, so to speak.
However, Elite has been made in a very smart way.
Some day watch a Galnet post. Perhaps a CG one. Make note of how long it lasts. Now, watch player-made events: Expeditions, Races, etc. Very 'strangely' these things all seem to 'work out' without too much overlap. That'd be your developers going, "Eh, let's keep this fair." When Jacques was to go to Beagle Point WE (at least some players) were bombing it. Therefore it had a little detour. The devs swapped out wherever their plans were to react to ours. We complain a lot about the way FD handled the CGs because the first-responders to Jacques had basically already come-and-gone with those things by the time the CGs came through. However, this is a sign FD is actually learning. That's forgivable. They reacted to us. They could have bulled through with their own plans not caring a wit what we do. On the other hand there are things like the Permits Locks coming down on areas planned for an Exploration Expedition. I think we all understand that it was necessary if they're adding things to those regions for whatever the story is heading into shortly. Still, people get upset because they do schedule time aside usually to be able to do certain things. Overall it does not matter and that's gaming life, but what we can take away from is that FD is pretty respondent to us rather than all reactive. And sometimes odd tings happens that don't work out for anyone.
One of these odd things is the "grind". No matter how you want to say it the RNG to Engineers is a Korean style MMO game mechanic. It can only ever be grindy. However, other things are avoidable currently. There ARE ways to get out of throwing away your summer to grind Naval Ranks. There ARE ways to recover the near-zero monetary gains from being an Explorer. Smugglers could probably use some serious love right now since a lot of the heat mechanics have been reworked such than NPCs seem not to care about that anymore. Miners just seem to want a less dumb interfacing and functionalities.
Now, I say the word dumb so let me de-mystify that meaning.
Idiotic, stupid, dumb, smart...
An idiotic thing is something done that is knowingly ignorant.
To say, "that was dumb" is a misuse of the word: dumb thing is a state of being ignorant.
Stupid is an action from ignorance which one was not formerly aware had some element of ignorance driving impelling it.
Smart is to act in such a way that one is aware of their ignorances, but can use them in conjunction with their wisdom (experience) to positive and practical outcomes.
Lastly, Intelligence is anything which is conceived having foreknowledge or pre-cognizance of what would otherwise (explicitly this is the case where experience - wisdom - has not yet taken place)
No Man's Sky is a lesson, therefore, in our own ignorance in the capacities of swift and easy computer generation. It's not yet possible. Probably not even going to be possible in our lifetime.
This is why FD has a 'road map', but also why they MUST take time aside to DEVELOP things. There's no computer-code that will 'mold' the new stuff for the game: whatever we want. In short, imagination really isn't the limit yet. Patience might be, but that's a social game I'm not talking about in this post.
I realize this is a bit wandering, but eh... the point is simple. The pace this game develops at is almost as at-pace as we have the technology to do it and the staffing FD can hire with technology really being the more limiting factor right now.
