What Did We Play Yesterday?

I reached a point in No Man's Sky where I got randomly attacked and decided I'd find out what the cold, sweet embrace of death feels like, and I have to say starting over with a bit more knowledge of how the game works has increased my enjoyment. I understand now that there's no point in fiddling around with base stuff until I find a Quality Planet to build on. Quality meaning, Not Actively Trying to Kill Me With Temperature Extremes/Radiation/Toxicity.

As someone who plays a fair amount of exploratory games, I'm acutely aware of how samey everything is. I remember this game advertised having 4 quintillion planets or something, and (cue prescription drug commercial voice) I think this is a really good demonstration of if, and when, procedural generation is right for you. Starbound has a dozen?ish? designed biomes that are randomly utilized in procedurally generated planets, resulting in a cohesion that isn't really present here. The developer has to decide when randomization is a real value add. I'm... not really convinced it is here.

Exploration is fun, but a lot of it is roaming geographically uninteresting planetary surfaces (and the roaming itself is limited, because the planet IS trying to kill me) and finding cool caves full of lush planty stuff and observing small packs of animals that exhibit basic behaviors, but so far none of these planets have things like standing liquid (in spite of having rain? maybe I missed it) or significant forests. They are all various flavors of tundra sprinkled with alien flora and caves.

Having played several hours, my assessment is that No Man's Sky still isn't quite where it needs to be, and I am starting to better appreciate how aggravated players were at launch. Multiplayer isn't a thing yet. I can see other player's ships, but cannot see or interact with the players themselves in any way, which makes the game seem strangely lonely and isolating in a way that surely was not intended. The story is bog standard science-fiction so far, down to the narrator's somewhat coded descriptions of the other races of people they encounter.

The more involved pace of space travel ended up working for me, and it's not too hard to make sure you fuel up properly before you depart a planet, but it's not yet clear to me why I care about the economy or selling things or buying things. There is a large in-game instruction manual which I haven't read because why would I read that that explains how to make money and presumably why one would want to.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp recently rolled out the garden update. It's pretty cool and most of you don't care, so it's under a cut.

You have 20 plots to grow flowers, which currently can be either tulips or pansies. You have access to 4 basic seeds and you can crossbreed to create other types of seeds, and flowers can be turned into craftable items (potted plants, toy bears, shirts, chairs). You can visit your friends gardens and water and crosspollinate with their flowers, which rewards both parties with friend powder. Previously, friend powder was much harder to come by, now I have stacks of it sitting around.

Crosspollination needs some tweaking, because the results are too random and there's a small chance of failure. Since you already LOSE a grown plant, which is at least 3 hours of growth time, it doesn't make sense to double-penalize the player that way. In its current state it would take a lot of doing to get the 10 ultra-rare blue tulips needed for a potted blue tulip, much less the other craftable items. The weighting could be intentional to get players to buy flower fertilizer, in which case they wouldn't tweak it, but seeing as how they've adjusted everything else that I considered unbalanced I expect this too will be adjusted.

This update also improved rents considerably. Previously, you'd go around and talk to everyone every few hours or so because you had no idea who wanted to chat and might get 100-500 bells or 1 or 2 essence if you were lucky. Now you get a popup advising who is ready to chat, and the gifts are 500 or 2,500 bells, 5 friendship points, or a significant amount of resources (10-20 primary, 10x secondary, and a random amount of essence). Essence used to be a huge chokepoint, now it's perfectly reasonable to casually earn 20-30 essence while amenities are crafting without having to get into weird grindy stuff.

I'm going through this gaming phase I'm calling Ren Plays Legitimately Great Games and Feels Nothing where I play legitimately great games and feel nothing.

Like, I'm not gonna lie, I shed actual tears when Ori's mom-person died in Ori and the Blind Forest, and the play control is phenomenal, but damned if I can play it more than about 30 minutes before going eeeeh~~ that jump's too hard weeh weeeh and putting it down for a week/month. I have tried playing gonzo stuff (Baobabs Mausoleum Ep. 1 Ovnifagos Don't Eat Flamingos) and indie stuff (Zzzz-Zzzz-Zzzz) and retro stuff (Odallus: The Dark Call) and well-written stuff (Sunless Sea) and all of these are legitimately great or interesting games, and I have also attempted games that are not so legitimately great or interesting, and the only thing I have been able to play with any regularity is goddamn Pocket Camp, which will have (GARDENS) with actual (FLOWERS) and (CRAFTABLE CLOTHING) soon, and Fuck You Nintendo for giving me everything I ever wanted, how dare you consistently meet and/or exceed my expectations what even is this.

Anyway, I don't know what my damage is.

Then I figured well, if I'm going to flounce around and accomplish nothing I might as well install No Man's Sky cause something something and see if I can find this actual game experience, look I told you I was gonna post more I don't know what anyone expected but this is it. This is the show.

So far, No Man's Sky is my dashing, handsome self running around like an asshole destroying geological features mining ores or something and courteously walking around herds of procedurally generated critters that make odd noises and appear to only have wander behavior. They do have babies, which is nice, the babies make cute sounds. The player is given minimal supervision, which is appropriate, and I don't really have an opinion yet except the immersive-gaming-experience part of my brain appreciates the limitations for saving one's game while the only-has-scattered-pockets-of-time-to-play-games part of my brain does not. But the format, "Here you are, it's a planet maybe?, have fun!" is working for me where more structured gaming experiences currently fail.

Did you know that you can leave fruit on the ground and fruit trees will continue to produce? That's not the weird part, that's fucking awesome--21 virtual inventory slots right there.

No, the weird thing about Pocket Camp is the game's attempts to incentivize late-level grinding. Which is to say it attempts to do so very poorly in a way that is slightly incompetent. Obviously it depends on what you're here for. I'm here to collect cute clothes, hang out with cute animals and make cute furniture. Leveling in and of itself is not a draw for me.

Every animal gives you a shirt at level 7, so I am greatly incentivized to do that, and it's comparatively easy. To invite an animal to your campsite, you must then craft 4 or 5 items they want. I am incentivized to the extent that I want the furniture or like the animal--some of their requests are weird or frankly stupid, but if I like the animal I'll go ahead and do it so they can hang in my camp.

All animals have a natural cap at 10, and to increase this you have to craft amenities, which take a LOT of time and resources. There's not any practical reason to do this unless you like the amenities (admittedly some are pretty cool) or just want to level them up. After level 10 or so the animal gives you a recipe for a unique item they want you to craft, but the items are potentially weird and resource-expensive. (For instance, Beau wants a stack of campfire wood, which costs like 100-something wood or make???) After that, at level 20 you will get a... picture of the animal? To hang in your camper? Okay, so it's the AC equivalent of a figurine, but it's not a great end goal.

This week Pocket Camp has a limited time event called Host the Most where you get rewards for hosting up to four new animals. They added four new animals, which is the cool part. Some of the rewards are leaf tickets, but some are cards, which are exclusively used to get extra requests/appearances from animals--so the event is rather circular in that case. The event temporarily boosts everyone's level gains, which is good, but it also reminds you how unnecessarily grindy friendship leveling can be? I'm sort of winding down on this game until the next holiday event, zodiac, but I'm using this opportunity to get a few shirts I want.

AC:PC feels like an advertisement for the AC franchise, and it does that very well. If that's the goal, player retention isn't super important, okay. But if the goal is to make money and keep players engaged, the later-game reward setup is a strange way to go about it.