Not really, the game is really made for the "10s of people scale".
But thanks to how it works, it doesn't need 10s of coordinated people, you can certainly just join some existing server with a friend and have an equally good time.
This was my biggest annoyance with Eco. It really does take a community, which is disappointing because you can't scale it down to 1-4 players. Are there any mods for this?
They've recently revamped it so you can adjust various levels (skill increase, cap, multipliers, etc) and make it possible to play with fewer. I've actually run a couple of single-player games, completely vanilla. Fun in a different sort of way.
It has a base setting for something like "1-3 players" that's pretty quick, and there are some advanced settings with which you can make things "cheaper" -- both in time and in resources -- via some coefficients.
I also "cheat" at the start by using vanilla commands to research and level up in all the disciplines -- makes the game more about finding and efficiently utilizing resources without also having to scavenge random stuff to "research". Since there's such a breadth of everything, it reduces the grind ("specializations" are annoying if you're forced to be a jack of all trades) without making it too easy.
It still feels like a real accomplishment to build a large building -- both architecturally and via thinking about how each block traces back to the resources pulled out of the ground -- without requiring huge amounts of time in the game. I'm fairly proud of this one [1], and more so of the industry and infra that supported it.
Plus, Eco is just gorgeous, especially when in single-player with low ecological impact there are so many animals hanging around all the time (peep the alligator in that shot).
IMO with a low total player count, a lot of the more interesting mechanics in the game go completely unused, even if you add multipliers so resource gathering is conveninent time-wise. No point in using the shop system with just 3 people, let alone the government stuff. So while I'm sure you can fiddle with the numbers, it just won't be the same experience.
I haven't even watched 5% of his episodes, and yet I've seen him call things out a number of times. Sometimes asking his producer to Google stuff to check in real time.
Do you think it is conceivable that what the parent comment is pointing out is found... I dunno, somewhere in the other 95% of Rogan's content that you haven't seen?
Apparently the lookups themselves are a really funky ruse sometimes actually, so it looks like he's fact checking but the source of the fact is like, some random opinion article somewhere.
> The video game crash of 1983 [...] was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985, primarily in the United States.
> But outside of North America the video game industry was doing very well. Home consoles were growing in popularity in Japan while home computers were surging across Europe.
Note that the article’s title in Japanese is “Atari shock”.
Honestly, I think it should be called the “US video game crash of 1983”, and the article should be more up-front that this was something that happened specifically in the US. I think the English-language Wikipedia relies too heavily on North American sources.
The other language Wikipedias have this issue even worse; they tend to be translations from English, so they’ll discuss the video game crash like it was important even if it didn’t happen in their country.
Sure, but there are tons of Japanese-language sources of commentary specifically about the video game industry, and the English-language articles about video games are almost pathologically narrow in their viewpoints.
Japan had a smaller “crash” around 1986. Before then, lots of Famicom games were selling millions or high 6 figures regardless of quality, but afterwards (with VERY FEW exceptions) the million sellers were mainly first party and Dragon Quest games.
Runescape never intended folks to hit that high a level. Two brothers made the game and they just kind of filled the endgame levels never expecting anyone to reach it. Later, they added more and more content to fill those later levels. So it also suprised them I guess.
I was impressed to find out even some mmos work, like Final Fantasy 14. There's some janky side loading you can do, but there's even a custom launcher that loads faster than the stock one, and runs Linux! I'm always super impressed when gaming communities fix their own issues like this.
I am similar but I cannot for the life of me understand game engine workflows. Other libraries and frameworks I get after a while of reading docs etc, but the workflow for game engines is so different than what I normally do that I get thrown off course lol. Any tips for unreal?
After spending a ton of time with React/Javascript/Html/CSS it worked in my brain like this:
- Game logic is your Javascript
- Animations/Models/Textures are your CSS
- Game objects (i.e. the character you control, NPCs) are like React components
- Levels/Maps are your "database"
Now that I've typed that out, it almost doesn't make much sense. But that's how it fit together in my brain.
I don't know about a engine workflow, but I was inspired to make a few games in JavaScript after reading the book/website http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com by Robert Nystrom
That helped me understand frame-tick/physics-tick aspect at least, and how you could offload some processing onto separate queues of events.
