It would be great if there was a guaranteed way to homebrew your consoles, but yeah security and stability is the real thing we benefit from. I don’t think anyone would advocate for more hackers in console multiplayer games, and I don’t want a homebrew game I’m running to crash or brick my system because of their fly-by-night hardware usage.
Remember when Sean Murray said prior to NMS launch that it was part of their vision for you to be alone in a vast uncharted universe with nowhere to call a home? That was code for, “we don’t have multiplayer or basebuilding, and there’s not really anything interesting enough for you to stay there long term”.
Give Starfield a few years, they’ll figure out what to do with those planets.
Zachtronics games are on another level, really. I think what sets them apart from “edutainment” games is that they’re not really made for someone to learn programming, they’re a labor of love for people who love to program. And as a result, they just happen to be the most attractive resource to learn programming that I’ve ever seen.
I think that’s a good lesson that all games that want to be educational should take away: don’t feel the need to force material down the player’s throat, instead make a game for someone who loves the subject matter, and the rest will take care of itself.
I hope you’re not disappointed by Inscryption, because it’s not going to be what you expect. But it is great. Don’t look anything up before you play it.
If you think I’m arguing that artists should not be compensated for their work, then I’ve completely misrepresented myself. Is that what you thought I meant?
I was going to say, all artists should share this position, but I’ll do one better: if you don’t have this position, you’re not an artist. Feels bold to make any absolute claim about what makes an artist, but I feel safe on this one. If making sure you’re fairly compensated is higher priority than sharing your art, then you’re not an artist.
Yeah, that’s why I think we’re in an MMO slump right now. The only companies who can afford the scale “need” it to be a cash cow. So they need really predictable methods of generating income, which means not doing anything too interesting. I’m hoping one day we’ll get past that. I think we have the technology right now for indie devs to roll out a semi-affordable MMO of decent quality, but I also don’t want the market to be flooded with garbage MMOs. We already have too many of those.
I’m not saying “for each player, they are able to experience a sense of wonder in a game when played in isolation”, that’s old hat. I’m saying “for all players, everyone experiences a shared sense of wonder and discovery in an artificial world they live in together”.
I’ve never played Elden Ring, yet I couldn’t help but see the community make new discoveries together. The first couple of days every post was about Margit, then a few people found the fake wall that hides an entire zone, and a month later someone has reverse engineered the levels and found a wall that takes over 1000 hits to get rid of.
When the binary is entirely hidden from the users, and the only thing the users have have access to is a window peering into the world as you want them to see it, you get to create an entire set of physical laws that is hidden from the players. Players have to work together to conduct experiments, peer review each other, compete with each other, and become experts in very narrow fields of research within your simulation. Imagine spending months as a community raising in-game funding and developing the technology to sail/fly/launch to a New World for the first time, and when you finally arrive you know you are the first set of players to ever see it, specifically as a result of your efforts.
What you’re describing is a neat little one-off escape room experience. What I’m describing is an actual world. We currently cannot do this.
Does this include cloud streamed games? I for one am still waiting for a streaming exclusive game in the vein of Elden Ring or BotW. Bonus if it’s an MMO. Imagine how much more mysterious a world could be if no one is able to datamine the binary. The only way to discover things would be players actually discovering them.
And not just easier, but cheaper. On lower end platforms it’s expensive to do floating point calculations all over the place because you don’t know how long it’s been since the last frame. If you can assume the frame rate, you can get a lot of performance back too.