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ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
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Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
Recently, I have been playing the video game Medieval Dynasty. It might be classed as a "survival" game; it certainly stems from that lineage, but the survival is pretty basic. You must drink, but rivers are plentiful. You must eat, but craft a knife from a stone and a stick on the ground, chase down two rabbits, and you're fed for half of the three-day season (Each in-game day is about 30 minutes), and the meter refills on season change anyhow. Occasionally, you run into wolves unprepared. Your stamina bar is depleted from running, you cannot out-run them, and you're mauled to death and sent to the last autosave, ten minutes ago. You quickly learn to save before going out into the wild.
Instead, the main focus is building a village. Select a spot to build a house (each building is templated, not freeform), clear the area, craft or hold a hammer, have the right materials in your inventory (logs from chopping down trees, rocks and sticks from the ground) and hit it enough times for the meter to be filled. Different buildings grant different abilities in a tech-chain (the workshop builds items, the hunter supplies meat, the barn works your farms and so one) and you slowly move from wooden to copper to iron tools, which last longer and take less hits. You invite people into your village; you need a house for each new male or female villager - if you put them together, they are now married and produce exactly two children (unless you built a small house, in which case they produce one). Meanwhile, you need to woo a partner to have your exactly one son, and you must, for eventually you die of old age and play as him. Then, you spend a lot of time on a manager screen with a kind of clunky interface, ensuring you have enough food to feed everyone, and setting tasks for each building each season.
Is it a good game? Not really, it's a waste of time. I frequently have sat, playing on my phone, for 20 minutes waiting for a crafting meter to fill while I cook 160 soups or what-have-you. Vendors have limited funds, so you spend time each season selling your goods, only to become rich quickly and easily. If you're OCD like me, constantly trying to manage where your stuff is versus where your villages put it is aggravating. The game is quite easy, the only real challenge is optimising your day to be the most efficient. The main gameplay loop in that sense is the list of to-do tasks: "first, I'll cook as many of these as I can. Then I must repair my buildings. Oh look, the hunters need new knives, which means I need to go mining - I can stop at the town and sell on the way. I need to harvest before end of season, don't forget, which means I won't have time for this quest".
Yet the game is compelling; I've yet to put it down, with my plans of what to do next in the game frequently being my top thought. I plan for what I'll do years ahead of game time, and I'm constantly chasing after the next thing to do. I'm 88.8 hours in (Fun coincidence!) with half that in the past fortnight. There's some legitimately funny writing, and an optional main quest with a pretty decent storyline. The valley it takes place in has all the beauty you'd expect of the Unreal engine, and its nice to just be there, watching it change each season. There's a sense of creativity, getting your village looking nice and just how you like it, but it's not stifling with possibility, because the options are limited, and you can only do a bit at a time.
If not really a survival game, what shall we compare it to? The obvious answer is Minecraft, but as I've never played Minecraft, I suggest three games I've played recently for contrast: Stardew Valley, Valheim, and Subnautica.
Stardew Valley is the primary exemplar of the "Cozy game". I played Harvest Moon on SNES, I still have my Game Pak, which I bought after saving for weeks and planning on my family's once-a-year shopping excursion from the bush to the city. A little bit of me dies when I see the current fanbase, and how they would spurn me, and how they never would have played the original, but I digress. Stardew Valley was a must-buy, a truly beautiful game, polished and filled with love. I first played it at a difficult time in my life - stuck, alone, in the city, longing for my rural childhood, and the opening scene brought me to actual tears. How I wished my grandfather could have left me a farm! My grandfather was quite a man, and there are stories of him for another time, yet he passed in early elderly years, and my grandmother, becoming too old, had to sell the farm. Yet here was a fantasy of that same life. I made a character who looked like me, made friends and fell in love as I couldn't in real life. Until about 40 hours in, when the stress of trying to optimise for increasingly complex goals sent my anxiety haywire, and I stopped, never to return. I regret it, and look longingly at the game, but I just can't deal with going back. I've made twice that time in Medieval Dynasty, and it is yet to become anxiety-inducing. When I quit, it is more likely to be from boredom from the grind of unlocking new improvements.
Instead, let's compare Valheim. Valheim stole me for 50 hours; I enjoyed the exploration, the planning, the building of my designs (unlike in Dynasty, you can be truly creative with your modular building designs, and some epic designs can be seen online.). The combat added a nice bit of spice to the loop, but then I hit the swamp. The difficulty increase was too big a jump. I was killed far too many times trying to build a small shelter to sleep in near the swamp I'd found, and running back had become just too much of a chore. It felt like I needed to be playing together with friends, and while I HAD friends playing the game, I just wanted to go at my own pace and build my own thing, undisturbed - with combat as a spice, not as a danger. So, I looked at my lovingly crafted longhouse, with its loft bed and outside forges, and the bridges I was so proud of linking the nearby islands, and the small dock I had nearby, and bid them farewell. Nah, I ragequit and uninstalled. The game had made me feel unwelcome as a solo player. Medieval Dynasty is a single-player only game, and one where the threat of danger is minor. It is a peaceful valley.
Another single player only game is Subnautica. An underwater survival game, you must manage your oxygen, food and water meters, much like Dynasty. You build modular buildings, like Dynasty, although there's no management component. The central loop of identifying a crafting material required, going out of your base to go find it, then coming back to build is very familiar to Dynasty. Both games have hand-crafted, not procedural worlds. Yet Medieval Dynasty has no real exploration. The same materials you need are either grown in your village or available pretty much anywhere. There's always trees and stones and sticks nearby, same with herbs. Specific animals to hunt always spawn in the same place, and these places are marked on your map when you encounter them. You need to find one source of reeds early on, a couple of claypit locations, one cave for metal, and learn which village has which shopkeepers (or look in on the wiki, since its 2022 and games are collaborative experiences with the internet now and there's no joy in discovery). Otherwise, there's not much to find, although it is pretty. In contrast, Subnautica is filled with many biomes, and exploring these is the main thrust of the game. Each has different resources to obtain, and different tech blueprints to discover, and soon, you must go into the terrifying deeper waters to get what you need. Subnautica is accidentally a horror game. I loved it, even though I hate horror, and I finished it, but only with my girlfriend holding my hand in the deepest and scariest parts of the ocean.
Cont.
I find the combination of simple, tedious and compelling to be far more worrisome than e.g. infinitely complex, aggravating and compelling.
E.g. as an underemployed adult I spent maybe 6k hours playing Ark: Survival, but at the very least I had to learn to get along with people, improved my English tremendously and learned to "not do it again".
I had read bad things about MMORPGs- people wasting their time on them. "It's not an RPG, it's an FPS and looks cool. Try it out".
Turns out, even if a game is inadvertently designed to be absolutely repulsive to almost everyone (think Valheim, except you are getting randomly invaded by other human players 24x7), it can still be immensely interesting once you find your people in there and start playing as a team.
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I love the swamp. So freaking dangerous at first. The first time I found it was a disaster. Got caught in a little bay on a sand bar between a pack of skeletons and a troll, died and lost the boat, too. Then I came in much more carefully, slipped gently in, and the first mob I encountered was a 2 star draugur archer. That was a spicy corpse run. All that to explore a Chile-shaped swamp that did not have a single crypt.
Second run through, co-op with my son, I went nuts and built walking platforms in the sky through the entire swamp we cleared.
Third run through, going as slow and carefully as I want, I have just been using to hoe to flatten it all out. Just got back with my first karve full of iron, and have not died once so far.
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Cont. from above
I have always felt a sense of "place" in video games. The levels I've played over and over, I could draw a map, I know the environments. When I got a VR headset, I discovered people had taken places from games I like (such as Zelda: The Ocarina of Time) and imported them, so you could see them in full realisation. It's fantastic. I have the same sense of place in my dreams - I think I always have. Off the main street of my city, go down the stairs that don't exist, there's a bookstore with piles and piles of dusty archives. Across the basement, up the stairs, you're in a street from another city I've been in, and there's another book store here that doesn't exist in real life, this one selling RPG manuals. There's a non-existent game shop on the other side of the city, which sells a non-existent miniature game with inch-scale modern jet fighters in pewter, and I want to play it. But more than the people or events in my dreams, it's the places I remember. I could map them out, if they didn't follow non-euclidean dream logic. Sometimes I return to them in dreams years later.
When I looked at some videos of Medieval Dynasty (since its 2022 and games are collaborative experiences with the internet now and there's no joy in discovery), it was strange seeing the other villages that had been built by other players. You can build your village wherever you like, flat ground notwithstanding (and there's plenty around) - mine is near a lake in a forest. I've slowly clearcut the forest to provide the logs to build it, and it's nice and central to everything, with a great view. Others put theirs on the plains northeast, or in another forest - but all are different. Yet the whole game takes place in the village! So when I remember Mario 64, I remember surfing on a Koopa shell around Bob-omb Battlefield and the slide on Tall Tall Mountain. But when I think back to Medieval Dynasty, I remember my village. I remember running to the other side to get to my barn, farm and animals, then back across the entire thing to get to my smithy. I remember I can go to my storage, get out goods for the kitchen, smithy, workshop, food storage, and tailor, and I can run a clockwise circle around my village and visit those buildings in order. But to another player, the layout will be entirely different.
Have I left a mark on a virtual world that no-one else will ever see? Did the others really play the same game if they never visited the places I did?
Was this in VRChat somewhere? Where can one go to see this?
Steam VR Home Environments on the workshop for Steam VR. Some of them are recreations, and some seem to be ripped from the original game and imported. For example, you can find Zelda's Castle, the lakeside laboratory, Peach's Castle (both inside and out) from Mario 64, and the campfire scene from FFX - it was interesting seeing the varying heights of the characters. You don't notice on a regular screen, but Kimahri Ronso is a huge guy. The environments themselves are static, but its neat to BE in a place you've been in.
I don't know if there's a way to import them into VR chat (I only spent 5 minutes in VR chat) but it seems plausible.
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I would recommend Minecraft, given what you've described here. The vanilla game has no serious management ecosystem (villagers are useless idiots you stick in boxes), but Minecolonies adds a very robust one that gives a pretty interesting progression loop. Combat can be involved at start, especially before you have armor or a sufficient area cleared to avoid skeletons finding you, but it pretty quickly reaches the point where most monsters are resources to be harvested rather than challenges to be scaled.
These games fit into a rare category. There's a lot of Civ Builders, ranging from classics like Dwarf Fortress to ZorbaTHut's own work in Rimworld, but they're usually treating the player as an eye in the sky rather than part of the world. There's a lot of Harvest Moon (well, Story of Seasons/Rune Factory-likes), but they're usually not about customizing or varying your world that much -- usually you're limited to changing farm plots and the inside of a house, and maybe a story progression marker. Animal Crossing doesn't even really get that. Games focusing on roving bands like Kenshi or Blade And Mount have even less world customization, even if they have the NPC management bit, and tend to be too high-strung on the combat side. Meanwhile, dedicated Base Builders like ARK, Factorio or Planet Explorers leave the world feeling and being very empty.
Some of that's because meaningful pathfinding AI is hard, and widespread 3d customizable worlds is Hard (so hard, in fact, Subnautica built and then stripped out the system), and mixing those things and then adding meaningful NPCs on top of that is even harder. But it also just feels like a really underexplored space.
And that's a pity, because it's a really fun space.
Could this be resolved in part by having the player design routines for the AI? Like a Minecraft/Dwarf-Fortress/Factorio hybrid thing where you have a colony of NPCs and deformable terrain and you map out what paths you want them to take and what areas to go to for each activity and how to get there. Hand hold the NPC through a daily routine, and then let it copy it and/or adapt based on modular subroutines or something. It would be more effort for the player to have to manage a bunch of stuff every time they changed the terrain, but the player designing the area is going to have a better idea of what they intend than the AI is going to, and if the NPC management and automation was a core part of the gameplay experience and well-fleshed out then it wouldn't be pointless hassle for the player.
It's a solution, and not an unpopular one for games with a heavier RTS inspiration. There are tradeoffs -- having to 'program' the NPCs can get unwieldy if either job complexity or NPC count go too high, for one example, and you generally need to cap path complexity or duration -- but they're not entirely unsolvable ones, especially if NPCs have relatively simple 'complete' paths. It can be difficult as a fit thematically, though, unless your NPCs are intentionally robotic or very habitual, or if you have a lot of NPCs.
Minecolonies tries to compromise by considering workstations (or beds, etc) as automatic waypoints while leaving the option of manually-inserting additional user-defined ones, and then doing path-calculation between those nodes (with some range and other considerations). But this does have its own issues. There's still an absolute mess of special-cases that have to be considered even while expecting players to handle most severe breaks, and a number of annoying and subtle problems that can pop up.
((And there's still some bizarre cases that break it.))
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