Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: Sandwich on June 20, 2013, 04:43:40 pm
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"Watching" the devlopment of a game could be interesting...or boring.
It's not like you have any menaingfull impact on game creation anyway. Acress to early builds? You get to play a buggy game again and again, never getting to finish it because of crashes and whatnot, and by the time a finished product rolls out, you're tired of it and never play it.
Yes, because you never played MineCraft after version 1.0, right? :p
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minecraft increasingly lost the plot as it neared and passed release, though, it's a case study in How Not To Do It
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minecraft increasingly lost the plot as it neared and passed release, though, it's a case study in How Not To Do It
What are you talking about? What plot?
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http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose_the_plot
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Ok, what was their objective from the outset? Notch wanted to make a game? Check. He wanted to make an open-world blocky game? Check. He wanted to somehow actually make tons of money off said game? Check. How did they lose sight of the original intention?
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I am also curious regarding this loss of plot that I am 100% ignorant of.
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Well... as development went on, it became clear that Notch didn't really have any overall creative vision for the game beyond 'you can mine and craft and it's all a kind of fantasyish environment with survival elements' (and neither did anyone else at Mojang for that matter), and increasingly new features were drawn from mods/fan pandering (like pistons, dogs, booster rails) or from half-baked ideas that never really went anywhere (literally all the RPG mechanics). The released version of Minecraft was if anything less 'complete' than a lot of the beta versions, and as far as I'm aware things haven't really improved since then. I do kind of harbour a personal resentment about this, because Minecraft had incredible potential and it didn't really live up to much of it.
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Yeah Minecraft is indeed the definition of failure. Just look at it.
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Yeah Minecraft is indeed the definition of failure. Just look at it.
just like how into darkness was a great film because it made a bunch of cash, right
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Actually, I'd say the number of people who play it regularly is a better indicator. It's an incredibly popular game, so it must be doing something right.
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are you serious about this
lots of people play cod too, are you going to leap to its defence if people start criticising its design
Edit: urgh, this is going nowhere. OK look, I did and do enjoy Minecraft! But I think a lot of its appeal comes from the core gameplay alone, and that the game's development beyond that was directionless and shallow, and that its phenomenal success is as much a factor of it being in the right place at the right time as it being particularly well-made.
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No, but if someone says something that I feel is somewhat erroneous, I WILL continue to point it out, or did you think that you are allowed to criticize and no-one is allowed to defend it?
If you don't like Minecraft, I'm fine with that, but don't act as though anyone who DOES like the game must be totally wrong and are not allowed to defend themselves. I don't like COD, but some people do, thinking that what defines a 'good' or 'bad' game is just your personal opinion of it only works with regards to yourself, trying to apply that to everyone is a false start.
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I always regarded Minecraft as a virtual lego in the internets. People, especially youngsters, love it for that.
I never saw any plot that it missed. Perhaps by not trying to be what it couldn't be and just being the simple thing it is is precisely its brilliancy.
Into Darkness may well be a bad movie, but I also never said it "lost the plot". I was disappointed by it, but that does not give me the right to reify my wishes into something that was supposed to happen and never did.
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If you don't like Minecraft, I'm fine with that, but don't act as though anyone who DOES like the game must be totally wrong and are not allowed to defend themselves. I don't like COD, but some people do, thinking that what defines a 'good' or 'bad' game is just your personal opinion of it only works with regards to yourself, trying to apply that to everyone is a false start.
I didn't do any of that; I criticised the way Minecraft was developed, and for my troubles I got some petty snipes from you and Luis for daring to speak ill of a game that lots of people bought!
Luis: 'lost the plot' is a turn of phrase, it has nothing at all to do with the actual plot of the game. MC certainly is pretty great as 'virtual lego on the internet', but the devs wanted it to be more, they tried to make it more, and I think it's perfectly fair to criticise its failings in being more.
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Yes yes I was speaking of "losing the plot" the way you intended. They might have had their ideas but they correctly dismissed them.
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No they... didn't. They really didn't. What was the entire complex of shoddy ideas that was the Adventure Update and release if not an attempt to move MC beyond the simple but fun premise of block-shuffling?
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I didn't do any of that; I criticised the way Minecraft was developed, and for my troubles I got some petty snipes from you and Luis for daring to speak ill of a game that lots of people bought!
So when you say something it is 'criticism' and when we say something in response to that claim it is 'petty snipes'
Yeah, I see where this is going...
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So when you say something it is 'criticism' and when we say something in response to that claim it is 'petty snipes'
He did actually offer criticism of the game, though he did not lay out a reasoning for a few posts, which is a typical failing of Phantom.
On the other hand it's equally true that any accusations "you just say X because you don't like the game!" or "you're doing the same thing" are very much unsustainable right now as Phantom has clearly elucidated what he meant and it can be engaged with on the level of actual criticism.
Rather than, you know, ad homs.
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[qupte]With regards to Minecraft, I don't think there ever was a 'plot' any more than Dwarf-Fortress, Gnomoria or any other rogue-based game, part of the fun aspect of the game is the complete lack of 'paths' that you need to follow.[/quote]
You mean like that from my comment of several posts ago? But then, who expects anyone to actually READ a thread these days on here?
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You're misreading 'lost the plot'. He doesn't mean a plot like a story. He's using this idiom http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose_the_plot
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You mean like that from my comment of several posts ago? But then, who expects anyone to actually READ a thread these days on here?
Luis: 'lost the plot' is a turn of phrase, it has nothing at all to do with the actual plot of the game. MC certainly is pretty great as 'virtual lego on the internet', but the devs wanted it to be more, they tried to make it more, and I think it's perfectly fair to criticise its failings in being more.
I should not have to resort to this with you.
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Well... as development went on, it became clear that Notch didn't really have any overall creative vision for the game beyond 'you can mine and craft and it's all a kind of fantasyish environment with survival elements' (and neither did anyone else at Mojang for that matter), and increasingly new features were drawn from mods/fan pandering (like pistons, dogs, booster rails) or from half-baked ideas that never really went anywhere (literally all the RPG mechanics). The released version of Minecraft was if anything less 'complete' than a lot of the beta versions, and as far as I'm aware things haven't really improved since then. I do kind of harbour a personal resentment about this, because Minecraft had incredible potential and it didn't really live up to much of it.
I didn't do any of that; I criticised the way Minecraft was developed
MC certainly is pretty great as 'virtual lego on the internet', but the devs wanted it to be more, they tried to make it more, and I think it's perfectly fair to criticise its failings in being more.
No they... didn't. They really didn't. What was the entire complex of shoddy ideas that was the Adventure Update and release if not an attempt to move MC beyond the simple but fun premise of block-shuffling?
Relevant bits for the hard of reading.
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Well... as development went on, it became clear that Notch didn't really have any overall creative vision for the game beyond 'you can mine and craft and it's all a kind of fantasyish environment with survival elements' (and neither did anyone else at Mojang for that matter), and increasingly new features were drawn from mods/fan pandering (like pistons, dogs, booster rails) or from half-baked ideas that never really went anywhere (literally all the RPG mechanics). The released version of Minecraft was if anything less 'complete' than a lot of the beta versions, and as far as I'm aware things haven't really improved since then. I do kind of harbour a personal resentment about this, because Minecraft had incredible potential and it didn't really live up to much of it.
This, as well as...
Edit: urgh, this is going nowhere. OK look, I did and do enjoy Minecraft! But I think a lot of its appeal comes from the core gameplay alone, and that the game's development beyond that was directionless and shallow, and that its phenomenal success is as much a factor of it being in the right place at the right time as it being particularly well-made.
These were the posts I was responding to.
Thing is, there's a whole list of arguments that could have been bought up regarding my posts. There are games that work in a similar fashion that are good, like DF or Gnomoria, but equally there are ones that are bad, like Towns and Cortex command. There's certainly a valid argument that the weakness in cheap beta-versions is 'It only cost $X, so what are you expecting?'. Charging more certainly puts more impetus for a polished product at the end. I would have accepted that argument as a valid point.
That's the whole thing, trying to judge a game, ANY game by things like that is pointless, companies have been trying for years to find what makes a 'good' game, and there's still no coherent answer, I doubt there ever will be.
The original point being raised in this thread that I was responding to was about release methods and whether or how they affect the final quality of the game, there are arguments that they do. I'm still not sure how this got into an argument about the pros and cons of Minecraft as a single program, but when it comes to release models, it actually worked. Not everyone was happy with the direction it went in, but it's certainly not an Ad Hominem nor a petty snipe to point this out.
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I always regarded Minecraft as a virtual lego in the internets.
I didn't; there was another game (http://www.blockland.us/) for that. I always played Minecraft for the survival gameplay; building shelter against hostile mobs and harvesting resources to beat back the darkness. Any megaprojects I engage in are few, far between, and mostly for the sense of accomplishment of having built something major in spite of being constantly under siege from creepers, zombies, and giant goddamn spiders.
As for "RPG mechanics"... what RPG mechanics? You mean "experience points", which have clearly been misnamed from the very beginning? I can't really blame them, though; what else are you going to call a magical, intangible resource you most commonly get by defeating hostile monsters? Once they added the anvil, and the ability to enchant books so you can pick-and-choose which enchantments your equipment ends up with, the game finally felt like there was a point to making high-tier equipment.
And, finally, to turn back around to the original topic... I backed Planetary Annihilation during the kickstarter (being a massive Total Annihilation and SupCom/FA fan), and I've been playing the alpha, and I can see the potential for this game even at this extremely early stage. I'm really looking forward for the engine to advance to the point where it's not just a cut-down, buggy version of TA played on a spherical map anymore.
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Is it really so difficult to not argue and bicker about an "I disagree" post? Really guys?
I suggest you guys take discussion about the merits (or demerits) of Minecraft to the Minecraft thread. I also suggest cooling the tone a bit, before something official happens.
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No offence Scotty, but my problem wasn't with whether he liked the game or not, I only play it with Mods because I find Vanilla Minecraft a bit dull after a while, it was the connection between 'good' and 'bad' and 'like' and 'dislike' that concerned me.
Let me give you a quick example of what concerns me about discussions in here sometimes :
are you serious about this
lots of people play cod too, are you going to leap to its defence if people start criticising its design
See, I'm surprised that people didn't pick up on this. Now, if it came to the question of whether I think COD is a 'good' game or not, I'd agree with Phantom in that I personally do not. However, the fact that vast numbers of people play it and enjoy the game mechanics must mean that my opinion of it is not universal. That's what I mean about the difference between 'Good' and 'Like'. As I said in my last post, 'good' is a very difficult thing to nail down.
See, my comment was never once related to Phantoms' opinion of Minecraft, he's totally entitled to it, but I was suggesting that saying it is 'Bad' was not entirely accurate, he may dislike it all he likes, but Bad is relative.
As I said in the reports comments, it's very difficult when discussing games, to separate financial investment with emotional investment, I have my Biases, other people have theirs, but I've seen what happens when a game thread starts getting emotional investment, we have several locked threads to remind us.
I'll admit to being pretty impartial to Minecraft at the moment, haven't played it for ages, and I'll happily accept and even agree to criticisms of it, but we are talking marketing and retail of a new game here, and if you want to hold up a model of a program that did a bad job of itself, Minecraft just isn't it.
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Not to take this back off-topic, but I agree that the single-player campaign of Minecraft sucks. :p I don't find that a disappointment at all though, since the core essence of the game is creative/survival (both single-player and multi-player), not a story mode. The story element they did tack on - the endgame text wall - was definitely weaksauce, but that's because it was added to a game that had absolutely no storyline prior to that. It's like reading the last chapter of a book without there being anything else. No, actually, it's like reading the epilogue of a book. :p
Anyway, the only logic I see in PA's pricing is that that was a KickStarter price level. The only difference is that when you pay $90 in KickStarter, it's to help make a game happen, whereas paying $90 in Steam is "merely" to have early access to said in-dev game.
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Someone earlier in this thread (Flipside maybe) dropped one of those internet fallacies that 'bad is relative'. It's not - game design can be criticized in ways that transcend individual opinion, much like anything else. The fact that a product is popular does not make it well-designed.
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2) Hoover suggests that I'm the kind of person who would leap to the defence of games he personally doesn't like - shock horror.
The CoD comparison has been brought up a few time, so: the point of that was that CoD has a pile of widely-acknowledged and heavily-criticised design flaws, but it is still incredibly popular. That was mostly a reply of frustration, since I'd just posted a reasonably detailed post on a topic I'm fairly interested in discussing, which is why I went back and edited in an addendum to that post.
Anyway. WRT Kickstarter, I think of it as paying for the service of making a game you'd like to play. Obviously there are rough edges in that way of looking at it, since the games are still usually sold afterwards; but I think it's an important development, because the general idiocy that is intellectual property law largely derives from creating a legal framework to protect a wrong-headed business model where non-scarce information is sold as a good by imposing an artificial scarcity of supply.
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I don't find CoD by design actually all that flawed. The way it gets developed and spewed out constantly without changing things drastically, is generally my problem with it, but if it ain't broke (sales numbers anyone?) don't fix it.
As a game, it plays fluidly, multiplayer is extremely solid, and a campaign that gives players a decent Hollywood experience (despite the story not being all that great). It's the same as those Summer Blockbusters only in November and for games. And most importantly: It makes the money
In terms of Notch "Losing the plot" you'd have to first stop assuming what his idea of Minecraft being finished is (and physically ask him [or get someone to. If someone already has, great, post a link]). You can say it is "clear that Notch didn't really have any overall creative vision for the game" past what was originally released as an Alpha, but your conclusions are based off of Mojang taking good ideas from a community who thought they were good ideas, and making them a standard. For me, that's similar to a community having a form of development input
But here's something that perhaps you didn't consider, maybe what the community thought of *they already did* but simply hadn't implemented it yet. Mojang vs Modding community numbers wise will have a significant disadvantage when it comes to everything. A modding community can work faster and come out with things for the game before Mojang has time to pull out the gameplan for the next update.
That, and "1.0" Minecraft was (to me) "we've reached enough content to market this as a full package" *slaps on the 1.0* "Alright, back to making it even better"
Minecraft isn't done. It's still getting updated and elements you find lacking, could down the line be revamped, added, finished, etc
Get back to me when Minecraft is done. Like actually done. No more updates. Ever.
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Look up "the best gamers minecraft". They did a very good review pointing out a number of major flaws with the supposed "acceptable full package". As far as the relationship with the modding community goes, I want to make it clear that I do not think anyone was 'stealing' ideas or anything like that — but one way of looking at it is that creatively, Mojang became just another modding team with access to the source code and the global update, but not much in the way of ideas. (I'd also like to add that Notch's attitude to modders was reprehensible; he was still using an obfuscator on the .jar even after he started incorporating mods that slogged it through the roadblocks he put up to fix his atrocious code.)
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If you want a more focused survival game, maybe that . . . "Don't Starve" would be more up your alley.
http://www.gog.com/gamecard/dont_starve
Minecraft to me is just . . a place to build ****. Build huge things in a very laborious way.
I think the "best gamers minecraft" is a little . . . skewed to be polite. The guy's just playing up the "minecraft suxxors" route for views, or maybe he has a personal problem with Notch. Who knows. Also some of his complaints have since been address in subsequent updates.
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In regards to "the best gamers minecraft", his saying "fully finished game" when it came out in November doesn't sit right with me
Since, to me, fully finished games imply that they no longer get updated (in the sense of adding content, not patches which fix aspects of a game) since they're fully finished.
As a sidenote: This guy is a really boring person to listen to
His mentions of "programmer graphics" as being "unacceptable" isn't really a good point. Minecraft's main charm is the fact that everything is so simple in terms of how they look. His distaste for the "retro" graphics (which I don't personally call retro, I call simple) is based on games always having to push the hardware that's given to them
Since when do games have to push anything?
I sense a common theme with his complaints about the gameplay. It's simple and boring
Well, it's boring for you, but it certainly is simple
Like everything in the game
And he says "Finished Game" again
Yeah, they probably won't make the AI anything other than... well simple... but as I said earlier
That's like everything in the game.
I stopped listening after that point (less so the content, more the fact that he can't hold my attention. Seriously, if Minecraft is that boring for him, I'd place listening to him below that which he finds Minecraft)
In the end, I bought the game, played it for a long while, got my money's worth. It was Lego without the restriction of how many blocks you have
And significantly cheaper