T w e n t y S i d e d
I don’t know why Paul and I get such joy out of dunking on No Man’s Sky. The game received over a dozen major updates since it was released six years ago. You’d think that, “Oh wow. The new content is awful and doesn’t address the core problems with the game!” would get old. But I guess not. I will never forgive this game for the way it spurned its own potential to give us a game about inventory sorting and bar-filling.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast379
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes:
01:26 Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
Is this game an expansion, a sequel, a re-release, a remake, or a spinoff? According to the Narrator, “Possibly.”
06:30 NMS:Outlaws
It’s almost heroic how far the game designer is willing to go in pursuit of doing the wrongest thing possible.
27:48 The Batman
Bruce Wayne and The No Good Very Bad Town.
Like I said on the show: I prefer my heroes to be more heroic than this, but I still really enjoyed this one for the wonderful art design. The Christian Bale Batman movies were always so preoccupied with “realism” that they never really captured my imagination. But this dirty, twisted version of Gotham was captivating.
38:03 HyperRogue
Link (YouTube) |
40:10 Dorfromantik
Link (YouTube) |
45:00 The Universim
Link (YouTube) |
48:06 Mailbag: Relationships with games
Dear Diecast… I mean, hi.
I noticed that I tend to have adversarial relations with games. Meaning that I usually put a higher difficulty (for some reason) and when the game gives an unfair challenge I get “oh, you want to play unfair? All right I’ll play unfair too” and start cooking up exploits or some cheap tactics within game rulesets. So it’ll become a battle of who can outcheat each other at this point as two bitter rivals. So what’s your relationships with games tend to be?
Best regards, DeadlyDark
55:01 Mailbag: Good habits
Dear Diecast,
I hope this early spring finds you in good humour.
I recently started my umpteenth playthrough of Neverwinter Nights 2 and noticed I have gained a new habit and lost an old habit.
Like most of us do in our daily life, I have started to close doors behind me in game.
There is no practical purpose for it, I just found myself doing so.
I have also stopped rifling through cupboards, desks, and so on for small change like the average video game protagonist.Do you guys have any habits you brought to video games from real life? Closing doors, keeping things organised, and so on?
Do you usually rifle through drawers and closets for random loot?Wishing you all the best.
Vale,
-Tim
59:16 Mailbag: Bonus Bugs
Hi Diecast,
Do you recall some bugs and glitches that were so funny/awesome that they made the game better for you?
Cheers,
Darek
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Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
Pixel City Dev Blog
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Yes.
It’s about squeezing as much investment from the player as possible without actually putting the effort into a making a coherent experience, essentially throwing darts on the wall and seeing what sticks.
I like what The Batman did where multiple villains appear in a single film but only one is really the main antagonist while the rest are just weird characters Batman encounters throughout the story.
It’ll be a good way for a bunch of Batman villains to finally make their live-action debut and introduce them in the setting without overcrowding the movie like Spider-Man 3 did. Some could even appear instead in the upcoming TV spinoffs like Black Mask in the Penguin miniseries or Hugo Strange in the Arkham show.
Actually it’s sort of amusing how Warner is trying to make another shared universe but this time with just Batman although I’m not entirely against it, I always thought Batman and Gotham could easily exist standalone from the rest of the DC universe.
Really, Gotham only really makes sense in a world without other superheroes. It’s such a dreadful pit, the other heroes would surely do part-time commutes to help clean it up. And Superman showing up on weekends to zip around and put away all the villains who’ve escaped from Arkham during the week might actually help.
After playing HyperRogue, Hyperbolica was such a disappointment. The dev went to all the trouble of making a 3d hyperbolic engine, but didn’t really do anything with it, in gameplay terms. HyperRogue, on the other hand, makes it possible to feel the hyperbolic geometry as you navigate the world.
For example, the crossroads. The borders of each zone are infinite straight lines, but you can still fit an infinitely branching path between them that connects an infinite number of them. Or how, despite the border being an infinite line, there is a zone that you are guaranteed to get lost in once you lose sight of the border, unless you brought items to drop and create a path back. Or the Temple of Cthulu, which consists of an infinite series of concentric horocycles, a shape that does not exist on a Euclidean plane. Or the zone that concisely demonstrates the point that was described on the show: a path equidistant to a given line will always be longer than that line. So, in the zone where every tile collapses from under you, it is impossible for the enemies to catch up to you at all.
There are many more zones, which are constructed to showcase hyperbolic phenomenon. Unlike Hyperbolica, I strongly recommend it if that sounds interesting to you.
And you can play it in actual VR… Which I did only for a few minutes, because the inital VR relase was bugged as hell. Need to try it out again soon.
I liked The Batman fine, and I agree with the points being made here, but… uuugggh! I though we were done with the hyperrealism after Nolan’s era. That was a nice experiment and all that but it shouldn’t have been used as a blueprint. Putting the character in a more realistic world limits the stories you can tell, the characters you can use and the nature of those characters. Some of Batman’s more fantastical opponents are yet again out of the question (no pun intended). What do we get for the sequel instead? The Joker. Again.
Call me crazy, but I like the colorful aspect of Batman’s rogues gallery. But now we’re again limited to mobsters and criminals dressed in suits or civilian clothes. What else are we going to get? Characters like Man-Bat, Clayface or Mr. Freeze are impossible to translate. Characters like Poison Ivy, Killer Croc, the Mad Hatter or Ra’s Al Ghul would be severely watered down. At this rate we’re never going to get a faithful version of Bane. And, of course, though less important, this applies to allies too. We’ll never see this Batman interacting with the likes of Superman or Wonder Woman.
I know what people are going to say: that Batman is a street level hero and has no place engaging with the supernatural or aliens, but I absolutely disagree. This sort of thing has been a staple of the character’s mythos since the start. Just watch the animated series and you’ll see him going against this sort of thing as much if not more as he does against regular people.
And I don’t see it necessary. You can have Batman live in a more fantastical world and still have stories like this movie had. You don’t need to use the extranatural element, you just need to allow it.
Actually the director of The Batman, Matt Reeves, said he wanted to do Mr. Freeze for the sequel. I think the movie strikes a good balance between the “realism” of the Nolan trilogy and the style of the Tim Burton movies so you can absolutely introduce the more pulpier and fantastical elements of Batman while still being grounded in this new series of films (and shows).
I remember MovieBob saying (I think in review of DKR) that after three movies, the net effect of showing all of this grounded realism as a thesis statement was…not much, just a shrug of the shoulders.
I was mad that there was the Joker again too, but according to the director that scene is mainly to show that Batman’s work is never done and that things are going to get worse before they get better. It doesn’t mean the Joker will be the main bad guy of the next one.
It’s not really hyperrealistic. There are certain elements that are tweaked to make some nods toward realism, but it’s still not a realistic story. A perfect example is the batmobile. It does make more sense for a vigilante getting in car chases to have a car that’s really maneuverable rather than a tank or a heavy weapons platform. At the same time, it’s not based on any real car, it can still drive through solid concrete, and it has a giant blue rocket engine on the back of it.
For what it’s worth the Nolan movies weren’t that realistic either, in their own way.
The other thing at work is that this movie is supposed to show both Batman as he’s starting out and gaining experience, as well as the villains doing the same thing. It’s that common theme that Batman’s villains are imitating his theatricality and his concept of using flamboyant gimmicks. That’s why the Riddler in this is an admirer, he was directly inspired by Batman and thinks that they’re working together. The Penguin will probably take inspiration as well and start getting into more classic Penguin stuff. The Joker is supposedly not the full Joker yet either, he’s some guy that Batman has run into before but he hasn’t fully developed his persona yet.
We could very well have Bane because there’s a lot of speculation that the green juice Batman injects himself with at the end is Venom. The director said he wants to do a “grounded” version of Mr. Freeze but even if you did that it still wouldn’t be a realistic character.
I imagine Joker might have a similar role to Nolan’s Scarecrow in the Matt Reeves movies, making a notable cameo in each film but never actually the main antagonist.
OK, that speculation is just silly. It’s clearly just adrenaline, which is why the movie didn’t feel the need to elaborate on it.
I still not buy the rest, though. The movie’s hyperrealism isn’t completely realistic because no movie is, but it still a far cry from even the more grounded works like the Animated Series. Introducing a character that’s more fantastical would completely change the tone at this point.
I mean, the Arrowverse managed to successfully do this, so it’s not impossible, but it was done very gradually. It would take several movies to do it properly.
It’s not because it works like adrenaline, it’s because it’s bright green. Obviously it has the same effects as adrenaline but so does Venom. It might be nothing and it might just be a reference, but if they wanted to go that way it’s there.
I disagree. I think the “grounded” stuff is more about putting together what works in a live action movie without using too much CG, rather than a specific dislike for the supernatural.
The Arrowverse is bad so hopefully they don’t do anything like that.
I’ve never played NMS, and don’t really plan to, but I’ll never get tired of Paul and Shamus getting frustrated by it. His tirade at 19:04 was a thing of pure beauty :D
Regarding difficulty, I really like the way Blade of Darkness did it. There are no difficulty levels, and the game is really hard, especially if you’ve never played it before. However, you can save at will. And the “difficulty” is the grade the game gives you. See, in addition to the standard info (which character you’re playing, what level you’re on, etc), the name of the save game also includes a rating based on how many times you’ve saved. If you’ve saved 1-2 times, your rating is “Awesome”, 3-5 – “Heroic”, and the lowest grade (I think) is “Normal”, which you get after your 30th save.*
So, if you want, you can save scum to your heart’s content, or you can have a more punishing save system than Dark Souls. It all depends on what you want out of the game.
*I don’t remember the exact numbers, but they’re somewhere in that ballpark
Hehe, yeah. NMS a pretty goofy game, but the best part (from an ease-of-critique standpoint) is how seriously it takes itself.
For Blade of Darkness, I’d assume the rating would be how many times you re-load a previous save? Otherwise, the rating is also based on how long your playsessions can run.
Unfortunately, it’s how many times you’ve saved. The game’s from 2001, after all, so quality-of-life wasn’t really high on the list. Also, their budget was running out at the end of production so that was probably not high on the list (the game was very ahead of its time, technologically speaking, and the combat system is something I’ve yet to see done in a better or more satisfying way).
My personal favorite bug is, funnily enough, from Knights of the Old Republic II. It’s the item-duplication bug in the crafting system, in which the game sometimes gives you a second, free copy of whatever item you just upgraded. A free lightsaber is always welcome, especially since (a) there are always at least two Jedi in the party and (b) the early- and mid-game are extremely stingy with lightsabers. Also, it’s nice that there’s a bug in the crafting system that actually helps the player, since the other notable bug in the crafting system, in which the game uses the wrong character’s Repair skill to compute the number of components the player gets when breaking down items at the workbench, hurts the player. Occasional free items are the least the game could do, you know?
As for Batman, I have not seen the latest movie. Nor do I expect to, unless my wife unexpectedly takes an interest. I didn’t even bother to watch the final Nolan film. Don’t get me wrong. I like Batman. In fact, I read a bunch of Batman comics just last week. The problem is that Batman films mostly leave me cold. Like Shamus, I prefer competent, heroic Batman and that’s not really what we get in the films for the most part. My personal favorite Batman film is still Batman Returns, which is not an especially good movie or even an especially good Batman movie, but which does have sets and art direction that I really liked when I saw it in the theater. It didn’t look quite so impressive when I saw bits of it on television later though, and I’m afraid to go back and properly watch it again.
An excellent decision. Major downgrade from the Dark Knight, or even Batman Begins. Bad plot, bad pacing, just a mess.
It was an easy decision. I was only so-so on the Nolan films to begin with and the reviews for the third were not encouraging. Critics get a lot of hate, but I have to salute them for saving me from some real stinkers.
I thought critics mostly liked the movie? At least more so than Batman Begins from what I saw.
I don’t remember what, specifically, the reviews I read said about the movie. They may well have been positive overall. But there’s more to a review than “movie good” or “movie bad” (and, oh, how I wish some people would understand that). Even a positive review can reveal that the content of a movie is not to your taste, which I’m pretty sure is what happened with Dark Night Rises. It is definitely what happened with The Force Awakens.
It made me realize exactly how much Nolan relies upon plot contrivances. He got away with it in TDK because of the Joker’s performance*, but in TDKR he just goes all out with all kinds of nonsensical things happening because he wants them to, not because there’s logical character motivations or any actual sense of realism besides the trappings. The entire city police force, down to a man, chasing into the sewers after Bane and then spending several months down there little worse for wear despite having no supplies is probably one of the more egregious things.
*Released in 2008, I think he taps into fears of terrorism quite well, so you even if the events aren’t remotely realistic (everything happens exactly as the Joker needs it to, until it doesn’t), you could view it as peoples fears of what terrorists could do.
Dark Knight Rises is fun but not very good. The Batman is not fun, but is very *very* good. However, the latter is indeed about an inexperienced, broody Batman who has issues. That said, the ending recontextualizes the movie. However, saying anything more would need a… spoiler warning.
Long-time lurker here.
Glad you’re on the road to recovery, Shamus! You’ve been a real help and inspiration, and I wish you many more happy years to come.
I don’t normally raise the difficulty past Normal unless I’m just snoozing through Normal, but my response to challenges is also to try to find an exploit. The best games can offer both high challenge or power fantasy in the same fight, depending on how well you know the systems*. Got kind of a love/hate thing with challenge; if a game throws a brick wall challenge at me, I’ll often smack against it until I knock it down, and then drop the game before it has the chance to put up another one. Sometimes it gets picked back up, sometimes not.**
Can’t think of any bugs that made a game better; I tend not to notice them anyway. Duplication glitches are always welcome, and the easier to perform the better; FF7’s W-Item just makes new copies of the first items if you backed out of the second, so you can just make 99 elixirs whenever you want as long as you still have 1 in inventory. Otherwise, there’s stuff like the Power Peninsulas from the early Final Fantasies where you can fight much stronger enemies early, but I don’t know if those are even bugs, they seem intentional.
*(“Knowing the systems” only kind of applies to roguelikes. I’ve got ridiculous hours into Slay the Spire, smacking my head against the highest ascension levels until I get the exact right cards to pull it off. Binding of Isaac is either a cakewalk or a mountain of mud depending on what items you get.)
**(Heavily depends on what comes after, gamewise. Bloodborne got dropped hard after it took eight hours to gain a single level, which as you might expect was profoundly underwhelming; I reached a boss, but had no desire to kill it. FF13 got dropped after the horrible Odin fight, because it’s followed by a long, not particularly fun Vanille/Bird Guy section. But Bravely Default 2 has kicked my ass several times and I keep picking it up again, because the brick wall bosses are all Job classes, and once you finally beat them, you can become them. So it’s a murderous brick wall with whole new mechanics and exploits on the other side.)
Oddly, while most remakes of FFI kept the Peninsula of Power, the Pixel Remaster (despite very obviously being a nostalgia title) patched it out.
RE: FFXIII – If you’d stuck it out any further, then you’d have gotten to see that the next Lightning/Hope section forces Hope into the party leader position, meaning that you still can’t actually summon Odin. What a horribly-paced game.
In regards to video game doors:
Left 4 Dead and Project Zomboid instilled a desire to close video game doors for me, although that’s a matter of breaking sightlines and protection from ambushes. You absolutely rummage through everyone’s drawers those games though.
In regards to fun video game bugs:
I love glitching by default, but I know one game’s bugs that made for lots of fun is Skate 3. Tired of playing the skateboard game? Sprint past someone and swing your board at them while trying to get on it at the same time, and watch in slow motion as your character turns into a horrible spaghetti monster flying everywhere.
Let’s Game It Out also does a good amount of exploiting and breaking games, if anyone’s looking for more of that content. Although, if you’ve seen Spiff, you’ve probably been recommended Josh by Youtube anyways.
I’m impressed. Everything you said about NMS was wrong.
– Solar Sail Ships is a new class of ship, not a tech upgrade
– They added Cargo Slots to Starships; Personal Inventory Cargo slots already existed.
– You can easily transfer items from every slot to any other slot.
– Normal items stack to 9999 in both normal and in cargo slots, unless you play Survival Mode
– Bigger items stack to 5 in you normal slots and 10-25 in cargo slots.
– You can have up to 48 Slots in each inventory (tech slots are less and starship cargo slot amount is dependent on starship class)
– You can buy additional Storage Containers for your freighter for items you don’t need frequently; Inventory Space has basically been a non-issue for years now.
– You do have to pay for new slots and they do get expensive, but you also get billions of credits
– You do not have to start a new game for the new content; you do have to start a new game for the expedition gamemode, but this mode gives you basically everything you need and you can finish the expedition in under 10h (I admit that this is still a big commitment for a game you don’t like)
– You can summon your pet anywhere (including space stations). You cannot have a pet lay an egg or hatch it in unsuitable environment
– There is variation in gravity
– Refilling your lifesupport takes about 5 units of oxygen
– X upgrades are not better than S, but they have a higher range for random values. They are cheaper, but they are a gamble. They can have really high values but also very low values.
– You can buy ship fuel directly
I agree that the “story” sucks.
Obligatory:
What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
(Going to link the Billy Madison clip, in case people didn’t recognize it.)
You’re haggling over the details, while the overall point holds true.
Me: Charles Manson killed five people that night!
You: Actually, he didn’t kill anyone. His followers did.
Like, yes. This is more technically correct, but it doesn’t change the foundational point that Manson was responsible for the deaths of multiple people.
Does it matter that X stacks in 48 and not 30? No. The point stands that the system is stupid, nonsensical, and counter-intuitive.
And claiming that “planets do have gravity” is giving the game an outrageous amount of undeserved credit. Yes, some planets are low gravity, but in my experience this has nothing whatsoever to do with the size of the planet. A small planet might have normal gravity, and a large planet might be low gravity. This is worse than having uniform gravity everywhere! The designer didn’t just fail to implement it, they went to the trouble of implementing something wrong.
You claim that “Inventory Space has basically been a non-issue for years now.”, which misses the point. Yes, you have lots of storage on your freighter. But this isn’t really the core of the problem. The problem is that the inventory system is outrageously more complicated than it needs to be, and takes way too much of the player’s time. Even when you have enough space to store all your stuff, you still need to spend an obnoxious amount of time shuffling items around, transferring them from here to there, and consolidating stacks. It’s dull busywork built atop a truly ghastly UI.
In short, No Man’s Sky interface is worse than Charles Manson.
Ooh, we could replace capital punishment with forcing people to play NMS… or would that go against the Geneva Convention?
What was that, you’re comparing Charles Manson and the Geneva Convention?!
You *MONSTER*!
[Yes that’s an exaggerated joke for anyone whose sense of humour may be faulty today.]
What’s that, up in the sky? Do I see…yes! The Pedantic Astronomer Signal! Finally, my night has arrived!
So, gravity is a function of mass, right? And density is how much mass you have per unit volume. Density is commonly given in units of grams per cubic centimeter, with liquid water having a density of 1.0* by definition. For comparison, common rocks have densities of roughly 2–5, while metals can have densities much higher: gold, for instance, has a density of 19.3, far denser than rocks, and even relatively less-dense iron still has a density of 7.8.
What’s this got to do with No Man’s Sky? I’m getting there. So, the gravitational attraction of a body is proportional (via Newton’s constant, G) to how much mass it has. For objects of equal density, it is thus indeed true that for one to have a larger gravitational pull it must have more mass, and since the densities are equal, it must therefore be physically larger. Capiche?
But! Suppose the densities are different!** Imagine, for instance, a body about the size, shape, and color of the dwarf planet Ceres. In fact, just imagine Ceres, that’s easier. Ceres is mostly made of ice and rock, with a mass of 9.8×10^20 kilograms and a mean radius of ~470 kilometers, giving it a mean density of just 2.2 g/cm³—only about twice as dense as water. However, if Ceres were instead made of something else—say, solid iron—then assuming a spherical frictionless…sphere, it’d have a radius of just ~311 kilometers.
“Big deal,” I hear you say. “It’s smaller, but it has the exact same mass as Ceres—you said so yourself!—so it has the same gravity, right?” Au contraire, my impressively-astute friend! You see, the force of gravity depends not only on the masses of the objects involved, but also upon the inverse square of their distance! Because our hypothetical ferrous Ceres doppelgänger is smaller than the original, someone walking around on its surface would feel a stronger gravitational pull*** due solely to the fact that the same amount of mass is now everywhere much closer! So it is, that a physically smaller planet, could, counter to our intuition, have a stronger gravity than a larger one! Truly, the mouse that roared!
But is our intuition really so very far off, then? Of the planets we know enough about to check, any large enough to sustain an atmosphere conducive to supporting life do not tend towards the extremes of either bare metal or pure ice; instead, they tend to have metallic cores with rocky mantles and crusts, and the four terrestrial planets in our solar system have very similar mean densities (roughly 4–5 g/cm³). Since it is rather difficult to imagine much life existing on planets composed purely of bare metal or ice, we can assume that life-bearing planets in No Man’s Sky (I haven’t played it) must also posses some admixture of various elements (at least carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus, plus an assorted smattering of other elements found in trace amounts in various lifeforms). For a planet to retain an atmosphere against the ravages of its star’s solar wind, it must posses a mixture of sufficient gravity and/or a strong enough magnetic field, and a good way to have both is to posses a metallic core at least part of which is still liquid. Thus, we can surmise that the planets of No Man’s Sky are likely to be, at least to first approximation, similar to the terrestrial planets with which we are familiar. This similarity will likely extend to their densities, and thus our intuition is preserved: a larger planet will likely be one with more mass, and will likely have a larger gravitational pull****. Thus, unless the smaller planets of No Man’s Sky consist of exotic arrangements such as a core made of uranium or similarly dense metals (though who can truly say?), it is probable they should, indeed, have smaller surface gravities.
Friendly Neighborhood Pedantic Astronomer, awaaaay!
*Technically, the density of liquid water changes veeeery slightly with temperature, with the minimum being around 4 °C! But that’s not important right now!
**For simplicity, I shall ignore the fact that densities are not constant in any object massive enough to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e., pull itself into a spherical shape), but instead increase towards the center!
***Approximately 2.3 times stronger if I’ve done my math correctly, but the exact details are irrelevant!
****Since increasing mass will tend to squeeze the interior and raise the density while decreasing the volume, counteracting the offset in force from the increased distance from the core to the surface!
This was a really interesting read, and it was something I was wondering about. Thank you for the insight!
You’re welcome! It’s not often one gets to utter the phrase “hypothetical ferrous Ceres doppelgänger.” I was originally just going to have a qualitative example until I got curious halfway through and decided to plug in some numbers, so it was a learning experience for me as well.
So if we’re doing real NMS talk… Personally as far as NMS discourse is concerned I think it’s time to accept the game for what it is. To be clear I understand people who still want to hold the devs accountable for the state the game released in as opposed to the promises. I also understand just plain not liking what the game is. For what it’s worth I came into the game late (it definitely already had functioning if clunky multiplayer) and overall enjoyed my time with it: a couple “oooh” moments at pretty skyboxes, the sense of wonder at some setpieces, the satisfaction of upgrading my gear; still I’ve ultimately found most of the systems to be fun for a bit but shallow. However I think by now the game has found an audience it caters to and it is unlikely it’ll take a sharp turn into an entirely different gameplay loop.
I know! Right? NMS is wrong on so many levels! We were able to talk for over 20 minutes about just the recent update, and everything we said was just one problem with the game after another. And we didn’t even get to the things that are still wrong with the game right from launch, like the broadly inconsistent Press/Hold E interaction method. It goes on and on!
I too found the New Content and the Jump Circle in The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe Edition, and maybe I’m just a sucker for metahumor or something but I had a silly grin plastered to my face pretty much the entire time I’ve spent playing it so far. I got the original after seeing someone’s video of it so I was already partly spoilered, and it’s fun to go in to the new stuff spoiler-free this time.
I don’t generally run into bugs all that much, at least not funny ones (does a screenshot of a civilian hunkering in terror on top of Torque’s head in XCOM: Chimera Squad count?), but I recently encountered one in the newly-released Terraformers where I somehow got a city to give me infinite free expansions to more regions on the planet. Normally these are costly enough (requiring either humans or robots added to the city’s population) that they’re always in slightly short demand, but somehow this city got into a state where even though it said there were zero expansions available, it kept allowing me to place them. I just placed three down to confirm it was a bug, though, I didn’t go wild with it and cover the planet or anything (the farther a city expands, the less happy its people get, which can lose you the game, so there was still incentive not to do so). I did use two of those free region slots, but it didn’t have a huge effect on my progress in the game.
One bug I can think of that improved the game is Zoren-coptering in Warframe. That was where you’d swing your melee weapon in such a way that it would fling you forward at ever increasing speeds. Best with the Dual Zoren weapons, hence the name. It became an unintentional traversal/speed mechanic. The bug was deliberately ignored for the longest time as it was it was fun and well received. Later the bug was incorporated into the game proper in a standardized way rather than ‘fixed’ out.
The type of bug I cannot stand are the ones that the Spiffing Brit focuses on. Those kinds of bugs and oversights break the game. I can forgive/ignore exploits. Like if you need to do X, Y, and Z at a certain type of day to glitch up a wall to blah blah blah, w/e that I can just ignore as a weird edge case. However an example closer to real gameplay like the lumber industry in Prison Architect is a deal breaker for me. It is a real legitimate of the game that breaks the rest of it. There’s an oversight in the game mechanics like that in Endless Space. It creates an optimal strategy that means you can never lose a game once you know it exists. That anything that isn’t following that strategy is a waste of time and effort.
That’s why I find those ‘bugs’ dealbreakers. (Although they are more oversights than bugs.) I do not enjoy deliberately avoiding doing something in a game in a deliberate attempt to hamstring myself.
So, I’m a person who loves these kinds of exploits, however I can agree with your stance in the perspective of PvP games. Due to the competitive nature, this immediately generates a metagame that warps everything to force every player to have to get with it or get out in a nature more strict than the developer-made metagame. Usually these sorts of things just get patched out though, so they’re not as much of an issue, but some, like Runescape’s invulnerability toggling stuck around to much detriment.
Now, I’m not trying to start a fight here, but I cannot understand the viewpoint in regards to singleplayer or cooperative experiences- not using it is merely playing the game “as intended” and there’s nothing wrong with just not using the exploit. Following your last sentence, I get the impression you also find no fun in challenge runs, which means we’re almost as diametrically opposed on this matter as possible.
Out of curiosity, what’s your opinion on speedrunning?
The word “just” is smuggling in some important assumptions here. In this particular case, while I’m not certain as I haven’t played either of these games, it sounds a bit like “just” ignoring an entire game mechanic which isn’t so much “play the game as intended” as it is “play amateur game designer by selectively disabling features until you have a playable game.” That’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
I see where you’re coming from, but the nature of the two example games are relevant to the dynamics of this situation. I’ve also already made my stance clear in being entirely on the other side of the opinion here, so really I’ve not got anything to add to this conversation but I’ll try anyways for the sake of clarification.
The exploit in Prison Architect’s case is merely that the value of lumber is a decent return for investment. The immense amount of money only comes when you already ignore the idea of making a prison and instead plaster the entire map in farm fields and underpaid workers.
By performing the “exploit”, you are selectively ignoring the rest of the game so you can play Farming Simulator for a long time to no end other than obtaining a massive pile of cash.
If growing trees for profit all you came to do, then I don’t know why you’d be playing a game called Prison Architect. If you wanted the money to start with a megaprison, I guess there you go, but you can achieve that by other means and is also not really “intended” gameplay anyways.
To reiterate, this exploit does not mean you have to never use the forestry business to play the game, you only have to resist the urge to play Farming Simulator if you wanted to run a prison. Grow some trees on the side and sell them, but don’t make your entire map into trees if that’s not the gameplay you want. It’s not a paradox of disabling features.
(And perhaps there’s some sort of statement in that a lumberyard makes more than a privatized prison does.)
As for Endless Space, I’ve never played it myself, but for a decade old PvP game I don’t have to imagine the online experience is damaged and warped by present exploits, I’ve seen it myself. You’re not going to get a public lobby to gentleman on not using the exploits, so you either join in to have any chance or only ever play with friends which isn’t likely to be ideal. Exploits in competitive scenarios are always a losing matter, unless the exploit just happens to be fun for everyone involved, then it becomes a feature.
Ooh, my favorite “bug” in Europe Universalis 4 allowed the player to become the Freedom Champion of Europe. Uh, from a certain point of view.
Leaving out the gory details, EU4 is an extremely deep historical sim game, like Civilization if it took ALL the cocaine. In addition to playable nations, there are some supra-national bodies with special powers, limitations, and actions. One of these is the Holy Roman Empire. Now, it is good for the HRE if there are more nations in the HRE. But it’s extremely difficult to do this. The player can conquer land and do some stuff to get a new independent nation inside the HRE, but it’s often difficult and time-consuming. However, the developers did include a hypothetical method where nations will apply to join the HRE under some extremely limited conditions. It’s ridiculously rare. I have literally never once seen it happen, although it’s not a random event.
Some patches ago, they inadvertently loosened those conditions – a *lot*.
This created a whole new playstyle overnight, where the player preferentially took Austria, or took control of the HRE some other way, and went on a mad spree of liberating Every. Single. Nation. In Europe.
That tiny independent kingdom that fell three hundred years ago and is only remembered by a handful of people in the back hills? Boom! Liberated! What was that, you want to join the HRE and immediately enjoy all its protections? Done! What was that, you have obscure claims on your neighbor’s land and by warring with them, I can liberate some other kingdom, too? Boom! Let the cannons roar! LIBERTY OR DEATH!
It was a wacky scheme and you could basically do a mad rush to the endgame in improbable time, plus ending up with some strange situations like the HRE getting into Ireland, Spain and extremely deep into Eastern Europe. But it was also *so* much fun, and for the player it meant doing very different things from the standard “War-Occupy land-Peace out-Repeat” cycle. It was exciting, wildly ahistorical, encouraged risk-taking, and… was patched within a week.
But man what a wild week. I had more fun in two days than I ever had before. That patch also led me to un-installing the game. I liked feeling like a liberator uniting the planet, and the playstyle had a number of other fun quirks to it such as requiring a different trade setup, having a weird number of colonial holdings and prioritizing certain Diplomacy features over military. Being told that this wasn’t the “right” way to play just sucked.
As a long-time EU IV player who had to give it up the last ~4 years while doing my PhD*, that sounds like an amazing bug to have missed out on. :(
*Not because it was addictive or anything, I just didn’t have any mental energy left for complicated long-form games after a long day of research. Now that I’m done I should see about getting back into it, I’ve probably forgotten everything I used to know by this point…
At the risk of going for the classics I’ve always been partial to the bug in the engine used in the modern Fallouts and Skyrim that makes player corpse ragdoll into the stratosphere. As I understand it it’s something that Bethesda decided not to even attempt to fix as it’s mostly inconsequential and players consider it an endearing quirk.
The difficulty I play a game at is dependent on what kind of game it is, in an RPG I may turn the difficulty down to play a sub-optimal class, but in an action game (like CrossCode, which I’m currently playing through) I like keeping the difficulty up.
Speaking of CrossCode, because of my probably misinterpreting the narrative I have decided to not fight optional battles. The game is set in a real world where avatars of people playing an MMO run around and I hope that the game is going to pull a Planescape Torment and make your life difficult if you inflict wanton violence on hapless mooks.
This does mean I am severely under-leveled, especially since I am also holding off on questing until Lea gets more to say.
As an example of how under-leveled I am, I fought the Red Sandworm boss today. It took me over 2 hours and at least 20 tries. And that is despite having a buddy who is level 23 (me being level 16).
There are many bugs that make games more interesting or fun, mockball in Super Metroid, transform jump kick in Symphony of the Night, Reflection Shield spell cancelling in Arcanum, double jump in Spyro 2,…
Without being too spoilery, I can say that you’re fine doing the optional quests. No worries about the hapless mooks—they’re all part of the game( within the game).
I did enjoy keeping the difficulty at max as well, until the final boss fight of the game( within the game), in the DLC, where after multiple half-hour-long failed tries I finally had to admit that my reflexes just weren’t up to the task. (The actual final boss fight I had a blast with, though!)
I always get so surprised by the amount of hate thrown at everything discussed in the comments section here, until I remember that I found this site by hating on Mass Effect 3…
What? People here are pretty damn chill and moderate in their opinions, by internet standards.
My favorite glitch ever was in Hellgate: London. I know, not exactly a well loved game, or short on bugs. Anyway, the British Museum area is a multi-floor dungeon. As I’m going up the stairs, there are distorted shadows moving along the walls and ceiling, and plenty of creepy noises. And it was like “ooh… they’re going for a haunting thing, instead of just more ‘Diablo with guns?’ Awesome!” It was a really cool, creepy effect.
Later I realized that walking between floors was causing issues with the lighting engine and the enemy AI, and so the shadows of the enemies in the floor above were showing in the stairwell, and the “angry demon noises” were playing because I was “close,” even though the combat music wasn’t playing (because I was on a different floor from the enemies). The reality of it was disappointing, but there was a brief moment where that glitch made for a really awesome game moment.
Yeah, I’m sure I’ve had lots of these moments in the past. They are just so difficult to remember, especially after discovering the truth of the situation. It’s like waking up from a dream and realizing that whatever was going on in there had very little to do with reality. My brain’s garbage collection just rounds up all that excitement and anticipation and it’s like it never was.
The Stanley Parable guys have been doing the “oh no, we ran out of ideas, isn’t it hilarious?” thing for more than ten years now. I kind of feel like I got the joke already.
An interesting bug(?) was in my copy of Scorched Earth. (I got it off a shareware CD, and it might have been hacked or something.) It had a habit of the cash randomly going berzerk, and giving you All the Money. At which point I would promptly buy up the Fancy weapons that I never could afford in normal gameplay.
I like the dragon quest builders inventory. If I remember right, it was just one massive inventory that could hold practically infinite items, and you can magically access it from anywhere. It certainly didn’t hurt the game at all that you could access it from anywhere, it was nice. I don’t know why in a sci-fi game they can’t let you do something similar.
Er, the Colossal Coffer is kinda limited in the amount of stacks you can store (2 pages), though the 999 stack size is pretty nice. The Colossal Closet (CC upgrade) can store 3 pages, but that still only goes so far.
Main inventory is very cramped, though.