On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

Cogito · 2020-11-09 06:02:14

Spoonwood wrote:

Cogito wrote:
Not sure why you are bringing up skill?
Because by 'average new player', I mean 'average skilled new player'.

But almost all new players have no skill. Any that are not average will necessarily have more skill, perhaps through watching some streamers before playing (I would not necessarily classify these as new players though, depending on how much they had learnt).

This is a game where pretty much everything that is a skill is 'learn how to do something'.

Spoonwood wrote:

Cogito wrote:
Do you think everyone who is commenting here has changed their point of view simply because they have played the game for a little bit?
I don't know. I do know that I didn't have the idea of judging the game as worth it or not on the basis of one hour or one life of gameplay before I played it. But, that is what the one hour one life concept suggests.

Which is more likely?

A. The views of the forum commenters has not changed significantly and is similar to what new players think.

B. Every forum commenter used to think as you do, but after playing for a bit changed their minds.

DestinyCall · 2020-11-09 08:03:21

I can't speak for anyone else, but I never thought that the title One Hour One Life or any of the advertisements for the game implied that EVERY life should be a full one hour in length. Or even that the "average" life would be exactly 60 minutes. That's silly.

I also disagree with this:

Spoownood wrote:

The game should be one hour one life for the average new player who tries to have such and doesn't get impeded by other players.

I don't think OHOL needs to achieve that as a goal to be true to its concept.

I see the title as being accurate to the core concept of the game. You are born as a baby of another player (human-controlled) and each minute of your in-game life, you grow another year older. From toddler to child, from child to adult, eventually reaching old age and inevitable death after sixty minutes ... unless something happens to you first. You can't live MORE than sixty minutes, but you can live less.

It is the same with Two Hours One Life. You can live for up to 120 minutes. But if you don't have time to play for two hours, you could just play for less time and die early. And if you have never played before, you will almost certainly die young a few times as you figure out what you are supposed to do in order to survive and eventually thrive. Nobody is guaranteed a full life. Just the potential to live their life to its fullest.

The challenge in OHOL generally revolves around keeping yourself and your family alive. Almost everything in the game revolves around it, since it is a survival game. Gathering resources, farming crops, accessing water sources, mining iron, drilling ore, making clothes, etc. If staying alive is too easy, it leaves the game without much purpose.

Boredom was a common complaint in late game towns when I first started playing, because you could reach a point where the village had several generations worth of food stockpiled. Since we had so much to eat, there was very little challenge to survival. Personally, I rather liked the more relaxed atmosphere in those towns. You had more freedom to stand around chatting and working on silly projects, instead of constantly grinding for water and food. But I know that many other people were unhappy with the lack of purpose and wanted a reason to keep working so they could feel like their efforts helped the village to survive. Ideally, I would like to see both playstyles made possible - difficult survival-oriented primitive villages and stable advanced towns with plenty of technological conveniences and silly entertainment.

As a new player, I died a lot. But most of the deaths were not that bad, because I knew they were my fault and I could easily work out that I should have done something different to survive. The deaths that really bothered me and made me feel like playing something else were the unfair deaths, like being abandoned by my mother because she had a dozen starving babies to feed or getting killed by a wolf out of nowhere or being murdered by a griefer without warning. In those cases, I had found myself in a lose-lose situation with no control over the outcome and I didn't like it.

It isn't just the dying young ... it is the why and how that makes the difference between a "good" death and a bad one.

Spoonwood · 2020-11-09 20:18:15

Cogito wrote:

Who cares about consistency with the rest of the advertisement?

I do. Also, looking to other parts of the texts often can work as solid way to interpret texts for meaning of terms.

Cogito wrote:

Huh? This is not your best work.

One hour passing in the real world is inevitable. It doesn't matter whether you, me, or anyone else lives or not. Time's arrow pushes time forward no matter what happens.

Cogtio wrote:

Spoonwood, you don't even believe that players only live one life, please stop repeating this without bring up some new idea.

Again, the Steam advertisement clearly talks about "having babies". It simply isn't possible for some players to have a one hour one life experience on their first life and have a single baby.

Cogito wrote:

It is possible to achieve all these things, over the course of multiple lives.

The ad does not concern multiple lives. It even talks about a 'whole life'. The game is a one hour game. One hour one life where the player's character can either have a baby in that life or cannot.

Cogito wrote:

This point is not related to the consistency of advertisements, it is about how new players are likely to interpret the name and the ad. These things don't exist in a vacuum, they exist exactly to advertise a game to people and why they should play it. How this game is different to others is an integral part of the ad.

The game is different from others in it's one hour concept and it's one hour one life concept. New players DO sometimes review the game after one hour or so. I've posted a few of those reviews here on the forums and there exist more of them. Again, the Steam advertisement implies things as possible that are just not possible in one hour one life. It's not possible to have a baby for all players in one hour one life. For some players they need either more time, or more lives, or both.

Cogito wrote:

In any case, Jason definitely seems to want it to be extremely hard for anyone to Eve successfuly - good thing new players don't have to Eve all that often!!

There were certainly a fair number of new players who had to Eve during the recent September sale. If 8 of the servers ever get filled with players, that likely also will necessarily be the case. The game is not getting designed just to have 40-50 players on bs2 constantly and that's it. Jason's dream has been to have all of the servers filled with players. And that would mean plenty of new players as Eves or as children of Eve or in Eve camps, at least until players could progress. But how would they progress if they die so fast?

Cogito wrote:

See above about how you don't have to do everything in every playthrough.

I've seen that above, and I see that Cogito refuses to take the one hour one life concept all that seriously with respect to it's advertisement. Instead, there exists talk of multiple lives. But that is NOT a one hour one life concept. It's a different concept, and not covered by the Steam advertisement.

Spoonwood · 2020-11-09 20:21:49

Cogito wrote:

But almost all new players have no skill.

No. New players know how to move around and know how to do something things. They had to exit the tutorial in some way, which requires some skill.

Spoonwood wrote:

Cogito wrote:
Do you think everyone who is commenting here has changed their point of view simply because they have played the game for a little bit?
I don't know. I do know that I didn't have the idea of judging the game as worth it or not on the basis of one hour or one life of gameplay before I played it. But, that is what the one hour one life concept suggests.

Cogito wrote:

Which is more likely?
A. The views of the forum commenters has not changed significantly and is similar to what new players think.
B. Every forum commenter used to think as you do, but after playing for a bit changed their minds.

I don't know. I don't see how that matters either. New players will think unlike how veteran players think, since veteran players will find some things 'easy' or 'intuitive' that some new players won't.

Spoonwood · 2020-11-09 20:48:04

DestinyCall wrote:

I can't speak for anyone else, but I never thought that the title One Hour One Life or any of the advertisements for the game implied that EVERY life should be a full one hour in length. Or even that the "average" life would be exactly 60 minutes.

I don't see how it would be silly if the average life were one hour one life. It sounds right to me that the average life for players who tried to live their entire life would be one hour one life, since the game is called one hour one life.

DestinyCall wrote:

If staying alive is too easy, it leaves the game without much purpose.

The purpose of a game is not "to struggle" to achieve an objective. The purpose of a game is just to achieve the objective of the game. One doesn't gain in purpose by struggling. One *loses track* of a game's built in purpose or *disregards it* by struggling. For the most part, people didn't care to complete Battletoads or Mike Tyson's Punch-Out or Bionic Commando, because those objectives were hard, frustrating, a grind, boring because of too much challenge, and so on. Instead, they would play to best a few levels mostly. At least after blowing on the cartridge and/or hitting their NES, trying to get the game to work right (a problem with all NES games really). Or people would play something else that they could beat. Zelda II got known as the black sheep of the series, likely in large part due to it being "Ninentdo Hard" unlike the original Legend of Zelda, which for the most part wasn't like that.

DestinyCall wrote:

Boredom was a common complaint in late game towns when I first started playing, because you could reach a point where the village had several generations worth of food stockpiled.

By whom? By someone like Dodge who has said before that he usually would *intentionally* die early (and it didn't sound like he was talking about using /die)? Or by Tarr who once recommended *as a general rule* that players die at 57, or whatever it was, voluntarily? Or by Jason who like Dodge, has a notorious track of not even trying to play one hour one life .... or ends up dying at 57, like that one time he did after The Come Together Disaster trying to do an oil rig, and then declares that late game is good, when he ends up having experienced fifty seven minutes one life, instead of experiencing one hour one life? At least I think he died at fifty seven... might have been fifty eight. I'm not exactly sure, but I am sure that it wasn't a death at sixty.

Also, for those players, were they doing much "civilization building" or "parenting"?

DestinyCall · 2020-11-09 21:30:03

Spoonwood wrote:

I don't see how it would be silly if the average life were one hour one life. It sounds right to me that the average life for players who tried to live their entire life would be one hour one life, since the game is called one hour one life.

If you can only live 60 minutes max, the only way for the "average" life to be 60 minutes is if NOBODY who tried to live their entire life failed to achieve that goal. If anyone died early, the average lifespan would less than 60.

That is silly. It leaves no possibility for anything to go wrong. No risk of death or injury or sickness. No skill required and no satisfaction for succeeding to reach 60 years old after a long life. Nintendo Hard games were frustrating because they were too hard. What you are describing would be way too easy.

I don't have a problem with a reasonable amount of death in a video game. It is an expected part of the experience for many games, especially survival-themed games. The tricky part is finding the right balance, so the game feels challenging and engages with the player without being too unforgiving. It is good idea to round off the rough edges and fix stuff that feels too brutal or unintuitive, but you don't want the whole experience to be a boring cakewalk that doesn't require any skill development or knowledge acquisition.

There are quite a few things that need to be fixed to make OHOL into the best version of itself, but I don't see how removing the threat of death would make it a better game.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2020-11-09 21:31:45)

Spoonwood · 2020-11-09 22:10:28

DestinyCall wrote:

If you can only live 60 minutes max, the only way for the "average" life to be 60 minutes is if NOBODY who tried to live their entire life failed to achieve that goal.

I think I talked about the average *new* player who tries to live to 60. You didn't take what I said literally Destiny. Before I was willing to ignore what you were talking about, because I didn't believe you were talking about what I said exactly. Communication failed, apparently, because you didn't take what I said literally.

Also Destiny, I'll come back to this:

DestinyCall wrote:

Boredom was a common complaint in late game towns when I first started playing, because you could reach a point where the village had several generations worth of food stockpiled.

But, making the game more difficult is no solution long-term. The result comes as that players adapt. And then again, the game becomes easy for them. Then *those* players go back to relying on the game's difficulty as a problem. And the source of the problem becomes even more entrenched. Because the source of the problem was that players tried to rely on the game for challenge. Instead, players would have done better to rely on their own ingenuity for challenge. Players can play variants, and the best games encourage advanced players to play variants to make the game more challenging for their own self. And it's simply not all that difficult to so for this game and never was.

A player in an advanced village can wear less clothing. Or they can spend more time in a desert. Or they can release several bears and try to avoid them on their own. Or make domestic boars and try to avoid them on their own. Or they can eat only 3 food types. Or they can only a certain food, like confining their diets to carrot pie or carrots. And so on.

The problem wasn't that advanced players felt bored with respect to their characters survival. It was that they wouldn't take responsibility for making their characters own survival more difficult when as players they could have done so. The characters are open to interpretation also to some extent, and that includes how much difficult the player subjects them to.

The situation with new players differs though. Because, one can't take responsibility for making a game easier when one doesn't understand how it works, and there's a limit on how easy any player can make a game.

Also, the game for characters survival gets more difficult and complicated the number of players on a server, and as the proportion of new players to experienced players increases.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-11-09 22:10:50)

DestinyCall · 2020-11-10 01:18:48

Spoonwood wrote:

DestinyCall wrote:
If you can only live 60 minutes max, the only way for the "average" life to be 60 minutes is if NOBODY who tried to live their entire life failed to achieve that goal.
I think I talked about the average *new* player who tries to live to 60. You didn't take what I said literally Destiny. Before I was willing to ignore what you were talking about, because I didn't believe you were talking about what I said exactly. Communication failed, apparently, because you didn't take what I said literally.

You are the one who is not taking what you said literally. I even quoted your post in my response so there could be no confusion. You said "It sounds right to me that the average life for players who tried to live their entire life would be one hour one life, since the game is called one hour one life." You did NOT specify anything about new players, so how was I to know that was what you meant to say? I was taking your words at face value, Spoonwood. I am not a mind reader.

...

That being said, if you substitute "average NEW player" for "average player", it does not change my point. You are saying that ALL of those players should be living to 60, because if any new players (who tried to live their entire life) died early, it would bring down the average to a number that is less than 60. The "average life" for new players would only be 60 minutes if EVERY life lived by new players was 60 minutes long. Unless new players were able to live longer than 60 minutes in one lifetime, any early deaths in the group would bring the average lifetime below the maximum age limit of 60 minutes. That's just how math works.

And extending the natural lifespan of OHOL characters beyond 60 minutes *would* violate the concept of the game, in my opinion. I don't see a problem with sometimes not reaching old age, but in a game called One Hour One Life, I do expect 60 minutes to be the upper limit of life expectancy.

If you were arguing against extending the lifespan of OHOL characters beyond 60 minutes, I would be in complete agreement. That would make sense to me. Arguing that the "average" new player should live for a full sixty minutes every life does not.

Spoonwood · 2020-11-10 02:16:08

DestinyCall wrote:

You are the one who is not taking what you said literally. I even quoted your post in my response so there could be no confusion. You said "It sounds right to me that the average life for players who tried to live their entire life would be one hour one life, since the game is called one hour one life."

Destiny, this is from the original post:

Spoonwood wrote:

Saying that living to 60 as the daughter of Eve should be pretty darn hard is like saying that one hour one life isn't a reasonable goal for first time players beyond bigserver2. It's like saying that living to 60 isn't a reasonable goal for new players if all of the servers were ever to get filled. It's like saying that they deserve to get cheated out of experiencing one hour one life. And again, the game is not 20 minutes one life. It is not 30 minutes one life. It is not 50 minutes one life. It is not 55 minutes one life. One Hour One Life.

So, if you forgot that new players got intended as the focus here, I think you lost track of context.

DestinyCall wrote:

You are saying that ALL of those players should be living to 60, because if any new players (who tried to live their entire life) died early, it would bring down the average to a number that is less than 60.

Average new player refers to the player in terms of skill level compared to other new players, not the length of time.

Again, for new players who try to live one hour, not 5 minutes one life, not 10 minutes one life, not 15 minutes one life, not 20 minutes one life, not 40 minutes one life, not 57 minutes one life. A game designed for those lengths of time comes as one where players get intended to have less of a gameplay experience in general than would be maximally meaningful. A game designed for those lengths of time for average new players is like saying that the game isn't interesting enough for players to have a full hour's of playtime in one life.

One hour one life. That should be the goal for average new players trying to stay alive, because that would make their experiences more meaningful, and would signal the game as interesting enough for players to keep on playing.

Cogito · 2020-11-10 03:13:28

In the interest of moving the conversation forward, because I think we're almost there, let's try and work out what we agree on.

Spoonwood wrote:

One hour one life. That should be the goal for average new players trying to stay alive, because that would make their experiences more meaningful, and would signal the game as interesting enough for players to keep on playing.

Whole heartedly agree!

It should be the goal, and I think is the goal for many people. It was for me.

It's not much of a goal if it is trivial to achieve, which is why I think it's ok for it to be hard.

You seem to believe that it should be expected that new players can live to 60 on their first life. That they may not always live to 60 on that first life, but if they are dying very young that is a problem. You also seem to extend that to a lot of possible first lifes the new player may have: if they are born as an Eve, born to an Eve, born on a freshly restarted server, born on a busy server, born on an empty server, etc.

If I believed those two things I would agree that making Eveing Nintendo Hard would be silly, counterproductive, and "garbage".

I don't believe those two things, though I do believe something pretty close.

I think that a new player should be able to live to middle age (say 40+) in their first few lives, and be able to live to 60 in their first week of playing.

I think they should be skilled enough to live to 60 as an Eve after ~20 lives, and have a successful Eve family after ~40 lives.

I want each life to be different from the last, and death is a part of that story. Even unfair, frustrating deaths. I don't want every story to be a tale of how I died and could do nothing about it, but I do want to have room to grow. Making an engine is hard enough that it takes a while to even be confident in attempting it, let alone trying to do it in one life. Being an Eve is at least as challenging, in different ways, and it is good that these goals exist in the game.

sigmen4020 · 2020-11-13 18:12:00

NoTruePunk · 2020-11-14 06:00:53

I've never interpreted the "one hour one life" as any kind of promise. It seems more like a challenge from the phrasing.

Spoon, this problem seems entirely fabricated. You're not a new player, but you seem to know what the "new player experience" is or should be. Why don't you ask them?

Morti · 2020-11-15 22:16:24

The_Anabaptist wrote:

One Hour One Life
I've always interpreted it as One Hour (maximum) One Life. Unlike Spoonwood, I would love to see it interpreted as One Hour (maximum) One Life (maximum).
Don't like your birth mom, birth town, birth race, whatever and /die? Great. Log back in One Hour from now.
Die because the game was too hard, mother was incompetent, whatever? Great. Log back in at the end of One Hour.
I think the game would be savored by more players if the option to just start again right away was curtailed.
"Hunger gives flavor to the food" - Amit Kalantri
The_Anabaptist

Anything is possible, in Rohrlandia.

Dodge · 2020-11-16 03:56:41

The_Anabaptist wrote:

One Hour One Life
I've always interpreted it as One Hour (maximum) One Life. Unlike Spoonwood, I would love to see it interpreted as One Hour (maximum) One Life (maximum).
Don't like your birth mom, birth town, birth race, whatever and /die? Great. Log back in One Hour from now.
Die because the game was too hard, mother was incompetent, whatever? Great. Log back in at the end of One Hour.
I think the game would be savored by more players if the option to just start again right away was curtailed.
"Hunger gives flavor to the food" - Amit Kalantri
The_Anabaptist

That was the original idea for this game, one of the easiest changes to put in place but probably the hardest decision to make, something that would completely change the way the game is played and give every life a thousand times more meaning.

No more babies that want to kill themselves because "this isn't the life that i want", you would do the best you can with what you were given.

Also the reason behind the life limit (joke currently set at 48 lives per hour iirc), so it's already in game just need to set it to 1 instead of 48

But honestly i dont think the game is ready for that at least not right now.

Right now the game is best played as a crafting simulator, a stardew valley "like" with a parenting twist, adding this to the game right now would just cause more frustration from players because it would make it harder to play the game like it currently is without making it more interesting.

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5824

OneOfMany · 2020-11-18 06:02:31

TLDR... Boring

One Hour One Life Forums

#101 2020-11-09 06:02:14

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#102 2020-11-09 08:03:21

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#103 2020-11-09 20:18:15

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#104 2020-11-09 20:21:49

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#105 2020-11-09 20:48:04

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#106 2020-11-09 21:30:03

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#107 2020-11-09 22:10:28

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#108 2020-11-10 01:18:48

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#109 2020-11-10 02:16:08

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#110 2020-11-10 03:13:28

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#111 2020-11-13 18:12:00

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#112 2020-11-14 06:00:53

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#113 2020-11-15 22:16:24

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#114 2020-11-16 03:56:41

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

#115 2020-11-18 06:02:31

Re: On "Nintendo Hard" Garbage

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