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Eiba posted:There are presumably reasons to spend more than 10 minutes exploring a place, but I have no idea why you'd spend 10 uninterrupted minutes sprinting in a straight line over procedurally generated nothing. If running in a line for 10 minutes was all you had to do you should get bored of that way before you hit a border. Statistically, a pretty big number of normies will be disappointed because they don’t pay much attention to game development but they’ve heard the engine has a 2 on it, and they were hoping the jump to next-gen might mean getting away from some of the obvious limitations they’ve been experiencing since they first played a Bethesda game with Fallout 3 (like hitting a loading screen every time you go from an exterior to an interior). If there was ever a time to make the world feel seamless, it would be for the big space game that’s their first new IP in 20 years, the first major non-cross-gen game on this Series X console that’s supposed to last an entire generation, etc. Then there are the somewhat more informed Gamers roaming subreddits, resetera who have let themselves get burned by “le Todd” before and won’t get their hopes up about the potential implications of descriptions like “open for you to explore”. Even some of these people who expected cutscene transitions between planets, mostly procedurally generated surfaces, etc. will still be disappointed that, once locked onto the mostly procedural planet, there will be no future opportunities for, say, long vehicle chases or low-atmosphere flights across great planetary distances. And No Man’s Sky is absolutely a factor, because when that game was revealed nearly a decade ago the part that drove everybody insane was the process of speeding across a planet surface, leaving the atmosphere and landing on a different planet without canned animations or loading screens. They prioritized this during development above seemingly all else, and at launch I couldn’t fly very close to the ground but spent hours flying in-atmosphere orbits, chasing various alien sunsets. On one particularly memorable planetary visit I fell down a steep canyon and came back up the wrong side. I took it as a happy accident and decided to walk in that direction until I found a beacon to call my ship over. I found myself lost 30 minutes’ distance away, angrily debating whether I should admit defeat, turn around and make the same walk back. I felt immensely frustrated and, when I finally found a beacon, immensely relieved. If the story had ended with me hitting an invisible wall, I only would have experienced compounding frustration. Sure, this isn’t something anyone would regularly do, and it likely wouldn’t be an interesting thing to do more than once with the content Starfield will ship with. But it could have been possible to design a game where these long excursions are encouraged, rewarded and made mechanically engaging in their own right. A lot of people involuntarily conjure these images in their head when they hear the phrase “forever game” because it’s just such an exciting notion for a certain kind of nerd who goes nuts for the idea, like when it was being said about No Man’s Sky pre-release, and like Bethesda is now saying with a “no really, for serious this time.” In the real sci-fi forever game, you’d be able to walk around the planet forever. And you’d be able to fly from one star system to another, through only darkness in between, if you didn’t mind it taking four months. You can’t do that in No Man’s Sky. There are invisible walls in that game, but they are between the planets and their star. (Somebody really did walk around the entire surface of a NMS planet in the early months, and he realized over the course of two weeks that there were several aspects of the planet that made it an especially poor choice for this task, considerably extending the ordeal. In the years since, people have made pilgrimages to this planet. No other word for it.) The invisible wall in the middle of the desert seems like a minimum viable solution, and hopefully one that’s been implemented to get the game stable and out the door. (Agh, what if you’re approaching a particularly unique or gorgeous vista, and you hit the wall right before you get there? And then to have to turn around and go all the way back to your ship and navigate multiple load screens to land somewhere accessible to where you were standing?) The ideas I’ve heard for potential mod fixes suggests there are various ways it could be done with creative technical slight of hand, which I’d hope can be added to future official updates (and wouldn’t require more RAM than exists on either Series box). Not following No Man’s Sky’s self-imposed mandate of seamless land-to-space-to-land transit should make it possible to employ something (anything) more functional, more fictional, or at least less frictional than a literal invisible wall, right?
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Aug 28, 2023 08:16
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Talkie Toaster posted:Apart from the 3 office workers on Mars who go to happy hour at the bar then immediately back to the office, proving that the game can still do it and Beth chose not to. Feel like the devs were trying to tell us something here
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Mar 26, 2024 20:34
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