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I was pretty disappointment by Noita I had been looking forward to this game for years before it was released, but it ended up being quite a different game the

I was pretty disappointment by Noita I had been looking forward to this game for years before it was released, but it ended up being quite a different game then I had intuited from the trailers. I expected an environmental sandbox where you would have to combine quick thinking with the manipulation of interacting environmental elements (water + electricity, or fire + coal) to survive, similar to my favorite roguelike Brogue. When the game came out, I realized it was designed more in the style of Binding of Isaac or Risk of Rain, emphasizing combining slotmachine-esque random weapon modifiers into hideously overpowered weapons that for the most part did not meaningfully interact with the environmental simulation in a meaningful way. It is still an interesting experience, the weapon combination system is a strong source of emergent play, but that emergent weapon design does not meaningfully influence the player's strategy in how he/she approaches the game across runs. I think there is a better game trapped inside of the pixel simulation of Noita, waiting to be unearthed.

baby 6y ago
Oh no :( still haven’t played it but I had a lot of hopes since it seems like it was inspired by liero
enraged_camel 6y ago
My biggest gripe is that the randomness of the weapons you find plays way too big of a role in your success. Instead of different weapons requiring different gameplay skills, you either get crazy good stuff (combo'd with perks that have synergies) and effortlessly destroy anything in your path, or end up so weak that even simple mobs give you trouble. I think some of this could be solved, or at least mitigated, if there was "meta" progression, like in Dead Cells. That way, even bad runs could result in something worthwhile, rather than a total waste of time.
- LegitShady 6y ago
  I think the randomness leading to overpowered rounds and weak rounds is sort of true for every rogue lite I've played.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  I've played through a half dozen roguelikes to completion of the final (final) boss of whatever it offers. Off the top of my head, Dungeon Crawl, 20XX, Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain 1/2, Signal Decay, Dead Cells. It's an indie friendly genre in that it enables lots of gameplay with limited content. But the design trope you've mentioned is waning on me. Most of these games have compounding benefits of good play early in the game to game state near the end, an hour later. Most of these games are easy to play for the first 80% and then quite challenging for the last 20% (BUT, it's still easy to mess up and so early penalties feel really bad). And so it's really frustrating playing them if the first half of your run just feels ok because you're inclined to think it's better to just restart. Enter the Gungeon was the absolute worst offender. Rare health restores at every level meaning you need to play well even on easy early levels. Hugely important max hp boosts granted only for flawlessly completing each level boss. Items have no indicator for how useful they are unless you get a feel for them or look them up, then have a bunch of hidden synergies which are also unexplained; and even then you have no agency in getting other items to make your crappy loot more viable than permanent garbage. And lastly, a single rare item which doubles the length of a run but vastly increases your chances of long term success. People love rare OP combos but they kind of suck. I'd rate Risk of Rain 2, Dead Cells, and Dungeon crawl having the best implementations of this.
  - trashcan 6y ago
    Dead Cells is my favorite game of all time. I've been playing it pretty much every week since it launched. Of the games you've played, could you recommend any in particular that might be similar?
    - vvanders 6y ago
      Nuclear Throne is by and far my favorite of the genre having played most of the ones listed above.
    - klmadfejno 6y ago
      Hmm, well Dead Cells is a roguelike castlevania and fairly unique in that regard. Rogue Legacy 1 and 2 are probably a good match. I'd put Risk of Rain down as the one of the best generic rogue action games to recommend. The first one is a 2D shooter. The second one is a 3D shooter and is especially good for online co-op. I would recommend starting with the second one.
eggsome 6y ago
I'm around 200hrs in. I concur with pretty much everything you've said, however I wanted to add 2 things. My mental model for playing has settled on "paying" for gold/wands with HP. As you progress though a level you will inevitably get hit by monsters and evironmental effects and there has never been a game as stingy as this one for letting you replace lost health. The "hideously overpowered weapons" you mentioned are the best part of the game. Finding spell components and building a crazy wand give this this game a fantastic (and fantastical) power curve :)
- LegitShady 6y ago
  Is there any progression in between rounds?
  - VectorLock 6y ago
    The enemies get harder the further down you go but there is no progression between runs, as a roguelike.
zimpenfish 6y ago
Same disappointment here. I've had some fun experiences - shooting out the side of a water tank to put out a fire below - but they are sadly few and far between.
VonGuard 6y ago
Ignore the haters. I loved this game. Yes, it is very difficult, but every play is totally different, and the environmental effects are truly things you have to think through before just blasting through. The game may be difficult, and in fact, too difficult, but I still enjoyed it. Finishing it seemed unimportant, as just making progress feels like an incredible accomplishment.
- hn_check 6y ago
  You could have simply given your opinion, but leading off with a dismissive "ignore the haters" (where haters are apparently people who didn't enjoy it) made your comment carry zero weight.
  - pm90 6y ago
    Well, didn’t you do the same thing with your last statement? “Ignore the haters” to me isn’t dismissive as much as a way of conveying that something is rather polarizing so the reader should check it out themselves before forming an opinion. I do concede that others may have a different interpretation, though.
- aspaceman 6y ago
  Their criticism wasn’t that it was difficult, but rather that the weapons don’t contribute much to the environmental simulation. I was also disappointed by how the game didn’t utilize its simulation very well. If you’re going to reply to someone’s comment, at least reply to what they said.
jtolmar 6y ago
I half agree on this. I agree the environmental manipulation and tactical side of the game is underdeveloped. I think a lot of that is similar monster designs. Despite a huge bestiary of cool monsters, when it comes to how you deal with those monsters it just boils down to flying/hopping, ranged/melee, and does it bleed something nasty. Not all of those 8 combinations need substantively different approaches, either. While you absolutely can just slot machine until you get a rigged build (which seems to be a requirement for a mass appeal roguelite), it's possible to win more consistently with other play styles. Wand editing adds a lot more actual decision making compared to BoI or RoR, so you have to actually think about building a game-winning kit of items. The focus on building a kit from random components reminds me more of Shiren The Wanderer, Brogue, FTL, or my own roguelike Hero Trap. The game ends up being about how many different ways you know to build a broken wand, which is something I can respect. The biggest problem with Noita to me is its emphasis on resource extraction. Good play involves grinding for 600+ gold in the game's first area, when a casual search for the bottom will get you under a hundred. Couple that with monsters that can usually be slowly killed without taking damage, but will deal large amounts of damage if your attention lapses, and you get a game where optimal play involves an awkward mix of long periods of focus with low interest.
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  Totally agree, optimal play is often just slow deliberate chip damage and tedious scouring for resources. It's a pretty common problem across roguelikes.
  - jtolmar 6y ago
    Yeah. Some games fix it by having small enough dungeons that scouring them all isn't such a big deal (Brogue comes to mind). Others use a hunger clock (I think Spelunky's ghost is actually the best hunger clock I've seen). I think Noita would benefit from harder monsters, with much higher gold drops (or cheaper shops), and a tight hunger clock. Though that's somewhat at odds with the cool side dungeons (which are already at odds with the rest of the game).
    - 6y ago
brundolf 6y ago
It's incredibly hard to design a game around an emergent physical system where that system not only allows the gameplay to remain fun, but actually contributes to the fun in a meaningful way. The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild did an astoundingly good job of this, but it's one of the only examples I can think of where it really worked at all. Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts is the other, though most people probably haven't heard of that one.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  > It's incredibly hard to design a game around an emergent physical system where that system not only allows the gameplay to remain fun, but but actually contributes to the fun in a meaningful way Starsiege: Tribes
  - codezero 6y ago
    This comment probably is referring to Tribes’ hill skiing “feature” that became a core gameplay mechanic in Tribe’s 2 - though I guess it’s fair to say this wasn’t originally by design, but a nice accident.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      You mean like some kind of emergent physical system? ;) For context: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zIAWzG-wOKY&t=4m11s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zIAWzG-wOKY&t=4m11s (~1999, probably)
      - Bjartr 6y ago
        That one mechanic emerged and became popular is not the same as a game whose core conceit depends on emergence occurring within each game.
        ethbr0 6y ago
        I would argue they're extremely similar across successful emergent games. The core feature of a playable, entertaining emergent game is a set of flexible gameplay rules, able to bend and tolerate the unexpected without breaking. In the case of Tribes, there weren't any gameplay rules predicated on movement speed or height. Consequently, skiing only enriched gameplay. I would argue that EVE Online features the same style of emergent-tolerant rules. In contrast would be something like Braid, where the available actions and rules, while seeming free, are in fact extremely rigid and intolerant of the unexpected. Failed emergent games typically fail by innovating in their gameplay, but attempting to apply inflexible or overly-specific rules on top of that.
greggman3 6y ago
I'm disappointed that game called "roguelike" is absolutely nothing like "rogue" Might as well say "Schindler's List" is an "Indylike" or a donut is a "Pizzalike"
- GolDDranks 6y ago
  Just to point out: it's called "roguelite", not "roguelike", which tries to be true to the fact that it's not actually "like" Rogue.
  - httpsterio 6y ago
    Roguelite and roguelikes have one major difference though, roguelites have some sort of progression like items or experience levels that cumulate on your several playthroughs giving you new features. Good examples of Roguelites would be Wizards of Legend, Flinthook or Moonlighter. To my understand (having not played), Noita would fall under a roguelike as the game resets after your death and you don't carry anything over to the next playthrough except for your newly accumulated wisdom of how you died and how to avoid that :)
    - ryani 6y ago
      I think that's a reasonable distinction between the genres but the boundary can get a bit gray. Two examples: Bones levels have been a staple of Roguelikes since Nethack, where you can find the area that one of your previous characters died. Usually this means a huge power boost if you can deal with the threat of your ghost and/or whatever killed you. Angband is an ancient and classic Roguelike but it has a "monster memory" that accumulates the knowledge of the enemies you have fought, both in your current playthrough and all previous playthroughs. This represents a significant assistance as you progress through the game, both because the knowledge that "this beast has killed your ancestor" is a big caution sign, and also that you eventually "know" the stats of all the monsters.
      - mcv 6y ago
        It feels to me like 'roguelike' has recently come to mean something totally different than in used to. It used to be games like Nethack, Moria, Angband, and later AdoM, where you're an @ walking between walls of # fighting d and o. Now it seems they can be any game that involves dungeons and fighting.
aaanotherhnfolk 6y ago
I can't wait for the computer generated content trend to end. I understand why it's attractive to indies, because they can focus on the engine - and a game emerges from the effort on its own. But hand generated content is always superior. Turns out Shakespeare writes better stories than even a million monkeys. There was an era of gaming where it was reasonable to think your game could become a hobby for tens of thousands of players, with all the requisite fame that comes from creating it. Spelunky opened the door here, and a lot of high profile indies like Vlambeer and Spryfox led the surge. What I think actually happened is that so many games started coming out, that there's more content than any one player can consume. The hand generated stuff floats to the top and a new class of indies now sits the throne. Anyone distracted by procedural gen lost their spot. For another parallel where players choose hand generated content over procedural, look to the prevalence of multiplayer where humans generate challenge for each other on the fly - versus AI baddies that can be cheesed by easily shared internet guides.
- pms 6y ago
  I wait for this trend to grow further. Procedural generation offers higher replayability, requires players to adapt their strategy every time, and shifts the focus from map design to core gameplay, which distinguishes games from books. Procedural generation has nothing to do with multiplayer. There are games that have competitive multiplayer and procedural generation, e.g., Heroes of Might and Magic III: Horn of the Abyss. Interestingly, this game offers both human-created and procedurally-generated maps, but players compete nearly exclusively on procedurally-generated maps.
- pastrami_panda 6y ago
  > But hand generated content is always superior It's very much not a binary choice between procedural vs handcrafted. Procedural content creation is truly great at some stuff, while the same is true for handcrafted creations. The real trick is to blend handcrafted and procedurally generated in such a way that both tools get maximal utilization in the domain they excel in.
- setr 6y ago
  I fundamentally disagree - games are simulations, and games that limit the simulation in favor of a planned “story” lose a lot of interesting nature of games, especially as they try to get closer to the hardcoded mediums - film, lit, etc. Procedural generation naturally ties into that simulation — though a lot of procgen games misunderstand its purpose, using procgen to “make the game for them”, rather than to produce various environments to interact with the simulation (they end up focusing on the procgen rules as an end to itself, rather than the simulation rules which is actually of interest). Borderlands is probably the most obvious failure in this — they entirely misunderstood the appeal of procgen/sim reducing it almost entirely to loot-gambling for % modifiers, with little to no real impact on the gameplay itself, except by accident (eg the difference between 1-shot and 2-shotting enemies). No man’s sky is another recent game in the same boat — they essentially had no rules to the simulation, and bet almost entirely on sufficient amount of “content” to be generated in an almost purely aesthetic fashion. Spore was also a failure in many, many ways, but the lack of real “rules” to its systems is one of them. It is the simulation rules that one wants to explore, not the visual rendering of it. That is, Dwarf Fortress is the one true video game. Multiplayer games on the other hand are like a game dev cheat code — you really don’t need to do much at all to produce a “fun” multiplayer game, because the player-interaction will bring all of the complexity and emergence facilities you need. All you need for multiplayer to work really is to not stop players from doing interesting things with the system, apparently a herculean difficulty for most companies.

baby 6y ago

Oh no :( still haven’t played it but I had a lot of hopes since it seems like it was inspired by liero

enraged_camel 6y ago

My biggest gripe is that the randomness of the weapons you find plays way too big of a role in your success. Instead of different weapons requiring different gameplay skills, you either get crazy good stuff (combo'd with perks that have synergies) and effortlessly destroy anything in your path, or end up so weak that even simple mobs give you trouble. I think some of this could be solved, or at least mitigated, if there was "meta" progression, like in Dead Cells. That way, even bad runs could result in something worthwhile, rather than a total waste of time.

LegitShady 6y ago
I think the randomness leading to overpowered rounds and weak rounds is sort of true for every rogue lite I've played.
klmadfejno 6y ago
I've played through a half dozen roguelikes to completion of the final (final) boss of whatever it offers. Off the top of my head, Dungeon Crawl, 20XX, Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain 1/2, Signal Decay, Dead Cells. It's an indie friendly genre in that it enables lots of gameplay with limited content. But the design trope you've mentioned is waning on me. Most of these games have compounding benefits of good play early in the game to game state near the end, an hour later. Most of these games are easy to play for the first 80% and then quite challenging for the last 20% (BUT, it's still easy to mess up and so early penalties feel really bad). And so it's really frustrating playing them if the first half of your run just feels ok because you're inclined to think it's better to just restart. Enter the Gungeon was the absolute worst offender. Rare health restores at every level meaning you need to play well even on easy early levels. Hugely important max hp boosts granted only for flawlessly completing each level boss. Items have no indicator for how useful they are unless you get a feel for them or look them up, then have a bunch of hidden synergies which are also unexplained; and even then you have no agency in getting other items to make your crappy loot more viable than permanent garbage. And lastly, a single rare item which doubles the length of a run but vastly increases your chances of long term success. People love rare OP combos but they kind of suck. I'd rate Risk of Rain 2, Dead Cells, and Dungeon crawl having the best implementations of this.
- trashcan 6y ago
  Dead Cells is my favorite game of all time. I've been playing it pretty much every week since it launched. Of the games you've played, could you recommend any in particular that might be similar?
  - vvanders 6y ago
    Nuclear Throne is by and far my favorite of the genre having played most of the ones listed above.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    Hmm, well Dead Cells is a roguelike castlevania and fairly unique in that regard. Rogue Legacy 1 and 2 are probably a good match. I'd put Risk of Rain down as the one of the best generic rogue action games to recommend. The first one is a 2D shooter. The second one is a 3D shooter and is especially good for online co-op. I would recommend starting with the second one.

eggsome 6y ago

I'm around 200hrs in. I concur with pretty much everything you've said, however I wanted to add 2 things. My mental model for playing has settled on "paying" for gold/wands with HP. As you progress though a level you will inevitably get hit by monsters and evironmental effects and there has never been a game as stingy as this one for letting you replace lost health. The "hideously overpowered weapons" you mentioned are the best part of the game. Finding spell components and building a crazy wand give this this game a fantastic (and fantastical) power curve :)

LegitShady 6y ago
Is there any progression in between rounds?
- VectorLock 6y ago
  The enemies get harder the further down you go but there is no progression between runs, as a roguelike.

zimpenfish 6y ago

Same disappointment here. I've had some fun experiences - shooting out the side of a water tank to put out a fire below - but they are sadly few and far between.

VonGuard 6y ago

Ignore the haters. I loved this game. Yes, it is very difficult, but every play is totally different, and the environmental effects are truly things you have to think through before just blasting through. The game may be difficult, and in fact, too difficult, but I still enjoyed it. Finishing it seemed unimportant, as just making progress feels like an incredible accomplishment.

hn_check 6y ago
You could have simply given your opinion, but leading off with a dismissive "ignore the haters" (where haters are apparently people who didn't enjoy it) made your comment carry zero weight.
- pm90 6y ago
  Well, didn’t you do the same thing with your last statement? “Ignore the haters” to me isn’t dismissive as much as a way of conveying that something is rather polarizing so the reader should check it out themselves before forming an opinion. I do concede that others may have a different interpretation, though.
aspaceman 6y ago
Their criticism wasn’t that it was difficult, but rather that the weapons don’t contribute much to the environmental simulation. I was also disappointed by how the game didn’t utilize its simulation very well. If you’re going to reply to someone’s comment, at least reply to what they said.

jtolmar 6y ago

I half agree on this. I agree the environmental manipulation and tactical side of the game is underdeveloped. I think a lot of that is similar monster designs. Despite a huge bestiary of cool monsters, when it comes to how you deal with those monsters it just boils down to flying/hopping, ranged/melee, and does it bleed something nasty. Not all of those 8 combinations need substantively different approaches, either. While you absolutely can just slot machine until you get a rigged build (which seems to be a requirement for a mass appeal roguelite), it's possible to win more consistently with other play styles. Wand editing adds a lot more actual decision making compared to BoI or RoR, so you have to actually think about building a game-winning kit of items. The focus on building a kit from random components reminds me more of Shiren The Wanderer, Brogue, FTL, or my own roguelike Hero Trap. The game ends up being about how many different ways you know to build a broken wand, which is something I can respect. The biggest problem with Noita to me is its emphasis on resource extraction. Good play involves grinding for 600+ gold in the game's first area, when a casual search for the bottom will get you under a hundred. Couple that with monsters that can usually be slowly killed without taking damage, but will deal large amounts of damage if your attention lapses, and you get a game where optimal play involves an awkward mix of long periods of focus with low interest.

Hammershaft 6y ago
Totally agree, optimal play is often just slow deliberate chip damage and tedious scouring for resources. It's a pretty common problem across roguelikes.
- jtolmar 6y ago
  Yeah. Some games fix it by having small enough dungeons that scouring them all isn't such a big deal (Brogue comes to mind). Others use a hunger clock (I think Spelunky's ghost is actually the best hunger clock I've seen). I think Noita would benefit from harder monsters, with much higher gold drops (or cheaper shops), and a tight hunger clock. Though that's somewhat at odds with the cool side dungeons (which are already at odds with the rest of the game).
  - 6y ago

brundolf 6y ago

It's incredibly hard to design a game around an emergent physical system where that system not only allows the gameplay to remain fun, but actually contributes to the fun in a meaningful way. The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild did an astoundingly good job of this, but it's one of the only examples I can think of where it really worked at all. Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts is the other, though most people probably haven't heard of that one.

ethbr0 6y ago
> It's incredibly hard to design a game around an emergent physical system where that system not only allows the gameplay to remain fun, but but actually contributes to the fun in a meaningful way Starsiege: Tribes
- codezero 6y ago
  This comment probably is referring to Tribes’ hill skiing “feature” that became a core gameplay mechanic in Tribe’s 2 - though I guess it’s fair to say this wasn’t originally by design, but a nice accident.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    You mean like some kind of emergent physical system? ;) For context: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zIAWzG-wOKY&t=4m11s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zIAWzG-wOKY&t=4m11s (~1999, probably)
    - Bjartr 6y ago
      That one mechanic emerged and became popular is not the same as a game whose core conceit depends on emergence occurring within each game.
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        I would argue they're extremely similar across successful emergent games. The core feature of a playable, entertaining emergent game is a set of flexible gameplay rules, able to bend and tolerate the unexpected without breaking. In the case of Tribes, there weren't any gameplay rules predicated on movement speed or height. Consequently, skiing only enriched gameplay. I would argue that EVE Online features the same style of emergent-tolerant rules. In contrast would be something like Braid, where the available actions and rules, while seeming free, are in fact extremely rigid and intolerant of the unexpected. Failed emergent games typically fail by innovating in their gameplay, but attempting to apply inflexible or overly-specific rules on top of that.

greggman3 6y ago

I'm disappointed that game called "roguelike" is absolutely nothing like "rogue" Might as well say "Schindler's List" is an "Indylike" or a donut is a "Pizzalike"

GolDDranks 6y ago
Just to point out: it's called "roguelite", not "roguelike", which tries to be true to the fact that it's not actually "like" Rogue.
- httpsterio 6y ago
  Roguelite and roguelikes have one major difference though, roguelites have some sort of progression like items or experience levels that cumulate on your several playthroughs giving you new features. Good examples of Roguelites would be Wizards of Legend, Flinthook or Moonlighter. To my understand (having not played), Noita would fall under a roguelike as the game resets after your death and you don't carry anything over to the next playthrough except for your newly accumulated wisdom of how you died and how to avoid that :)
  - ryani 6y ago
    I think that's a reasonable distinction between the genres but the boundary can get a bit gray. Two examples: Bones levels have been a staple of Roguelikes since Nethack, where you can find the area that one of your previous characters died. Usually this means a huge power boost if you can deal with the threat of your ghost and/or whatever killed you. Angband is an ancient and classic Roguelike but it has a "monster memory" that accumulates the knowledge of the enemies you have fought, both in your current playthrough and all previous playthroughs. This represents a significant assistance as you progress through the game, both because the knowledge that "this beast has killed your ancestor" is a big caution sign, and also that you eventually "know" the stats of all the monsters.
    - mcv 6y ago
      It feels to me like 'roguelike' has recently come to mean something totally different than in used to. It used to be games like Nethack, Moria, Angband, and later AdoM, where you're an @ walking between walls of # fighting d and o. Now it seems they can be any game that involves dungeons and fighting.

aaanotherhnfolk 6y ago

I can't wait for the computer generated content trend to end. I understand why it's attractive to indies, because they can focus on the engine - and a game emerges from the effort on its own. But hand generated content is always superior. Turns out Shakespeare writes better stories than even a million monkeys. There was an era of gaming where it was reasonable to think your game could become a hobby for tens of thousands of players, with all the requisite fame that comes from creating it. Spelunky opened the door here, and a lot of high profile indies like Vlambeer and Spryfox led the surge. What I think actually happened is that so many games started coming out, that there's more content than any one player can consume. The hand generated stuff floats to the top and a new class of indies now sits the throne. Anyone distracted by procedural gen lost their spot. For another parallel where players choose hand generated content over procedural, look to the prevalence of multiplayer where humans generate challenge for each other on the fly - versus AI baddies that can be cheesed by easily shared internet guides.

pms 6y ago
I wait for this trend to grow further. Procedural generation offers higher replayability, requires players to adapt their strategy every time, and shifts the focus from map design to core gameplay, which distinguishes games from books. Procedural generation has nothing to do with multiplayer. There are games that have competitive multiplayer and procedural generation, e.g., Heroes of Might and Magic III: Horn of the Abyss. Interestingly, this game offers both human-created and procedurally-generated maps, but players compete nearly exclusively on procedurally-generated maps.
pastrami_panda 6y ago
> But hand generated content is always superior It's very much not a binary choice between procedural vs handcrafted. Procedural content creation is truly great at some stuff, while the same is true for handcrafted creations. The real trick is to blend handcrafted and procedurally generated in such a way that both tools get maximal utilization in the domain they excel in.
setr 6y ago
I fundamentally disagree - games are simulations, and games that limit the simulation in favor of a planned “story” lose a lot of interesting nature of games, especially as they try to get closer to the hardcoded mediums - film, lit, etc. Procedural generation naturally ties into that simulation — though a lot of procgen games misunderstand its purpose, using procgen to “make the game for them”, rather than to produce various environments to interact with the simulation (they end up focusing on the procgen rules as an end to itself, rather than the simulation rules which is actually of interest). Borderlands is probably the most obvious failure in this — they entirely misunderstood the appeal of procgen/sim reducing it almost entirely to loot-gambling for % modifiers, with little to no real impact on the gameplay itself, except by accident (eg the difference between 1-shot and 2-shotting enemies). No man’s sky is another recent game in the same boat — they essentially had no rules to the simulation, and bet almost entirely on sufficient amount of “content” to be generated in an almost purely aesthetic fashion. Spore was also a failure in many, many ways, but the lack of real “rules” to its systems is one of them. It is the simulation rules that one wants to explore, not the visual rendering of it. That is, Dwarf Fortress is the one true video game. Multiplayer games on the other hand are like a game dev cheat code — you really don’t need to do much at all to produce a “fun” multiplayer game, because the player-interaction will bring all of the complexity and emergence facilities you need. All you need for multiplayer to work really is to not stop players from doing interesting things with the system, apparently a herculean difficulty for most companies.