Three Things, Somewhere, Quarter 4 2027 | Extra Punctuation
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 2 окт 2024
- Support us on Patreon to get Early Access to new videos, exclusive Discord perks & more for just $2 per month ►► / the_escapist
Join our growing Discord community: / discord
Subscribe to Escapist Magazine! ►► bit.ly/Sub2Esca...
Want to see the next episode a week early? Check out www.escapistmag... for the latest episodes of your favorite shows.
---
---
The Escapist Merch Store ►►teespring.com/...
Join us on Twitch ►► / the_escapist_official
Like us on Facebook ►► / escapistmag
Follow us on Twitter ►► / escapistmag
Funny thing is, there is a kind of game where you can “go anywhere and do anything.” Table Top RPGs, the only limits really come down to your imagination and how bad of a drinking problem you are willing to give the DM
Joke's on you, many of us DMs come to the table with our drinking problems pre-installed.
The only mainstream game that comes close to the level of interaction in TTRPGs is Divinity Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate 3.
I will forever stand by that.
@@utisti4976 Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous is also kind of open.
Here's the thing, though: you still can't do anything.
Every TTRPG has rules and templates for you to use, there's still a structure applied, you don't just sit on the table and start rambling random shit out of your mouth.
DM: "congratulations you saved the ship! The big scary mercenary leader lady comes to give you your reward"
A player: "I try to sedate her"
Dm: O.o *rolls* "you fail and get shot on the spot by her armed guard"
(Thank god my friend group does one-shot sessions, because we don't have to worry about consequences)
In nearly every creative industry there’s an impression among consumers that the “idea” is the key. Anyone who’s actually tried to create knows that getting ideas is easy but enacting them is the real challenge. “Having just a vision’s no solution, everything depends on execution.” -Stephen Sondheim
Yep, idea guys get into this industry and think they can solve problems other people have already solved or don't need to solve.
I had a friend years ago who was really hyped about the idea of a "do anything" game, but when asked what he'd actually do in it I think a fuse broke in his brain.
I'll take a polished, unique experience over "anything" any day.
I think "do anything" is a bad fit for a sandbox type game, but it's a perfect ideal for an RPG. That's essentially what TTRPG is.
@@amaryllis0 true, and a mechanically strict system with a large database of options also makes me think of noita or terraria
@@amaryllis0 Well except of course in a TTRPG you only get to do whatever the person running the campaign lets you do. It's only 'ideal' if you're dead-set on ruining everyone else's fun to make your own ambitions come true. Which is why the concept of the 1-person Do Anything game is so appealing, it's all the wish fulfillment without all the broken friendships.
'But a game in which the player can do anything is a game that focuses on nothing'
- Some video game review guy
@@amaryllis0 Wasn't there that comedy skit where one of the "party members" refuses to go stop the lich & save the world and instead was just flirting with a waitress in a tavern. Which just kills the pace for everyone else and dooms them to fail.
“I fear not the man who’s made 10,000 shitty gameplay loops. I fear the man who’s made one really good game” - Bruce Lee
Man was so amazing he could see into the future and predict the industry
I'll assume you paraphrased that.
“I fear not the man who made 10,000 shitty shitty openworlds. I fear the man who’s made one shitty open world and sold it 10,000 times” - Todd Howard
I don't think that means what you think it means.
Bruce was true gamer.
Funny thing about "Everything, Everywhere, All at once" is that it focuses on one thing, from start to finish, and never deviates from it. Mending broken relationships. Either between daughter and mother, wife and husband, father and daughter, etc. The entirety of the movie, in all aspects of it's creation, on every plane of it's existence, within every moment from it's inception, it focuses on relationships.
Yeah, it's what makes the film special, it's all about finding the one thing that matters to you instead of worrying about what could've been.
I'm so glad they did a theater re-release. My first attempt to watch it on a plane was... unsuccessful.
This title had me thinking you accidentally published the video with a working title, and not the final one, but it all makes sense now
Okay, glad it wasn’t just me. Love the video and insight, 100%. But I reread that title so many times I thought I was going mad until I finally had full context.
It was a real cool plot twist I think, better than most AAA shit coming out.
When I saw the title, I didn't connect it to "Everything, Everywhere at Once" at all. I assumed Yahtzee was going to take a hypothetical look at what could potentially be happening at an E3 or similar event in the future. A nice "Future of the Industry" video. I'd have liked that, but I love this too!
"It's the core gameplay loop that matters most, not abstract ideas of untapped potential."
Succinct and perfect. Good job as always, Yahtzee.
Honestly after a hards day work I want a game with some structure. Can be a open world but they can have structure.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands was my personal open world fix.
That and Warframe but the "structure" in a Warframe open world isn't easy to see until you know the mechanics.
Agreed. The Ubisoft style Jiminy Cockthroat model was fun for a while when it was new, but it quickly got stale. I've finally gotten around to playing the Dishonored games lately, and while not without their flaws, HOLY SHIT was it refreshing to play something well-structured. An insanely fun core gameplay loop, a broadly linear series of levels that individually are fairly open and contain things that actually contribute meaningfully to that core gameplay loop to make them worth exploring, and all layered with (and this was more true of the second game) an actually paced story with a narrative I could follow, background narrative well-conveyed through environment design, and even one or two characters I actually liked. Fucking wild how actually crafting an even marginally refined experience yields a better game than all but a tiny handful of the huge open world sandbox games I've ever played.
I think Minecraft was successful because the survival gameplay gave the game juuust enough structure to feel like an actual game instead of an aimless sandbox.
"Build anything" wouldn't be as compelling if there wasn't the threat of monsters.
@@pokemnfan1 Disagree, as there are people who devote themselves to the pursuit of building and design (and sometimes coding,) who never step foot into the survival aspect of the game
There is a reason for "the Dad Game", such as ETS2 or Farming Simulator 22, or Elite Dangerous (solo), etc., there may be an optimal method to complete, but there isn't any real losing game here, just variations of how to continue. They are often open worlds for that reason, and often without structure, because structure can lead easily to a lose scenario.
The funniest thing about this is: there’s already an entire genre of games that let you go anywhere and do anything: it’s called the tabletop RPG.
And divinity original sin 2 with its GM mode
And... life.
@@draketheduelist life is too pay to win for most gamers desires of instant gratification
Small issue with them: you have to talk to other people to do it
The other issue, as an often DM, is that it takes an incredible amount of effort to create from scratch. Turns out anticipating ‘everything’ is very hard for a single person to do, even in the theatre of the mind, let alone with the need to actually build, design and animate a thing.
This one hit home for me. A handful of years back a few old friends from my WoW days wanted to get together and make a game, and they wanted my help. They'd somehow managed to attract the attention of investors, yet when I asked what the core gameplay loop was the self-appointed project lead (aka the ideas guy) just said "A story-centric RPG with primarily a Diablo II gameplay style with elements of the original Deus Ex and original Fallouts".
Setting aside how that is a wildly ambitious and mostly nonsense concept, I ask how much they've played those games. That seemed to cause offense, which made sense when push came to shove and the answer was almost not. Long story short, I got out within a few weeks of that shitshow reeling me in but a lot of the other volunteers on the project didn't, despite running into the same issues.
I guess the lesson is that charismatic lunatics will launch as many catchy buzzwords as they can at you to get either your money or your labour, without even the faintest shred of a plan in sight, and a lot of people fall for that like you address in the video.
After watching the video and reading some of the comments here, I think this is probably some sort of dreamer vs. craftsman sorta thing.
The dreamer, usually an individual not yet versed in the process of developing games, is all about ambition, all about the potential that evaded all the other games. They're full of ideas, not realizing they haven't taken into account why those games haven't been made yet. Reality hasn't slapped them in the face enough to make them realize they're way over their head.
The craftsman, however, has experienced successes and failures, and as such, has a proper idea of what their limits are. They're all about feasibility, scope and planning. These guys may not promise you the moon and the stars, but their ideas have an undeniable tangibility to them, either because it's something they've shown to have done before, or they just know how to explain their stuff without using grandiose language.
Writing this, I just remembered watching a comedy skit where multiple executives in a room are talking about impossible projects using impressive words and superlatives in an attempt to flaunt their wealth and vocabulary at each other, meanwhile the only actual expert in the room is panicking and declining the propositions as he's trying to reel them all back in.
I think kickstarter hype is a lot like that.
I recall playing World of Warcraft and that's still my general starting point for a do everything game. I only ever played vanilla, but that still has mining, fishing, herb gathering, and three different crafting areas. All of that was central to getting better gear in the process toward raiding. All in this secondary loop of gearing up for the primary actions. I've spent a lot of time in Elden Ring, but I don't think a specific fishing game would help. I really should start up and play the arena before the dlc drops whenever that happens
We have a go anywhere, do anything game. It's called Minecraft. Came out in 2011. I think it was pretty successful.
The problem is someone other than Mojang/Microsoft wants to make the same amount of money.
Also Roblox
still not exactly do anything. Main gameplay loops built in the game are mining, crafting, building, exploring, and fighting. Those are the gameplay loops, and they are intertwined pretty well. There are no bloated "manage a kingdom" or "marry a villager" mechanics "do anything" games seem to love showing off. Mods and your imagination don't count.
Can you move to Israel and set up a bus network for penguins in Minecraft?
@@CornishCreamtea07 regards will say "of course we can, with mods", which misses the point of the video
I’ve started to enjoy Extra Punctuation a lot more than ZP lately, it really puts things about the broader games industry into perspective with a good balance of humor and proper opinions instead of just swearing repeatedly at a single fucked up game
ZP is still great too, Extra Punctuation is just…a little bit more. Some would even say ‘Extra’
It kind of reminds me of the excitement one feels when falling in love. How in the early points you can feel obsessive and that this person is your whole world. But even if you are the type to get so revved, a healthy person eventually comes down off the initial high and realizes that their life is more than just their relationship with this one person.
that’s a pretty great comparison. every time a new game comes out promising you can “do anything”, it’s like a new relationship. the possibilities are endless. the healthy people eventually recognize that feeling as infatuation and settle into what is rather than what could be. the unhealthy ones jump hopelessly from paramour to paramour, never realizing that anyone can be anything, but everyone has to be something eventually.
That's an incredibly stupid analogy, which makes me think you do buy into the hype for these games.
@@TaeyxBlack The thing is, we can enjoy these games that try to be everything for everyone all the time, but we don't form good long-term relationships with these games. Those fires burn hot and die fast, and if that's what you want then great. We only form long-lasting relationships for games, and people, that have distinct personalities and present themselves as possessing a genuine and authentic character. People can look past appearances if character is being displayed.
@@CJusticeHappen21 yea and authentic character is hard to come by when it's "design by committee". the fruits of those sorts of organizations are often more timid. they give you the blank sheet because to actually give an opinion or perspective puts you in the vulnerable position of not having that perspective being validated or liked (read: the customers don't buy your product).
@@TaeyxBlack Same with people. If you base your personality off of what a lot of people say is good, then you'll appeal to a lot of folks but you won't engage with them personally.
As others have mentioned, TTRPGs do scratch this "do anything" itch. But your DM is basically your own personal game developer that designs much of the game in real time as a reaction to whatever you do. They are their own breed, and finding a good one is difficult. Saying "Play D&D" works if the person your talking to already has a group of friends who are interested and enthusiastic about it, and they're all willing to put up with the awkward months of learning. But if the stars don't align, you're out of luck.
I agree that most groups won’t be able to form. It usually takes a very dedicated DM to bring new players up to speed, and then keep them engaged with concepts that interest them.
If the stars do align though, it's pretty great. DMing can be stressful and difficult sometimes, but once I started running games, I never wanted to go back to being a player. Really, it's kind of hard to believe that DM is usually the job that's hard to fill.
But regardless, the right combination of players is indeed absolutely vital, and on that note I'm definitely glad I somehow stumbled into a group in sync with the adventures I wanted to create. The right players for the DM are just as important as the right DM for the players.
also doesn't help for playing solo.
I can't imagine how hard it would be for a development team to develop a game where you can "do anything". Keeping all those systems balanced, engaging, and worth pursuing sounds like the recipe for burn out. From a support perspective where do you even start when things break? A game that tries to everything ends up doing nothing well.
Lol, I know someone who did a game development degree. Everyone he met aspired to being the ideas man of a successful indie dev company and shunned any suggestion they might want to learn to code.
Been there many times. Also happens a lot when it comes to animation, everyone wants to be a writer, never the animator.
5:09
Thank you. I watch the whole "metaverse" fad and I'm absolutely gobsmacked by how such a large section of the tech industry doesn't seem to understand this.
Efficiency is EVERYTHING. We text instead of call because it's more efficient. We stream movies instead of going to the theater because it's more efficient. We use the dungeon finder instead of shouting in town because it's more efficient. Tiktok's popularity against RUclips is likely due in large part to the fact that it's more efficient to just have an algorithm show you another video instead of having to pick one out yourself.
These days I get my groceries mostly by making a list on an app that employees fill in-store, then drive over and have them load my car. The ability to virtually shop in a grocery store might be appealing if it were the only alternative to shopping in person.
"It's like handing someone a pen and stack of paper and saying 'Now you can write the novel /you/ want to read!'" Absolutely fuckin nailed it, m8.
This is a big thing in the Tabletop RPG industry. We have so very many TTRPG systems that are called "Generic" and pretend to handle anything and everything. Which means whoever runs the game as the Game Master generally has to do a lot more work or the game is a lot less generic than it pretends - usually they handle Pulp Action in various genre but not real emulation of those genres. So those that have specialized tend to have the system better handle actually making the game interesting. They have loops that are fun and engaging.
Absolutely. Another problem of the "generic" system is that, once you find a couple you like, that's kind of it. You just use those and don't need more. FATE or Cypher or Savage Worlds could run pretty much anything I'd ever need a generic system to run, so why would I want another one? Make something specific instead!
I play games to have fun, but all I can think of when I hear "do anything" is "obfuscated busywork simulator." I want to experience a good story or a tight gameplay loop, not do my digital taxes or sweep the digital floors.
That VR metaverse thing reminds me of Ready Player One. And it's funny there are still people who think that is still able to become reality
I love VR but there is no way what Facebook wants will ever be popular. Vr is only used for gaming and certain jobs and that’s probably all it will be used for
I mean, some version of it may, but there's a reason all the reasonably successful immersive 3D worlds (vr or otherwise) have been games, and not real world simulations.
You need a reason for that VR world to exist, and for you to engage with it, and standing around talking, having a meeting, or shopping are not things you need a VR world for. You can do all those things far easier in RL, or other digital formats.
Fighting dragons however, is much more their speed.
The funniest part of Ready Player One to me is how, with all the cameos on it, the ones that show up all across the film are characters from Battleborn and the game was dead before the film even came out.
Matt is emulating classic ZP humor better and better as time goes on. Don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing.
I can feel the Josh Strife Hayes in this video
with a touch of Callum Upton
Anyone who likes JSH might enjoy WickedWiz too.
KiraTV
@@chocohex5395 and KiraTV
Remember Scriblenauts? And how when given the infinite I myself would struggle to come up with anything interesting and new after 5 minutes? A little bit of focus and structure is a good thing ^_^
You can beat Scribblenauts by summoning Cthulhu at almost every single challenge.
Here's the simple reason the reason I know some people fall for them. It isn't the aspect of "do anything" so much as a very specific fantasy that you and your mates can all play one game, and work towards one goal separately. It is the mmo cycle of crafters, gatherers, and raiders. They don't really want the matrix, they want EVE, but to be in on the ground floor.
This is a result of what marketing experts would call "broad appeal." As stated, people will typically buy games in the genres that interest them, so the goal is to make a game that touches on basically every genre (at least the popular ones) just enough to trick people into thinking you're offering a worthwhile experience in that genre.
Is that why people still buy jimminy cockthroat games?
Except that the end result of "Three Things, Somewhere, Q4 2027" won't be more awards than Return of the King. Quite the opposite.
Ive always felt Indie devs are the most guilt of trying to "bite off more than they can chew" in terms of development.
It think it's a common dream friend of mine told be such idea in the early 90s. To some degree we even got something like that. Open Word Games or even MMOs do have several things in one. IN GTA you get car races, shooty parts, planes flights and mini games. You can't do many things but you can't do everything.
For the record, spore is a perfectly fine game. I wasn't around for the hype when it was coming out, I imagine it was over-hyped. It's an amazing game if you take what's there.
I was around when it came out, and it was overhyped to hell and back. And that's the problem. When something fails to live up to expectations, especially the expectations the developers themselves set for the masses to hype over, then any game that falls short of it is going to be heavily bashed. I don't even remember what we were expecting, and i never ended up playing it, but even now, hearing the title makes me winge.
Of course, being an outsider of the promises will do that. That said, all those ideas and cut content we eventually see from Spore archives really hurt. It was going to be real complex before it got simplified to heck. Especially since we pretty much lost the fish stage which should had added one of the many aspects to the game/life loop we didn't get in the end. And I did enjoy the game even post hype, but I do know somethings feels missing.
Spore was the first and only time I ever pre-ordered a game. The marketing and articles written about that game made it seem like some grand simulation of life and the universe itself.
Once everyone and myself got my hands on it, it became immediately clear that it was just 5 different okay games taped together with a (admittedly really good) character creator. Also the last "game" of the 5 was the worst but also took up 90% of your playtime.
So was Fable tbh, it was an okay game for 2003 if you're a kid with no expectations (like me). Hell, it completely blew my socks off when I first played it at like 8 years old: "you mean I can equip these boots? And they show up on my character mid-game?? Woahh"
Yeah, that's what hype will do for you. I made it a point to not expose myself to anything Cyberpunk '77 related before it came out and as a result I came away from the game underwhelmed but satisfied. Was quite a surreal feeling when I then watched a video detailing all the cut content and broken promises. Perspective truly is a magical thing.
I take your point, Yahtzee, but let's be clear about this. "Everything Everywhere All At Once" is a genuinely great movie.
And if any movie deserved that title it's that one. On your first watch, you could reasonably expect anything to happen
@SloppyDetective why don't you just watch it instead of depending on people on the internet to tell you what to think of it then?
Not really that great
@SloppyDetective Never said I was a fan. Just find it strange you're giving your opinion without watching it.
@SloppyDetective If your bar for Rick and Morty style fans is "Telling you to watch a thing before judging it" you're gonna find them everywhere.
And hype continues to be the poison that everyone seems to willingly swallow
It's a poison with addictive qualities. It feels good to be excited about something.
@@rahcollier7006 and hurts twice as much to be disappointed
@@rahcollier7006 “Hype is just one letter off from hope”
it's hype or existential dread
pick your poison
@@horstherbert35that’s a false dichotomy. What about cautious optimism? Or my go to, indifference. If something’s genuinely good, then it’ll still be talked about and praised even years later. Combine that with all the shit major game publishers pull, and there’s literally no benefit to buying games when they’re brand new other than FOMO, which I don’t care about. Exercising even just a little patience can let you see a game’s actual quality, while buying something brand new is just an unnecessary gamble that could go either way.
These types of videos are my favorites from Yhatzee as they highlight his cumulative knowledge of game design and skill as a writer to make a persuasive and convincing argument.
Like how the final joke comes full circle with the title of the EP, nice touch
I think most of us wanted this type of game and thought it would be excellent when we were teens and otherwise young and inexperienced. Experience is what dispels the notion of this being interesting, fun or achievable in reality.
We think we want this because we all have that experience in one game or another of going "this is fun, but I wish the game didn't stop me doing X or took me in Y direction instead." It takes experience and thought to realize that "this is fun" because it was designed to be fun within those borders, if they were removed it stops being fun. Sorta like going into the ini file in Skyrim and removing the world borders and expecting to find more Skyrim and not just a blank void.
Personally I sated my desire for this via modding and I think modding is the best answer to those who seek this.
Scammers, inadvertent or intentional, have always lived off of people's dreams, making people think the scammer can fulfill those dreams for money, taking the money and going away. This happens everywhere in society, politics, gambling, jobs, education, social relations, etc and won't ever go away because people want to fulfill their dreams and will forever be liable to be cheated on the way.
The game where you could genuinely go anywhere and do anything was Second Life. Tons of people sank countless hours into creating an endless amount of content.
The end result was basically a recreation of the internet. It was difficult and slow to find what you were looking for, and a huge slog to wade through all the stuff you didn't want.
Isn't that game mostly used for sex rp
@@sgtmarcusharris4260 "Now"? Like I said, basically a recreation of the internet.
I think games like kenshi and dwarf fortress are the best examples of the "do anything" game... Thats because they focus on making a world you can interact with however you want especially kenshi due to it's lack of random generation
You can interact with it however you want, provided what you want is to either whack something with a stick or run away from said thing.
“They can go anywhere in a huge, complex open world; and maybe they could be a warrior, or maybe they could be a blacksmith, or own a restaurant, or become a king or a general, and order other players around. And you’ll play in a huge, persistent, always online open world, and there’ll be player run economy, government, and law enforcement. And there’ll be crafting and vehicles and farming. You basically won’t need any other games cause it’ll have every other game in it.”
I heard about a game like that once. I heard the guy who made it threw it all together in just six days and took a nap on the seventh. It’s still kicking if you know where to look.
I was recently discussing Tears of the Kingdom on a forum, and lamenting the fact that we can apparently build vehicles in it. Obviously I'm gonna wait and actually play the game before I solidify my opinion, but it's not something I remotely associate with or want out of Zelda and so my hype is nonexistent. But as I was airing this opinion, I came across an enthusiastic discussion about the prospect of being able to build houses in each region of Hyrule, Skyrim Hearthfire style, with someone saying something along the lines of "I love doing life sim stuff in games like Animal Crossing, I'd really like it here!" And I felt simultaneous utter bafflement and complete despair.
I know tightly focused, small experiences are still around (mainly in indie circles), but I seriously miss when they were decently common, and gamers as a whole weren't so spoiled and demanding.
I think the idea of the "do anything" game appeals so much is that, at least to me, a game is the most enjoyable when it feels open-ended. When you aren't sure what gear there are to find, what abilities are there to unlock, what game systems even exist. When you have current goals, but aren't sure what all the potential goals to pursue even are. When the question isn't what you do next, it's what you want to do the most. If exploring open-ended potential is your happy place, then, at least in theory, a game where you can do anything would be the most possible fun because it would have the most open ended potential. Finally, a return to the nostalgic rush games used to have when you were young and dumb and couldn't get a pretty good measure of what a game would ever do in the first 5% of it and games felt like anything might happen.
Now in practice, as this video explains quite effectively, "do anything" games never live up to that idealized dream in cold hard reality. I've been in the jaded choir this video's preaching to for a long time now. But nonetheless, there's enough of a shred of that wide-eyed, idealistic kid who's happiest feelings were exploring a Zelda game with no realistic concept of what to actually expect still left in me to understand the allure of a game where you could do anything. Doing anything, with no end of discovery and so much content you never need to deal with the miserable escort missions, areas with instant death hazards, or the minigame you hate... Impossible or not, that remains the one true dream in my gamer heart.
I think the core of this issue comes from a conflation of freedom and agency. People think they want the freedom to do anything when really they just want the agency to do what they want. A game with a tight scope can give the player a lot of agency, but a game that tries to let you do anything often lacks the depth to actually let the player do what they really want
Watched the whole vid to figure out the meaning of the title, and, as always, never ceases to both entertain and educate.
I remember a RUclipsr talking about the flying in GTA. He said that it perfectly encapsulates the GTA experience as a whole: It’s fun, but it’s not the best. If you want a flying combat game, play a flying combat game. If you want a racing game, play a racing game. The same for third person shooters and crime sandbox games. GTA is *good* at doing those things and we play them because they’re all there in a convenient place, but they’ll never be the best at what they do. That’s fine though, you don’t want the flying to be as complicated as Flight Simulator or Ace Combat. The races aren’t supposed to be like Gran Turismo or Forza. They’re designed to be easily accessible for every player and fun, to some sort of degree.
Feel that the editor this time was really in tuned with what Yahtzee was thinking. Maybe having clear vision well communicated is a good thing!(?)
First one I remember being hyped for was Shadowbane; I was a late teen at the time and completely fell for it. I can play a Vampire? Dragon? Angel? I can do whatever I want? Setup an entire city and economy? Police PvP?
That one really helped the scales fall from my eyes and realize the realistic scope of a video game.
I remember a friend who wanted to do exactly this. His first name was James. I won’t mention his last name but it sounded like “Pierce”. James if you’re out there, I hope your game development career is going well and you didn’t fall down the AAA cesspit.
4:45 I find it hilarious Yahtzee dropped that "hardcore roleplayers" line because Outer Worlds actually fits the exact complaints of this video. It was hyped to hell and back about being a HUGE ROLEPLAYING EXPERIENCE BY THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU NEW VEGAS, where all the commercials showed a slot machine (HA HA NEW VEGAS SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR GUYZ) that kept rolling through all the different "roles" you could play in the Outer Worlds, being whomever you wanted to be!...and then the game came out and your two options were "rebel hero" and "corporate stooge", in a storyline with exactly two real endings and one joke ending.
The AI Dungeon segue does point out how perilously close we are to technology that can interpret player input to fabricate the "do anything" game of their dreams. (Or nightmares: be careful what you wish for.) But, in the meanwhile, I think we can separate a lot of wheat from the chaff by requiring they at least get a prototype up with an appropriate core gameplay loop. There's an odd correlation between "do anything" claims and people who can't even do that.
if AI game development is anything like AI art, AI games will consist of shoddily written Dark Souls clones full of racial slurs and characters with fucked up eyes and hands.
which for some will be the perfect game, but regardless.
@@boarfaceswinejaw4516 I feel like you haven't looked at AI art recently. It's gotten vastly better in just a few months. If it progresses like it has been, AI art will be the new norm. AI game development will follow a similar path. No doubt it will take longer, but it can progress all the same.
@@orbbb24
"AI art will be the new norm"
just like NFTs.
@@boarfaceswinejaw4516 GJ intentionally dropping the important part of my sentence and intentionally misquoting me. Let's try again.
"If it progresses like it has been, AI art will be the new norm."
Doesn't sound so silly with full context. Go bag ice.
@@orbbb24 joy. I love soulless creations that are products of taking other peoples work without permission. I love the risk that artists will become increasingly obsolete because people think a machine can do the job just as well as an actual person.
Developer: “In our game you can do anything!”
Me: “I can? Awesome. I want to play a game with a beginning middle and end. Now, get cracking!”
The "Everything Everywhere All At Once" comparison is even more important because that movie is a full-hearted endorsement of looking at the vastness of all possibility and choosing to be "Now, Here, Completely" with the people who matter to you. Choices are not meaningless just because alternate choices exist with outcomes that you might like better. Don't put everything on a bagel and call it a good video game. That's a recipe for utter despair and nihilism in the face of an uncaring and meaningless universe and also a recipe for a bad video game.
Killed me when star citizen was brought up, just hilarious
While I appreciate the importance of a satisfying or engaging core gameplay loop, I suspect that many developers are still afraid that players will eventually grow bored of playing their game. Consequently, a game that was initially designed to let the player do a single but very fun activity - now becomes a game that lets the player do a plethora of chores to keep them busy. That being said, I believe a game today is much easier to sell if it's truly unlike anything that's come before.
That's human nature though, no? Humans crave novelty. Nothing lasts forever and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. A game doesn't need to last thousands of hours to be a satisfying experience.
Out comes elden ring with avg player clocking 200+hrs. You can see why ER's success pissed off so many devs. Having a core engaging loop is still the most important thing. Recent successful games like hi fi rush ovef open world blockbusters like Harry Potter proves the point
There was a big scandal related to one of these games within the last year called Earth 2, and as you may have guessed it’s promise was to create a full 1/1 scale replica of the actual planet earth, and there would be a real money trading component where you paid the developers or other users for squares of in-game land (unsurprisingly, this is the only part of the “game” that actually exists.) I followed the drama around it for a while and, for lack of a nicer way to say this, the vibe I got is that people who are really into this as a concept are people who are such fucking losers in real life that their actual, literal best hope is that someone creates an alternative to real life where they can totally start over. It’s the kind of the same phenomenon with AI date bots that are unfortunately becoming a thing, they’re for people who are so incredibly unsuccessful and unhappy in real life that they need alternatives to real experiences and people in order to feel fulfilled.
I feel like you gotta give star citizen credit for its honesty at least. Most of these projects hide the game away just promising backers that it exists and will eventually come out. Star citizen however is quite happy to let you download their latest buggy mess and dont mind at all when you go online and tell them how shit it is. They at least have some perseverance
No, star citizen is the worst of them all. It keeps adding flashy stuff and and new ships to sell instead of making any meaningful progress. It's never coming out.
Honesty in Star Citizen the game that at this point honestly needs to have in criminal investigation for fraud
@@addex1236 I believe there actually was one investigation already made into them. Not a criminal investigation, but a fraud investigation nonetheless.
And while they didn't find it to be fraud because a game really was being made, they did find a staggering amount of wasted money, micromanagement, and changing scope which all contribute to the mess that it currently is.
@@dracosolis7956 weirdly enough that only makes more convinced that I'm right like I get that's irrational but honestly it feels like its so close to being fraud that the only reasons it's not being treated as such because they're are technically still working the project which is true but that's so paper thin like the fraud equivalent of coming into a restaurant at 8:59 and saying the sign says 9:00 like with as much of others people money they've spent with no real release date in sight if this was a traditional funded product I feel like the SEC would have all ready been involved
@@addex1236 Oh, I'm in full agreement there. While it might not be "technically fraud," it's certainly not a project I want to support precisely because of all this shit around it.
It might not be a straight-up scam, but that's not saying much. xD
I saw Celeste come up at the start of the “indie games people actually care about” segment, and was briefly worried he had another “actually good anime” situation on our hands.
Seems he warmed up on Celeste
Pretty odd, since that game wasn't that good
@@jimmyjohnjoejr To each his own.
got really giddy on that title drop
For months, I've assumed the title was referring to a bunch of predictions Yahtzee had for the future.
Nope. Just a decently clever joke referencing the video's point
Be careful Yahtzee. You must not anger the Star Citizen fan boys.😂😂😂
My younger brother was so hyped for No Man's Sky and I was just like "okay so you can visit infinite planets. That's cool, but what do you DO?"
as i always say: "don't hate the supply, hate the demand".
they make this shit because enough cretins fall for it and buy it.
PLEASE continue calling out the consumer!!
Mad respect to everyone at the escapist!
Option 1: Try to do everything and be bad at all of it. Stand out for being garbage or never even getting that far.
Option 2: Do a few things really well. Stand out for offering a polished, distinct, and focused experience.
Crowd: OOH OOH! OPTION 1!!!!
Wait is matt's name literally laughin? that's amazing
I completely agree with the points made in this video about the unrealistic expectations and hype surrounding "do anything" games. It's important for developers and players to focus on creating and enjoying games that excel in specific areas rather than trying to create an all-encompassing experience that ultimately falls short.
As a side note, I had an interesting experience playing a form of Dungeons and Dragons using GPT-4, which in many ways can be considered a "do anything" game. Surprisingly, when I asked the AI to let me jump to the moon, it denied my request. This was unusual, as ChatGPT often tends to please users even if it defies logic. This incident demonstrated that even in a game with seemingly limitless possibilities, boundaries and limitations can lead to a more enjoyable and coherent experience. So, while the concept of "do anything" games might be appealing, focusing on well-crafted and specialized experiences is ultimately more rewarding.
Ehh, I think Yatz is forgetting that there are beloved games more or less let you go anywhere and do anything. EVE Online is the first to come to mind. But good do-anything games have three things going for them:
1) Limits on the player, so you have to get creative
2) Consequences, so your choices still matter, and
3) A fully authored world to do things in, which gives you decisions to make and reasons to make them.
Technology used to limit the scope of virtual worlds, but between better hardware and procedural generation, making big worlds with lots of interactivity isn't impossible anymore. The limiting factor now is custom content. Procedural worlds aren't infinitely replayable like we once hoped, although they're slowly getting better. Theoretically infinite content doesn't mean infinite replayability when the rules which govern content generation are finite and easy to learn. The limiting factor now is the man-hours it takes to continuously flesh out a world.
Very interesting topic for a video, well organized and presented. Thank you.
"I really feel like this has happened enough times that we should all be immune[...]", dude, people still fall for phishing e-mails/phonecalls and kidnapp-datings despite being all over the news almost every week, what makes you think the gaming community, of all things, would be any smarter? ._.
Feel like I want to partly blame big high level 3D game dev tools that advertise themselves as letting you build a 3d character in a 3d in 5 mins.
Gives a false sense of how easy it is to make things and encourages a 'do anything' game.
I'm trying to make a game in python and takes bloody ages to just make menus work. Pain, but keeps you targets very very low! :)
Of all the game concepts I've come up with, "do anything" has not been one of them. That said, the idea I have for a monster catcher probably comes closest since you can go fishing and have your creature participate in fashion shows. Even so, each activity serves a purpose to the overall narrative. I do wish Yahtzee would be into making a game like that. I'd call it Hothumon.
Do anything? I like the idea as a concept and world view, but I don't think it could really be done in a game. There is an anime Log Horizon where people get transported into an MMO's new update thing and are now living the whole game. There is this moment where the main characters finally leave the safety of the starting town to go on a big expedition to another starting town and they find themselves in a never before seen area. They stop for a moment and gaze at this sunrise overlooking a valley that didn't exist in the previous game and talk about how they are the first people to ever see this.
That concept that you get to see something breathtaking for the first time in some crazy new world full of wonders and mysteries sounds awesome. Double awesome if we could somehow full dive and really experience the sensations of it all too. It's just not going to happen in our world anytime soon, or maybe ever. So what does get promised always sounds like some nifty idea that is wayyyy too good to be true.
I love yahtzee video games because if I close my eyes and plug my ears, they are about everything i can imagine.
Really worth my money
When I was a child I was obsessed with the idea of the "do anything" game, and GTA San Andreas was the first time that notion was challenged. Sure the game world was massive and there were tons of things to do in it. But none of it was very deep. The movement wasn't as satisfying as Prince of Persia; the shooting not as good as Timesplitters. It was a buffet of lesser gameplay elements. That realization sort of changed my attitude toward the "do anything" mega game
EVE Online is kinda like these "Do Anything" games. They definitely have the player run economy and government down. You can participate at any level from mining materials, to constructing things, to being a speculative trader on popular goods.
Even EVE knows its limits though - despite the cool player-driven economy it's still one based around a fairly constrained number of interlocking systems (the aforementioned mine, trade, build, fight, etc). Turns out you can get a lot of complexity from that! But it still took a fairly large team of experienced developers a long time to accomplish. Also, the impressively functional player-driven economy is very impressive and interesting, but it comes at a very obvious cost to the core gameplay loops, which are much less fun (subjectively, according to most) than games which don't have to care about balancing an intricate economy on top of 'is this part fun?'. The game is mainly worth playing for people who find economics and diplomacy fun in themselves - people who just want to mine and build are better off playing minecraft.
Hell I think games like team fortress 2 is a FPS version of "Do anything" with the mods and communities.
yes and there's a reason why eve online's playerbase is almost exclusively american gen X whales with more money than braincells
Except you can only truly do anything _inside_ of the game's boundaries. That's what Yahtzee meant with the fundamental misunderstanding bit, from what I could tell. There are no games where you can truly do anything (start a bus service in isreal for penguins) because that's not how games work.
My thoughts exactly, and also what I was trying to explain many times to people who fundamentally misunderstand D&D. It's not unique to video games, it's just a lot easier to do in TTRPGs, and a bit harder for laymen to notice it's broken
Couldn't agree more - even with the games I love, there are multiple systems that are extraneous to what I actually like about the game. For example, when Mass Effect 3 came out and there was the massive pushback about the ending, I found myself really liking the game because I was engaged with the third person combat, skill combinations, party-based tactics, and over-arching narrative. Sure, I was disappointed by the ending, but the journey to get there was still a blast.
It was right around that time that open world games were gaining more and more traction, and soon it became this "go anywhere, make your own fun" style of game, and I've always thought "but I really like these handcrafted set pieces from games like Mass Effect, Uncharted, and others". So I find myself more and more turned off by my own options - like Yahtzee said, I'm paralyzed by choice. I'd rather be taken for a ride than have to carve my own amusement park.
Early Sea of Thieves fell into this trap I think. The water physics are really cool and you can be the captain of your own ship! Awesome, sounds great!
What do you do with said ship...?
Apparently visit a bunch of samey generic islands to kill samey generic skeletons for loot that you give to 3 guys to increase a number associated with each guy. Also we peddle cosmetics.
SoT has improved over the years but periodically I'll still load into the game and be like "Now what?"
I've been following Star Citizen for years (haven't invested a cent) and it is very interesting look into game development. At least they will have a staff that will have no problem finding work elsewhere. Seriously, the people that do the level architecture and the ship design are amazing. They did figure out some time ago that people actually need something to do in their game.. so it actually has something that resembles a scope.
I do hope they manage to pull it off though and as technology advances this type of game will be easier and easier to make. Though I have no doubt that Star Citizen regrets not going Unreal for their project xD
AI will soon also play a major role in game development. Recently Microsoft Office got an AI assistent that is likely going to get 90% of people that most work with office fired over the next year because it does all the heavy and time consuming work. I see no reason why similar tools couldn't exist for a game engine.
AI bots especially in open world RPG's are going to be an interesting experience once they get to the point you can't really tell them apart from a human player.
And they'll be pretty funny before they get good.
Been playing SC for a few years now, and I have had a great deal of fun playing it, just hopping in with a few friends and seeing what would be cool to go see and do. One of the big drawbacks, as mentioned in the video actually, is stability. It's painful. The other is waiting for new major patches that add content, it is extremely painful.
How much are you being paid to bot for Star Citizen cause I think it's clear with the exception of the whales most people don't care about Star Citizen like most people have accepted it's a scam and moved on
This reminds me of a reddit post from years ago about someone who was "making" a "science-based MMO about dragons". That sounds contradictory but hey it does get your attention. The poster had done...some concept art for the dragons. That's it. How was the rest of the MMO supposed to be made? Who knows!
Apparently Peter Moluneax would always be intoxicated at events like E3, so that's why he'd just sorta run his mouth and promise the world lol. The story behind Fable's development is really fascinating tbh
With AI getting so advanced now. I wouldn't put out a do anything space game coming out in 2027 made in most part by an AI game developer.
"Everywhere" and "Anything" are such perfect fudge-titles. They are the ultimate excuse for the devs to NEVER show anything off. After all, how can you demonstrate literally "Everywhere" - an unbounded notion, an infinity? - before it's actually finished? Which it never, *ever* will be.
Funny thing is, what they really want to make is an immersive sim.
Much agreed. This is the maximalist variant of the central challenge of game design - building rollercoasters with invisible rails. Players want to believe they have total freedom and all this magnificent adventure is happening to them because they are innately amazing, but if you were to give them total freedom the illusion would instantly fall apart, leaving them pushing their roller coaster car across a flat plain, pretending it's fun.
I get the impression that a lot of the people who have these ideas in their heads play games a lot, but have next to zero experience with actually making them. I've played games my entire life, and I've taken classes where they teach you to make *very* basic games, and I can tell you that playing games and creating games are two completely different animals. Even making an extremely simple game takes a couple of hours. Making a game as described in this video would be basically impossible, and the people who have those desires haven't even the slightest inkling as to the scope of that problem.
I liked it a lot better before I realized there was a makitable incentive for people to make these things. But now I realize idiots are paying for these snorefests to be built. I just assumed the money came from busses lones and life savings...
I think we ought to mention Rodina, the indie passion project to create "Daggerfall in space!" complete with four full-size planets to explore.
One guy has been working on that game more or less continuously for _at least eleven years_ . Most recent update was in February: there is now a system for increasing your stats!
I feel that the “best” ‘do anything’ game would be of all things Space Station 13. Where you can do nearly anything, but there is an objective, you and everyone else has a job. Your job is to prevent or cause the stations inevitable destruction. It’s limitless int what you can do but I can guarantee you won’t play it because the UI and Controls are so fucking horrendous that it makes Valkyria Chronicles look streamlined. However you can: *Get revived from death three times, Reenact the Thing, Claim the cargo area as it’s own country, Turn your friend into a Pizza, Start an Orgy, Summon a dark god through sacrifice and finally learn what happens when you put an infinite bag of holding in another bag of holding.* however again the game is an absolute nightmare to play because A: it’s being run on an engine old enough to not only drink but drive and own a rifle in some states. B: The Servers can’t handle most people so it’ll probably result in the server having 300 ping when the 70th player joins. And finally C: the games controls are so convoluted that I and every other autistic man child has put the hotkeys to muscle memory.
On player driven economies, you need not look further than EVE Online. They fucking nailed that shit better than anyone else ever has and a lot of people enjoy it. There's also a lot of people who don't enjoy it because it means somewhere, someone is going to have to do something terribly menial and track it in a spreadsheet. This is a requirement if you want your economy to be interesting enough for people to drive it. It's a great idea in theory _and_ in practice, but it's not going to exclude a large market segment.
I say this as someone who dipped their toe into EVE (meaning ~60 hours) and just couldn't get into it enough. More experienced players will probably have a very different take.
I was sucked in years ago and had two accounts running on a laptop and a desktop. The shitty desktop was for sitting in a major station trading goods in the multi-millions and contracting people to ship orders for me, and the laptop (which could run the game better suprisingly) was a pirate to fuck around with by funneling money to them via the first account.
It was a fun fever dream that one day I'll go back to. Those years old accounts are like Scrooge McDuck going back to a vault he left untouched for generations.
When you get down to it, games are about the things you can't do and how you get around those limitations, it's the definition of challenge and the idea you can do anything means you don't have anything to overcome outside of imposing silly challenges on yourself. Like how Jurassic World at a point had a gun that when pointed at a person, causes a dinosaur to go and kill them, but you could just have a regular gun and shoot the fucker.
Ha, I knew the title had to be a reference to Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
6:21 Correction: Hi-Fi Rush isn’t an indie game, it was made by Bethesda/Tango Gameworks
Oh ho, but what about dwarf fortress? where you can almost do anything albeit in a very unrefined medium
The final punchline wrapping around to being the title was perfect.
To quote The Stanley's Parable "Raphael trailer" sarcastically talking about a theoretical game where one could do "LITERALLY ANYTHING":
"In this scenario the player has just infused a bicycle with the soul of with the soul of his great-great-uncle Hermophules. From this point he may use Hermopules' ethereal presence to detect nearby mineral deposits, or perhaps he might train the bicycle in the art of undoing temporal paradoxes. Ah, it seems the player has has chosen to use the haunted bicycle to deceive townsfolk as a part of his snake oil salesman ruse. How bold."
As someone who used to be REALLY into Elite Dangerous... I even question the "Everywhere" part. Practically anywhere you go is the exact same as everywhere else!
Does your star system of choice have a planet with rings, a black market, and a place to pay off fines only one jump away? Congratulations, that's all you need for doing combat.
Does your star system have one of those Rare Goods, with another system the appropriate length away that also has Rare Goods? Congratulations, that's all you need for trading.
Seriously, there's only so many times I can steal the kills of the space cops in a planetary ring, or run the Laave Cluster Rare Trade Goods Route, or just pick a random direction and spend like 7 evenings scanning planets for money, especially given how SLOW ship advancement is, which limits the stuff you can do. It's the main reason I dropped the game. :s
After months of work, I unlocked what was apparently considered one of the best mid-tier combat ships, the Vulture, and kitted it out with all the fixings... Only to discover that it was realistically speaking only marginally better than my Viper, which was already quite good at killing pirates with the help of the space cops. I STILL couldn't comfortably go hunting for random pirates on my own, and hilariously, my best combat experiences were still had by using my trade ship that had a miniature Fighter bay! x_x
The concept of "Go Anywhere, Do Anything" fundamentally can't be a game. That's a framework, a simulation - see something like Second Life. Games are rules, objectives, challenges, etc. A GADA is a deck of cards. You can play a game with a deck of cards, but handing someone a deck of cards isn't a game.
3:57 I am not. "Go anywhere, do anything" sounds interesting until you think about it. I'm not even a game developer and even I can recognize that logistically such a game project is.... shall we say, unrealistic. Like look at the average Bethesda game (good, non-exploitative Bethesda game) and how infamous it is for bugs. It's buggy because the game has so many moving parts that don't always neatly fit together. Now try and imagine that on the scale these "Go anywhere" projects are going for, it'd be a nightmare to fit all the various moving parts together. And then there's the issue of well "go anywhere, do anything"? Like what? Give me an objective.
Starsector at first glance seems like you can 'do anything and go anywhere', but the gameplay loops involved are so well done that it's hard to get bored of it. Start a game, fly around, then mine shit/hunt shit/trade shit/build shit to your heart's content. And, best of all, you can break all of it!
Sat bomb Chico
ALWAYS SAT BOMB CHICO
@@williamwhitehouse8741 Ain't that the truth.
Weird to hear Yahtzee mention Star Citizen. Yeah, the development is slow, and the cash-flow-to-progress ratio is at the least dubious. Still, I have a hard time ditching the game. The honest biggest issue with the game is stability: since it's "alpha" everything is left pretty unstable (especially with the most recent update, holy shit) because why polish a system that isn't in its final form? Beyond stability, the actual systems in place are impressive and make for a really fun game, especially for somebody like me who loves smaller details in games. Still, the people who buy multi-hundred dollar ships right now have to be insane.
You know, there's an interesting point here to be made about abstraction. In the medium of text, you really can do anything: "the blue polar bear transformed into a stoplight." There, see? Trivial. But imagine trying to put that in a play, or a movie, or a video game. In a play, you might be able to do some wibbly-wobbly special effects, and the audience will go along with it. But in a movie, you'd have to make it look convincing, and in a video game you'd have to animate every little bit of it.
So the promise isn't just "do anything," because as you said, you can "do anything" on a blank sheet of paper, too. They want to be able to do anything, and have it be incredibly life-like and realistic. They want all the physicality, and animations, and game mechanics that would go along with it. Whereas when we talk about "elegant" game design, we're talking about choosing just a couple of game mechanics, etc. and doing as much as you can with a little.
Being fair to Chris Roberts he has created 3 really good games out of SC so far, whether he'll ever be able to reassemble Humpty Dumpty into one really good game is questionable even with all the kings horses and all the kings men, but I've gotten my $100 CAD out of what I've played so far so if he flubs it I still got my money's worth.