Tomfhaines

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You might remember that last week I enjoyed another round of mockery at the expense of No Man’s Sky. It’s become something of an annual-ish tradition around here. In this case, the application exhibited baffling windows behaviors that forced me to track down and edit settings files to get the thing to start.

Then in the comments of that same post, Mephane listed some mods that really improved the game.

Wait, modding NMS is a thing? I never even looked. This game is obviously using an extremely idiosyncratic custom engine and I sort of assumed that modding would be impossible. 

But as it turns out, there are lots of mods for No Man’s Sky. Sadly, this is an unfortunate time for me to revisit the game.

Mod Stratification

So let’s talk about Minecraft, which features some pretty intense mod stratification.

Minecraft has the most extensive modding community that I know of. In general, mods are tied to a specific version of the game. If you upgrade to the new version then your existing mods will all break. Maybe they’ll malfunction wildly, maybe they’ll just stop working, or (most likely) they’ll crash the game on startup.

So a new version will come out and break all the mods, and then over the next few weeks the mods will gradually be updated by the various authors to work with the new version. About half the mods won’t get updates because they’ve been abandoned by their original authors who have since moved on to other projects / have gotten jobs / have new living situations that preclude maintaining large ambitious hobby projects. New authors come in to rescue the abandoned mods and launch new projects.

What you end up with are these various strata throughout the version history. In Minecraft, versions 1.7, 1.12, and 1.14 were all popular and long-lasting versions that got a lot of mods, while the in-between versions are somewhat more spotty in terms of working mods. This system is subject to the network effect, where popular versions get more mods and thus become even more popular, while the opposite happens to unpopular versions. 

This means you need to make a choice: Do you want the version with the latest features and bug fixes but few mods, or the two-years-ago version with lots of mods that’s missing some bug fixes and quality of life improvements, or the ancient version that’s downright savage by today’s standards but has a huge number of stable ambitious mods that inter-operate gracefully?

This can be annoying, but it isn’t really anyone’s fault. This is just how things work out. 

No Mod’s Sky

It’s been less than two weeks since the Desolation update was released for No Man’s Sky, and we’re still in that chaotic post-update window where lots of mods are still broken and nobody knows which ones are going to be fixed and which ones have been abandoned. I would have waited until mid-August, but other games are coming out soon so this was a bit of a now-or-never moment for No Man’s Sky and I.

Only a few mods were available to me. One that made language acquisition about 5x faster, one that made your storage slots hold about 100 times more stuff, and one that made scanning about 10 times faster. In any other game, huge multipliers like that would represent game-breaking cheats but in No Man’s Sky this brings things into the realm of “normal”.

There was another mod that promised to eliminate the interface headache where you need to hold the E button for several seconds instead of just clicking on things, but the installation instructions were a bit complicated and it sounded like it was going to be incompatible with my other mods. I don’t know. I’m really happy with how the game feels right now and I’m reluctant to mess with it.

The Turnaround

The first year or so of NMS patches really underwhelmed me. The updates were so modest and incremental in the face of the horrendous original design that it felt like there was no real hope. The game needed a massive systemic overhaul, and instead it was getting tweaks and bonus content. In fact, some of the new features – like the proliferation of inventory screens – exacerbated the problems with the original.

But here we are. It’s been 4 years, and this game is shaping up nicely. With mods you can cure the underlying focus on inventory, and once that headache is out of the way it becomes clear that the last few updates have made massive changes to the various gameplay systems.

All of the nonsensical and inscrutable progression systems – like doing unexplained tasks for an NPC who dispenses unexplained rewards at unexplained intervals^[1] – have been replaced by intuitive systems with a clear means of progression. 

This game has a lot of systems that inter-operate. You’ve got your progression of ship upgrades. You’ve got a base you gradually build over time as you acquire new building materials. You’ve got a freighter that can serve as a mobile base of operations. You’ve got a fleet of frigates that can be expanded, leveled up, and sent out on missions for random-ish rewards. You’ve still got the familiar quests for Atlas and Artemis, and they’ve remained largely unchanged. But now they’re no longer choke points to progression. The game can be enjoyed as a huge sandbox without needing to run around and click through annoying / cringy text to get the next upgrade.

I honestly thought the game was beyond redemption, but the developers have proven me wrong. These latest updates are so much better than what came before. These changes demonstrate an understanding of systems that simply wasn’t present in the game before.

The Anomaly

I couldn’t hope to cover every improvement, but let me offer up one as an example of the system-wide changes that have been implemented.

In the original game, there was this space station called the Anomaly. It would show up completely at random every few hours. Inside were a couple of NPCs: Nada and Polo. Polo was an amalgamation of about 10 different horrible design decisions and I spent an article exploring and explaining all the things wrong with him. I highly recommend revisiting that post if you don’t remember it, but here’s an excerpt:

Each time you randomly encounter Polo, he’ll require you to have reached some milestone on your journey. Kill X spaceships, destroy X robots, save up X galactic space-bucks, survive an accumulated X hours in extreme weather conditions, scan X alien animals, learn X alien vocabulary words, etc. He presents these milestones to you, in order, whenever you stumble onto one of his outposts. You don’t know what his next challenge will be, so you can’t prepare for your next encounter. If you run into him and discover you need to invest a bunch more time to meet the next goal, then you need to continue on your journey, grind out the requisite tasks, and then wait for him to show up again.

[…]

This is a bizarre way of doling out rewards in an open-universe sandbox. “Go anywhere! Do anything! Find things that are fun for you! But in order to make progress you have to jump through these specific hoops, in this specific order.” Just… what? This is the antithesis of everything else the game is trying to do! It’s basically engineered to create frustration and bottleneck your progress on other tasks.

Polo only recognizes one achievement per visit, even if you’ve completed a bunch of them. If I’ve completed challenges 4, 5, 6, and 7 but got stuck on #3, then once I complete #3 I can’t turn in #3 through #7 all at once. I have to turn in #3, then wait a couple of hours for Polo to show up so I can turn in #4, then wait a couple more until another random encounter lets me turn in #5, and so on. And remember, you don’t have any way of knowing what’s coming (unless you read the wiki) so you’re more likely to “waste” one of these rare visits just figuring out what you need to do.

So the main progression was a series of blind rewards that could only be obtained by completing unexplained goals for an obnoxiously written character that only showed up randomly, creating a linear progression that was profoundly dissonant with the premise of the game. That was the No Man’s Sky experience in a nutshell. 

But now? Now the Anomaly is awesome. You can summon the space station at will. Inside, you find a player nexus. You can see real players coming and going like in a traditional MMO quest hub. 

Polo and Nada are still there, but now there’s a sprawling complex around them full of various types of upgrade / research terminals where you can progress through various technology trees. Things that Polo used to hand out at random^[2] are now integrated with the rest of the mechanics. You still need to work to unlock gear, but now you can see what your choices are and how to obtain them, and you can decide which areas you want to focus on. 

There are a lot of new NPCs hanging around now, and each one seems to focus on a different aspect of the game. They’re mostly a way to reward progress or nudge you to engage with different systems^[3], and they don’t require you to click through four or five screens of awful blather before they get around to telling you what you need to know^[4]. 

Maybe Give it a Try?

The whole game is filled with improvements like this. I know I’ve spent the last four years dumping on this game, but I think that the changes are large enough that I can honestly recommend it. To be fair, I did need to use a few mods to smooth out the interface headaches, so keep that in mind. You can either fuss around installing mods or you can accept that your first few hours with the game are going to be spent fussing with a ridiculously limited inventory. But if you can make it over either of those hurdles, this game has lots of cool things to see and do.

If you shelved the game years ago or if you avoided it due to the bad press, then now might be a good time to give it a[nother] chance. I know I have a reputation as a guy who complains about everything, and maybe that leads people to conclude that I’m always looking for things to complain about. But honestly, I’m happy when things are headed in the other direction. I find the No Man’s Sky redemption story to be kind of heartwarming.

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Welcome to the Shirk Report where you will find 20 funny images, 10 interesting articles and 5 entertaining videos from the last 7 days of sifting. Most images found on Reddit; articles from Digg, Kottke, WITI, Facebook, Twitter, and email; videos come from everywhere. Any suggestions? Send a note to submit@twistedsifter.com

 

20 IMAGES

– Friday!
– Photo checks out
– Me vs my problems
– Dad joke incoming
– This week in pandemic signage: one | two | three
– The light illuminated these knobs perfectly
– Me writing an email
– Offering durian fruit to cats
– This ingenious way of sorting fruits by size
– The clearness of this water
– Killed it!
– Do you have a minute to talk about the environment?
– Mask of the week!
– Her jacket looks like a tiny person
– This University laid walkways where the students naturally made paths in the grass
– Next up in our ongoing series of loos with a view
– How to make teddy bear towel art
– Weekend mood
– Weekend mood continued
– Until next week

 

10 ARTICLES

– Ask a Sane Person: Jia Tolentino on Practicing the Discipline of Hope
– The Role of Cognitive Dissonance in the Pandemic
– You’re Doomscrolling Again. Here’s How to Snap Out of It.
– Meet the company that sells your lost airplane luggage
– The 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time
– Erdogan Signs Decree Allowing Hagia Sophia to Be Used as a Mosque Again
– What Bird are You Most Like?
– Who’s Behind Wednesday’s Epic Twitter Hack?
– That Time Charlie Chaplin Almost Got Assassinated In Japan
– How Gödel’s Proof Works

 

5 VIDEOS + Bezos

 

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Back to one of my favorite natural built trails. Such an amazing flat balcony to cross from Lille to Store Vengetind here in Romsdal. • @gopro #hero8

A post shared by Kilian Jornet (@kilianjornet) on Jun 22, 2020 at 10:08am PDT

 

 

 

 

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This was on another level. (via @moregardhtruls)

A post shared by SportsCenter (@sportscenter) on Jun 16, 2020 at 10:23am PDT

 

 

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Cake: The Movie

A post shared by Daniel Spencer (@danbanbam) on Jul 13, 2020 at 4:13pm PDT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(306): 2020 sucks, I want a refund.

(206): So I tried to catch a rabbit in Terraria & accidentally blew it up with a grenade made of bees. Monty Python would be proud.

The post And the screaming just…stopped. appeared first on Indexed.

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As of tomorrow, it’ll have been eight weeks since I last ate refined sugar. This would have been “pretty impressive” during a decent year, but in the Age of Pandemic, the fact that I haven’t stress-eaten a cake a day has been nothing short of miraculous.

The big question is, how have I given up sugar for so long when I’m constantly craving a big ol’ glass of chocolate milk?

The answer: By using the Lent abstinence, compassionately, as a brain hack.

See, I believe that religion is at its most useful when it’s not merely faith, but also doubles as a brain hack to make you a more resilient, more compassionate person regardless of whether God exists or not. That’s a concept neatly stolen from Alan Moore’s thoughts on magick, where he says that casting spells isn’t really about shaping the world, but are simply a way of using patterns to rearrange your own consciousness.

Which is why for me, prayer isn’t about helping people. If I’m spending more time praying for people than I am actually helping them, then I’m failing. My days are spent calling politicians, listening to friends when I can, and donating to charity.

With that in mind, my prayer is a sort of anxiety-reducer for the large-scale things I can’t control – things like pandemics, wars, politics, and so forth. I quiet down and talk to God, trusting that He (or She, or It) has a plan – and I do genuinely believe that, but even if I didn’t, focusing on a belief that everything’s going to be okay is a meditative way of hacking my brain to get my ass to calm the hell down.

Because yeah, if I turned on the logic circuits in my brain and said, “Everything’s gonna be fine,” then my asshole brain would devise a thousand reasons why everything is spiralling out of control. But focusing on a compassionate being watching over us all – even if they’re imaginary – helps short-circuit those frantic concerns. And I need those concerns quelled, because as noted, I’ve done all I know how to do already, so stressing about the economy 24/7 will just break me down.

So I have this twinned issue: I believe, and also that belief is useful. I never assume prayer will be helpful for anyone else, because everyone should process stress in their own way. But that’s how it works for me. God is both a reality and a way to cut through the conscious levels of thought straight to the amygdala.

Which is how Lent happened to be useful.

I heard a priest discussing Lent not as a time of abnegation, but as a time of self-care. The point, said the priest, was not to grudgingly give up your favorite hobbies for six weeks; the point was that you knew what was hurting you in your life, and God wanted you to stop hurting, so why not take the time to get closer to him?

Which flipped a switch. (Or, perhaps, flipped my switchy tendencies, ha ha ha.)
I’d been dreading Lent, because six weeks of no chocolate milk? Six weeks without the nectar of life? How?!?

But that concept made me go, “You know all that sugar is hurting you. I know you can’t give it up for yourself, but what about envisioning doing it for a being who absolutely loves you and wants you to be happy?”

That… felt like a Daddy Dominant.

Which is to say that there’s a lot of BDSM relationships that aren’t predicated so much on bloody whippings and ball gags so much as “You’re not good at taking care of yourself for yourself, so let’s externalize that focus.” There’s a lot of people who take their medications because their dominant sends them a text every morning reminding them that part of their relationship is, yes, working out and taking time for themselves. You don’t take your medications for yourself, but as part of a ritual that affirms your bond for another person.

You devote yourself to another person, who in turn wants you to devote yourself.

So whenever I felt the itch for a big gloppy eclair, I thought, “If there is someone all-loving who treasures me, do I want to disappoint them by shoveling this food into my face?” And I felt them saying, “You know what’s right, don’t you?” And I let my putting the eclair aside be an act of devotion to someone else.

Basically, I hacked my brain out of an eclair. (And my brain really likes eclairs.)

And yeah, it’d be nice if I could externalize that concern to someone actual, like my daughters or my wife. (Which I have, to some extent – on the days I really want to skip a workout, I think of my daughter Erin stressing out over my heart and then I get to the weights.) But those real people have real disappointments, and if I fuck up they might yell at me – or even leave me. Whereas the God I envision might sigh a bit, but the all-loving, mysterious creator knows down to the atom precisely what a fuckup I am and still cares, so I don’t carry that extra stress of “Must be perfect in quitting sugar or I’ll be alone.”

And so it’s two weeks past Lent, and here I am, still not tucking into the boxes of Girl Scout cookies on top of the fridge.

Still. I’ll have a chocolate milk some day. This isn’t about refraining for the sake of refraining. Part of the deal with a Daddy Dom is that they know you fuck up from time to time, or even just need a break. A really compassionate Daddy Dom gives days off, understands the times when you’re so wracked you need to deviate from the routine, and will be stern but loving on the days you forget.

It is weird to think of God as my Daddy Dom. But honestly? I’m a big fan of whatever works. And if I gotta be a little closer to God to get me a little further away from diabetes, well, I’ll take it.

The post This is the plan, people: appeared first on Indexed.

We will now get down to brass tacks.

Let’s do the bad news first:

1. The ending of Mass Effect 3 offered the player three primary options for defeating the reapers: destroy, control, and synthesis. It’s not clear what the exact consequences of each choice are, but the three are mutually incompatible outcomes regardless. The effects they would have on the game world are so big that anyone trying to make a sequel would almost have to make three entire seperate games to account for the three separate game states. And that’s just the three “main” endings – trying to account for the gajillion sub-endings is most likely impossible.
2. For a series that likes to remind audiences that their choices matter, this is a tricky issue. It’s a tradition in Mass Effect to import your saves from the previous games into the new one. Reasonable or not, some people are going to expect to see their choices in the original series reflected in the new game.
3. The ending destroys the Mass Effect relays and strands multiple species on unfamiliar planets in a way that would make survival an immediate and alarming problem. This particular element has been since been half-retconned into clarifying that the relays are only “damaged,” but there would still certainly be a desperate situation in the short-term.
4. The primary antagonists of the series – the Reapers – are gone, and you’re going to have to find new ones. (By the way, don’t pull a Star Wars and just bring them back to life. Together, we can do better.)

Those are some pretty big problems. Especially the first two. If we can lick those first two, we can salvage this thing. Here’s how: stalling and retconning.

Stalling

Mass Effect 4, if it’s ever made, should be set a significant amount of time after the events of the original series. By “significant” I mean anything from 50-200 years or so, though I’m open to flexibility on the timeline. But whatever happened in the immediate aftermath of the Crucible going off should happen offscreen.

Instead, the player will be someone born on Earth after all that. Said Earth will in some kind of post-apocalyptic state, either mild, severe, or medium, depending on what tone you want. What happened to the Reapers, exactly? No one knows. They used to be flying around and blowing everything up, and now they’re not anymore. They say someone called “Shepard” defeated them somehow, but there are a hundred conflicting stories.

Stalling in this way accomplishes several things.

• You avoid a long exposition dump right at the beginning. No one likes those.^[1]
• If you write carefully, you can leave it ambiguous which ending happened. For example, don’t have any synthetic or partly-synthetic life forms enter the story for as long as you can manage.
• You can make a clean break from whichever characters you want, but it also leaves open running into Liara or maybe a getting-too-old-for-this-shit Garrus or something.
• When a setting moves forward in time, it can make it seem more real. The Fallout series did this from one to two to New Vegas. It also leaves the intervening time as open space for quest/character hooks.
• Got some crazy idea that would need fifty years to be plausible? Now you can put it in. The gap between Mass Effect 3 and the hypothetical Mass Effect 4 is your canvas. Go nuts.
• It’s a perfect excuse for whatever mechanical changes you want. Personally, I recommend deciding that thermal clips are once again not a thing, but that’s just me.
• Thanks to the events of the third game, all the setting’s various species are well represented on earth, meaning you can bring them all back. I know someone still has those old Hanar models saved somewhere.

The action of the main quest can involve sorting out the truth from the stories, and discovering what exactly happened. And, when the time comes that you can no longer write your way around which ending the player picked, you limit the effects of that choice to certain limited and manageable parts of the game.

For example, the main quest involves a mission in an area full of leftover husks. If you picked destroy, there are a bunch of husk corpses, colored red. Maybe some somehow survived and are hostile. Control, and the husks are blue, and controlled by an NPC or something. Green, and the husks are NPCs themselves. This way, the player’s choice in the previous game is acknowledged, and you don’t need to move heaven and earth to do it.

That’s a deliberately oversimplified example, but hopefully you get the idea. The question of “what did your Shepard do in the original series” can itself be transmuted into story content for the new game. That’s what stalling gets you. But stalling alone is not enough – it’s like the jab that sets up the right hand. The right hand – the knockout punch – is retconning.

Retconning

If you don’t already know, “retcon” is a term meaning “retroactive continuity.” It’s when you change something already established about the setting, like retroactively deciding that Klingons actually had forehead ridges all along.^[2] When retconning, the scalpel is preferable to the bazooka, and I mean to take a scalpel to one particular thing: the Crucible.

As a refresher, the Crucible was the giant space doodad that did in the Reapers. It was jointly designed by multiple pre-Prothean species and then the Protheans themselves, and finally built by Hackett in a Manhattan project-style massive endeavor. It’s an enormously complicated machine, built under desperate wartime conditions, and it’s not clear exactly how it works. Therefore, it’s entirely plausible that it wouldn’t quite work right.

A crucible that didn’t quite work right is a technobabble get-out-of-jail-free card. Player chose the “destroy” ending, but you want a quest that has them dealing with Geth? The Crucible didn’t quite work right. Some of the Geth are still alive, possibly changed somehow. The Crucible as presented in Mass Effect 3 is more or less space magic, so it can do anything. I don’t mean that it broke entirely. It should still mostly have done what it was supposed to do, or the player’s choices in the original series won’t be validated properly. But it’s a gajillion year-old space machine. It could easily have gone a bit on the fritz.

And so, by using our twin weapons – the fourteen-inch socket wrench of stalling and the sock-full-of-batteries of retconning – we can bludgeon Mass Effect 3‘s ending into something resembling submission long enough to have a functional main quest. Now, you might be thinking that with all the stalling and retconning, the main quest is going to suck. Well, it might – that’s always a risk. (Though in future entries we’ll try to mitigate that risk, and maybe even make it good.) But the thing is, this is Mass Effect. It can have a bad main quest and still be a good game.

In fact, that’s how it usually works out. In this genre, the “main quest” often only accounts for a about one-third of a typical playthrough, if not less. And of the three original games, only the first one had a good main quest. The second had that business with Harbinger and the human Reaper, and the third had the Crucible and, of course, the Catalyst. But the second and third games were still reviewed well and enjoyable for most of their runtime, because they had good characters and side content. That pattern even mostly held for Andromeda, which, for all its rushed qualities, still had characters that weren’t too far off the Bioware standard.

I can personally see a game like that – assuming it’s not rushed and crunched into existence – comfortably getting 8/10 reviews with the occasional 9/10, which is more or less what the original Mass Effect got. You can build a second trilogy out of that. This is a deep setting, with plenty of potential left.

What exactly does this 8.5/10 game look like? Fortunately Bioware has a reliable template for making these things, and certain parts of it still work. Next entry will wrestle our campaign hook into a five-act structure that will seem reassuringly familiar.