It’s different to most other games, by not being goal-oriented except for the goals you set for yourself. No main quest line dictating progress. No mandatory tasks. No win condition. Instead, it drops you into a simulation of our entire galaxy roughly 1300 years in the future, where humanity has mastered hyperspace travel and spread through hundreds of star systems.
(To give an idea of the simulation’s scope: Around 85 million systems have been recorded by players so far, and those are a vanishingly small fraction of what’s out there. Space is big.)
I like that it offers a variety of activities to fit whatever mood I might be in on a given day. I can hunt pirates, mine asteroids, engage in a bit of piracy myself, find and collect bio samples, infiltrate rival settlements, venture into vast unexplored areas of space, discover Earth-like worlds that nobody has ever encountered before, defend humanity against hostile forces, photograph beautiful stellar phenomena, rescue stranded survivors, customize and finely tune my ship to perform beyond its original specs, team up with friends, pledge to a political power and expand their influence, or chill out as a space trucker and haul cargo to earn enough money for my next upgrade. It can occupy all my attention, or just be relaxing entertainment while I listen to music or an audiobook.
It’s an MMO in the sense of having a large game world (galaxy) shared by all players in real time, but PvP is optional. One mode exposes you to other players, while another limits you to NPC encounters. You can switch between them at will.
One warning: A space ship has more than a few controls to learn, and they’re better suited to a game controller or HOTAS than a keyboard and mouse. I use button combinations for almost everything beyond basic flight controls, since there aren’t enough buttons on a controller for everything.
hmmmmmm you’re tempting me to get back into this one. I think I have 60 or so hours on it? Not enough to try everything yet, but definitely enjoyed chilling in space.
Seems like a lot of people step away for a while only to return to it. I had hundreds of hours before taking a break, came back with new hardware, and have been playing hundreds of hours more. At this rate, it might end up overtaking Civilization as my most played game.
Lol we actually played worms Armageddon against each other before. If it still has stuff like exploding sheep etc it be a good game to play with their kids
There’s loads of Worms games now though they’re all the same sort of thing. I think they just announced an “anniversary edition” of Armageddon, which looks basically the same as the Steam version but ported to modern consoles. Still a banger 25 years on!
Not sure if it’s been done already, but Zelda LttP would be cool. I haven’t played Echoes of Wisdom though I like the art style and could see it working well.
I don’t think Nintendo is capable of doing anything to Link to the Past other than ruin it.
A lot of the Zelda games that got “remasters” mostly had their resolutions and brightnesses increased, to the point that the Wind Waker remake has problematic amounts of bloom. Makes me think someone important at Nintendo has cataracts. So if you want to “remaster” A Link to the Past, run it through an AI upscaler and turn a desk lamp on your screen.
The few that have gotten ground-up “remakes” like Link’s Awakening…I kind of liked the art style they chose, it fit the tone of the game pretty well, going with quartets for the music is a stroke of genius, WHY DOESN’T THE FUCKING D-PAD WORK? The original game was designed for use with a D-Pad and either 4- or 8- way motion. I get that modern gamers might instinctively reach for the analog stick, but bind movement controls to the D-pad too, especially if you’re not going to bind anything else to those controls. Nintendo never doesn’t fuck this up. They made an entire console based on a revolutionary new way to fuck up the controls.
So what you’d get out of a first-party re-release of aLttP is a blank white screen you control entirely with the gyros.
trying to live train AI against your playstyle is both expensive and unnecessary. Hard bots have never really been too much trouble. We don’t really need to use AI to outpace humans in most games. The exceptions would be an extremely long play games like chess and go.
There’s been a lot of use in AI for platformers and stuff like trackmania, but not for competition, simply for speedruns.
It would certainly be nice to have for the fighting games I play. A few have toyed with the idea of “shadow fighters”, but it never really feels like playing against a person. It might get their habits down, but it doesn’t replicate the adaptation of facing a person and having them change how they play based on how you’re playing. If someone could crack that nut, everyone would have someone on their level to play against at any hour of the day, no matter how obscure the game is.
yeah I would like to leverage AI for stuff like RPG NPCs. instead of hearing the same filler lines for 200 hours of gameplay, barely reacting to the context of your game you could have a vibrant array of endless dialog that actually keeps up with your game progress (or lack thereof).
That would be a pretty good use. Llms are a little slow on most home hardware still. Hallucinations could also be a little scary. I wonder if that would affect your ESRB rating, That’s technically it could say anything…
The fear of hallucinations is so great for a commercial company that when square enix tried it on a remake of a detective game of theirs, it became the poster child of how awful LLMs are for videogames, it’s one of the worst rated steam games, it’s like talking to a wall because they nerfed it so hard it’s worse than a normal text parser.
Hard bots have actually been so much trouble, that literally the only way to make them hard at all is to make them cheat by allowing them to operate outside of the ruleset the player is bound by. It’s a humongous issue with every strategy game on the market.
People tend to think of digital things as unchanging and permanent but that isn’t really the case. I’m fascinated by the concept of bit rot and other ways that digital things can disappear or degrade over time.
It’s good that flash is not still an essential part of the modern Internet but its death did firmly cut off an entire era of Internet culture that cannot be experienced in quite the same way.
The official Homestuck site will still let the original SWF files load as long as you have something that can play them. Ruffle works fine. You can also use one of the few browsers that still supports PPAPI plugins (like Falkon) with the official Flash plugin.
But personally I’d say to just use The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, which is more pleasant to read through than the original ever was.
i mean sure, but we’re actually approaching the edge of what can even be considered a game.
i don’t call those games personally. they are vaguely interactive novels. imo a physical choose your own adventure book has more “gameplay” than most of these virtual novels.
i honestly don’t think game is the right term here. these are books with an odd format.
It depends on the VN and its implementation. The existence of things like Slay the Princess, 999, Raging Loop, Phoenix Wright, AI: The Somnium Files, these are all inextricably linked with player participation and choice, as well as very dense narrative.
Then you have ones like Steins;Gate that don't have very much choice at all, that's a lot closer to a book in most respects, but as a blanket VNs are, more often than not, absolutely games.
The thing is some games make the line really fuzzy and it’s hard to draw an exact line where it no longer is a game.
Pyre does have a whole RPG wizard basketball thing going on that I enjoyed, but wasn’t the reason I recommend the game. The more engaging part of the game was the visual novel stapled to it, which was affected by wizard basketball in cool and interesting ways, but inside each scene it’s largely non-interactive.
Disco Elysium also has some RPG mechanics going on, and there’s a city block for you to wander around, but the vast majority of the game is dialogue. It could largely be written as a more complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, but it’s so much stronger as a game.
Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is almost entirely dialogue and telling people’s fortunes, with only brief moments of creating new tarot cards to break up the dialogue. Despite this, the fortune-telling aspect of the game has made it one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a bit.
There’s any number of “walking simulators” that this debate comes up around and I counter that with the fact that Outer Wilds built off the back of that formula to create something unquestionably a game, but built off of gameplay loops largely based around traversal and finding new bits of lore to unlock progression.
These were all successfully marketed to gamers as video games. My hot take is that they’re all games, but with a form of gameplay that some may find too simple for their liking and that’s ok. And the semantic debate over what’s a game and what isn’t is just feels vibes based sometimes.
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