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Use the player's IP address to enable the developers to just email a photo of your house to you if you decide to side with the corpos
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Dec 6, 2021 15:15
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Wrr posted:Gotta make this poo poo as cut and dry as possible so the clueless capitalist bootlickers get the message. Your heart's in the right place but there's a great book called Capitalist Realism that points out that capitalism constantly critiques itself and people just don't give a poo poo. Disney released a movie about capitalism literally turning people into incapable chubbos and polluting the planet so badly that nobody can live there anymore and nobody cared.
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Dec 6, 2021 15:25
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Your heart's in the right place but there's a great book called Capitalist Realism that points out that capitalism constantly critiques itself and people just don't give a poo poo. Disney released a movie about capitalism literally turning people into incapable chubbos and polluting the planet so badly that nobody can live there anymore and nobody cared. My man I know all about Fischer and precorporation and whatnot. Regardless of that, I still think that if art is going to try to grapple with critiques of capitalism, or play in the space of labor history, they should try to make it very clear to people whats going on. While art like Wall-E or a some video game will never itself lead to the revolution, it can open the door to a change in worldview to people, or at least put a name to the cause of the lingering feeling of despair. I think that people just don't connect the dots between the world of consumer detritus and the system that produces it, and it needs to be explicitly spelled out like you would to a child. I'm talking about needing a character to look straight at the camera and say "This is happening because of Capitalism". gently caress subtext and subtly. We haven't earned those.
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Dec 6, 2021 15:42
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I apologize for assuming you didn't know about Fischer's book. My bad.
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Dec 6, 2021 15:47
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If the game wants to depict a capitalist dystopia they have a lot of work to do. In my opinion, because the setting is a video game "job sim" type arrangement it removes the player from the extreme discomfort, existential crisis and danger associated with difficult, easy to exploit jobs. You're sitting in the comfort of your own home, eating food you enjoy, able do to whatever you want without restrictions. To you, dying in this game is of minimal consequence, you just come back and continue "as you". Now if you were really living in this setting you'd have to cope with the fact that the moment you went through the onboarding program, you were unceremoniously murdered and a clone has resumed living your life. You never have to reckon with the fact that a corporation now owns your DNA sequence and identity. Depending on your view of how clones work, the moment you got on that shuttle was the moment you died and ceased to exist... Someone, or something else resumed your life from that moment as if nothing happened to them. That already is a serious problem. The entire cloning program is a massive dystopian breach of personal liberty and every imaginable form of ethics you could think of. You had a choice between living in total squalor and disease or becoming property of Lynx as their personal indentured servant. These are serious problems with capitalism that you can't really feel or experience as anything more than inconsequential flavor text. You're here to break up ships because it's "fun". You don't have to deal with weird oxygen that was doctored with cancerous or lung destroying chemicals. You don't have to worry about getting maimed and then the company kills you to get another clone to resume your life. The debt you're in is completely inconsequential and since you don't have any other physical or emotional needs beyond "playing the game" it doesn't matter that you get paid in company scrip to buy tools at the company store. Then there's the payout. The debt seems crippling at first but then you get generous rewards for playing the game. The game is rewarding you generously for your scrapping as if you are an owner operator rather than a slave. It's possible that the money they get for your scrap is like 5x as much as what they pay you for it, but it doesn't change that the old capitalist bootstraps theory is "true" in this game. If you do work hard you can easily pay back the debt in like 80 game hours. Outside the dangers and the fact that your individual death is permanent despite the clones, working for Lynx seems like a REALLY good deal. If this was real life, you would get paid $20 per hour for your work or a few bucks per scrap that would barely scratch your debt. They'd keep changing the rules on your debt demanding lump sum payments you can barely meet and then penalizing you. They'd come up with Kafkaesque rules and regulations that a supervisor will selectively apply and you would get fined if you cut the cockpit before you cut the engine pay or outer hull panels for no other reason than "too bad, bitch". You'd NEVER get out of that debt. But see, that doesn't make it a fun game. If you aren't getting rewarded for your gameplay efforts and it turns into an obscene grind nobody would play, especially if they actually physically experience the dangers and extreme discomforts of living in this world. How do you even know they allow enough oxygen in the living unit ventilators? They could keep you in a permanent state of semi-hypoxia because it saves them a few bucks on O2 and "too bad gently caress you". At the end of the day, a lot of these job simulator games exist because many people think that a job driving trucks, scrapping ships or running a farm are genuinely fun and exciting lines of work and they'll happily spend hours doing it in a virtual world. But why aren't people rushing to become truck drivers right now? Or farmers? Because in real life, starting from scratch as a private farmer requires insane amounts of capital to get going. Often even if you can grow something your product is going to be outcompeted by massive agricorps with govt ties who can sell the same product as you for pennies to the dollar. Many farmers get into serious debt, get constantly abused by companies like Monsanto who will sue you for infringement if a random seed from a neighboring farm blows onto your property and starts growing on your property. There are constant suicides and bankruptcies in the farming world and its especially prominent in developing countries where companies like Monsanto make enormous promises, that bankrupt people and leave them with nothing while they profit. Then there's Eurotruck simulator. People have spent hundreds of hours trucking yet in real life there's a "shortage"... why? Because it loving sucks. You got customers and your own company riding your rear end to get poo poo delivered on time. You spend 4 hours not being paid for your work idling at the warehouse or port waiting to get loaded. In many cases when you show up to get a truck loaded, the customer expects you to personally open up the truck and do the loading yourself with no help what so ever. If they do do it for you, they do it on their own time and you're stuck waiting with no recourse or pay. Then when you get paid finally you deal with getting a pittance of like 8-12 cents per kilometer. Then your personal living costs are so high that you barely see any of that money as take home pay... You don't have to deal with any of the "bullshit" and stress associated with trucking in ETS. The game just... rewards you generously for your work and minimizes the amount of bullshit you deal with outside your immediate job description.... Guess what - THATS WHAT UNIONS ARE BUILT TO DO FOR YOU... Fair pay, specific rules about what your employer can and cannot make you do within a specified job description. If we still had powerful teamsters unions covering all the trucking, maybe more people would want to drive again. But as things stand you'd have to be stupid to be a truck driver now... Basically because it's a video game and the goal is to entertain and keep you playing - you're exposed to an idyllic world where capitalism works well enough that even more abusive practices are easy to put up with because you don't personally experience them and the rewards the game gives you are so big that any talks of unionization etc seem pointless... If you could actually bootstrap yourself into a successful career and entrepreneurial life then capitalism would probably be an amazing system and we'd never need unions. But that's not what happens in real life.... In real life your costs are almost equivalent to your earnings so you're always barely breaking even and racking up debt for unexpected costs. You're never going anywhere and as a small business owner trying to compete in a world where all the capital and wealth is concentrated at the very tip top where the big players make all the rules you are destined to fail. This is a lot of word to say that: It's a loving video game and all the reasons you'd want to unionize a job like this are not physically affecting you as the player. The rewards are too high and costs and bullshit factor are too low.
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Dec 6, 2021 15:57
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I apologize for assuming you didn't know about Fischer's book. My bad. Its cool; its a reasonable assumption to make tbh. Fischer and post-modernism featured heavily in my gradschool work as factors (along with Neoliberalism) driving people to seek community, belonging, and entertainment in the Online world, leading to the creation of SA and 4Chan and whatnot. An idea informed by / directly copied from Dale Beran's It Came From Something Awful. I also think that there is a degree of distinction to be made about who is producing the work, and what that says about its anti-capitalist message. Some industry titan like Disney is incapable of producing any real critique as they are capitalism incarnate, right? A true anti-capitalism message, or one approaching a true message, would threaten profit and must be carefully managed. I think a smaller studio would be more willing to take a risk, or not be as strictly governed by demands to safely maximize profits and be more capable of actually saying something. They are producing something within the capitalist system and are governed by it, but my hope is that they are not completely controlled by it, if that makes sense. Regardless, even if a true anti-capitalist message is impossible, even if everyone would ignore it, I think it is still very important to try to say something.
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Dec 6, 2021 16:05
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There's a lot to say about making a player actual feel a situation that social solutions make sense for. It's like Cart Life is 25% a rehash of Lemonade Stand and 75% watching your life ignite into capitalist induced omnishambles. My main problem so far is the scenario is the stakes and situations of heavy industry in 1900 and the play books on the side of the corporation and union are from 2010 retail. Just a complete mismatch in severity leading to my earlier comment that the sort of corporate dystopia presented is solved by a Red Faction game. Kraftwerk posted:Many farmers get into serious debt, get constantly abused by companies like Monsanto who will sue you for infringement if a random seed from a neighboring farm blows onto your property and starts growing on your property. Everything a socialist could love: idiotic duplication of research procedure, extra doses of unneeded herbicide that will run off and cause environmental impacts or give the farm hands cancer, and public adjudication needed to clean up the mess afterward.
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Dec 6, 2021 16:29
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zedprime posted:There's a lot to say about making a player actual feel a situation that social solutions make sense for. It's like Cart Life is 25% a rehash of Lemonade Stand and 75% watching your life ignite into capitalist induced omnishambles. Cart Life is an interesting one to bring up because it is contrasted against a game that is fun but also is a misery simulator, Papers Please. The difference is that CL isn't fun to play because it punches home that all of these horrible things are happening to *you*, whereas in PP the script is flipped, the horrible things are very clear but they happen to other people. It makes me wonder if they could actually go the opposite route, have the player start in a union shop and then hear stories of horrible conditions in other companies, perhaps even going to a bad shop later on for some reason and having the ship instantly explode, and then have the plot be about your union job being bought out by WalCut and having to fight to keep your conditions. Make the possible conditions clear but still make the game not incredibly awful to play. Hell you could even become a supervisor at some point and have to deal with the demands of the company vs the workers, give you something to actually do in the Hab.
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Dec 6, 2021 16:48
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CuddleCryptid posted:Cart Life is an interesting one to bring up because it is contrasted against a game that is fun but also is a misery simulator, Papers Please. The difference is that CL isn't fun to play because it punches home that all of these horrible things are happening to *you*, whereas in PP the script is flipped, the horrible things are very clear but they happen to other people. Shipbreaker can't ever really manage any of that because gameplay-wise it's actually a game about chill shipwreck disassembly to its core. Unless it's willing to make the timer penalty a lot more unforgiving, at best it could try and go the infinifactory and have you find dead bodies of your coworkers or clones and collaborate in more unethical acts than "this shipwreck looks a bit too recent", like those infinifactory levels where you have to build slaughterhouses or grind down whole trees just to get a bottle of juice. Chev fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Dec 6, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 21:56
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Chev posted:Shipbreaker can't ever really manage any of that because gameplay-wise it's actually a game about chill shipwreck disassembly to its core. Unless it's willing to make the timer penalty a lot more unforgiving, at best it could try and go the infinifactory and have you find dead bodies of your coworkers or clones and collaborate in more unethical acts than "this shipwreck looks a bit too recent", like those infinifactory levels where you have to build slaughterhouses or grind down whole trees just to get a bottle of juice. Timers have been in games, not just video, since games have been a thing. Why is there such consternation towards this one? Being chill is a play style but given the dystopian setting and 1.25b debt I'd say the game is intended to play as fast and efficient as possible to get out of debt before zeroing out. And I really really hope the game doesn't develop a gore a side. If you want gore play visceral cleanup or whatever it's called, HSSB doesn't need it.
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Dec 6, 2021 23:36
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Infinifactory doesn't actually go into gore territory, it manages to be plenty disquieting without it. Very clean dead bodies among other things. Same with Papers Please where having people die due to your decisions is eventually gonna be a factor. The problem with the timers (both the shift timer and the debt itself), specifically in the context of how a game like Papers Please generates tension and oppression by the sytem, is they aren't threats. You're gonna lose money but you've already got plenty of lost money and it's not the currency you use to level and upgrade through the game anyway, that's Lynx tokens and whatever the XP's called. Unlike Papers Please there's no point, unless I'm mistaken, where you're gonna be taken behind the shed and shot because you lost too much money, you won't be terminated because you didn't get to the hab before the end of your shift, you aren't gonna lose your family because you can't pay for their survival, you're just playing the game forever, it has nothing to threaten you with except more of the chill enjoyable game. So it does nothing to support the oppression narrative the game is trying to tell. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying it necessarily needs such a thing in general, but if it wants to support the kind of story it seems to want to tell it does need to give you something to lose that matters. Chev fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Dec 7, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 23:56
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Big Ink fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Dec 7, 2021 |
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Dec 7, 2021 00:34
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The whole thing's been about how flavor text is at odds with the game itself.
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Dec 7, 2021 00:40
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Chev posted:So it does nothing to support the oppression narrative the game is trying to tell. It seems very clear to me that this game came to it's narrative late with how little room there is to involve the player in the storytelling and how the incentives are structured. I think the story will probably be fine at the end of the day(and hopefully they do something interesting) but it's never going to be Papers, Please Hub Cat fucked around with this message at 08:31 on Dec 7, 2021 |
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Dec 7, 2021 04:19
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I think they should spice things up with mandating that the player avoid damaging or cutting some part of the ship!
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Dec 7, 2021 05:30
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There's tension in the difference between "work" and "game about work". Like, there's a way of tearing down every ship methodically in complete safety. You can pretty much sweep through it doing the whole buffalo and spread it out over a few in game days and there's enough time so that even when you're just throwing sheets of nano carbon into the processor you're still above break even. It's chill, but it gets samey, fast So they put in things that force you to change your approach like broken atmospheric units, and people complain! "This decision is stopping me doing my routine" like the added puzzle makes the work less efficient and instead of being "yay, more game in my game" it's "you're making my job harder and more dangerous". Weird to see. Especially when the realities of performance mean you're never going to get enough variation in ship layout to make the job interesting unless they try and gamify it in other ways. Like, if they nailed down performance enough to make every ship procgen a really diverse set of layouts and you genuinely never knew what was going to land in your bay, the chill, pleasant drudgery experience suddenly works better but that's not the game they're building. I don't think they could if they wanted to, sadly.
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Dec 7, 2021 10:35
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What if instead you start the game right as a long struggle of the workers succeeded in unionising. The story is LYNX trying to dismantle it and you, the player, have various tools to help or fight this.
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Dec 7, 2021 11:54
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Mr. Evrart is helping me find my laser cutter.
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Dec 7, 2021 12:54
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Wrr posted:I think they should spice things up with mandating that the player avoid damaging or cutting some part of the ship! Which reminds me how demo charges we pay for replaced cut beam mk 2 being always on no take backs, so players avoided the upgrade. Which would be cooler if charges were polished instead of "who cares if the disarm UI you unlock is buggy REAL cutters don't make mistakes" introduction we got. So "punish the player more = immerision?" Just gets more and more exhausting to hear every game I see it repeated while turbo jank is front and center that would make such things more awkward than engaging even if you liked the idea. If they added space hornets Nests and they no clipped into fuel lines like a heat sink through coolant, there would still be people saying "gosh, I guess some people just hate variety and don't understand how great this is for gameplay." At people thinking the space hornets have not been a slam dunk success for their game play flow. Section Z fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Dec 7, 2021 |
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Dec 7, 2021 13:43
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I mean, if they really wanted to they could add a Papers, please? element where you have to choose whether little Timmy back home gets medicine or food this week because you accidentally hosed up and splitsawed a computer. That would make the union element much more persuasive - but also ruin the chill cut ships apart game that I love. It did occur to me that the union could push for less time pressure and get you longer/unlimited shifts, but at the same time that feels weird because a union would push for fewer hours, not more.
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Dec 7, 2021 15:16
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Bremen posted:I mean, if they really wanted to they could add a Papers, please? element where you have to choose whether little Timmy back home gets medicine or food this week because you accidentally hosed up and splitsawed a computer. That would make the union element much more persuasive - but also ruin the chill cut ships apart game that I love. It can be framed as Lynx purposefully makes the shift too short to force the shipbreakers to get dinged on all the fees as much as possible so longer shift is better for the worker or something.
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Dec 7, 2021 15:35
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Isomermaid posted:So they put in things that force you to change your approach like broken atmospheric units, and people complain! "This decision is stopping me doing my routine" like the added puzzle makes the work less efficient and instead of being "yay, more game in my game" it's "you're making my job harder and more dangerous". Weird to see. I've never seen the "breaking my routine" complaint. What I've seen is that the ships can generate themselves in such a way that there's no way to deal with them safely and they blow themselves up, which is bad. Essentially it generates a puzzle with no way to solve it. Also can we please stop calling everything on this forum that we want to critique "weird" now?
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Dec 7, 2021 16:13
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Did they ever explain why they removed thruster keys? That always seemed more like a stab in the right direction even if the execution was lacking. I guess the real "problem"(not really a problem) is the lack of any kind of fail state, if the ship blows just grab another it leads to a lot of degenerate strategy. Which they lean into by leaning towards the speedrun crowd 
Hub Cat fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Dec 7, 2021 |
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Dec 7, 2021 16:40
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Hub Cat posted:Did they ever explain why they removed thruster keys? That always seemed more like a stab in the right direction even if the execution was lacking. I think this coming update is the ship to see if they have any intention to dig the well deeper on system based disassembly. Electricity, atmo, and reactor-thruster systems were introduced as just a taste of systems standing in the way of your disassembly and the more ship gen they get going without any new ideas, the more we just have the same disassembly in different shapes. Lol I just reminded myself of reinforced cut points, maybe it's for the best if they just focus on new shapes 
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Dec 7, 2021 16:49
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I mean they didn't have to sell them though, just make them unique to the ship. That's part of what I mean by lacking execution. But then people just blow the ship because it's faster and there are no consequences.... lol gently caress
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Dec 7, 2021 16:51
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The goal should really be to blow the ship up artfully and creatively. I think Teardown has a bit of a better goal for a physics game because most bad side effects or weird physics can be harnessed for traversal much easier than clean up. But like I want to use a clogged toilet and hydroponic grey water system to shoot pieces of the ship into the processor. I want to incinerate or break a bunch of cheap poo poo holding a bunch of expensive poo poo together by blowing up a fuel or cryo tank. Having hand held versions of the primal physics forces of move and cut is maybe too powerful now that I know how to traverse zero G. I think a good goal is that certain ship classes should encourage "look ma, no tools" runs not because they make the cutter and grappler worse or take them away but because the ship systems themself are funner to rip the ship apart with.
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Dec 7, 2021 17:04
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Just make the ship that blows up the instant you load in into a story event. You get big fines from LYNX even though you clearly didn't even touch the thing.
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Dec 7, 2021 19:42
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there is a contradiction between a game that’s about presenting you with a fair puzzle to solve that’s also about how unfair work is under capitalism. it’s a solvable contradiction i think, or at least one you can get over with a little suspension of disbelief.
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Dec 7, 2021 19:51
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Listening in on the dev Discord AMA thing, apparently this upcoming ship has been at least in planning for a year, so probably an entirely new model e: "no ships planned beyond this for full release" stringless fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Dec 8, 2021 |
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Dec 8, 2021 00:16
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cowboy
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FFT posted:e: "no ships planned beyond this for full release" 
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Dec 8, 2021 01:58
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FFT posted:Listening in on the dev Discord AMA thing, apparently this upcoming ship has been at least in planning for a year, so probably an entirely new model W E L P
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Dec 8, 2021 04:41
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FFT posted:Listening in on the dev Discord AMA thing, apparently this upcoming ship has been at least in planning for a year, so probably an entirely new model Wait, wait what? As in, this is going to be the last ship added to the game? So there's like. . . what 6 ships in the game?
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Dec 8, 2021 05:00
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And that's it. No reason for me to touch it beyond the occasional urge to go cutting once this ship is revealed. What a waste of potential.
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Dec 8, 2021 05:19
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That's huge dropped ball. Unless the last of leg of the race somehow involves player made ships or something.
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Dec 8, 2021 05:21
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After years of development, save breaking patches, reworks, and re-designs, we have finally come together to say that ship deseign hard
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Dec 8, 2021 05:22
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Wrr posted:Wait, wait what? 4 classes total. 4 varieties each for macs and geckos, and 6 varieties for javs if we're counting all the sizes. Edit: Sounds like new mechanics and equipment are off the table except maybe as post-launch content if it does well. act 3 spoiler hint Some kind of "boss fight" planned for finale Hub Cat fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Dec 8, 2021 |
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Dec 8, 2021 05:31
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Boy oh boy thats really disappointing. Goddamn. Well, I got my fun out the game already so I guess I can't complain. Sorta feels like they shouldn't have gone Early Access and should have just dropped it in full.
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Dec 8, 2021 06:02
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Somebody will do this concept justice some day, but it wasn't this game. Alas. I did get my money's worth tho so no hard feelings here.
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Dec 8, 2021 08:42
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I also got my money's worth out of it, and I'm glad they gave the concept a shot even if this isn't going to be the game that takes it to its full potential. And if it's a choice between them pouring more effort into Shipbreaker, or pouring it into Homeworld 3, I do not mind them choosing the latter at all.
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Dec 8, 2021 09:47
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Well I got my money's worth out of it, and it will always be my go-to "Chill out and play something satisfying" game.
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Dec 8, 2021 15:57
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