spoilerI’ve done entire runs of this game only salvaging water. No bladderfish, no coral + salt, no stillsuit, no water reclaimer. You can easily make it through to the endgame on the water you spawn with plus what you find in wrecks.
Subnautica comes to mind. It’s a survival game with a heavy focus on exploring and a very structured story. Fluff text and the obligatory random documents and audio logs are mostly optional, though the game does have a mystery to solve so some of those you want to pay attention to. No real spikes in difficulty, it’s honestly an easy game.
This is about maintaining the compromise that is intellectual property law.
IP law has been so perverted that I see a lot of the takietarians around here wanting to abolish it completely. That’s not a good idea. The US constitution empowers Congress to make laws that for a limited time give creators exclusive rights to their creations. FOR A LIMITED TIME. That’s the key feature. I know this is an EU petition, I imagine they have a similar concept of IP. That it belongs to the creator for awhile, and then enters the public domain as the heritage of all mankind.
Do away with copyright protection entirely, and you kill a lot of people’s jobs. The rate at which things will be created will drastically decrease. Throughout the 1980s, how many decade defining or genre defining video games came out of the United States? The nation known for a video game industry crash that decade? How many came out of the UK? How many out of Japan? How many out of the Soviet Union?
Okay so let’s make copyright permanent! Well no, because then you get Disney, a collection of stuffed suits who have MBAs instead of souls holding as much western culture hostage as they can in perpetuity.
So, we compromise. You create something, you get an amount of time of exclusive right of way, then it becomes public domain.
That length of time has gotten longer and longer to the point now that it’s more than 2 human lifetimes long. To an individual human, that’s as good as forever, so it has the problems of permanent copyright.
Especially in the realm of computer software and video games, where the life of a platform averages 10 years. There’s a whole body of software and games written for OLD systems that are still protected under copyright, but finding the copyright holder is damn near impossible. I’ll make up a game: Turtle Adventure for the Commodore 64, copyright 1985 by Bedsoft Inc. Bedsoft Inc was a sole proprietorship operated by Bartholomew Teethwick in Bristol, England. Mr. Teethwick published Turtle Adventure, a typing tutor game that didn’t really work right, and an advertisement for a Pacman clone to release in 1987 was circulated but that game was never made. The “company” was shut down in 1988 and Mr. Teethwick died of AIDS in 1991, unmarried, no children. Who’s going to sue me for posting Turtle Adventure on Github? Whose rights is copyright law protecting here?
Then you get into this model where video games don’t work at all without a central server somewhere. That’s just an end around of the deal. This software is supposed to end up in the public domain eventually. By copyrighting it, that’s the deal you made.
To patent something, you’re required to submit a technical description of your invention in sufficient detail for it to be replicated, because patent law is a similar compromise. You invent something, it’s yours for awhile then it belongs to humanity. You cannot have a patented trade secret. Why do we allow closed source software to be copyrighted?
The rules for software weren’t created for software, they were created for human readable works of literature, and they’ve been misused in ways that benefit large greed-based organizations like Microsoft.
Requiring game developers to publish their server side code when the game goes defunct is holding them to the deal they made when they installed that copyright notice. It is what they owe humanity.
Yeah at first during onboarding when you’re running like one smelter into one constructor on the ground with a wavy belt and spamming power poles everywhere it’s kinda goofy but when you start designing factories you can make some cool looking stuff.
Is RNG always bullshit? No; only a sith speaks in absolutes. There are appropriate uses of randomness in video games. Is RNG very often a source of bullshit? Absolutely. Do I feel like that’s the case in Blue Prince? ABSOLUTELY
“I got the pump room but not the boiler room again so I still can’t try doing the thing I’ve been trying to do.” Said players of a game designed to disrespect their time.
If, at the start of each in-game day, you were given all of the rooms you’d unlocked so far, and were allowed to arrange them however you like right then and there, and were then free to move around in it however much you please, would the game be worsened? I’m convinced it would only be improved, because pretty much all you would do is remove “Welp, for the fifteenth time, I know what I want to try, but random chance prevented me from doing so.”
The presentation is charming and the puzzles are intriguing but I think the community is putting up with the deeply terrible mechanics out of sheer novelty, and another game made like it isn’t going to be well received.
Putting a jigsaw puzzle together is a challenge. You could increase that challenge by requiring yourself to roll a die and getting 6 five times in a row before you’re allowed to try to fit a piece. Does that sound like good game design to you?
From what I saw of Blue Prince, it would be like playing Return of the Obra Dinn, except after you get one of the death scenes and the soundtrack blarps at you for awhile, there’s the door unlock sound, and there’s a random chance it’s going to make you arbitrarily replay the game.
I’m just not on board with all the shit they piled in front of the mystery to solve.
That question is the thesis statement of a 2 hour long video essay if ever I heard one.
Most games involve random chance somehow to make the game feel more alive and less deterministic, like in an early Zelda game, should the Octorok run 3, 4, 5, or 6 tiles forward? Should it turn left or right? Should it drop a rupee or a heard when killed? These I’m fine with.
In an RPG, things like monster encounter rates might use the RNG to simulate the behavior of a dungeon master, both “roll for initiative” and “I’ll have them encounter 4 groups of low level monsters on their way through the creepy forest.” Using an RNG and lookup table for that is a reasonable low overhead way to add some unpredictability and adventure to the game. Note: I don’t really play RPGs that much.
The term roguelike has started to be overused to mean any game that features procedural generation and permadeath. By that definition I think Tetris qualifies as a roguelike. The original Rogue kind of worked like a virtual dungeonmaster, it would create an RPG campaign for you to play in, and then it played like any RPG where you have to explore a dungeon, learn the mechanics etc. with permadeath and the consequence of having to relearn everything you’ve learned thusfar generating stakes and pressuring the player to survive, no “whatever, I’ll just die and respawn.” So that’s an innovative use of a computer random number generator. Most things that call themselves “roguelikes” are more “We designed a cool primary gameplay loop but can’t really be bothered with level design so here’s some procedural generation to beat your head against over and over again, maybe hoping to find a scenario you can possibly win.” Quite often, it’s not that the game randomly re-engineers itself, it throws the same pre-scripted things at you in a somewhat different order, so they end up playing more like old arcade games than an actual adventure.
A “roguelike” I’ve spent the most time with is FTL: Faster Than Light, and its roguelike structure is by far my least favorite feature. I don’t really like beating my head against the RNG hoping a permutation of combats, 50/50 “do you help with the giant spiders” encounters goes my way so that I have enough scrap, and that it gives me a shop with a useful array of weapons so that I have a chance at the end encounter.
Blue Prince takes the randomization to a whole other level. It might be compelling if it procedurally randomized the house for each playthrough such that you do have to learn YOUR way through it, and you have limited stamina so that each day you can only explore so far, but you can get upgrades to your stamina so that you can stay in the house longer and explore deeper, but…I can’t see the way they implemented the game’s RNG as anything other than flagrant disrespect of the player’s time.
The “AHA!” moment in a puzzle game is what you’re after. That hapens in the player’s mind. If the player thinks up the solution, but the mechanics of the game make it take a long time to implement, all you’re doing is grinding the player’s teeth together. And Blue Prince seems designed to maximize teeth grinding, because the player may know the solution to a puzzle, but contriving the circumstance necessary to implement that solution requires several unlikely rolls back to back to back to back to back.
Sorry, I’m just convinced it’s bad game design pretending to be novel.
A puzzle game that puts RNG in between the player and the ability to attempt a solution is something I’m not willing to tolerate.
how is it different from playing Riven with one of your sticks of RAM poorly seated so the computer crashes on a semi-regular basis resetting your progress?
No. Not for me. I’d be more interested in wearing the corner fire hydrant in my ass than playing that.