What about the blocks and items you get in those dungeons? I've seen tesla coils elsewhere as well as some of the building materials but there isn't really a way to obtain antimatter from anything besides a sci-fi dungeon and I haven't seen apex lab material outside of the labs - although I've seen 2 posters in the apex compounds. That just seems like it would be frustrating though. Is frustration not the direct opposite of fun or enjoyment? I'm usually playing video games to forget about my stress for a while. (Along with all the other negatives that come with being planted on this gods-forsaken rock with the rest of humanity.) Plus, what if the game asks you to do something you can't? I know the typical argument is "get better at it" but that involves actually doing it which may incur aforementioned stress and cause headaches or broken screens. (They don't make TVs like they used to.) It seems like at that point, the cons outweigh the pros and there really is no point in doing it at all unless you enjoy it. This is why I say if you enjoy challenge then you should be able to go be challenged but what if you don't and you just end up frustrated and give up? That is my usual response to being asked too much of, I shut down under pressure. I have a lot of games in my backlog that I stopped playing for this reason. If the effort I put into something isn't rewarding me, it isn't worth the effort, and too often my best effort has been slapped away by video games as not good enough. That's the only thing I like about new mario games - they do give you an A for effort. If you die enough times in one level, they spawn a box that will give you a white tanooki suit that makes it much easier. There is a penalty but I forgot what it was which probably makes it negligible. Compare to Meat Boy which planted a big "you must be this good to ride" sign in front of my face and regardless of how hard I tried to raise up to that level, I could not. My effort didn't feel like it mattered at all even though it was the best that I could do, so I figure the game is just unfair and can screw off. I haven't picked it up since. I'd rather not do something at all than do something to the best of my ability and still lose. Unfortunately, real-life pretty much mandates this constant bombardment of my self-esteem and I really don't feel like dealing with it in something I'm playing to feel positive.
What is frustrating, having a challenge? no, its engaging. If I was playing a fighting game and every punch one-hit my opponent it would be a snooze fest. If mario consisted of walking along a hill countryside of pleasant farmers it would be boring. If Sonic consisted of running in a straight line nobody would like it. It is the elements of challenge that make the game. If you don't want a challenge, you don't want a video game. Maybe you don't want a lot of challenge; as I've said before, difficulty settings are great. However, if you truly don't want any challenge, you aren't asking for a game anymore. You are asking for a toy, or maybe a mindless button mashing distraction. Keep in mind, challenge can take many forms. It can be platforming and reflex based skill challenges, but it can just as easily be about tactics or strategy, or puzzles, or any number of other things. If you are not looking for a lot of challenge, then you are not going to enjoy a game based on high challenge like super meat boy. All that means is that you are not the target audience. making super meat boy less challenging would defeat the base dynamic that makes the game work. That design hinges on having a high but fair difficulty, which has the drawback of being unable to lower the difficulty for wider appeal. That is just the nature of the game.
There really isn't anything available with the same simulation potential as video games right now - and part of that immersion is a kind of structure, although I don't believe that inherently means a challenge, at least not one that is frustrating in the way Meat Boy is. I am a big fan of realistic flight physics - Minecraft's flight physics are not fun to me, I like the feel and the liberating freedom I get from flight simulators which would imply a structure, but not necessarily a challenge. I generally prefer my effort to be recognized - like I said, there's nothing I hate more than trying my best and losing. If I wanted to further gimp my self-esteem by being reminded that I'm not good enough for other people's arbitrary standards, I'd go back to college, or just ask my mother for constructive criticism. A video game has no logical reason to not give someone an A for effort - and many modern games do, but this is still considered a taboo concept in some indie circles. (I really don't know why, I usually attribute it to the typical elitism that comes from the Nintendo Hard crowd of the 3rd generation.) It's really a shame, too, because there are so many instances when a game becomes too hard for me and doesn't offer some kind of alternative. I'm wondering if you have any personal experience to relate to that crushing moment when you realize a game might be asking too much of you and all of your effort before that point becomes totally invalid. It's not a particularly upbeat feeling. Implying that you don't already do that in every Sonic game, even the 3D ones. I guess that's why everyone hates them though, hold forward to win, occasionally do QTE or sit through horrible cutscene trying to be funny and failing which I guess qualifies as a challenge.
You can have a video game that is a toy. Meat Boy is on the high end of the challenge scale, you don't have to get anywhere near that level of challenge to be engaging. If all it is is flying around, its not a game, its a toy. Simulations are a common form of toy. If you are dogfighting in the simulation, it becomes a game, and the design goals shift. I find it extremely insulting and patronizing when a game does that. Its like I'm being treated like a little kid. A game that rewards me for effort doesn't boost my self esteem, it lowers it. You still aren't good enough, but now that game is taking pity on you. Sure. Then I go and play a different game. If Its too hard for me, I don't expect the game to stop being challenging and let me win. I just find another game that is better suited to me. There are times when I don't feel like putting forth the effort it would take to try to beat it. It doesn't mean the game is wrong to be that hard (unless the game is hard because the balance was screwed up, but that's a different matter to discuss). We shall not discuss the 3D sonic games. The 2D ones where not even remotely "run in a straight line".
I wouldn't consider MS Flight to be a toy, although my favorite flight sim of all time is still Windhaven which remains unfinished to this day and scarcely available for download anymore. :/ It did have a story mode, it also had a free flight mode, if that's what you need to define a video game. My definition hasn't really changed since I was a kid. "It's a cartoon I can do stuff to." I don't like feeling as if my time is wasted and being told I'm not "good enough" has always been a peeve of mine. Good enough for what? Some arbitrary standard people made up based on their own subjectivity? $#&% their subjectivity. There's nothing remotely objective about any standard we impose on anyone else but that goes far beyond what we do with our free time. Not rewarding someone for the effort they put in at all invalidates it entirely. Imagine if you worked on a project for a year and 11 months into it the whole thing got cancelled and you weren't paid for any of your work. It's basically the same thing in a video game - even if you don't get all of the benefits, what you do put into it should actually matter because nobody likes feeling like they wasted their time. If you put 11 months of effort into something, you should get 11 months of pay. It isn't patronizing you by giving you something for free, it's giving you SOME compensation for your effort. Edit: I should probably note that even though Meat Boy is an extreme, there are many games which still have a fixed standard and I think it might be a trap that's easy to fall into for developers to believe whoever is playing their game is just as skilled at whatever genre they're making as they are - which is backed up by an interview the original Crash Bandicoot team did in regards to why the first game was so punishingly difficult. They didn't have the funds to hire quality control or beta testers so they went with their own bias because it was all they had to rely on. I'm fairly certain starbound was never meant to be hard - and I mean that in the sense of how terraria was a hard game because it forced you to unlock hard mode to get half the content which is one of the reasons I hate it so much and it didn't even have the "beta" status to justify why it suddenly became impossible to do anything on a map without getting killed by 3 unicorns in a row even with end-game armor. Starbound doesn't have that problem because you can just go to lower-tier sectors so unlike terraria, it actually does have a safe zone when you progress that far, and the safe zone expands as you progress which, to me at least, is a really important thing for a game with survival elements to have. Plus, no matter what has been said on the subject of platforming, Starbound, even in the nightlies, is not NEARLY as fast-paced as terraria was and even though it isn't a platformer, it is still very relaxed compared to any platformer I've ever played that wasn't a puzzle-platformer, so I think it is a really good idea to discuss the varying jumps in difficulty added with the nightlies wherever different parties might perceive them and that's why I keep bringing it up. If I were a developer, I would consider arguments like this extremely useful. (Although I don't know if everyone does, I'm just going with the golden rule since it's the only reliable guide I have.) Also it's a bad idea for me to ever talk about sonic but suffice it to say I only like one game and that was tails adventures because it's the only one that I feel has any real substance, which I actually find demeaning to the entire series when a 2D game has more exploration value than a 3D game in the same genre, let along the same series. Apply this to starbound vs minecraft and, well, let's just say that hopefully everything I use a mod for in starbound now will make it into vanilla (there are only like, 2 things I mod into it right now and both should probably get into vanilla eventually.) because unlike minecraft which is extremely flimsy without mods, starbound is actually fun in vanilla, for the most part.
Thats a fine definition as a player, but if you are discussing design you need to make more sophisticated distinctions. When the project is done and people are buying it and discussing it, it doesn't matter one bit what people feel like calling it. When discussing design, you need to know what your design paradigm is. Games will have standards. That is intrinsic to their nature. Are they arbitrary? yes, but setting them is part of the design process. Super meat boy sets them high, and the entire game design is based on that. Lowering them would be the wrong choice for super meat boy, and if that means its not the game for you, tough. That is what the game is. You may be upset if the standards are too high, but others will get upset if the standards are too low. Difficulty settings allow you to hit a wider range, but there are limits to what you can do with that.You can't take it personally if a game is designed for a different skill level than you possess. Imagine you put in your year and 11 months into a project, you work hard and its successful. Then someone else comes along, tries for a month, fails, and everyone clusters around them and goes "its ok, you don't actually need to be good, have the exact same reward that the guy who worked for it got" If you fail a super meat boy level 100 times in a row, should you get a skip option for it? If you skip this level because its too hard, how will progressing to harder levels help you? You won't have the skill for those either, you will just fail your way through skipping the rest of the game. Getting an A for effort doesn't always make sense. If you go skiing, would you go down the black diamond courses, then complain that the course should have been easier for you when you hurt yourself? Would you expect a skii patrol come to guide you down the course so you can handle it even though you aren't capable of the challenge? If you can't complete a game, it is not some deep failing in the game. Not every game is easily adjustable in difficulty. As such, the fixed standard has to be set someplace. If that someplace is high, you end up wit ha game for skilled people. If its low, its a game skilled people will skip for being easy. Neither one is necessarily better than the other, but you are demonizing a game for having the gall to provide a challenge for skilled people. For every person claiming its too hard, there is someone else relieved there is some meat to it now, and someone else who thinks the entire thing is still trivial because of the block building aspect. However, the change being discussed is literally "allow the puzzle/platforming dungeons to function without being trivially bypassed". That is a good change, flat out. Even if it means you will personally never enter another dungeon. Everyone thinks the 3D sonics suck. They did not cary over the design principles that made the original 2D ones work. This is why I said we wouldn't talk about them, they are not examples of good design and going into why would be a huge deviation. However, the original 2D ones were so popular that they still haven't stopped trying to revive the fervor and there are still dedicated fans despite all of the junk they have made. Right now, starbound is a mess. Their basic game progression isn't in place yet. I couldn't stand playing it for very long the last time I tried, but I have stuck around and payed attention because the overall design they had stated to be working towards is much more solid. I am not going to hold the flaws of a partially implemented alpha against the final game.Part of that design was making the dungeons actually mean something.They have been putting in a lot of effort on their dungeon system, and its an aspect of the game that will truly benefit how it plays. Being able to disable them would be a huge blow to the game design. If you truly can't stand it,get a mod to fix it. That is part of the advantage of a mod, if the developer's goals for the game don't align with what you want, you can mod it into what you do. It will be great! I think the idea of being able to disable it after beating a dungeon is a great one, it allows the dungeon to be held as a coherent challenge despite the creative aspects of the game, while not ruining the creative aspects by having huge areas of "lol, nope" for being creative. The dungeons themselves can still be looted, removed, rebuilt, remodeled, and/or made into your base. Adding on its constrains does allow a lot more gameplay to come into the game.
I wonder what, if anything, they'll do to prevent us from just filling up the dungeons with water? That seems like it'd be pretty trivially easy to do, just pour in water from above where the block protection starts. Then you can easily swim your way through the dungeon.
That's assuming the dungeon has a chimney (not in the literal sense) to pour the water in. A door would be more likely, but then you have pressure and levels to prevent this trick. And if it doesn't have a chimney... you can't make one.
plus, the amount of water needed would make that hard to pull off. I feel like the difficulty of pulling off flooding the dungeon means that if you manage it, you have earned the dungeon's reward.
In a way. Alternative ,creative solutions to problems are a good thing. They only become a problem when they can systematically trivialize the entire challenge of the game. Digging through dungeons is a problem because that is what it does; it trivializes things with a common, nearly-universal solution.
I do agree with you that alternative, creative solutions are awesome. In fact, they're one of my favorite parts of games like this! I love the feeling of doing something that seems like it's not what the creator intended, like I've come up with something clever on my own instead of following the instructions of the game dev. But this seems like the kind of thing that would be fun the first time you do it, and then very quickly turn all the dungeons into an exercise in tedium. I don't know if you've played the nightlies, but just in the course of ordinary digging you very quickly end up with thousands of blocks of water. Plenty to fill up those relatively small jumping dungeons. Maybe I'm misremembering how the pressure system works, but if you could just pour water in right outside the front door of the dungeon, that seems like it would systematically trivialize the entire challenge of every dungeon with a common, universal solution, just like you mention.
Small ones, maybe. The dungeons I had seen that had enough too them to be worth trying to bypass would be much harder to flood out.
Yeah, you may have a point there. I was mostly thinking of smaller ones, but as you say there are and will be much larger ones, as well. You'd have a hard time swimming through without drowning. Well, it won't bother me either way, I'll be happy to go through the dungeons more-or-less as intended. Once you get a movement tech or two it makes them a lot more fun & interesting, as well!
There is a world of stories behind my reasons why I might not take offense to someone trying their hardest and failing still getting paid for the month they worked on something but suffice it to say that I don't get nearly as offended by it that others seem to because I've been around enough people who would be screwed and probably dead if nobody had the common decency to feel empathy but that's not really talking about video games anymore. In the case of video games, though, since the actual achievement is not really worth a lot (unless you like leaderboards and...I just can't imagine why anyone pays attention to those things) I'm not really sure why some people get so upset about some people bypassing a challenge. It's not like succeeding at the challenge is beneficial unless you're doing it for money. But Meat Boy was always designed that way and even though I think its design philosophy is flawed, I don't go on their forums and raise hell about it because it was pretty much always like that and so is the genre it is part of. Starbound's genre is significantly more open-ended and accessible than most games and when a game has a somewhat awkward departure from what the rest of the game is like, it feels like...well, do you remember when 3D platformers were big? They are my favorite genre - or were, but an imagined need to create "variety" by adding in a bunch of minigames that had nothing to do with collecting or environmental puzzle-solving killed them for me. It basically feels like that kind of awkward. The first Jak is the only one that had success with doing it and obviously Naughty Dog didn't care since they rewrote the series immediately after it. I mentioned it before, but I don't play 2D platformers - with the exception of metroidvania games - specifically because of, well, you actually mentioned it. Because if there's something in them that I cannot do, their linear progression pretty much guarantees I won't be able to do anything else after that. So I just don't play games like sonic or 2D mario. In a game without linear progression though, this problem doesn't exist. This is why I push for alternate ways to obtain things - even if the alternate way is just a different obstacle, because it accommodates the precept of the genre about choosing how to go about things. Also, until we can mod console games, "just mod it" will never be a valid argument. It also makes it sound like you think my playstyle is less valid than yours if yours is in there by default and mine is not. (The only mods I currently need for starbound at this point are one that disables combat music because having it interrupt the nice ambient sounds is grating on my nerves and another that lets me craft building blocks instead of tearing apart some poor sod's house to get them instead. Both of which are things I feel should be in there by default.) However, you brought up one thing I can agree with - they worked hard on this aspect of the game which I have seen in their posts, and not all of the dungeons are mega man hell. (At least I hope not.) So I can appreciate not invalidating the effort they put into them, if nothing else about the shield makes even remote sense to me. The dungeons in the stable build looked quite nice to me, and I usually tried not to destroy things in them unless I couldn't pass something and if it were me and I worked really hard on those awesome avian statues I probably wouldn't want people haphazardly destroying them either without at least glancing at them. By the way, considering water does behave like a block even though liquid is stored more like a particle by the game, I think the "shield" will just block all liquids from moving inside of its radius, putting them in suspended animation as soon as they enter the threshold. They would have to do this since quite a few dungeons also contain lava which can be moved with that fancy new liquid tool they added several builds ago. Although if that was an oversight on their part, thanks so much for pointing it out because floran dungeons totally didn't suck before. >_> Speaking of sonic, I never liked the 2D games and the reason I hate on the 3D ones so much is actually because they are nothing like jak or spyro which happens to be my favorite game of all time and also the definition of how you make a 3D platformer to me since 2D platformer formulas do not work in 3D. The transition is jarring for most genres actually, but few big devs have ever acknowledged that. I guess that is one area where the sandbox building genre is unique.
I'm sorry, but the real world can't work like that. Someone who tries and fails cannot get the same reward as someone who is successful. if I try to start a business and it runs into the ground, I don't get the same rewards as steve jobs or bill gates. I can't get those same rewards. I'm not saying there can't be a safety net to keep people from failing too hard, but you can't say that people who failed should get the same things as people who were successful. It has a great design philosphy. It just isn't a type of game that you care for, and it is important to recognize that difference. I don't see dungeons as a departure from the gameplay of starbound. You go from jumping around and fighting monsters in a open wilderness to jumping around and fighting monsters. The movement mechanics are the same. The combat mechanics are the same. You lose the ability to place blocks to wall off enemies, but that has been a problematic mechanic from the start. Farming seems more like a departure for me; rather than going out and doing things, I will put some seeds in the ground and wait. Sure, its easier and doesn't present an obstacle, but its more of a departure. Dungeons just take the existing mechanics and say "here, do it harder" Pretty much everyone I have every heard talk about it agrees that jak 2 was leagues better than jak and daxter. Jak 2 was one of my favorite games, and going back to play the first one was disappointing. And I am perfectly fine with multiple ways to progress. Starbound is going to have that. One of those ways will be dungeons. Skipping the dungeon should not be one of the ways. modding was an argument I was making specifically for this case. I do think your playstyle is less valid for a specific game if it is at odds with what the developers want to do with that game. Your playstyle would be less valid for super meat boy. If the game has to compromise its intended design to accommodate your playstyle, it is less valid. This goes both ways; if someone tried to claim that the sims needs to cater to the high-difficulty crowd and include more skill-based progression, their stance would not be valid. It doesn't mesh with the design of the game. That said, starbound can work with your style. And it should do that by following the stated design structure and offering multiple ways to advance. The method you are suggesting violates the structure and design of the game. I would assume that "can't remove blocks" is meant to extend to the liquid blocks.
I don't make the distinction between a flawed philosophy and one I don't agree with because I think trying to attain objectivity when my species and specific instance of individuality are always going to be subjective is extremely pretentious so I don't think it's important to make that distinction at all. Otherwise we just do not agree. And unfortunately this isn't the place for me to vent just how angry jak 2's direction made me. (because adding guns makes everything cooler right? >_>) Technically getting the same reward for doing something else is still skipping the dungeon. It's just doing it in a way that takes a bit longer. Nobody seems willing or able to say whether or not you can still obtain dungeon blocks and props elsewhere, though I still think you should be able to craft them. In Minecraft, Terraria, and pretty much every other game in the genre I've played (which is a lot) most of what you see in the world can be crafted with the exception of abundant or renewable natural resources. The only example I can think of was Minecraft's saddles and when they added a proper function for them I think they implemented an alternate crafting recipe just because finding them in dungeons would be annoying. I feel the same way about Starbound's current state where what you can make is significantly limited as opposed to what you need to find and I'm fine with the blueprints, but I'm not fine with tearing down a glitch village or stealing their furniture. Why? Because it makes it look ugly. Same reason I carefully slope out landscapes for cobblestone and dirt instead of haphazardly biting into the side of a mountain. But as long as I end up being able to obtain everything by either crafting it (preferable for blocks, honestly) or buying it (or stealing it from some pirates) then you go nuts with your masochistic endeavor. If you really want to do it like that, I don't want to stop you. Just don't make me do it because I think it's laughably ridiculous. Also, I do not consider fighting monsters to be that dominant of a game trait. My impression is that much of the game is spent exploring, gathering resources, and taking care of your needs such as hunger or not freezing to death. The ability to construct and destroy the world as you see fit is probably the mechanic that stands out the most, and removing it feels like an entirely different game. I guess if you think the combat is the most dominant game trait it's a no wonder you think it's a problem how it can be averted. I think it's a nuisance that becomes more of a chore than anything else the farther you get because you stop killing for food and start killing just because you're sick of getting attacked while you're trying to mine some ore which is where walling off the enemies comes in. I don't think a game mechanic that stops being interesting 20 minutes in and becomes more like swatting annoying gnats is necessarily a good mechanic at all. I know people slam Minecraft for supposedly not having gameplay but it did have a mechanic that I appreciated quite a lot - if you lit up an area, nothing hostile would spawn there. Starbound doesn't seem to have any method of preventing monster spawns in previously-explored areas which leads to a lot of pointless tedium in that you might have to go through 6 grumpy-looking fat togepis to get wherever you were in a cave system before or that you might be on the surface of a planet trying to farm or build something when one of aforementioned annoying gnats pops up and acts as a distraction from what you were previously doing and I don't know how you feel about that, but I equate it to trying to work on a paper when an annoying roomate comes in blasting death metal throwing off my concentration, so then I have to get up and break their jaw, knocking them unconscious so I can get back to working on what I'm really trying to do. I have a great idea for that shield generator though: give it a setting that prevents monster spawns in its vicinity as opposed to block protection. Then it would be worth it to someone like me to acquire one and give the dungeons their own unique item. Having a shield cream for monster herpes that just pops up every once in a while to be annoying sounds like a logical benefit.
