No Man's Universe Starter Kit
May. 13th, 2018 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tigerfortI've been playing No Man's Sky recently. I got it heavily discounted around Christmas time, and for the £15ish I paid for it, I reckon I've had pretty good value. As a fairly relaxing mentally undemanding space-wanderer/gardener sim, it's quite fun in a lightweight way.
If I'd bought it at launch, even at the price I paid (~1/3 the launch price), I might well have joined the angry hordes complaining about it.
But for all that the several vast post-launch patches have added (base construction, freighter fleets, gardening, bounty missions, a (very basic) story that adds a bit to the (mostly awful and/or trite) lore, and a variety of other stuff) a fair number of things the developers promised still aren't actually there. Also, many of the design decisions are odd. Where odd covers a range from "that's unnecessarily awkward?" to "what moron came up with that?"
The biggest missing promises are all about interaction. The total absence of the promised multiplayer understandably bothers a lot of people, although I'm not one of them. ("Other players can see what you named the planets you landed on!" is not multiplayer; "you can leave messages for other players in specific dedicated mailboxes that they then have to find" is not much closer.)
But the developers also sold the game as having a deep immersive simulated universe, with realistic interactions within each planet's ecosystem, and factions whose approval or disapproval of the player's actions would have a major effect on the course of the game, and the state of the galaxy.
No Man's Sky has a universe as deep as that of Elite on the BBC Micro. It may actually be less immersive. That's not to do with realism. The NMS universe is unrealistic in a range of ways[1], but most of those are decisions made for obvious reasons[2] that I can understand even if I don't always agree with them. The problem is that there's a huge amount of surface, and no depth. Habitable planets have around five to fifteen species of animal, each procedurally generated from a huge range of different parts and textures, giving a wide variety of possible appearances.
But appearances are all those animals have. Behaviourally, they act in one of four ways:
There's no identifiable difference between two different herbivores of different species other than appearance. And neither will ever eat a plant. (Plants fall into two types: those the player can harvest resources from by walking up and pressing the "harvest" button, and those you harvest by vapourising them with your mining laser. The first kind offer various metals, the second give you carbon.)
[1] planets are far too close together, there are huge hyper-dense fields of asteroids everywhere, and no planet supports more than about a dozen species of animal, as examples
[2] you can plot your course from one planet to another by eye, fuel up from space rocks anywhere, and not have your computer crumble under the strain of storing data for millions of species
The procedurally generated "ecosystems" can be very pretty, but have less depth than a shoebox diorama. What of the factions?
Well, there are giant space battles you can take part in, affecting the outcome (said the developers before launch). These actually exist, sort of, since one of the big patches. The player warps into a new system, and sometimes there will be two freighter fleets blasting away at each other using turrets and fighters. Both will contact the player, offering money for assistance[3]. Ignore them. Sit and watch for a while. Nothing will change. There's lots of shooting going on, but no-one ever gets hurt, unless the player joins in. The player's guns damage whatever they hit; the player's ship takes damage from being shot by others. But if you don't take part, there isn't really a battle, just a slideshow of one. (And if you do take part, you destroy a fewpop-up targets sorry, fighters, and then the side you chose is declared winner and you get your money. Yaay, go team!)
[3] Never any reason to get involved. No factional arguments. Not even "please, I don't want to die". Just "If you help us, we'll give you money".
Well, OK, the space battles are a bust. (Also, the ship combat is awful; I found it totally unfun and tried to avoid it completely other than a couple of necessary plot-related battles.) But there's more to factions than ships shouting "bang" at one another across the space-lanes. Right?
Sure! There are three "alien" species (the player is a "traveller", ie the only member of their species in that universe. Because reasons, that's why), and three guilds. The game records your standing with each species and each guild. Guilds are simple: they hand out randomly generated missions (of fairly standard MMO/RPG type - kill ten predators, collect 50 iron, etc). When you complete a mission for a guild, your standing with them increases. What does increased standing with a guild mean? Why, it gives you access to more random missions, but of a higher level! (Instead of 50 iron, collect 50 platinum, for a higher reward!)
If you removed the entire guild system, and just allowed the player to pick any mission off the bounty board, the game would actually benefit slightly. The skinner box is so naked here that you just can't help seeing it for what it is. Let me do whichever missions I choose, dammit!
What about species? Well, they do also offer random missions on the bounty board. But there are also various aliens standing around at space stations and trading posts that you can talk to, each in their own language. (All alien languages conveniently have word-for-word equivalence with US English in a way that, say, RP and Yorkshire English don't have equivalence with one another, but we'll assume that's just because everyone's using very standardised trading terminology. Why not a standard language for communicating? Because then you'd only need to learn one, that's why.)
Ignore the fact that none of these people ever move. Not in your presence (OK, saves a lot of animation-related work). Not from one place to another when you're gone (allows the procedural system to generate them from the location data easily). This contributes heavily to feeling that the universe is actually less real than that of BBC Elite. In Elite, you never encounter another "person", except in their ship. In NMS, you can go back to a location after months or years, and Captain Bob will still be standing in the same spot, tapping on his tablet, like the worst possible version of one of those pubs where it's hard to tell the regulars from the furniture. Would the space stations be improved if you never got out of your ship in them? Quite possibly. They could certainly do with being much smaller, since the handful of things you can interact with are annoyingly widely scattered.
But the aliens are there, and you can talk to them. (The dialogue interface is one of the worst pieces of not-deliberately-bad design I've ever had the misfortune to use in a game.) Each race has a basically identical set of conversation options: learn a word, trade with person, ask for directions. You can ask each alien for directions as many times as you like, but no individual will trade with you a second time, or teach you a second word. Sometimes, there'll be a random introductory dialogue before the standard menu. Some of these give rewards (cash, items, or a change in your standing with that race), some are just things you learn to click through because the 50th time you're told "this alien is humming" it ceases to be interesting.
But while your answer to the introductory dialogue can give you a reward (or penalty), it makes no difference to anything else. The person you've just congratulated on their wedding will react to further conversation in exactly the same way as someone you'd condemned to death or prison for criminal activity. And while the introductions are race-specific, the only difference in the main dialogue options is what resource you need to hand over 10 units of to learn a word of the relevant alien language, and what resource they'll trade 100 units of for a random amount of cash.
The aliens don't feel like people, they feel like poorly designed vending machines. Quest dialogue is just as bad (when the quests involve talking to anyone, which isn't often). I don't just mean that the writing is bad, though most of it is very bad[4]. Say you've taken on a "find a person" quest. There are a variety of flavour texts for these, from "track the criminal mastermind" to "we're worried about this old friend". But when you find the target, their response is chosen randomly from the same short list of options, and can be totally inappropriate. (Or it might literally be "I am a [racenoun]. Looks like you found me.", which ... yeah.)
[4] If you've played lots of computer RPGs: the writing in NMS, at its best, still belongs in the bottom 10% of trite predictable rubbish that thinks it's clever and original
So, OK, guilds increase reputation for doing quests, and that reputation affects access to quests. Alien species increase (and occasionally decrease) reputation for doing quests, and as a result of choosing various dialogue options. (Initially, because you don't understand them, the dialogue effects can be a bit random. Once you know a decent number of words in their language, it's pretty obvious which choices will increase or decrease your standing with a given race.) What does your reputation with a species affect?
Well, it affects them offering you random quests through the bounty board in the same way that guild reputation does. There are also a couple of dialogue options that require you to have reputation above a certain level with that race, but the requirement is low enough that you'll easily pass it within the first few hours. Purchase of ship and spacesuit upgrade blueprints is gated by level, but you'll get most of those from trade (or burglery) anyway[5], and there's no gating on that. The benefits of having a high reputation are trivial, and there are no negative effects at all. Nor is there any kind of trade-off where being favoured by one faction makes another suspicious.
[5] The ones with the highest level requirements are also the ones least likely to turn up in shops (and often require expensive components you can't afford until long after you'll have exceeded the level requirement to buy the blueprint anyway)
Would the game benefit from having the aliens cut entirely, like the guilds? Probably not, although the absence of the awful dialogue UI would be a minor blessing. But if you fixed that so that it required about 1/10th the player effort, I'd be slightly sorry to lose the quests that involve people. And while two people standing facing away from one another forever at a trading post is a slightly laughable sight, it does add a little visual variety to the game. Equally, there are probably other ways of doing that just as well.
I don't think the three languages add anything to the game. (And given the lore, the player not knowing them at the start makes no sense anyway.) Especially since there are some things - various individual bits of dialogue, and some entire plot missions - where you magically can understand everything perfectly anyway. So while they were presumably put in to help the illusion of a realistic simulation, they actually have the opposite effect. Trading a pile of Platinum to someone, and then not knowing their word for Platinum, is not immersive.
Actually, distinct from that problem, the trading is badly immersion-breaking. The whole setup is clearly designed to force the player to keep moving if they want to make money trading (or mining). Which, OK, that was what the designers wanted. (Designers: please let me play your game the way I enjoy most. Don't force me to play it the one way you think is correct. Yes, it's your game, but it's my fun, and if you don't let me have it, I'll buy from someone who does.)
But it makes no sense. A typical NMS solar system has one space station and several planets, each of which can have potentially dozens (perhaps hundreds on large worlds) of trading posts on. The station and trading posts can each have huge freight-haulers landing and taking off several times per minute. There may be fleets of immense freighter ships warping in and out of the system. But the player can turn up at a market, sell a backpack full of iron or carbon, and permanently crash the entire system's price for that basic construction material. The same backpack full of iron isn't enough to construct more than a few rooms of your base, though. And a 50% drop in the price of iron won't affect the cost (buying or selling) of anything madefrom iron. Why would it? No-one except the player is actually making or doing anything at all.
The economic system is clearly broken in other ways, too. Ship/suit upgrade blueprints can only be purchased for "nanites", which are distinct from the main cash currency and which, unlike cash, occupy cargo space. The game repeatedly asserts they're highly valued. But if you have more than you think you'll need for upgrades and want your cargo hold back, bad luck. No-one will actually buy nanites off you. (Not quite true - very rarely you'll meet a specialist trader who'll buy nanites at a hugely variable price, with one catch. You have to go through a whole conversation cycle, which is five clicks/button presses[6], to sell every batch of fifteen nanites. A typical reward for a mid-level mission is three hundred nanites, so it'll take you several minutes to sell even one reward's worth. If you can find someone to sell them to at all. About one trader every 10th system I visited, I reckoned. I stopped taking missions with rewards in nanites long before I had all the ship upgrades I wanted.)
[6] not all the same, you understand - a mixture of the two. Also, it takes about 10-15 seconds. Have I mentioned that I hate the NMS dialogue UI with a fiery passion for its awfulness?
There are other, more minor, immersion-breakers, too. And then there's the design side - both the UI, which mixes strange with outright bad, and the game engine, which... I might rant about another time.
And yet, I still had something over 100 hours of gentle, (mostly) relaxing fun with the game, despite its best efforts. And depending on what the next big patch adds, I might go back. I think of what the game could be if the effort expended on annoying the player had gone into adding more fun instead, and I wish I could play that game...
If I'd bought it at launch, even at the price I paid (~1/3 the launch price), I might well have joined the angry hordes complaining about it.
But for all that the several vast post-launch patches have added (base construction, freighter fleets, gardening, bounty missions, a (very basic) story that adds a bit to the (mostly awful and/or trite) lore, and a variety of other stuff) a fair number of things the developers promised still aren't actually there. Also, many of the design decisions are odd. Where odd covers a range from "that's unnecessarily awkward?" to "what moron came up with that?"
The biggest missing promises are all about interaction. The total absence of the promised multiplayer understandably bothers a lot of people, although I'm not one of them. ("Other players can see what you named the planets you landed on!" is not multiplayer; "you can leave messages for other players in specific dedicated mailboxes that they then have to find" is not much closer.)
But the developers also sold the game as having a deep immersive simulated universe, with realistic interactions within each planet's ecosystem, and factions whose approval or disapproval of the player's actions would have a major effect on the course of the game, and the state of the galaxy.
No Man's Sky has a universe as deep as that of Elite on the BBC Micro. It may actually be less immersive. That's not to do with realism. The NMS universe is unrealistic in a range of ways[1], but most of those are decisions made for obvious reasons[2] that I can understand even if I don't always agree with them. The problem is that there's a huge amount of surface, and no depth. Habitable planets have around five to fifteen species of animal, each procedurally generated from a huge range of different parts and textures, giving a wide variety of possible appearances.
But appearances are all those animals have. Behaviourally, they act in one of four ways:
- Fish: swim around at random in schools
- Herbivores: move around at random unless attacked, when the attacked creature retaliates
- Birds: fly around at random, mostly (but not always) in groups of three
- Predators: attack nearest herbivore/fish. When the target dies, ignore the corpse and choose a new target.
There's no identifiable difference between two different herbivores of different species other than appearance. And neither will ever eat a plant. (Plants fall into two types: those the player can harvest resources from by walking up and pressing the "harvest" button, and those you harvest by vapourising them with your mining laser. The first kind offer various metals, the second give you carbon.)
[1] planets are far too close together, there are huge hyper-dense fields of asteroids everywhere, and no planet supports more than about a dozen species of animal, as examples
[2] you can plot your course from one planet to another by eye, fuel up from space rocks anywhere, and not have your computer crumble under the strain of storing data for millions of species
The procedurally generated "ecosystems" can be very pretty, but have less depth than a shoebox diorama. What of the factions?
Well, there are giant space battles you can take part in, affecting the outcome (said the developers before launch). These actually exist, sort of, since one of the big patches. The player warps into a new system, and sometimes there will be two freighter fleets blasting away at each other using turrets and fighters. Both will contact the player, offering money for assistance[3]. Ignore them. Sit and watch for a while. Nothing will change. There's lots of shooting going on, but no-one ever gets hurt, unless the player joins in. The player's guns damage whatever they hit; the player's ship takes damage from being shot by others. But if you don't take part, there isn't really a battle, just a slideshow of one. (And if you do take part, you destroy a few
[3] Never any reason to get involved. No factional arguments. Not even "please, I don't want to die". Just "If you help us, we'll give you money".
Well, OK, the space battles are a bust. (Also, the ship combat is awful; I found it totally unfun and tried to avoid it completely other than a couple of necessary plot-related battles.) But there's more to factions than ships shouting "bang" at one another across the space-lanes. Right?
Sure! There are three "alien" species (the player is a "traveller", ie the only member of their species in that universe. Because reasons, that's why), and three guilds. The game records your standing with each species and each guild. Guilds are simple: they hand out randomly generated missions (of fairly standard MMO/RPG type - kill ten predators, collect 50 iron, etc). When you complete a mission for a guild, your standing with them increases. What does increased standing with a guild mean? Why, it gives you access to more random missions, but of a higher level! (Instead of 50 iron, collect 50 platinum, for a higher reward!)
If you removed the entire guild system, and just allowed the player to pick any mission off the bounty board, the game would actually benefit slightly. The skinner box is so naked here that you just can't help seeing it for what it is. Let me do whichever missions I choose, dammit!
What about species? Well, they do also offer random missions on the bounty board. But there are also various aliens standing around at space stations and trading posts that you can talk to, each in their own language. (All alien languages conveniently have word-for-word equivalence with US English in a way that, say, RP and Yorkshire English don't have equivalence with one another, but we'll assume that's just because everyone's using very standardised trading terminology. Why not a standard language for communicating? Because then you'd only need to learn one, that's why.)
Ignore the fact that none of these people ever move. Not in your presence (OK, saves a lot of animation-related work). Not from one place to another when you're gone (allows the procedural system to generate them from the location data easily). This contributes heavily to feeling that the universe is actually less real than that of BBC Elite. In Elite, you never encounter another "person", except in their ship. In NMS, you can go back to a location after months or years, and Captain Bob will still be standing in the same spot, tapping on his tablet, like the worst possible version of one of those pubs where it's hard to tell the regulars from the furniture. Would the space stations be improved if you never got out of your ship in them? Quite possibly. They could certainly do with being much smaller, since the handful of things you can interact with are annoyingly widely scattered.
But the aliens are there, and you can talk to them. (The dialogue interface is one of the worst pieces of not-deliberately-bad design I've ever had the misfortune to use in a game.) Each race has a basically identical set of conversation options: learn a word, trade with person, ask for directions. You can ask each alien for directions as many times as you like, but no individual will trade with you a second time, or teach you a second word. Sometimes, there'll be a random introductory dialogue before the standard menu. Some of these give rewards (cash, items, or a change in your standing with that race), some are just things you learn to click through because the 50th time you're told "this alien is humming" it ceases to be interesting.
But while your answer to the introductory dialogue can give you a reward (or penalty), it makes no difference to anything else. The person you've just congratulated on their wedding will react to further conversation in exactly the same way as someone you'd condemned to death or prison for criminal activity. And while the introductions are race-specific, the only difference in the main dialogue options is what resource you need to hand over 10 units of to learn a word of the relevant alien language, and what resource they'll trade 100 units of for a random amount of cash.
The aliens don't feel like people, they feel like poorly designed vending machines. Quest dialogue is just as bad (when the quests involve talking to anyone, which isn't often). I don't just mean that the writing is bad, though most of it is very bad[4]. Say you've taken on a "find a person" quest. There are a variety of flavour texts for these, from "track the criminal mastermind" to "we're worried about this old friend". But when you find the target, their response is chosen randomly from the same short list of options, and can be totally inappropriate. (Or it might literally be "I am a [racenoun]. Looks like you found me.", which ... yeah.)
[4] If you've played lots of computer RPGs: the writing in NMS, at its best, still belongs in the bottom 10% of trite predictable rubbish that thinks it's clever and original
So, OK, guilds increase reputation for doing quests, and that reputation affects access to quests. Alien species increase (and occasionally decrease) reputation for doing quests, and as a result of choosing various dialogue options. (Initially, because you don't understand them, the dialogue effects can be a bit random. Once you know a decent number of words in their language, it's pretty obvious which choices will increase or decrease your standing with a given race.) What does your reputation with a species affect?
Well, it affects them offering you random quests through the bounty board in the same way that guild reputation does. There are also a couple of dialogue options that require you to have reputation above a certain level with that race, but the requirement is low enough that you'll easily pass it within the first few hours. Purchase of ship and spacesuit upgrade blueprints is gated by level, but you'll get most of those from trade (or burglery) anyway[5], and there's no gating on that. The benefits of having a high reputation are trivial, and there are no negative effects at all. Nor is there any kind of trade-off where being favoured by one faction makes another suspicious.
[5] The ones with the highest level requirements are also the ones least likely to turn up in shops (and often require expensive components you can't afford until long after you'll have exceeded the level requirement to buy the blueprint anyway)
Would the game benefit from having the aliens cut entirely, like the guilds? Probably not, although the absence of the awful dialogue UI would be a minor blessing. But if you fixed that so that it required about 1/10th the player effort, I'd be slightly sorry to lose the quests that involve people. And while two people standing facing away from one another forever at a trading post is a slightly laughable sight, it does add a little visual variety to the game. Equally, there are probably other ways of doing that just as well.
I don't think the three languages add anything to the game. (And given the lore, the player not knowing them at the start makes no sense anyway.) Especially since there are some things - various individual bits of dialogue, and some entire plot missions - where you magically can understand everything perfectly anyway. So while they were presumably put in to help the illusion of a realistic simulation, they actually have the opposite effect. Trading a pile of Platinum to someone, and then not knowing their word for Platinum, is not immersive.
Actually, distinct from that problem, the trading is badly immersion-breaking. The whole setup is clearly designed to force the player to keep moving if they want to make money trading (or mining). Which, OK, that was what the designers wanted. (Designers: please let me play your game the way I enjoy most. Don't force me to play it the one way you think is correct. Yes, it's your game, but it's my fun, and if you don't let me have it, I'll buy from someone who does.)
But it makes no sense. A typical NMS solar system has one space station and several planets, each of which can have potentially dozens (perhaps hundreds on large worlds) of trading posts on. The station and trading posts can each have huge freight-haulers landing and taking off several times per minute. There may be fleets of immense freighter ships warping in and out of the system. But the player can turn up at a market, sell a backpack full of iron or carbon, and permanently crash the entire system's price for that basic construction material. The same backpack full of iron isn't enough to construct more than a few rooms of your base, though. And a 50% drop in the price of iron won't affect the cost (buying or selling) of anything made
The economic system is clearly broken in other ways, too. Ship/suit upgrade blueprints can only be purchased for "nanites", which are distinct from the main cash currency and which, unlike cash, occupy cargo space. The game repeatedly asserts they're highly valued. But if you have more than you think you'll need for upgrades and want your cargo hold back, bad luck. No-one will actually buy nanites off you. (Not quite true - very rarely you'll meet a specialist trader who'll buy nanites at a hugely variable price, with one catch. You have to go through a whole conversation cycle, which is five clicks/button presses[6], to sell every batch of fifteen nanites. A typical reward for a mid-level mission is three hundred nanites, so it'll take you several minutes to sell even one reward's worth. If you can find someone to sell them to at all. About one trader every 10th system I visited, I reckoned. I stopped taking missions with rewards in nanites long before I had all the ship upgrades I wanted.)
[6] not all the same, you understand - a mixture of the two. Also, it takes about 10-15 seconds. Have I mentioned that I hate the NMS dialogue UI with a fiery passion for its awfulness?
There are other, more minor, immersion-breakers, too. And then there's the design side - both the UI, which mixes strange with outright bad, and the game engine, which... I might rant about another time.
And yet, I still had something over 100 hours of gentle, (mostly) relaxing fun with the game, despite its best efforts. And depending on what the next big patch adds, I might go back. I think of what the game could be if the effort expended on annoying the player had gone into adding more fun instead, and I wish I could play that game...
(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-13 11:36 pm (UTC)Elitealikes are all a bit stuck, re the economy; at best (like the X games) they might have one that functions in the sense of goods being shipped for actual industry and supply and demand influencing prices, but there always has to be an enormous supply of easy money to be picked up, because the player doesn't want building themselves up from a handcart to Eddie Stobart to take a real lifetime and require a lot of luck. Hence (although NMS clearly gets it very wrong) it's never going to bear much thinking about.
EVE? EVE has the opposite problem; because the economy is genuinely functional, albeit with a peculiar money supply [1], it's pretty hard to find profitable trades at all (leaving aside the risk of being murdered en route), and if you try to manufacture stuff one of two things happens:
1) It's easy to make. You are now competing with useful idiots who think the minerals they mine are free. You cannot make a profit. [2]
2) It's hard to make. You are now competing with people whose skills and operations are perfectly optimised after a huge investment of time and capital. You cannot make a profit.
[1] and a real money supply mechanism could not possibly function in EVE.
[2] Useful to people who buy the stuff, that is, not to you.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-14 12:34 am (UTC)Actually, another weird effect of what they've done is that if you have a freighter, you can make periodic stacks of money from any suitably high-value cargo, because what you buy/sell affects the stock in the local market, and well as the system price.
So you turn up with a cargo-hold full of (say) cryochambers, and sell it all in one transaction, getting the initial price for every unit. This tanks the price of cryochambers by 90%, so you can now buy your original cargo back for about 1/5th the cost (there's always a buy/sell margin in the market, which is fair enough). Apparently you used to be able to just cycle through this about a dozen times in a given system before the margin got too low, but the devs didn't like that. But the patch they put in was that the price stays down, rather than saying "you sold them to someone who's shipping them out". So you still get to keep your cargo and most of the money.
And the whole game is built on decisions like that. Including, alas, the UI. Did I mention the conversation UI at all, in my rantings? :)
(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-14 03:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-14 09:00 am (UTC)