Tomfhaines

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SUPPORT LUNARBABOON ON PATREON!

Credits

Created and Directed by: Charlie Todd
Executive Producers: Alan Aisenberg, Justin Ayers, Juan Cocuy, Andrew Soltys, and Charlie Todd
Co-Producers: Aleks Arcabascio, Katie Young

Associate Producers: Oung-Jo “OJ” Yuh, John Backstrom, Mattheau O’Brien
Production Assistants: Jamel Francis, Gene Drikman, Dan Normile, Jose Bonilla, Brook Shafer, Chris Kelly, Rochelle Rose, Jonathan Portee, Matt Marsh, Alex Augustyniak, Alex Ocansey, Shilpa Ananth
Production Manager: Isabel Lopez
Locations Manager: Kristen Mink

Director of Photography: Justin Ayers
Camera Operators: Marius Becker, Michael Crommett, Christian Mortensen, Andi Obarski, Max Skaff, Chloe Smolkin, Spencer Thielmann
Assistant Camera: Brian Ansel, Brian Hall, Goran Mrvic, Jeremy Musher, Josh Riley, Zach Rockenstyre
Still Photography: Arin Sang-urai

Production Designer: Anthony Henderson
Art Assistant: Josh Rosati
Storyboard Artist: Ed Traquino

Illustrator: Elke Reva Sudin

Production Sound Mixer: Alan Kudan
A2: Artur Szerejko

Editor: Andy Bond
Assistant Editor: Ryan Connors
Post-Production Sound Mixer: Jordan Moser

Set Fabrication: ReadySet
Lighting: The Lighting Design Group
Holiday Lighting: Mr. Holiday Lighting
Additional Camera: TV Boy
Security: Securitas
Coloring Facility: Irving Harvey

Music by: Tyler Walker

Special Thanks:
Big Screen Plaza; Olga Ryrakhovsky, Dave Scala. LTH; Charles Di Stefano, Julie Garces. Birch Family Services; Sherlan Joseph.

For our latest mission, we created a custom-built set that allowed random New Yorkers to instantly deliver a card and light up someone’s holiday. Participants were surprised as Christmas lights lit up the plaza and their message was displayed on a 30-foot wide screen above.

This project is a collaboration with Hallmark, who provided us with an assortment of Hallmark Signature Cards for the project.

Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our mission report and photos.

This mission took place in Manhattan’s Big Screen Plaza, which really was custom built for an idea like this. As its name suggests, the plaza has an enormous screen. We were able to hide our cameras in the plaza’s event space on the 2nd floor, as well as on one of their roofs and in an office building across the street.

We were able to hide microphones in our custom-built set, and we hid a camera in the table lamp, giving us the ability to see the cards as they were being written.

In our control room on the 2nd floor, we had an illustrator who was able to re-create the messages live in a close approximation of the writer’s handwriting.

Our control room on the 2nd floor.

Since the plaza doesn’t get a ton of foot traffic at night and we were shooting on a cold evening, we did a little bit of advance casting. We put out a casting notice looking for people who wanted to surprise a loved-one. The people we cast were just told they’d be writing a card that would eventually be seen publicly. This prevented people from writing anything they wanted kept private. Other than that, the people we cast didn’t know anything else about what was going to happen. The people they were surprising were completely in the dark. We also had several couples throughout the night who just stumbled upon the table and decided to do it. The video is a mix a both types of couples.

It was awesome watching the moment people realized their card was going up on the big screen. It’s hard to really capture the size of the screen in photos and videos, but it looks enormous when you’re standing where our set was.

It was heartwarming to read all of the messages people wrote to each other.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this one, and thanks again to Hallmark for supporting Improv Everywhere and partnering with us on this idea!

Mission Accomplished.

 

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Production photos from photographer Arin Sang-urai (photo credit for all photos on this page).

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Maybe you’re wondering why I spent so much time with this game. Shamus, if you hate the game so much then why not just play something else?

I love procedural worlds. I mean, obviously. I love expansive exploration. The only reason I stopped playing Skyrim was because I’d basically exhausted the world and had too many of the dungeons memorized. It took me years to kick my Minecraft habit, and all it would take is one good modpack to get me to relapse.

No Man’s Sky provides more explorable space than any other game. There’s tons of variety. I enjoy seeing what’s over the next rise, on the next world, and in the next system. If the gameplay could have been upgraded from “aggressively disappointing” to simply “kinda dull” I’d have been able to enjoy it for months.

Meet Donny

*FART NOISES*

Let’s say you’re playing one of those tabletop games that NERDS like so much. The setting is great. You’re really happy with your character. The story is pretty interesting so far. There’s lots of laughing and fun around the table. Everything is great except…

Except for Donny.

Donny is a jackass. He’s loud, abrasive, argumentative, and entitled. He eats more than everyone else, he never chips in for food, and he’s always knocking things over and spilling stuff on the game pieces. He starts fights when he’s bored, which is whenever his character isn’t the center of attention. A couple of girls used to be part of the group, but they left because Donny was such a creep towards them. He throws tantrums when the dice don’t go his way and he watches YouTube videos on his phone at full volume when other characters are having an intense conversation that doesn’t involve him.

Sure, you can ask, “Why are you still going to this group if Donny ruins everything? Why not do something else with your Friday nights?” That’s a fair question. Although a more incisive question would be, “Who the fuck keeps inviting Donny and why can’t we get rid of him?“

Yes, I can quit playing No Man’s Sky. In fact, I’ve done so. (I was wrapping up my time with the game just as this series started.) But it’s tragic. Yes, quitting the game solves the problem of being annoyed by the game, but a better solution would have been for the game to stop being so annoying. There are things I love about No Man’s Sky. There are things many people love about No Man’s Sky. Everyone loves exploring these worlds. But like I said last week, the game is engineered to create disappointment.

But not everything is bad. After three weeks of constant negativity, it’s time for me to be positive. Or at least try to. Look, I’m not making any promises, I’m just saying I’ll try to be nice. The updates did manage to get a few things right and I want to list them here in the interest of encouraging more of this sort of thing.

Survival Mode

If the atmosphere is so thick (or the gravity so weak) that these butterfly-cows can hover on such tiny wings, then I imagine they could just as easily fly without the wings.

In normal gameplay mode, your survival is basically a foregone conclusion. It’s very hard to get killed and the game does very little to push back against mistakes. In survival mode, this is no longer the case. Every single planet will try to kill you in some way. If the weather isn’t deadly, then the robotic sentinels will attack you on sight and hound you relentlessly across the surface. You’ll consume resources at an accelerated rate, meaning your shield against toxins / radiation / hot / cold will crumble quickly in extreme environments. Worst of all, the accelerated resource consumption means you must constantly be looking for more stuff just to keep from dropping dead.

Now, this sounds like it would be a horrible mix with the restricted inventory system, but it’s actually an improvement on what we had before. See, in normal mode all of your goals are long-term. You were always looking to the horizon, to the next big upgrade. And like I said last week, most of these were eventually disappointments. But survival provides you with much more immediate goals.

I don’t have enough fuel to take off. I see some plutonium about half a kilometer from here. If I can get out there without melting in this acid rain and without getting ganked by any of the bloodthirsty dino-possums and raptor dogs, I should be able to take off and escape this hellhole.

I think it’s a bit like The Long Dark. Intense at first, but after a few hours of running in place and facing the same hazards again and again, it gets to be monotonous. I don’t know that this is the ideal game style for the No Man’s Sky planetary procgen engine. But it is a viable game with mechanics and a proper gameplay loop.

Space Combat

Pirates leave red trails, space police leave blue. Here a couple of pirates are about to pick a fight with something way above their weight class.

You might remember that at launch space combat was so pointless, broken, and frustrating that I dedicated an entire column to the problems. Those are mostly fixed now. You can run from fights. You can communicate with pirates and pay a ransom to avoid being attacked. The shooting feels a little better and there are a variety of weapons for you to try. When there’s a large-scale engagement outside of a space station you can tell what the sides are and who you’re shooting at. It’s much easier to see and pick up the “loot” dropped by other ships. The AI pirates no longer slam comically into the freighters they’re supposed to be shooting at.

The AI is designed to focus on putting on a good show rather than trying to win. AI pilots do almost no damage to each other. They just fly in loops and generate lots of Star Wars style pew-pew lasers to make the battle look impressive. The two sides will be stuck in this stalemate until you weigh in. Your ship is the only one that can really deal (or receive) fatal damage. This means you can have a space battle nearby that generates lots of fireworks and makes for a good show, or you can jump in and join one side or the other.

It’s not going to be mistaken for a deep-sim space combat game. It’s still pretty shallow, but it looks good and the game is clear about what’s going on and what the stakes are. A lot of work has gone into fixing this, and it shows.

Call Your Ship

In survival mode, you REALLY want to try to park your ship at a landing pad. Taking off from the ground eats a ton of fuel and you`re not going to want to do it unless you have to.

In the original No Man’s Sky, you’d jump out of your spaceship, walk half a mile, then realize you needed to turn back because your pockets were full. So then you had to turn around and hike back over the ground you’d already covered. Not only was your adventure over before it got started, but you spent half your time looking at the same patch of land.

Now you can summon your ship to your position. This costs fuel, so it’s not something to be done casually. But still, it cuts out the worst bits of exploration and lets you focus on the less worse bits.

In survival, having your ship take off is really expensive, so having it waste a launch to come to your position is something you’re going to avoid unless you’re in a really tight spot. Which makes sense, since all the environmental dangers would be nullified if you could just leave whenever you wanted to. Also, once you reach the mid-game you’ll be able to carry enough fuel to splurge on decadent luxuries like doing the occasional ship-summon. This is one of the too-rare bits of the game where it feels like you’re making progress.

Quests

Uh, this guy is not a Korvax. On the other hand, all of these text boxes are useless noise to be clicked through as quickly as possible, so I doubt most people noticed.

The game now has quests. On a space station you’ll find an agent with job listings. Kill X pirates. Kill X predatory animals. Kill X sentinel robots. Retrieve an item. Travel to a remote outpost in this solar system and repair the machine. It’s all pretty shallow, but it works as a way of giving you something else to do while hunting for the rare resource you need to build your next upgrade.

In Skyrim, you’re often accomplishing multiple things at once. I’m clearing out this bandit camp as part of a quest, but at the same time I’m also earning XP towards leveling up my skills and I’m winning the favor of the local Jarl so he’ll sell me a house and I’m collecting crafting materials I’ll need later and I’m gathering loot to sell for money and I’m looking for books to complete my collection and I’m hunting for rare knickknacks^[4] to complete some other quest. The various mechanics work together and all of them encourage me to engage with the main gameplay loop of looting and leveling.

In No Man’s Sky, far too many of the mechanics work against each other and – aside from learning alien languages – they’re all in conflict with the stupid inventory. But the quest system finally gives us something that has a little bit of synergy with the gameplay loop. Many of the quest types simply encourage you to do the stuff you’re already going to be doing: Land on a planet, harvest some stuff, and shoot anything that tries to stop you. It’s not enough to make No Man’s Sky as engrossing as Skyrim, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Surprisingly, the quest system hasn’t been designed for maximum inconvenience. I realize this comes off as obnoxious snark, but “inconvenience” is such a huge part of the design of the game that this really is unexpected. You can take a job in one system. (Say, destroy 10 sentinel robots.) Then you can do the job at your leisure along your travels as you move from one system to the next. Then you can turn in the quest in whatever system you like.

Base Building

Yes, I deliberately scouted around for a spot where I`d have an enormous planet on the horizon. None of the planets in NMS sky spin or orbit, and the upside is that it`s easy to stage shots like this one.

Like I said in earlier entries, the base building is pretty good. It’s a lot like Fallout 4, in that you build your home from modular parts that snap together like a habitrail^[5]. It’s really easy to make something attractive and functional, and it makes for a good alternate activity when you want a break from planet-hopping.

The game allows you to jump back to your home planet from any space station, which keeps it fun and easy and helps solidify the gameplay loop of collecting treasure and hauling it home.

Base building is not perfect. Basic things take a lot of materials, which means they take up a lot of inventory space, which means you’ll spend a lot of time fussing with containers.

On the upside, windows make your base look fantastic. On the downside, the game seems to leverage this to make you work to obtain them. In our universe, glass is made from very cheap stuff, but in the universe of No Man’s Sky windows can only be constructed using huge volumes of magical ice crystals.

As a warning: The game promises you that you can move your base whenever you like, and that you’ll get “most” of your building materials back. This is a lie. You get half, rounded down. If an item required 5 rare things to construct, you’ll get back 2. I guess in the NMS universe, 40% qualifies as “most”. Anyway, make sure you really want to move your base, because it’s a lot more expensive than the game lets on. This penalty also applies when tearing down an item to re-locate it within your existing base, so don’t get click-happy and misplace that landing pad or trade kiosk or you’ll be setting yourself up for some expensive grinding to correct your mistake^[6].

Building your base is tied to an annoying linear questline, and the game withholds a few important building pieces until you’ve progressed through a lot of it. This means they won’t be available until you’re basically done building the place. Given the penalty for deleting stuff, this is pretty obnoxious. You can’t build the base you want until you’ve finished building the compromised version you had to settle for because the game wouldn’t give you access to all the parts.

I’d suggest starting a game in creative mode (another great addition in these updates) where building is free, and using that to plan out your base before you attempt to do it for “real”.

Yes, there’s a lot wrong with the building mechanics. But there’s a good idea under the hassle and plenty of room for it to be refined.

Atlas Quest

*Rolls eyes, makes jerk-off motion*

The Atlas Quest is much improved. Previously you made a journey from one Atlas station to the next, and at each station you’d be given an “Atlas Stone”. At the end of the journey you’d turn in the 10 stones you collected and get whatever passed for a conclusion. The Atlas stones didn’t stack, so the further you got in this quest the more it exacerbated the inventory problems that made the game such a chore to play.

In the update, the Atlas gives out “Atlas Seed” recipes instead of stones. The recipes actually form a chain, so that each new item requires the previous Atlas seed as a crafting ingredient, along with a measure of some element. These elements get rarer as the quest goes on. What you end up with is this mystery orb that you add to after each visit, using the materials you gather along your journey.

It’s far from perfect. The big problem is that one of the steps requires some material only found around blue stars, which means you must complete Polo’s entire “questline” before you can obtain it. Perversely, this isn’t the final step. Step #7 requires stuff that you can only obtain with the final tier (tier 3) warp reactor, but the next 2 steps require stuff from tier 2 stars, and the final step requires stuff you can get literally anywhere. I can’t imagine why these requirements are so backwards. Again, it feels like someone was just throwing things together randomly and not thinking about how the player was supposed to progress through the game.

Also, I think the Atlas Quest is still broken. Or maybe it’s just confusing. Sometimes I’d arrive at an Atlas interface and not get any text. Nothing would happen. I’d get a blank screen, leave, and it would give me the location of the next Atlas station anyway. This game is such a pile of random broken stuff it’s tough to tell the difference between when it’s malfunctioning and when it’s just being really coy.

Um, LINE? Isn`t there supposed to be some text here or something?

The ending seems to be broken as well. The final Atlas Seed is called “Heart of The Sun”. The interface indicates you’re inserting this thing into a machine to get the ending, but then when it’s over I’ve still got it in my inventory. Some players report getting a certain reward item for completing the quest, but I never got that. The game told me the quest was complete and the Atlas stuff was removed from my quest log, but I didn’t “get” anything. I’m not saying I should have, I’m just saying I can’t tell if it’s broken or if this is the intended behavior.

A lot of people faulted the game for telling its “story” through nothing but text boxes. No animated characters. No voice acting. No lip sync. No cutscenes. No branching outcomes. I’m not going to complain about that, but I will say that if you’re falling back to 1985 technology for your storytelling then you ought to be able to make it work without the whole thing glitching out or breaking, particularly a year after release.

I realize this post is supposed to be about “Good Things”, but here we have a good thing wrapped in a bunch of bad (or at least questionable) things. I’m doing what I can to be nice, but I’m not going to pretend I didn’t notice all of these problems. My point is that I like the idea of building up an Atlas seed using elements gathered along your journey, thus creating a link between the Atlas quest and the planet exploration gameplay. It’s a solid design choice, even if it’s weirdly structured and possibly bugged.

The Music is Really Good

Did they add more music in one of the updates? It seems like I got more musical variety this time. I dunno. For such a long game, I’m pretty impressed at how rarely I found myself thinking, “Oh, this track again?”

Okay. We’re done talking about No Man’s Sky. Probably for good. Onward.

There is a very distinct rhythm to playing No Man’s Sky. It’s been a part of the game since launch, and even after an entire year of updates it still holds true: No Man’s Sky is a disappointment engine. I don’t just mean the game was a disappointment when it came out. I mean the game seems to have been designed to create a series of frustrating let-downs as you adventure across the galaxy.

Problem: Find some shortcoming or annoyance in the game. Usually, but not always, this annoyance stems from the inventory system.

Solution: Maybe you think of it on your own, or maybe you check the wiki, but you find a possible solution for the problem. You realize that the solution is going to be a long, frustrating, unrewarding grind. But you do it anyway, in the hopes that you’ll be able to have more fun once the task is over.

Disappointment: Once you’ve completed your goal, you realize the reward is incredibly underwhelming, not worth the effort, and doesn’t even fix the original problem.

There are a lot of these moments in the game. I can’t enumerate them all. But let’s look at a few that really got to me…

Black Holes

If it wasn`t for disappointment, I wouldn`t have any appointments. - TMBG

Problem: So you’re done with the main story and now you want to fly to the galactic core, which is the “real” ending inasmuch as that’s when the credits roll. You figure it would be neat to reach the point where so many players have converged, visited systems, named planets, and so on. However, you notice you’re more than 600,000 light years from the core. You can cover about 2,500 in a single jump, which means 240 individual jumps. Each jump consumes 1 warp fuel.

Let’s say you want to do this the optimal way and just grind for fuel. (For the purposes of this discussion, “grind” in this case means doing the same task for a long time with no intermediate rewards like level-ups, gear upgrades, costume unlocks, major scenery changes, new enemy types, story beats, companion romances, new Bat-gadgets, or whatever it is your other games give out to keep you interested.) If you’re looking to do this in bulk then:

1. You land on a relatively calm planet and round up all the nearby Carbon, Plutonium, Heridium, Zinc, and Thaumium9 you can find. (Thaumium9 will probably be the limiting factor here.)
2. Once your inventory and cargo hold are full, get back to the ship and start crafting stacks of warp fuel. Because the interface was designed by a madman, you can’t just craft them directly. You have to craft a suspension fluid, then craft that into electron vapor, then craft that into antimatter, then craft that into warp fuel.
3. Now you’ve got a few stacks of warp fuel and some free inventory. Go back out and do it again and again until you have about 48 stacks of warp fuel.

Remember that while all of this is going on you’re still fighting off sentinels, fending off wildlife, spending some of the gathered resources to charge your suit, taking shelter from storms, and otherwise doing what you need to do to get by. I’m going to make a ballpark guess and say that under these optimal batch-processing circumstances, the total time it takes to gather the materials, craft the fuel, and plot a single jump on the galaxy map^[10] is five minutes^[11]. So to do our 240 jumps will take twenty solid hours of uninterrupted travel. Maybe I’m off by a factor of two in either direction, but you get the idea.

That’s a long task. You’ll probably start looking for a shortcut.

Just a little closer and we can begin the hurting.

Solution: Find a black hole. Nada can direct you to one. Or you can find them yourself after completing the Atlas quest. A single trip through a black hole can fling you 300,000 light years!

Disappointment: It flings you 300,000 light years, but not 300,000 light years towards your goal. Most of the travel is lateral. You only move a tiny bit closer to the center. For my most recent playthrough I did four different black holes, and they consistently moved me about 10,000 towards the center of the galaxy. That saves me about five jumps worth of progress.

But five jumps is still a shortcut, right?

Not even close. Going through a black hole breaks your ship. Several parts (chosen supposedly at random but it always seems to target my super-expensive drive system) will break. It will require exotic resources to repair the parts. The more upgraded your ship, the more the repairs will cost you.

Sure, it might take five minutes to gather up a small pile of common resources for a single jump. But how long will it take to gather a large pile of several different resources, all of which are exotic, and which incidentally will all come from different planets^[12]? And of course planets with exotic resources are generally more difficult than the paradise playgrounds where you might gather warp fuel.

A black hole might save you a few jumps, but depending on how the dice treat you it could incur hours of opportunity cost. It’s not remotely worth it. Instead, it feels like a cruel prank from a game designer who wants to punish you for attempting to circumvent the grind.

Landing Pad

On the right is MY ship, stuck halfway through a wall and blocking my main entrance. On the left is a rando alien, and his ship is blocking my secondary entrance.

I’ve built my base, which is a new thing you can do now. The building interface is pretty good. The bits snap in place and the game always seems to know where I’m trying to put something. It compares very favorably to Bethesda’s unwieldy, unpredictable, and unhelpful base-building interface.

Problem: When you teleport back to your base from a space station, the game brings your spaceship with you. However, it doesn’t know where to park your ship. So it just guesses at where would be a good spot. In my experiments I’ve had a total of five different bases^[13]. All of them used different layouts in different locations, and without fail the game has always placed my ship somewhere obnoxious. It usually ends up parked behind my base, stuck halfway through a wall so the wing reaches inside and blocks an important corridor.

So whenever I get back home, I always have to walk outside and manually re-position my ship. Aside from being annoying and inconvenient, it costs resources to do this. So sometimes I get home from adventuring and have to run around outside to gather up resources so I can move my ship so I can walk around inside my base.

Solution: It turns out you can build a landing pad! Wonderful. Obviously the game will park my ship on the landing pad once I’ve constructed it. Not only will it be out of my way, but it should also look cool. The downside is that the landing pad is stupidly expensive. It requires some exotic resources and it takes me a couple of hours to track them all down.

Disappointment: The moment I build my landing pad, an alien craft swoops down from the sky and parks in my spot. I just spent two hours building this parking spot for myself, only to have a useless NPC steal it. I should add that this NPC has no business at my base. There’s no reason for an alien to land here. This is my private base and not a trading hub. I assume this is just the default behavior of the game: If an NPC flies over a landing pad, it will land there and hang around for two minutes. That’s good for making a starport look busy, but I don’t need my base to look like a busy starport. I need to get my spaceship out of the wall.

I can’t boot the guy, either. I just have to wait for him to leave. Once he clears out, I move my ship to the pad before someone else steals my parking spot again.

Then I teleport away. The next time I teleport home, my ship is once again parked in the weeds and an alien is in my expensive parking spot.

Storage Container

I tried to color-code the containers to make organization easier. But there are more than five of some colored items and less than five of others, so it didn`t really work.

Problem: Inventory Space is way too tight. My pockets are always full. I’ve got six units of some obscure resource taking up an entire slot. Should I dump it? Will I wish I had it later? I’m sick of Alt-Tabbing away from the game to check the stupid wiki^[14] every time my pockets are full just to see if I can afford to throw something out.

Solution: Along with base building, the game has added storage containers. You’ve got to do quite a bit of messing around before you’re allowed to build a container. You’ve got to recruit people, do their quests, and gather resources, even if all you want is a stupid box to put your shit in.

Disappointment: You know how in Fallout 4, you could walk up to your workbench and instantly unload the materials you’d collected and get back to the adventure? And you know how the building interface could automatically draw from storage while you were building? No Man’s Sky doesn’t do this. Instead, the entire storage system has been designed for maximum hassle. Each eight-meter cubic vault holds a measly five items. You can build ten vaults. You need to HOLD a button for a couple of seconds to open a vault.

You can’t hold very much in your pockets, and building consumes a lot of resources, so you’re constantly shuffling back and forth, putting things away and getting them out again.

I wanted these containers so I could do LESS inventory juggling, you obnoxious ass of a game.

Extra Bonus Disappointment: Ten storage containers times fives slots equals fifty unique items. There are a lot more than fifty different items and materials in this game. So you’re still going to have items you can’t store, particularly once you get into the late-game planets and their new resources.

Farming

On a planet, where exotic plants are free for the taking.

Problem: It’s really hard to make money. The next meaningful upgrade to my ship is astronomically expensive. I’m seeing ships for $300 million, and after 25+ hours of gameplay I have about $30 million. I should add that income in this game doesn’t climb on an ever-increasing curve like in an RPG. Despite my steadfast greed, my income has remained pretty linear. Which means if I want ten times as much money I’d need to play ten times as long. Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but I don’t think 250 hours of mindless grinding is a fair cost to alleviate the sodding interface headaches and give myself some space.

There are some tips online for how to speed up making money. One person suggests setting up a farm to grow certain rare materials, and then using those materials to craft a rare resource^[15].

Solution: In the new version you can recruit a farmer to your base. This is a game mechanic that allows you to grow resources in your base instead of going out and hunting them down. So I recruit a farmer. He gives me a series of quests. Each quest teaches you how to grow a particular plant that yields a particular resource. The resource itself is an ingredient in the plant, so you can’t grow something until you find it in the wild. I’m kind of wondering what I need the farmer for if I’m just re-growing stuff I’ve already found. Maybe growing it in your base is really really fast?

Disappointment: So he’ll send you out to gather Frost Crystals. Once you find some, you can plant a Frost Crystal plant. Now, if you’ve found some that means you’ve been to a planet with Frost Crystals all over the place. If you really need Frost Crystals then the most efficient way to get them is to run around on this planet and gather them yourself. But instead you must sink some of your already-gathered resource into planting. Then you wait for the plant to mature. This can take anywhere from 20 minutes to two and a half hours of real time depending on the plant. Once the plant matures, you return to the farmer and give him your first harvest as proof that you grew the plant.

Dude, you`re not a farmer. I`M the farmer. You`re just a freeloader.

Which means the farmer is worse than useless. He doesn’t help you get more Frost Crystals. He simply creates a short-term drain on them. It will take a couple of hours for your farm to simply yield enough to replace what you spent doing the quest, and longer still to turn a “profit”.

Worse, your farm needs supervision. Once a plant matures, it stops producing until you come by to harvest it.

Also, the high-tech space-planter needs to periodically be re-powered^[16] with generic energy resources because I guess in my hi-tech space base I can’t plug the stupid thing into a wall outlet? The harvesting and power-ups happen at different intervals, so you need to return to your base often to fiddle with your plants so they can continue to dribble out their pathetic yield. I can’t help but wonder if someone at Hello Games had to run outside every hour and put change in the parking meter. After a couple of days they started thinking, “This is so fun! I should add this experience to my videogame!”

He doesn’t plant crops. He doesn’t harvest crops. He doesn’t take care of crops. So what is this idiot farmer for?

The game won’t let you build this farming stuff without him, but he doesn’t actually do anything! He sits at this desk all day, literally staring at your plants and not taking care of them. He can’t pick a few Frost Crystals and dump them in a bin for me? I can’t give him a tub of carbon to shove into the machine once an hour to keep it running?

Just to keep it awful, his quests appear in a particular order. So if you’re just really eager to grow some Gamma Root, then you have to put in the hours and hours required to obtain, grow, and harvest all of the plants that come before Gamma Root in the quest chain, whether you care about them or not. Since this is an open-universe sandbox game where you can’t be guaranteed to encounter stuff in a particular order, it means your entire farming questline can end up bottlenecked by one elusive resource. And in the meantime you’ll probably be stockpiling all the plants you suspect you’ll need later. Yeah. Have fun speculating and storing even more inventory.

Extra Bonus Disappointment: This actually doesn’t really solve the money problem. People claim it does. “Once you have the entire farm up and running, you can make a million credits every 15 minutes!” The problem is that it takes many hours to get your farm to such a high level of production, and “A million dollars every fifteen minutes” isn’t all that fast when you’re trying to save a hundred million. And besides, hanging around your base gathering carbon and shoving it into your planters is mind-numbing. This is a game about exploring 18 quintillion planets where this supposed optimal money-making technique isn’t finding rare treasure on alien worlds, but staying home and clicking on machines like you’re playing Farmville.

I haven’t clocked it, but even a fully-expanded farm can’t be much faster than running around on a planet and picking the plants yourself. And it would need to be significantly faster to justify the long setup time and steep opportunity cost.

Trade Interface

*CLICK CLICK CLICK* Just skip the fancy interface animations and scrolling text and take me to the shop!

Problem: As I’m building my base, I sometimes need to make a run into the wilderness for more building resources. As a byproduct, I end up with my pockets full of vendor trash that I need to sell. Also, some things in the base require specialty parts. So sometimes I need to make a run to a shop in a space station to unload, and other times I need to make a trip for specialty parts. Making a run to the store requires going through a long loading screen (the teleporter) then hiking from one end of the space station to the other, doing my business, then hiking back and sitting through another load screen. It’s a real killjoy to have to keep doing this while building.

Again, this dumb timesink would be less of a problem if inventory space wasn’t so tight. I know I keep bringing this up, but that’s because this problem infects every aspect of the game.

Solution: It turns out you can build a trade interface inside your base. You can’t do it until you’ve completed the quests for all of your personnel, which means you can’t make it until you’re long finished with your base and you’ve already endured the shopping headaches for hours. Still, better late than never.

As you probably expected, the trade interface is stupid expensive and represents at least an hour of resource-gathering.

Disappointment: The trade interface only allows you to sell items from your personal space, not your ship, which results in the interface shuffle I ranted about last week. Also, this trade interface doesn’t sell the specialty parts I need^[17], so I still have to make trips to the space station for those.

A New Ship

At launch, finding wrecked ships was a good way to get upgrades. Now they`re VERY hard to find, VERY unlikely to be an upgrade, and VERY expensive to restore. Some people say it`s worth it, but since changing ships is such a monumental pain in the ass I`ve become very risk-averse.

Problem: Inventory space is tight. I’d love to have a ship that can carry more. Also, the ship I’m using now looks like someone welded some quasi-aerodynamic fins to a toaster oven. Sideways. The ship I owned before this one looked like a pair of D Batteries glued to a trackball mouse. Ideally, I’d like to be able to haul more stuff in my ship, and I’d like it to look sleek rather than silly.

Solution: Getting a new ship takes a ton of grinding for money. But worse than that is the silly way you go “shopping” for ships. You have to hang around in the hangar bay of a space station. When a new ship lands, there’s no indicator of what class it is, how much it can haul, or how much it costs. To find out you have to physically walk up to the ship, initiate a conversation with the owner, click through three useless boxes of identical flavor text^[18], and then click on “offer to buy ship”. Then you can see what you’re buying and what they’re asking. And if the ship isn’t what you’re looking for? Exit the dialog and stand around in the starport with nothing to do for 20 seconds until another ship rolls in and you can try again.

I guess they don’t have Craigslist in space? No used car lots? The only way to shop for ships is to hang out in the parking lot and chat people up, clicking through the same 3 dialog boxes again and again?

Like Grand Theft Auto, the game is more likely to generate ships in the style of the one you already own. This means if you hate your current ship it will be even harder to find an attractive replacement.

This would be sort of tolerable if you were supposed to jump from ship to ship on a whim when you see something cool-looking, but this game is really punishing about changing ships. You lose a ton of value and all your upgrades during the trade-in process, so you’ll want to change ships as rarely as possible. Which means you want to buy the best ship you possibly can for your money. Given the way ships ramp up in price, you’re looking for something in a very specific point on the price range.

This would be outrageous enough if the ships were all random, but about half of them are useless starter ships. So now you’re playing a fishing game where half of the fish are useless duds. Of the other half, some will be smaller, some will be far too expensive, and a very small minority will be in the right price range.

The ships are generated by putting together random parts. This means the vast majority of them are lumpy misfits, a minority of them are acceptable, and a tiny sliver of them look cool. Given what an amazing pain in the ass it is just to find something suitable, it would take astronomically longer to find something suitable and stylish.

If 1 in 20 ships is the right size / price and 1 in 20 ships looks cool, then your odds of finding a ship that is both suitable and stylish is 1 in 400. If ships arrive every 20 seconds then you’re going to wait an average of two hours to find your perfect ship.

Disappointment: Assuming you didn’t spend two hours shopping for ships, you’ve probably got an upgrade that looks like another flying shoebox. That’s a pretty sad outcome after spending so much time and all your money. And just to rub salt in the wound, aliens evidently fly around with all of their energy systems empty. Have fun gathering up new warp fuel, fuel for the launch thruster, and fuel for the mining beam. That stuff ain’t cheap.

Extra Bonus Disappointment: Like I said, you can’t take your upgrades with you. That upgraded warp drive? The super lasers? The shield made of ultra-rare exotic resources? Gone. You can disassemble them before the trade and get half the resources back.

So now after spending all your money you’ve got a ship that’s broken, empty, and still ugly. And now you’ve got to spend an hour tracking down more of those rare resources to rebuild everything. This isn’t so much a “disappointment” as “infuriating”. Basically, you’ve paid this ridiculous price in money, fuel, and opportunity cost so you can have a slightly larger inventory space. Because EVERYTHING in this game revolves around the inventory system.

And So On

My base. I`m kinda happy with how it turned out. Too bad about literally everything else.

The game tantalizes you with locked doors for dozens of hours with no clue how to open them. Then eventually Polo gives you the key and you discover the rooms are filled with completely mundane loot, and often contain no loot at all.

The game tantalizes you with the mysterious blue star systems, but then Polo gives up the warp drive and you realize all you really got was a bunch of additional crap to store.

You make a pilgrimage to the end of the Atlas path and voyage through the mystery of a black hole, and the only reward is that a bunch of expensive equipment on your ship gets broken and you need to track down the rare resources to fix it.

You work for hours to unlock the exocraft only to find out they’re really inconvenient and expensive to deploy, they’re difficult to use on uneven terrain, their cargo capacity is minuscule, they’re impractical to use on planets where their fuel isn’t plentiful, and their mining laser is slower than the upgraded multi-tool you’ve been using.

Everything is like this. You’re constantly chasing one mirage after another, always hoping that on the next world you’ll find the magic upgrade or unlock the gizmo that unshackles you from the annoyances the game keeps throwing at you. But each reward is itself just a new way to annoy you.

Yes, eventually you do escape the inventory blues and alleviate some of the interface headaches. But by that time you’ve basically completed the game. The disappointment in this game isn’t the graphical downgrade people complained about. It’s not the bugs, the threadbare quasi-story, or the simplistic combat mechanics. The disappointment in this game is built into its DNA.

Hello Games needs an intervention. They need someone on their team (or maybe multiple someones?) that can design a set of mechanics to compliment their planetary / lifeform procgen engine.

Shamus, if this game sucks so bad then why are you still playing it?

I’ll answer that next week, as well as go over a few things that I like about the updates.

The post Surprises inside. appeared first on Indexed.

After a year of major content updates and gameplay changes, the original sins of No Man’s Sky still permeate the design. There are a lot of little problems, but if you trace the problems back to their roots you’ll see they basically all stem from a couple of really bad ideas: The Inventory System, and Polo.

Polo is certainly the less harmful of the two, but let’s discuss him first.

Seriously, Screw This Guy

I feel the need to point out that there are no windows anywhere on this space station.

Polo is one of the very few named characters in the game. He and his partner Nada appear randomly along your journey. Sometimes you’ll warp to a system and there will be an “Anomaly”, which is what the game calls Nada and Polo’s brutalist styled doom sphere / space station.

In a forum, some internet rando claimed the anomaly is scripted to appear about every two hours. I have no way to confirm that, but it feels about right.

Polo has a series of 16 challenges for you to complete. Although in typical No Man’s Sky style, the game doesn’t tell you what the challenges are, what the rewards will be, or what order they come in. You just show up and talk to Polo. He’ll comment on your journey, and if you’ve completed the latest challenge he’ll give you a reward.

This would be fine if Polo was just dispensing bonus items, but one of the things he gives out is the final tier of Warp reactor. There are four different colors of star systems in the game. In order these are Yellow, Green, Red, Blue. Each tier has new exotic resources to harvest, and each tier requires a warp drive upgrade.

The final warp drive is Polo’s very last reward for his very last challenge. The game has three different overarching goals: The Atlas Quest, the journey to the center of the galaxy, and the (newly added) Artemis storyline. I don’t know about the last one, but to finish either of the first two you will need this warp reactor. Which means Polo is effectively part of the “main quest”.

Thanks dipshit. You know my journey would have been about five thousand percent easier if you`d given this to me forty hours ago.

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^[10].

As icing on the cake, his entire design is really goofy and dissonant. He’s written like he’s this peace and love idealist who hates violence, but literally half of his 16 rewards are weapons. The story is written in this unconventional first person as narrated by the player character, and tells how the player and Polo become fast friends. It feels so disconnected from everything else and the friendship feels so unearned I found it off-putting. The game keeps telling me I’m dear friends with this unhelpful little pain in the ass. I realize that the problems with this game are so profound that complaining about ludonarrative dissonance is really petty, but it really did stand out.

So what’s wrong with Polo?

Polo is wrong.

If this was part of some labor-of-love indie project with a shoestring budget I might call Polo an “interesting experiment” and a “worthy try”. But this is a $60 AAA game^[11] and this is one of the main characters. I’m less eager to hand-wave shortcomings like this with the excuse of, “It’s an indie effort.” I’ll forgive wonky audio or amateurish lighting if I’m watching a student film on YouTube, but if I just paid $60 to take my family to the movie theater then I expect a certain level of professionalism for my money. Even ignoring the issue of presentation and production values, Polo suffers from a terminal case of needing to, “Show, don’t tell.”

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 know 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.

Right: Polo. Left: Nada. Nada is just as useless, but Nada isn`t tangled up in the late-game bottleneck. Nada and I are basically cool.

Many of his early gifts are a waste. He’s hard to find, the story doesn’t tell you he’s important, his challenges are often daunting, and his early rewards are often useless or underwhelming. It’s like the game is teaching you that this guy isn’t important and he’s not worth your time.

His reward doesn’t even make sense! The final warp reactor is obviously not a rare secret super-technology in this universe. Why can’t I just go into the parts shop and buy this warp reactor like all the other technologies in this game? It’s clear there are literally billions of people living in these blue star systems. They come and go as they please. Apparently everyone has this warp reactor but me. So why do I have to jump through all of these hoops for this strange little taskmaster?

His milestones are dissonant. Like I said, he’s written as this lifeform that cherishes life, but he rewards you with guns and his tasks require you go out of your way to shoot down other ships. Alone this is a minor problem, but with everything else it sort of adds to the sensation that the whole thing was slapped together without any thought. For example, he could have given away shields instead of guns, and his ship combat milestones could have been swapped out for any of the other non-murder ones.

Here are the various milestones in the game. Polo eventually requires you to get most of these to high level.

So the game inadvertently teaches you that Polo is a waste or that his rewards are optional and not very good, which means you might not spend time doing them. Which means you’ll run into a wall later when the game casually gives you a goal that can only be completed with a maxed-out hyperdrive. Maybe you’ll shop around for hours before giving up and looking at the wiki, only to discover you’ve got dozens of hours of Polo-grinding before you can return to the task at hand.

Polo is a microcosm of everything wrong with the overall design of No Man’s Sky. An undocumented linear progression of arbitrary tasks that bottleneck progress, glazed in a layer of earnest but sophomoric writing.

As bad as all of this is, you can deal with Polo by just keeping the Wiki open in the background and making sure you plan your activities so you don’t get stuck on any of his tasks for too long. That’s annoying, but it’s not enough to ruin the game. The task of ruining the game falls to…

The Stupid Inventory System (Again.)

This is your starting inventory. The three items in the upper-left are devices that can`t be moved. The rest of the slots are for storing stuff.

You might remember my long tirades last year about the No Man’s Sky inventory system. The inventory wasn’t just annoying, it actively inhibited the one good thing the game had going for it. But in case you missed it, here’s a quick^[12] overview…

Imagine you’re playing Skyrim or Fallout 4. You leave town, hike across an empty wilderness, and plunge into a dungeon. Halfway through looting the first room, your inventory is already full. Your first instinct is, “I’ll take what’s valuable.” Except, it’s all valuable. Every dungeon has a couple of rare resources that are hard to find. You know you’ll need them later. You can ignore them now, but ten hours from now you’ll be able to forge yourself a sweet new weapon except you’ll need the thousand units of the Unobtainium that’s currently right in front of you. You won’t be able to find this particular dungeon again. You’ll have to voyage around for three hours to find the next batch of it, and the whole time you’ll be thinking back to the thousands of units you left on the floor of this dungeon because you couldn’t carry it.

Your inability to plan for the future aside, you also really need money. Which means you need to take some of this other loot with you. But your gear (and the materials to keep you going) take up 90% of your carry capacity. So what do you do? Excavate this dungeon a spoonful at a time, running between here and town to make some trivial amount each trip? If you do that, you will spend a vast majority of your time hiking back and forth (boring) and not exploring the dungeons, which is the one thing this game does right.

This was a game about exploring and collecting resources on vast worlds where your pockets were full two minutes after leaving your spaceship.

“No problem for me! I don’t have the reflexive hoarding instinct. I’ll just ignore the loot and do the dungeon anyway. I’ll still level up.”

That might work in a Bethesda game, except in No Man’s Sky building upgrades is how you level up. Imagine doing the dungeon, except all the “loot” you’re leaving behind is actually piles of XP.

This is what made the game so maddening at launch. Almost every single system of the game tied into the inventory: Materials to build upgrades, items to sell for money, items to grind reputation with factions, quest items for the main storyline, and the half dozen or so materials needed just to fuel your suit, your tools, and your ship. They all took inventory space. It was the one thing everyone hated about the game at launch, and the one thing that needed to be fixed.

Well the designer addressed this problem, and the result is perfectly indicative of the weird-ass approach No Man’s Sky has always used with regards to game mechanics. The solution is awkward, convoluted, frustrating, and doesn’t actually solve the problem.

Originally you had two and a half inventories: Your exosuit^[13], your starship, and your multi-tool^[14]. My original complaint was that all of your upgrades used inventory slots. So if I wanted to upgrade my exosuit with a radiation shield so I can explore an irradiated world, then I need to give up one of my too-few inventory slots to do it. The same thing applied to the spaceship. To solve this, Hello Games didn’t just give us more inventory. Instead they gave us more kinds of inventory.

Now, I’m going to suggest that you NOT read this next bit. This is long and it’s not totally required to understand what’s wrong. But I’m leaving it here for the curious. If you find yourself thinking, “It can’t be as silly as Shamus is making it sound”, then come back and read this. If you’re willing to take my word for it, then just jump down to the section titled What a Mess.

An Explanation of the Five Different Kinds of Inventory, Their Sub-Inventories, How They Differ, How They’re Connected, and Holy Shit This is Already So Stupid.

When people demanded “more inventory space!” I think Hello Games misunderstood. HG seems to think that what we really wanted was more different kinds of inventory. The updates have added new inventory groups and sub-screens. Here is what they are and how they work^[15].

Exosuit

This is your inventory near the end of the game. I would say this is basically playable and would make a good STARTING inventory, and should get bigger from here.

Exosuit Cargo

Exosuit Technology

Multi-Tool

This LOOKS like an inventory screen, but you don`t keep items here. Instead this is where you install upgrades to make your gun / mining beam do more murder / mining.

Starship Cargo

This is the default inventory for your starter ship. It is MUCH too small to facilitate exploration and gathering style gameplay, which is what I ASSUMED the game is supposed to be?!?

Starship Technology

Exocraft Inventory

Storage Containers

What a Mess

This is the grid where you install upgrades to your suit. On the right, the three options are how you switch between the KINDS of personal inventory.

Suit, multi-tool, ship, exocraft, vault. That’s five different kinds of inventory^[17], three different stack sizes, multiple different ways of managing upgrades, several different behaviors when transferring items, and a couple of interface bugs. Some inventories you can’t sell from, some you can only access when you’re close to the container, some you can access at limited range in one direction and unlimited range in the other, some can’t stack items, and some share space with upgrades. You can move between the four main inventory types with the top menu but then move through the sub-inventories with a control on the side.

Let me tell you a story about this new inventory system…

The game now has quests. Some quests give you trade items as a reward. Typically you get either 3 or 5 items. These are automatically dumped into your main inventory, where they cannot stack, instead of going into your starship where they would stack nicely in groups of 5. If you don’t have enough free slots^[18] then the “extra” items vanish forever. If you’re turning in several quests at once then you need to talk to the agent by holding the interact button for 2 seconds, then click through his useless three dialog boxes of blather, then click on the completed mission, then click to get your reward. Then you have to exit the entire dialog, open your inventory, and shift all of those single items over to your starship where they will take just 1 slot instead of 5. Then you can talk to the agent again, skip his dialog again, and turn in the next quest, and so on, until all your quests are accounted for and everything is packed in your starship.

This is a preposterous amount of hassle and clicking for what should be a completely trivial transaction. I assumed these trade goods were important, because otherwise why would the developer make them such a pain? If you’re supposed to sell them for money, then why not just pay the player in money? Indeed, some quests do exactly this.

I had a vault where’ I’d stored a bunch of these trade goods, anticipating the moment in the game where they would become useful or important. Then I looked on the wiki and saw they were basically just vendor trash.

So I had a vault with five stacks of ten items. All I needed to do was get them out of storage, walk downstairs, and sell them on the galactic trade network. Here is what I had to do:

The Interface Shuffle

I`m tired of posting pictures on inventory grids, so here`s a picture of a planet I named "Willy Wonka".

Because they don’t stack in my main inventory, I couldn’t hold all 50 items from the vault at the same time. And I couldn’t just dump a single stack of 10 into my main inventory. No, I had to click on a single free space in my personal inventory, request a single item from the vault, then move to another free slot and repeat, again and again, until my inventory was full. Then I closed the vault, opened my inventory, and sent all the trade goods over to my starship so they would stack. Then I closed that and re-opened the vault (opening the vault requires you to hold the interact button for two seconds) and filled my inventory again. I did this several times, until I’d fully vacated the contents of the vault into my starship.

Then I walked downstairs to the trade interface and discovered that this trade kiosk – unlike all the other trade kiosks in the game – wouldn’t let me sell directly from my starship. So then I had to open the inventory, move a handful of items from my starship to my backpack, then open the trade interface (opening the kiosk requires you to hold the interact button for two seconds) then click through the splash text, then select “sell”, then sell those items. Then exit out of the trade interface, re-open the inventory, and transfer the next batch. I had to do that over and over again, until I’d successfully cleaned out my starship.

All told, it took me several minutes and easily over a hundred mouse clicks. I probably spent over a minute just holding down the “interact” button and waiting for the stupid interface animations to complete. All of this hassle, just to sell five stacks of items!

In a Bethesda game, you would simply take in the excess inventory and then slow-walk to the shop. It’s silly, but at least it wouldn’t require several minutes of interface shuffle. And let’s be clear, if your interface is being compared unfavorably to a Bethesda game you have made a mistake of epic proportions.

What is any of this for? What does any of this senseless bullshit and hassle add to the game? The developer heard the fanbase cry for “more inventory space” and they “obliged” them in the most insane, wrong-headed, sadistic way possible. They gave you more total space to store stuff, but then also multiplied the number of items you had to carry and made a byzantine set of rules and behaviors for dealing with it all. People wanted more inventory space because they wanted to spend less time shuffling items around and more time playing the game. So Hello Games granted their request in a literal sense while making the actual problem much worse. This is griefing disguised as game design.

Let’s go back to that first E3 reveal trailer that set the world on fire:

Did anyone watch that trailer and think it was going to be a game about sorting items, managing stack sizes, and juggling items between different storage containers? Why was inventory management given such focus? Why, after a year of updates, has it been expanded into the most complex system in the game?

The crazy thing is that the fix for the inventory problem is pretty simple. There was no need to mess around with cargo screens. All they had to do was make the inventory bigger.

Since the update I’ve played through in regular mode, and then I played in survival difficulty. After two days of slamming my head against the inventory screen in survival mode I downloaded a save editor and cheated myself the largest ship possible. The result was I was suddenly playing a completely different game. I could adventure around on a planet for more than five minutes without feeling like I was wasting my time because my inventory was full. I could gather loot, fill up, and then go back to “town” and unload. The interface was still an abomination, but at least the lack of inventory was no longer preventing me from engaging with the best parts of the game.

It wasn’t like this trivialized the game, either. Even with this massive cheat in place, NMS is still a long, long game. This didn’t let me take any major shortcuts or skip large parts of the game. All it did was cut down on the hours I spent opening my inventory to fuss with things so I could focus on the exploration.

Despite my egregious cheating, inventory space was still a bit too tight! I think what I gave myself would make for a pretty good starting inventory, with more space being added as the game progressed. But still, this massive improvement didn’t require doubling the number of inventory systems and making them all operate under slightly different rules.

It really is shocking how hard Hello Games worked to do things the wrongest and least satisfying way possible.

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