It's actually a really nice spell casting system. It lets you have a ton of different spells with only 4 buttons. It rewards memorizing the most useful (like reinforce). It gives a way for things like the squid disruptor fields or whatever they're called to mess with your muscle memory while still allowing spells. It would be way less interesting if it was just using spell slots like so many other games.

The only wrong thing I've been throwing is the SOS Beacon instead of a Reinforce, which is just annoying, and not just once. It makes the game public if it was friends-only and gives it priority in the quick play queue. So that can't be it.

The dialing adds friction to tense situations, which is okay as a mechanic.

Not only does the bad tutorial have an in-universe justification; the ways in which it is bad are actually significant to the worldbuilding in multiple ways.

The missing information also encourages positive interactions among the community - newer players are expected to be missing lots of key information, so teaching them is a natural and encouraged element of gameplay.

I stopped playing the game awhile ago, but the tutorial always struck me as really clever.

I also think that the tutorial would be tedious if it went through too much of the mechanics. They show you the basics, the rest you pick up through trial and error.

The tutorial is just fine - here's a gun, here's how you shoot it, here's how you call reinforcements, now go kill some bugs!

Compared to the bigger gaming studios they are small. In fact they are not that much larger than the company I work for (not a game studio).

The fact it is un-optimised can be forgiven because the game has plenty of other positives so people like myself are willing to look over them.

I've got a few hundred hours in the game (I play for maybe an hour in the evening) and for £35 it was well worth the money.

What does the age of the game in years have to do with anything?

A fun game is a fun game.

It costs $40 for a 2-year-old game because the market is bearing $40 for a 2-year-old game.

If anything, it's a testament to how good a job they've done making the game.

Not op, but magicka is a pretty fun game.

You cast spells in a similar way as calling in strategems in hd2.

The spell system was super neat. There’s several different elements (fire, air, water, earth, electricity, ice, ands maybe something else. It’s been a while since I played). Each element can be used on its own or is combinable. Different combinations would cast different spells. Fire+water makes steam for instance. Ice + air is a focused blizzard, etc.

there’s hundreds to learn and that’s your main weapon in the game. There’s even a spell you can cast that will randomly kick someone you’re playing with out of the game.

It’s great fun with friends, but can be annoying to play sometimes. If you try it, go with kb/m. It supports controller, but is way more difficult to build the spells.

Oh, it's not bad or janky (...okay, no, it was in some ways janky, but on purpose), I loved that game.

But the sense of humor/tone between the two games is very visibly the same thing.

It's not a negative, at all.

I just shared it because it's sort of like learning Slack started life as the internal communication tooling for the online game glitch, or that a lot of the "weird Twitter" folks started life as FYAD posters - once you know that, you can draw the lines between the two points.

> More or less nothing is optimized these days

Not true, lots of games are optimized, but it's one of those tasks that almost no one notices when you do it great, but everyone notices when it's missing, so it's really hard to tell by just consuming ("playing") games.

> I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involvement being a benefit

I'm not, SIE have amazing engineers, probably the best in the industry, and if you have access to those kind of resources, you use it. Meanwhile, I agree that executives at Sony sometimes have no clue, but that doesn't mean SIE helping you with development suddenly has a negative impact on you.

No Man's Sky didn't have technical issues at launch though, it ran fine for what is was. The problem with NMS was that people were told it would be a completely different experience compared to what it ended up being (at launch).

To be clear, walking backwards (away from the target) reduced your bullet velocity relative to the target, reducing the damage you were doing and leading to you needing more shots.

It may not be intentional, but it sounds like it's a fun, emergent gameplay mechanic. How much fun have people had with physics and silliness with Valve's Source engine, which was one of the earlier full physics games? Or going back further, "surf" maps in e.g. Unreal Tournament or CS that abused the movement physics to create a movement puzzle (which, arguably, led to some of the movement mechanics in Titanfall).