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Notes -
How much are video games about social validation? My intuition is that no would play League of Legends or chess if you only played only against bots, even bots designed as a perfect challenge, and if there were no rankings. Do you think that’s the case?
For others? Probably quite a bit. The non-autistic millenials that I used to play with often had a very competitive streak to them and seemd to be genuinely invested in how they ranked relative to others.
The zoomers...oh man. The zoomers keep talking to themselves. It seems to me they all imagine themselves to be the next big streamer. Or maybe it's not even conscious, and they just naturally adopted the monologuing from watching too much Twitch and Let's Play.
The autists are just fine playing against bots. They seem to prefer it, even, for predictability.
As for myself, where multiplayer is an option I strictly prefer it to playing against bots. Not really for the social aspects, those are rather tiresome, but because playing against bots invariably becomes an exercise in exploiting the AI's predictability, which feels like a waste of time. In playing against humans, I can at least semi-credibly tell myself that I'm exercising my mind a little bit rather than just consuming product.
Yesterday I spent 30 minutes before going to bed playing a round of Nebulous: Fleet Command, and I rammed my Beam Battleship into the enemy Cruiser formation just right. It was pure dumb luck, of course, and a game at a fairly low average skill level, but still. Against bots that would have been meaningless. Against humans...it was still just dumb luck, but infinitely more exciting - they could have countered this! Nobody on either side knew what to expect! And so it was a lot more satisfying.
Interesting, but apparently they canceled the single player plans? What’s going on there, any way to get that back?
They worked really hard on a strategic game mode, but ended up having to give up on it for various reasons in order to focus on the core tactical gameplay. Very recently they released an update that significantly improved the tactical AI so that you can get a meaningful single-player skirmish experience, and they announced the development of a single-player classically scripted campaign mode.
As it stands, you can actually go and play the strategic mode they worked on, as they left it in an opt-in branch on steam, in just the state they aborted development in. I haven't tried it yet. IMO it was a very interesting concept, and I do kind of hope they revisit it eventually, but I somewhat doubt it'll happen.
That said, the multiplayer is great and I invite you to come play. Or we can just skirmish against bots, if you're dead-set against competitive MP.
So they will have a single player campaign? That’s what I thought was cancelled. Neat if so.
I will probably pick it up… someday. I still need to complete the original two Homeworlds.
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