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S2 Ep121: The Four Horsemen
81 Plays5 years ago
Join Dave and Jake they face the most ominous of Steam tags head on in this week's episode!
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Introduction & Host Banter
00:00:00
Speaker
Let our powers combine. Survival. Early access. Crafting. Open world. Find your powers combined.
00:00:34
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? That's going right. I'm surprisingly tired. Yeah, I feel that. I've done nothing today outside of drive and sit.
Grocery Shopping in the Rain
00:00:54
Speaker
That's pretty much pretty much the same. We did some grocery shopping and it rained on the way out, though. It was just like tropical rainforest deluge.
00:01:04
Speaker
Oh, like where you run to the card. You're like, doesn't matter. Fucking soaked. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't even run. It was just kind of like brisk walk because fate has already determined, you know, we will be the sponges in this situation. Try your moist trench them. Just pick them up and drop them in the ocean.
Humorous Spider Encounter
00:01:26
Speaker
So when I got home today, I got home around close to one. I sat the wall on the way because I was driving up from the beach stuff. Right. As soon as I opened the door after I checked my mail, there's apparently a little wolf spider. Oh, yeah. Hold up for size to your camera. That's size. For the listeners, this is this is about half of a tennis ball. All right. We're down to a 50 cent piece, if anybody remembers those.
00:01:57
Speaker
It's like a gun, I think is what you've described at this point. Yes, it is. A gigantic gun. But no, I fucking just rolled in. Oh, now I get the joke. Shit. OK. Well played. Yep. As soon as I open the door, it scurries in and I'm worried it's going to now like climb up to the steps before I can reach it. Yeah. It's going to be within my home.
00:02:22
Speaker
So I have like a small salt lamp there. And then I also got like a very small package of honey because Jewish people send that sometimes. So I take these things and I just like kind of mash at where it is in the corner and then verify it's dead and then bring everything in. But you survived the encounter.
00:02:44
Speaker
I did. I would have liked to have like removed it from the apartment in case it regens and reconstitutes its body and seeks vengeance. Right. I played horror games before that sounds about right. I think Wolfswiders, they're the
00:03:04
Speaker
Those don't harm people though, right? Wolf spiders hunt flies and things like that. If I remember correctly, maybe it was other spiders are like that. Yeah. They're going for things that they can kill, which I mean, will be things that are caught in their net, not things that would destroy their life and ecosystem. Right. Although you did say that you were pretty tired. So maybe in your like diminished state, you could have counted as a great and take this bitch boy down.
00:03:35
Speaker
yield. He treats me like a Dark Souls boss. He's like, I'm just going to go for the ankles and sidestep. Yeah, exactly. Oh man.
Desire to Play Dark Souls or Sekiro
00:03:44
Speaker
I've kind of wanted to play Dark Souls recently. Like Dark Souls, Sekiro, something like that. I don't know why it just got there. I most recently went through Sekiro again. Still feels good.
00:03:57
Speaker
Yeah. Are you looking for it for like the combat aesthetic or are you going for more of the progression of skills? I don't know. I think it's just the gameplay, probably the combat, probably the best way to put it.
00:04:14
Speaker
It's just the moment-to-moment gameplay, a kind of mess. I've been playing a bunch. You ever have a lot of options for games, but then there's one thing that you just want to play, and it's not even the novel thing. It's the thing you already have. You mean Path of Exoc, so I've been able to play it for a week? Yup. Well, you've been deprived of that at least. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Ever since we announced it.
00:04:41
Speaker
It's like a safe go back to in the same way we've talked about Minecraft as something that you can always kind of go back to as a touchstone game. Yeah. Because it scratches certain itch. I like the mindlessness of Path of Exile or just trying to get cool new shiny shit or it feels very comfortable always playing Dota 2 with a squad who I know and we just hang out bullshit and Dota 2 is kind of the medium.
00:05:11
Speaker
Yeah, I can understand that completely. It's nice to have a comfort title you can
Game Choices & Indecision
00:05:18
Speaker
go back to. There's times I've launched games recently and I'm like, do I have the patience to get into this right now? And sometimes the answer is no. So I just quit out and do something else.
00:05:27
Speaker
I actually, like the night before I left, I was like, Oh, I'm definitely going to launch a thief for and play a mission. I played one mission. I'm like, we, we okay though. Yeah. Yeah. I'm done. Like, the idea of thief, but it's not.
00:05:47
Speaker
I don't know. It's not the same anymore. Crusader Kings 3 came out pretty recently and I started it up and I started going through the tutorials because you kind of have to know how those games play since a lot of it is menus.
00:06:05
Speaker
Um, and I got like a couple tutorial screens, tutorial screens in and I was like, uh, then I went and I took a nap, woke up and came back and tried again. I was like, I literally need to like read, generate mental capacity in order to do this. So I get that Minecraft though, that's, that's the nice one.
00:06:29
Speaker
So much thing that you could focus on anything in Minecraft, but if you want to just chill and do something, you can you can let it ride, as they say. I wish I experimented more with it. Like one of my boys, Stevie, has more recently gotten into Minecraft and he like didn't play it until, let's say, half a year ago. Yeah. But now he'd be like, hey, Dave, check this out. And he'll show me things. I'm like, what the fuck is this?
00:06:56
Speaker
Like it's from Minecraft. Yeah, it's an automated thing that he designed himself or got from somewhere, or it's like this very expensive build project or it's like custom assets for shaders, for lighting. I'm like, I played vanilla as vanilla can be. That was it. I punched wood and I heard that classic Minecraft song kick in and like, this is my jam. Oh, yeah.
00:07:27
Speaker
No, the Minecraft tracks are actually legitimate. I have a Spotify like nocturnal playlist for going to sleep. And it has one or two Minecraft tracks on there because it's just so soothing. And what's weird is like
00:07:45
Speaker
We weren't super young, I think, when it came out, probably still but formative college years, maybe. Would have been the time. I think that was really going on. That sounds right. But like I had nostalgia for that game. And I know that like the generations after us will have even more nostalgia because they literally played it as kids.
00:08:09
Speaker
And it's kind of the high point for this week's episode. It's the counterpoint to all of the issues that we'll bring up with other games. I mean, Minecraft was a huge thing, is a huge thing. The same way everybody knows what the fuck Mario is, or you've heard of it, you know what Minecraft is, or have heard of it. Right. And people said, wow, that was successful. What elements did it have for its success?
00:08:38
Speaker
And that would be we're talking about today. Yeah is the four horsemen of video games. Yeah, these things are kind of
00:08:50
Speaker
Not necessarily bad on their own. When they're joined together, dear God, it is Red Flag City. It's just a force multiplier for each one. It's like, oh, one of these things? That's kind of cool. I like survival games. And it's
The 'Four Horsemen' of Video Games
00:09:07
Speaker
like, oh, crafting. You're like, yeah, I could see survival and crafting. Let's go together. That makes a lot of sense.
00:09:11
Speaker
and you're like open world. You're like, all right, well, I mean, that's gonna take a lot of effort. I hope you guys have set aside some good design time and got ideas for where you're headed with things.
00:09:23
Speaker
And then you're like early access and you're like, it's never gonna launch. It's never gonna see the light of day. And those are, those are the four horsemen, which is a term I've actually seen thrown around like a fair amount, maybe a little bit less now. I feel like as usual, we're covering things in the waning years of their relevance, but it still exists. Oh yeah, definitely.
00:09:50
Speaker
It's been a steam green light or just steam indie metric for a very long time. Yeah. It's not, again, not that any of these individual elements are bad or even that they're necessarily bad altogether. It's just raises red flags because a lot of times they are implemented poorly or just. Okay.
Video Game Red Flags
00:10:16
Speaker
Let's say you're on like a dating app.
00:10:20
Speaker
There are certain types of people that you'll take a look at and you will make immediate judgments on based on their solo selfies, neck tattoos, standing next to an American flag type thing. None of these things are necessarily bad, but red flags are being raised and I'm making assumptions.
00:10:44
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, having a red flag raised behind the person is also, you know, a red flag in itself. That is true. What does that mean? Probably communist. Probably communist, yeah.
00:10:57
Speaker
I like that we started with Minecraft though, because there are, like you mentioned, positive examples. And Minecraft obviously was never truly early access because it wasn't on a platform. Minecraft was just distributed from the Mojang site. But it was available in alpha and beta long before its actual release, and it's had really long development cycles.
00:11:25
Speaker
Which is something that's really common for games in early access surprise surprise And so it still it still matches all of those things and I think that's that's one of the things that's gonna be nice to compare against like
00:11:42
Speaker
I would pause the podcast right now and go play Minecraft if I was slightly less diligent, just a little bit, just a little bit less diligent because I consider it exemplary of what those games could be. But so many games that followed wanted to ride those coattails or be the next Minecraft and see that level of success. And they failed with the exact same basic formula, I would say, or close to it.
00:12:14
Speaker
Yeah. I'm going to pick an example from the list. Sure. Rust. Rust is not trying to be Minecraft, but it does share a lot of elements. It's fairly open world. It is a static map, so it's not procedurally generated as we know Minecraft to be.
00:12:37
Speaker
I did have, you kind of hit rocks and trees, which are nodes, which is a fairly common thing as far as resource gathering games. Instead of the whole earth being your beacon of resources, it's just a couple of set places. Right. I don't think there was terraforming rust. Not that I recalled. Okay. So you can actually modify terrain specifically, but you could craft and build structures.
00:13:07
Speaker
Right. And it's worth this claiming I haven't played rest in literally years. Oh, yeah. Everything I'm saying is off of these memories from like four years ago. Yeah. But the game is still in development, which is one of the
00:13:22
Speaker
One of the horsemen is the early access moniker, where it never seems to be resolved. And I think Rust is really emblematic of that. When we played it, there were zombies, because they were doing the whole zombie thing. But they always said the zombies were placeholders. They're going to change them out eventually. And then, apparently, they did that at one point. And they're not zombies anymore, because they didn't want it to be a zombie game, I guess, long term.
00:13:53
Speaker
And yeah, it's had core fundamental changes in ways that are completely separate from a positive way like Minecraft. Minecraft was building on top of existing complete systems. And so when they added gliders to Minecraft, no one was like, this undermines my gameplay. This is real with Minecraft, I hope. Or the Nether or anything like that.
00:14:19
Speaker
But early access games oftentimes undergo changes that aren't always positive and are sometimes super transforming in ways that could hamper the existing community. I didn't actually think about that when we were working on this list.
00:14:41
Speaker
But yeah, I think of other games I've played early access that have had transformations. The only thing I can think of as a quick go to is Hades from Supergiant,
Critique of Early Access Games
00:14:50
Speaker
but that's been very iterative. They've done some balancing patches here and there, but it's not like they're like that whole system was shit. Get it out of here. Yeah.
00:15:02
Speaker
Because they had the design in advance for where they wanted the game to go. And then they were filling in the mechanics and layers that they had planned from the start. So it never felt like they were undercutting themselves, I think.
00:15:18
Speaker
Another example of a game that we've covered that did actually undercrowd itself in this way, which was really popular with us. We had some fun with Rust for a while. A game we played even more was Seven Days to Die.
00:15:33
Speaker
which we had an episode on. And, you know, that's a game that's similar in the Minecraft space, sort of. We will get together four or five friends and then be like, all right, for the next week, this is it. This is our multiplayer thing. And...
00:15:50
Speaker
The reason I say they kind of undercut themselves is they had a major system change semi recently. So like a year, year and a half back, something like that. They completely changed the way that like skill points were earned and the way like experience was applied. And it showed that they were dissatisfied with an existing fundamental system in a way that you wouldn't see with Hades because they had all of that thought out in advance.
00:16:18
Speaker
And Seven Days to Die is always under development. They're always like, okay, we'll add a vehicle, we'll tweak all of this, we'll revise all of this. It's literally in development hell and playable in that state. It's still a really fun game, but
00:16:38
Speaker
It embodies early access. 100%. It actually embodies a lot of the sins. Yeah. Because there is survival, right? You do need to essentially monitor your health, food, and water.
00:16:57
Speaker
Yep. So anytime you start up on these games, it's like, go find some shit. So usually you will have a couple of deaths early on before you know what you need to ingest or how to procure it. Yeah. As far as the early access, which state kind of already covered the crafting of that game.
00:17:21
Speaker
exists and is fine. I actually really don't have any issues with it. Yeah. Um, vertical progression, when attacks happen, all your shit will be destroyed. I like, I don't think there's a way around that. So that's just more of a design choice. Kind of interesting. Uh, and the open world thing again, I think it is.
00:17:45
Speaker
Not sure if it's generated per server. There's like two options. You can use a pre-made map or you can make one, a new one and spend time generating it. But the generation just has like, you know, old style Minecraft where you could have like hard biome transitions where it was just like,
00:18:05
Speaker
this one's mountains, and then immediately tundra on the opposite side, or desert on the opposite side. And they kind of smoothed some of those biome transitions out. Biome gradients. Yes, exactly. Seven days to die, the automated one does not have gradients. It's just like, and here's the point where the desert stops and the snow tundra begins.
00:18:32
Speaker
And I also realized tundras can be deserts. You don't have to write in with that. I get that. I get that. But you know what I'm talking about. Fair enough.
00:18:41
Speaker
It still has very much of that open world feel, where it does feel rewarding to go around and explore and raid a building or something else, which is usually going to be a node for some random items in a house that might respawn after a set number of days. But at the same time, it just feels very empty. Someone's like, hey, let's make a map. They take a picture of a map, and they load it into Blender or something else. They're like, OK, here's the map.
00:19:10
Speaker
Well, we have to, and he's essentially trying to pick in random dots to fill in the circle, so it looks kind of filled. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So kind of like if I was going to make a blueberry cobbler, I didn't have a set number of blueberries, but I wanted people to be like, well, I don't want them to think there's no blueberries, but I want them to think it's not just only a bucket of blueberries. Right. So they can try and evenly disperse things. I see what you're getting at. Yeah, yeah.
00:19:39
Speaker
You curate the map. Yeah. Yeah. So it still feels kind of weird in a way because usually it is just like a static asset of like a house. Now, to be fair, it looks fairly cohesive in the game compared to how I'm describing it. There's very much a feel of
00:20:00
Speaker
It's not super cohesive. Yeah. Like a smaller cohesive elements. They kind of use like a points of interest system. So like there's cities about and there's towns, but most cities are pretty similar. Most towns are pretty similar. The terrain just varies. Um,
00:20:23
Speaker
I think like I don't want to undersell it because we have I think a lot of fun when we play Seven Days to Die, but it's also a game that could be significantly better if there was a concerted push to finish it. It's one of those like eternal early access games where like
00:20:46
Speaker
It looks like Source 2, or like less than Source 2. The game looks like garbage most of the time, graphically. And if you try to change that, it'll destroy your system.
00:20:57
Speaker
But it's like that's fine. I don't mind if graphics are bad, but it's still in development, right? It hasn't the graphics are bad and it has not shipped. It has like these deficiencies that continue. And that's kind of emblematic of the process here is sometimes they're like juggling early access games feel like they're juggling issues. And there's always something up in the air. They're not that aren't being resolved.
00:21:25
Speaker
So anyways, that's, that's the negative thing, but I mean, the cool thing is I guess for early access, which you see with like a lot of like Patreon and what was the other one for Patreon Kickstarter or GoFundMe or anything like that. GoFundMe is for medical bills now. Well, it's not officially. It can't be used for other things, but.
00:21:53
Speaker
Yeah, well, specifically, it was the initial thing of, hey, I'm somebody with a little bit of flexible income, somebody starting a cool project. They're not part of a major corporation. There's somebody with a dream, a kind of cool idea. And I want to be a part of that as a part of that community. So you support them and their efforts and they work on a thing and you get to iteratively see it come to life.
00:22:19
Speaker
Right. And that's a really cool fucking thing on its own for how I described it. But rarely ideal. Yes, it is very idealistic because rarely we see that happen. A lot of things like Marcus early access and then you check it out two years later on steam. You're like, that still looks where it where it did. Yeah, it's like had two small patches.
00:22:42
Speaker
So I'm not sure if they just never got the development resources to continue to work on it, if interest was lost overall or something else came up. But that's why it's one of those flags and it's.
00:22:58
Speaker
It's like looking for a short term and you're like, yeah. I've mentioned it before, I think, but there used to be a gate for releasing games. And it's like, even if the game was garbage, you found a way to say like to ship off the gold copy or the copy that's going to end up on shelves.
00:23:20
Speaker
going gold is like having your release copy go out, right? And that doesn't always exist here now that there's new models like Early Access or Patreon funded games, which I think are even in some ways more strenuous with the community than like Early Access, because in like a Patreon funded game, for instance, there's actually an incentive for the developer not to completely finish the game,
00:23:49
Speaker
because as soon as they do, that might cut off some of their continual funding. Right. Like people may be like, game's done. You know, now, you know, I don't need to be a patron. I wanted to fund the game itself, not future DLC.
00:24:03
Speaker
Exactly. And I'm not saying everyone's like that, but I know it can be part of the mentality. And early access lets you push things out, theoretically get resources to keep it running, like to keep that development going. So you could finish projects that theoretically you might not have had enough gas for to finish with your development team.
00:24:26
Speaker
And that's great. That's awesome. But once you get some of those sales, if those start to drop off, where's your incentive to finish your product? Like how many people are waiting for that gold in quotes release versus the people who bought it early?
Minecraft vs Early Access Games
00:24:43
Speaker
And it's not always worth it for these people to finish their games. And maybe they personally just don't have the investment. Maybe if they didn't have the early access option, the game wouldn't have been shipped.
00:24:56
Speaker
You know, who knows? But on some point when I'm retired, I'd like to have a corollary episode to this and my field of work. Yeah, some interesting commentary there. So that seems like we pretty much covered early access. Yeah. Typically, I would I would say for myself, I'm probably speaking for you, kind of skeptical of it.
00:25:26
Speaker
Unless you are very familiar with the developer publisher. Yes. Buying potential is much sketchier than buying a finished product in my mind. I would never get an early access hoagie. Just to be fair, timeline aside, I want the finished project so I can consume it immediately.
00:25:52
Speaker
I'm not going to come back and be like, oh, is there lettuce on that? Okay. I'll eat the lettuce. What is your tomatoes on that? And I'm essentially just eating ingredients as I'm going like a very slow grocery shop. Right. I'm just imagining they have like the hoagie roll in front of you and they're like, all right, we put the meat on it and you're just like, excellent. I love meat. And then you just grab it off of the bun, eat the meat and they're like, okay.
00:26:16
Speaker
Lettuce, you're like, lettuce is okay. Grab the lettuce, eat the lettuce. You're just sitting there with a fork, like eating the contents of this roll. Yeah, that's exactly that. But yeah, the other ones, the other horsemen we have here were crafting and survival and open world. I think crafting and survival are probably more closely related, like,
00:26:43
Speaker
I feel like those are really tied together in a lot of these games. There's definitely a connection for where they come up. But as concepts, I would at least at this point in time, think of them as very separate. Okay.
00:26:59
Speaker
I guess it's worth noting Minecraft actually, even though it had survival mode, which was the common thing to play. Survival is a very small component of most of Minecraft. This is probably the least emphasized option. Yeah. Or tag. It's first couple of days. Okay. Hey, did you learn how to punch bread or punch wheat? Grats, you're good for life. Yeah. Can you kill cows? You're done.
00:27:29
Speaker
Like you really don't exude enough energy in that game for it to ever really be an issue. You have to opt into danger, I think in Minecraft. You're explicitly going to the Nether, you're fighting bosses.
00:27:43
Speaker
You have to go out of your way for that stuff. But I mean, as far as like just maintaining your food and health, your health is maintained by you having full food and your food is maintained by killing cows and eating their meat, which is really easy to do, like surprisingly easy. So if you have a small farm and you do it occasionally, it's such an afterthought.
00:28:08
Speaker
There's a lot of other games like when we're talking about the raft episode it was like
00:28:15
Speaker
Oh, you're thirsty. You're starving. I'm like, huh, you're tired. Go to sleep. Yeah, there's things that you and it feels again to go back to like an arbitrary. Difficulty meter is like, oh, let's throw in some fucking meters here where if you don't meet these requirements, you're fucked. Oh, the game's hard. It's difficult. There it is.
00:28:41
Speaker
You like challenge the right to eat with a dark five minute Minecraft. Okay.
00:28:48
Speaker
That's a good point. That's actually succinctly, I think, the main problem I had with Raft, which is also on this list, I believe. Or if not, then I should. Yeah, I did put it on the list. I actually enjoy the challenging slash risky things in Minecraft. Holding Shift to avoid falling into lava is the most terrifying thing. Like, do I trust my pinky this much? Right.
00:29:14
Speaker
But like those optional things, exploring the nether or, you know, armoring up and finding a dragon or doing whatever. I go for those goals and I expect to be kind of stressed out while it's going on. But like you mentioned, that baseline hemeostasis sort of like I'm basic needs are taken care of in Minecraft.
00:29:37
Speaker
really easy to attain. So if ever you want to dial it back a little bit and just do something casual, watch something on Netflix while you like hit rocks, that's all super easy to do in Minecraft and you can just opt into it.
Survival Games: Busy Work or Fun?
00:29:55
Speaker
Whereas Raft is only the stress.
00:29:59
Speaker
Everything's a meter and it's going down. It's like, you know, um, the famous episode of I love Lucy and the chocolate factory. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It just feels like you're going around trying to like keep up with everything.
00:30:15
Speaker
I didn't expect the I love Lucy reference, but it's probably not my best analogy. I think it will. It works perfectly. I just, uh, it is my best analogy in time. Sorry. Losing you. I just think it's probably the most highbrow reference we've had in like the last two years. I just, I really hate having to.
00:30:39
Speaker
Hey, go do this because you have to go do this. Yeah. What? Fuck off. No. If I'm playing a game, I want to play to relax or get immersed more, discover or just enjoy or be surprised. Like I'm looking for emotional reactions. Don't give me busy work for the fucking sake of it. Right. Such a turn off because it's a it's a substitute for gameplay in my eyes.
00:31:08
Speaker
Metal gears survive now. It's also they don't like it. It's discouraging to be given a list of tasks where the end goal is to stay where you are, to not like make progress to something that you're building towards. But it's like if you want to keep what you got, you're going to need to scare those birds away, right? Like that's not engaging. Did you ever play Drowning Simulator?
00:31:34
Speaker
No, but that sounds terrifying. Okay, so this was something I think not subnautica. No Okay, this is something back when we were in college somebody made I think just a first-person video of somebody just kind of dog paddling like in the ocean but essentially if you don't keep clicking to keep them active and
00:31:55
Speaker
at a point, they just start to sink. Obviously, just from a viewer's perspective, it's very stressful. If you've been in the water once, you've had these thoughts. But essentially, you're just keeping to keep that person afloat. Right. What joy there is that outside of like, there's none. It's more of information like, hey, here's some things that people go through when they drown or in the process of drowning.
00:32:27
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's exactly what it feels like. I feel a little bad cause I don't know if we've ever like just pooped on a game as much as wrapped, but anytime it comes up. We had a whole episode pooping on it though. It's, it's true. It is true. Oh, it's going to come back up in another section very shortly too. Probably. Yeah. Um, I like survival in a sense of,
00:32:57
Speaker
It's something that I'm fine with having to do it. Yeah, but.
00:33:04
Speaker
Here's a good example. Breath of the Wild. I haven't played too much of it. It does hit a lot of these boxes as far as things it hits. But as far as the survival aspect, let's say I fall a great height. I've taken damage. My health is going to be low. Fair enough. I can go and craft a meal and eat that or have to use other elements or gear to go through a cold area so I don't die. Those are all survival elements.
00:33:33
Speaker
The things I have to maintain. But to what you were saying, if I'm going into a cold area, I'm going outside of where I am currently. I'm bringing forth. You're not into sitting there enjoying the breeze and then I'm starving to death. Right. So I think it's fine if it makes sense within gameplay, not just we added some random timers into the game. Yeah.
00:34:01
Speaker
I actually, I didn't have Breath of the Wild here because it's not early. It's the opposite of an early access game. It's a Nintendo game, which means they probably were finalizing plans for it 20 years ago. And they never touched on it. Yeah, well, you know, you win some, you lose some. But one thing I loved about Breath of the Wild mechanically is like you're talking about the meals and the food.
00:34:29
Speaker
If you put in just like a baseline amount of effort there, there's advantages. If you spend time like diving into the system and figuring out what certain components do and how to like use synergy or whatever, you can make ridiculously good food. It's just like, oh, do you want to just like fill all of your heart bars with just like resilient hearts, like all the way to the end, just double your health in the course of a meal?
00:34:58
Speaker
Because if so, go out here and gather some of these nice, rare ingredients, and you can do that. And I never use consumables in games if I can avoid it, because who uses consumables? And I freaking did for Breath of the Wild, because they're like, yeah, I'll double my health for a boss. That sounds awesome. There's incentive to actually do the crafting and survival mechanics and go beyond it.
00:35:28
Speaker
And so it's, it's, you know, it's great for that. That's what I want when I'm opting into the survival and crafting tagged game is a reason to do them beyond maintaining the status quo. Yeah, you should never have to just maintain in a game because it feels like busy work.
00:35:50
Speaker
I mean, to be fair, like when I'm playing games, it is kind of usually mindless fun stuff. And I'm not really progressing in my current, my real life, but hear me out. I'm not sure where I was going with this. Um, yeah. Right. Hear me out. And then, all right. Don't hear me out actually. Sorry guys. Yeah. So good. I just say breath of the wild also hits on the open world aspect.
00:36:21
Speaker
Yeah. So again, open world, you have, let's say.
00:36:27
Speaker
You can have fixed maps. We've talked about this. You can have static things. But if you just have a great open void, what are people going to do? So you bring things in. And then you have a variety of what you put things in. So these can be like different bandit camps, points of interest, shrines. From what little I played a Breath of the Wild, it does a great job of this because I feel encouraged to explore. I feel rewarded when I get something cool.
00:36:56
Speaker
I like checking off like, oh, I found this on the map. Cool, cool. What about over here? And you go around checking stuff out and you're not limited by the game says to go here now, go here, please. Uh-huh. And you can't go anywhere else. It feels cool to be like, hey, Link, there's some darkness by the castle. And you're like, that's cool. Oh, a bird. And then you follow the bird for two hours and you find it. Exactly.
00:37:22
Speaker
That is exactly the essence of that game, too. It's like, in Breath of the Wild, you can actually fight the final boss at the beginning of the game. You'll probably die well before you make it there, but speedrunners do it. And it's, I mean, there are gates. There's areas where it's like, hey, you need clothing, like you mentioned, to get there.
00:37:50
Speaker
But you realize once you get to that gate, you're like, all right, I'm gonna work on this issue. I'll find a solution for it. We'll push past it. And there's multiple solutions sometimes. Food, eat spicy food. There you go. Now you're more resistant to cold because that's how spicy food works, right? My mouth is hot. Let's brave the storm. Yeah.
00:38:11
Speaker
It's the sense of exploration, I think, too. One of the reasons Subnautica was my game of the year for, I think, 2017, 2018. I can't remember exactly. Both years. You wouldn't stop talking about it. He said 2019 as well. Even 2020. If Cyberpunk wasn't coming out in a couple months, maybe, maybe.
00:38:34
Speaker
Man, I hope it's good. If I say that, and this age is really poorly, I was going to be so disappointed. But open world games are often trying to cash in on this feeling of exploration. Even Seven Days to Die, where the world's pretty bland, has you at least exploring nodes looking for loot, weapons, guns, ammo, things like that.
00:38:59
Speaker
And Breath of the Wild is the same. You're just like, that's something awesome all the way over there. And I can see it all the way from over here. I'm going to go run and check that out or write a pony. One of the horses, right? Link is a literal horseman in that case.
00:39:18
Speaker
But like it literally has the ability to like drop icons on your map. Just custom things, which I want all games to do this from this point on. Because if you have an interesting enough map, players should just be able to market. Just drop things on it. Yeah. Because if I don't play your game for a week, I've forgotten where I am and where I'm going and where I've been. It was nice to have like a, Hey, let's check this out next time. Save and quit. Yeah.
00:39:48
Speaker
Um, even if you have to pay for the markers, Hollow Knight, two out of 10 game fucking size, best platformer in a, um, yeah, no, it's, it's, I play games for a sense of exploration a lot and open world, I think when implemented well supports that goal. Um, like yesterday I, uh, as an aside, I completed the game in other waters. Um,
00:40:17
Speaker
which has a large exploration focus. It doesn't have an open world, really, since it doesn't have that sort of implementation. But when a game can evoke that sense of exploration, that's always huge
The Allure of Open World Games
00:40:33
Speaker
for me. That's the reason I loved it in Subnautica. That's the reason I loved it in Breath of the Wild. That's the reason I enjoyed the world building in other waters.
00:40:43
Speaker
And some of these games on our list just don't do that. Well, how about we list some examples of games that have done it poorly? I'm sure people can think of good examples like Metal Gear Solid 5, Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption. These are all things you can kind of just go fuck off, do what you want and come back. Yeah.
00:41:07
Speaker
I think, so those are some interesting examples. I think most of those are kind of like,
00:41:17
Speaker
Kind of like Waypoint or point of interest based games. Metal Gear Solid 5 is what I'm thinking of in particular. There's only a few maps in the open world that really stood out as super interesting to me. And they were usually kind of separated off. And the rest of it was sort of Far Cry-ish. And then you're just like clearing out posts. But the game was so good that that felt fine, right? Like that was still really fun.
00:41:45
Speaker
So there's definitely different ways you could implement it. On this list, I could mention Conan Exiles, which I played a little bit. What did Conan Exiles do wrong? Because I did not play that one. As far as, well, part of this is like Rust. It's a competitive multiplayer survival crafting experience.
00:42:12
Speaker
Which I've yet to see Actually work like I don't know how you implement that in a way that feels good for all of the players and I don't think that they've reached that because you can literally summon gods to completely wipe out enemy bases and Like the 15 or 20 seconds or however long they're around But you know like
00:42:41
Speaker
I guess as far as the open world is concerned, it was pretty basic when I played it. It was mostly sand, sand and red rock. A couple oases, you know, cool build around that, I guess. Some novelty and that you could like build stairs and structures up the side of pillars and things like that. And you could choose to build pretty much wherever you wanted, which is nice.
00:43:07
Speaker
It was held back by the early access part of it. This may never reach the aspirations we had at the start of development. I think that at least fits thematically of this is a desert-based game. It makes sense that it wouldn't necessarily be a lot of structures.
00:43:31
Speaker
But it feels so weird from a gameplay perspective to be like, all right, the next thing's I'm just going to hold in W for a bit. You just have to wait until you find something else. Yeah, there is a fair amount of that. I'll say I haven't played it in a while. I played it mostly when it launched. And it's a game I wouldn't mind revisiting with a group of friends if it was on sale.
00:43:57
Speaker
But it still, as far as I know, in early access, it's like, when do these games get finished? And it definitely doesn't have the same open world appeal of something like Breath of the Wild or like Subnautica, where it's just part, like a major push in the game is figuring out what's around that next corner. Yeah, and that that's the way I prefer it.
00:44:27
Speaker
I feel like in general, it's easier to implement open world for a single player than for multiplayer because it's a much more curated experience. Right. Whereas with multiplayer, you have to be like, well, we have to allow players to build bases wherever the fuck and interact. And so you give them more of a wide swath. Right. Versus in single player can say this is your game world. It's big. You can still do whatever the fuck you want, but
00:44:57
Speaker
their limitations. Yeah, one of the games on the list, I think it's kind of emblematic of what you just mentioned, because green hell, like we played in multiplayer. Comical game. Yeah. But
00:45:17
Speaker
part of the like it had a relatively curated map with a couple like points of interest most of it's jungle desert with some rivers jungle desert now tropical desert with some rivers um no tropical jungle with some rivers i was just gonna let you go yeah i'll get there any uh random generation algorithm we'll get there eventually right
00:45:44
Speaker
But the game wanted you and single player in as far as the story was concerned to go all over the place. But that was constrained by the survival crafting parts of it, where it wants you to like build shelter, be safe from these enemy attacks, like gather supplies, establish your base. This is something that I think that comes up a lot in these games is
00:46:12
Speaker
you need to balance incentivizing people building and exploring. Because once you set up camp somewhere, it's hard to say, all right, guys, fuck that base. Let's go over here now. I spent three days on the structure of this giant golden penis. It looks really cool and detailed.
00:46:36
Speaker
Yeah, because you can't really just migrate your base in any of these. Yeah, it's explicitly bad in green hell. I went through and I played the single player after doing multiplayer, and the game really wants you to be mobile through the campaign. But at the same time, they implemented base building, which is the antithesis.
00:47:02
Speaker
Yeah. Unless you have like a personal teleporter, that's not going to work. Another sin of green hell I thought was everything looked so samey.
00:47:13
Speaker
Like again, it was a fucking jungle. So it's trees out the wazoo. So even when we were trying to find each other initially, I think it took me an hour of complaining on Discord saying, where are you guys? Describe your exact location. I was just like a fucking idiot. We're down the river. Like I'm at a river. Describe your local wildlife. It was
00:47:40
Speaker
There's a hundred percent that. So yeah, if you have like copy pasta things, there's no notable landmarks. It's harder to obviously find out where you are. And then to have interesting points or to say, Hey, as a gamer, I want to go explore over here and check that shit out. Yeah. You're just like, I mean, it's, it's trees either way. I'll just slap mud on my, my wounds. Right.
Crafting in Games: Enhancing or Detracting?
00:48:08
Speaker
Yeah, that was, it also had the, uh, the meter management issue of the leeches. Like throughout the entire game, you were, you were ripping off leeches. And did it ever really matter or was it just something that interrupted the gameplay? It was pretty much something that interrupted the gameplay, right? Yeah. Like.
00:48:29
Speaker
I will say it was, at least from that aspect, it was cool to look at different body parts and tilt it and be like, where the fuck is this leech? But then with multiplayer, someone could just go up, mash E and rip all the leeches off your body.
00:48:47
Speaker
Like we would just form a little triangle of monkeys picking bugs out of each other's fur. You're clean, you're clean, you're good. You could argue that's multiplayer engagement in some way. Maybe that's a better way to do it. I liked the wound tending system and things like that, which was very similar to the Leech system, but was purely reactive. And I think that's one of the big differences for some of these games.
00:49:13
Speaker
Like you need an incentive to go out and do what you're trying to do. So is there anything? I'm sorry. Let's say we haven't focused as much on crafting. That's true.
00:49:29
Speaker
So I don't think crafting of itself is an innately bad thing. I like crafting a lot of games because it allows me to express myself creatively. But at the same time, a lot of it can for some games be fairly samey and it might not have functionality.
00:49:52
Speaker
Like in the sense of Minecraft, I can like digging a hole, make a cool base. It's functional because I can question myself for mobs and enemies. It can be a place to store my goods and I can make it look cool. So it's also aesthetic, but still functional. Whereas I felt like the stuff in green hell was again, not the shit on this game or raft. Like it does have function.
00:50:17
Speaker
but it seems like a lot more work to build and craft.
00:50:25
Speaker
Well, I think part of that is because, again, the game didn't actually want you to use the crafting systems to the extent they were implemented. They kind of just felt like they had to. I feel like this is my guess of what the developer's intent was, but I feel like some of that base building was added as a community request because the community wanted this to be a Horseman game. They wanted that crafting component, excuse me, in their base building and
00:50:55
Speaker
their survival game. Whereas like, you know, none of that was strictly necessary. Right. But I'm asking more of what is your thoughts on your thoughts on crafting in general? How do you like it to be implemented?
00:51:11
Speaker
I guess in general, it's pretty much a support system for most games, right? So Dead Space has crafting. Like Dead Space 2 and 3, I think, have weapon modification crafting and things like that. Technically, they can have the crafting tag. I don't know if that would be one of the prominent ones, but it could.
00:51:33
Speaker
But in that game, the crafting works really well. It supports the overall pace of the game. It feels like you're getting good upgrades or you're working towards something.
00:51:44
Speaker
I think crafting, I appreciate in games where it enhances the pace and the pacing and progression of the game, as opposed to restrict mandatory with little reward for something like Raft. What would be a good example of that then? My thought is going to be something like,
00:52:08
Speaker
not base building, but Last of Us, where you get resources, you kind of slap some stuff together. You kind of have to choose where it goes, whether you want like a shiv or a bottle rocket or a land mine. Like you have your versatility of what you actually want it to be. But it is things you can just kind of collect in the environment, slap together for functionality.
00:52:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's enhanced and Last of Us also because it's like part of a scarcity economy too. You don't have that many resources, so where you put things matters. If you have a really tough fight, you can be completely depleted of resources like before the next fight. And it feels more stressful when you've got no options going up against that boss or whatever.
00:52:57
Speaker
I think I appreciate it most of the time when it's implemented as a well-balanced support system.
Effective Crafting Systems
00:53:05
Speaker
It's harder for me to pick one of these games and be like, crap, this game would be better without crafting, right? Like pretty much anything I have on the list here. All right, so my question still stands.
00:53:19
Speaker
Do you have a good example of this? Can you say just it's a good support system? I'm not sure what that translates to.
00:53:29
Speaker
Um, so I guess, so we could talk about like the forest for a little bit, I guess, which is similar to a better green hell is probably the most concise way to put it. And this came up with a green hell upset a lot. We're like green hell bad forest. Good. Yeah. Um, but the crafting system and the forest.
00:53:51
Speaker
was largely about getting either potent temporary boosts, like wrapping your weapon with something that will light it on fire, or long-term significant boosts, armor, building your base, diminishing need on your stupid meters by having water storage and things like that.
00:54:16
Speaker
Any time I went out and I chopped down a bunch of logs in the forest and brought them back, I felt like I was accomplishing something. And that's what I like crafting to be. Okay, so the crafting is going to facilitate other pieces of the game. Yes, exactly. Gotcha.
00:54:38
Speaker
So if it makes your survival more manageable, awesome. If it makes mechanics a little bit less sharp in some of the penalties, because you've got negative consequences mitigated by having a wall before the cannibals run at you, for instance, it feels good to be prepared for that and to actually have a payoff for what you're doing in the game. Okay, I like that description of it the best because it's not specific to
00:55:09
Speaker
the kind of slap things together of Last of Us or something that is strictly base building. Because your needs might vary. Right. When I made a Diamond Jay on top of my house in Minecraft, it wasn't strictly necessary from a survival perspective, but from a bling perspective, it was very necessary. So that still qualifies as necessary.
00:55:36
Speaker
What's the Jstone for? Jake and Dave's podcast. I was really just expecting you to pull something out that was less wholesome and kiss-assy.
00:55:54
Speaker
Yeah. I thought it'd be like, just stop asking me these questions. Jesus. Jesus. That's what it stands for. There you go. Yeah. I could have put a cross up there. Probably would have been a little more direct, but you know, that's fine. Um, I'm trying to think of a game that I'm really enjoying the crafting of. Huh. Uh, everything in Path of Exile, I would say is kind of crafty, but it's more,
00:56:21
Speaker
RNG, the gym combinations. I would, I would classify those as crafting your crafting company, even if it's not like inputs consumed. True. Um, you're, you're creating an end product. That's pretty cool. In-game customization for, yeah, I'd count that. Yeah.
00:56:45
Speaker
Like I didn't define the parameters before talking on the set. What this means for me. This is a journey of discovery for us every every episode. Man, some of these I feel like the really good ones.
00:57:04
Speaker
the good ones being games that we've covered as previous episodes are typically the exemplary ones. Otherwise, we've made it pretty obvious that we shit on it. Again, going back to Green Hill or Raft.
00:57:22
Speaker
I was just going to give a shout out to a friend of the show, Starforge, which I have screenshots in here for things I took from Steam. One of them was, there's no recent activity from the developers of this title or from your friends. And the other was a top community guide for how to remove it from your Steam library.
00:57:42
Speaker
Because it's not for sale anymore. And there's literally videos on YouTube documenting its fall to complete inaccessibility. And it just has all the negative things. It's a game I wish we could have covered when it still existed, because the vitriol that would have spewed forth could have sustained us for decades. But, you know, it was not to be. Just live off the hate if you'd be like, yeah, fuck Star Wars.
00:58:10
Speaker
Yeah, pretty much. She's unfortunate because it shares the name of a MacGuffin in Knights of the Old Republic. But that's a reference for a very specific subset of listeners. If you're one of the listeners, please write in, let us know. So I guess what?
00:58:38
Speaker
Having categorized what we liked and what we disliked about this, has this turned you off of looking forward to these types
Future Game Design: Avoiding Pitfalls
00:58:52
Speaker
of games? We've talked about Grounded recently, which is another one of these. How would you hope that Grounded could learn from some of these missteps or some of these actual improvements?
00:59:07
Speaker
to make it so we'll actually pick it up when it goes on sale some day. I know that one's a tough one. I know. It's like a paragraph. I want to like it. I want to be on board with it. I would say ideally if it could not be janky, that's one of the things with a lot of earlier access games. Yeah. If it could not be janky.
00:59:39
Speaker
If it didn't have shit, literally just for the sake of it. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Whether that be samey outpost type things or some tedious mechanic.
00:59:55
Speaker
Like I've seen like a little bit of gameplay on YouTube of like some once players. And it seems like the map is actually, it's laid out like you're in a backyard. Right. So it seems like it is a static map. Obviously still fairly big because you're shrunk down. Right. But it seems like there is going to be a story that interconnects everything. The forest had a story and we gave it positive marks for that.
01:00:24
Speaker
Yeah. Like obviously you can just get on and play with your friends, but it's nice to have an overall objective because let's say we were to play something like seven days to die. The objective is defend self from zombie attack. Right. To cut off three letters from the title of the game is basically the objective.
01:00:45
Speaker
Seven days to hang out with my pals. Whereas the forest was to explore, find out what's going on, and then it can actually lead you into an end game. It was really cool when I accidentally fell down a hole and discovered there was a fucking plot that I didn't know. That was really cool. You had your fall broken by a stack of papers. The story? Chapter three.
01:01:17
Speaker
I guess mainly those things. These are just comments based on what little I've seen so far. I still would try it out on sale, but I'm expecting it to cover a lot of the same ground as other games in that space.
01:01:38
Speaker
I'm a glutton for punishment and an obsidian fan, so for multiple angles I'm probably going to pick this one up. I really hope that they have a crafting system that has good vertical progression. There's incentives to do it and they reward the overall pace of gameplay.
01:01:58
Speaker
Um, and there's, uh, fun experiences with friends, things like that, having challenging gameplay that requires people to work together. Awesome. I don't see that enough. Usually in these types of games, you can kind of run off and accomplish things on your own. And then your friends log in later and you're like, I beat the game. They're like, I like to have fun stories with people to look back on versus remember that time that they were T posing across the river? Yeah. Cool.
01:02:28
Speaker
There was a comment I read once that was talking about how multiplayer could make bad games much more manageable. And someone was like, yeah, because rolling the ball back and forth and the back alley is fun if you're doing it with your friends. You could do anything with friends and make it fun. And I want to see more games in this space, emphasize that social aspect, I think.
01:02:55
Speaker
Hmm, maybe you could have like a specific class based. Yeah, which would force some cooperation. Yeah, it's one of the things not to go back to Seven Days to Die, but it's one of the ways we played the game originally that led to a sense of community as we focused on different things. Have one person go minor, one person go science, one person go explorer, one person be a chicken farmer, chicken farmer, actually. Yeah, it's an essential role.
01:03:30
Speaker
Those are my thoughts on it and hopes for the future, hopes and dreams. But what are your thoughts to your listeners? Yeah. We'd love to have your input and discussion on one of the two mediums that we always broadcast, that being the Soap Zone podcast at gmail.com, where you can email us privately before we sell that to the cloud. As always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.
01:03:49
Speaker
What's that noise? Oh no.
01:03:58
Speaker
Took.com slash soap some podcast where I post things, which is mainly a link to the audio boom. Um, and occasionally we'll add a witty comment and very even more less occasionally we'll post other things as well. This is the contract. This is the way check out those things as always. We'll see you in the next one.
01:05:34
Speaker
you