My short answer is "Not frequently, but when I do, I'd be very angry about having to screw around repartitioning a disk instead of fiddling with an LV, VG, or some PVs.".
I use LVM on all my non-appliance Linux systems, [0] both servers and desktops. Given that few (no?) filesystems support online shrinking but every one that you'd use as '/' supports online growing, my strategy is to take a fairly conservative guess at how big my various subdirectories need to be and leave most of my available space unallocated. Later on, if I -say- find that I need more space in '/' or '/home', or prevent a blowup in '/var/log' from eating up all the space in '/' by putting that on a separate LV, etc, etc, it's just a few commands [1] and the job's done.
[0] ...someone else has configured the storage scheme for the appliances, and I'm not going to override their choices...
[1] ...and some data copying in the case of backing a subdirectory with a new volume...
And using LVM for "partitioning" bypasses a lot of this silliness. Do 'lvcreate --contiguous' and you should be good to go if you're using most any non-toy initrd.
Given that every r/w filesystem you're going to use as your '/' on a Linux desktop or server supports online growing (and most support offline shrinking), it's nuts to me to hear people worrying about getting partition sizes correct. With LVM, if you get it wrong you just resize the LV and the filesystem it contains.
Hell, LVM makes swapping out disks a really easy online operation. [0] If you don't have nice hot-swap drive caddies, you might have to power off the box once to add in the new disks and again to remove the old ones, but all the data transfer can happen while the system is in use.
[0] Assuming the new and old disks have the same logical sector size, which they usually do.
> Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life...
The loudest parents absolutely cannot. I don't know if this is because of the sleep-deprivation-induced brain damage that caring for a tiny human for their first year or so gives you or what, but there are some very loud, very neurotic people out there who appear to have forgetten that humans live for sixty to a hundred years.
Childhood is a tiny slice of life and if these folks had the time and ability to sit down and think very clearly and carefully, they'd see that making it so much harder for parents, relatives, and authority figures to get away with child abuse -sexual or otherwise- does far more to keep minors safe than removing those minors' ability to talk to adult strangers.
Hell, being able to talk to adult strangers is one way minors can both realize that they're being abused and find a way to get out of that abusive situation. To borrow a dark meme, it's hard to know that Penis Inspection Time isn't a legitimate activity when you can't talk to anyone who knows better.
No, that leaves vulnerable adults unprotected. It should be "Is my thing in one of the categories of things that this device says this user is not permitted to do? If so, I shall not permit this user to do the thing.".
Nothing stops software authors from providing pre-built bundles of categories that they believe fit certain types of vulnerable people [0], but the fine-grained control must be there so that guardians can choose to set things up for those they guard so to adequately protect them while minimizing the amount of stuff that they're blocked from.
[0] Like: "Overly-trusting human who needs protection from scams", "Dementia-damaged adult who cannot be trusted to manage their finances", "Median sixteen year old USian", etc, etc.
Sure, the categories can be expanded. For example, movie ratings aren't just "children" and "adults." But explaining the simple case seemed like enough for one comment.
> ...my impression is that they are releasing updates to No Man's Sky as a marketing effort...
Given that they don't (often? ever?) advertise Light No Fire alongside the NMS updates, I'd say that the updates into NMS are large-scale playtests of LNF engine updates, game systems, or both, rather than marketing.
I'm not so sure about that, but otherwise agree with your comment.
I'll gently point back to my hunch that many (most?) of the NMS updates are large-scale tests for things they're thinking about having in LNF. Given that it seems likely that both games are using the same engine, it'd make a lot of sense to use a preexisting playerbase for large-scale, no-cost testing of new changes.
Yes, I think we agree... I think they're using it for both marketing and to test the viability of it and get player feedback, but I do expect LNF to have at least some substantially similar mechanics to NMS for this reason.
> I come back after every major update and still find myself bored after a few hours.
Yep, me too. It's a decent sandbox to spend a bit of time in, and it's fine that that's all it is.
> Adding new content is great, but I'd rather see them spend that time on UI, UX, and tutorials.
They have spent substantial amounts of time on UI, UX, and tutorials... several times. Unless you're proposing they convert everything into a brain-dead "mobile" game UI (which would be a significant downgrade), it'd be very difficult to do much better than they already have with the inventory management and conversation UIs.
> It still feels like there are rough bones under all that content.
I mean, it's a sandbox. If they did all of the UI overhauling and tutorial creation you wanted from them -and nothing else- would that keep your interest for weeks and months... or would you play for a few hours and get bored? There's not much _game_ in the game and it's been that way since the beginning.
> I could play for two hours and still feel like I accomplished nothing except for "interacting with the world".
Two hours is like three or twelve story missions, depending on where in the story you are. Did you spend most of that time farting around doing stuff that wasn't main story [0], or are you just not really into the stories being told? IME, Rockstar's 3D games have always been not-all-that-great third-person shooters, but made up for it with the storytelling and world-building.
> ...because these games didn't respect my time.
If I were Global Overlord for a month, I'd permanently banish the sentiment "This video game doesn't respect my time". It's fine to say "This game bored me." or "I just didn't enjoy this game.". Unless we're talking about predatory "free" to "play" games [1] that survive by deliberately reaching deep into the wallets of whales, mixing pride into the discussion and claiming the injury of disrespect is very silly.
[0] ...of which Red Dead 2 has an absolute assload -most of which will bore folks to tears who don't really dig the "late 1800's outlaw going on about his day" thing-, and GTA V has a fair bit...
[1] Games that you have to pay up front to play can also belong in this category.
RDR2's intro absolutely did not respect my time. I sat down with an hour free to play it, and in that time, I did not reach a save point. There was some story, but it was very slow, and I had precisely zero interest in repeating it. I ran out of time, turned it off and never came back.
Almost all of the story missions are:
1) walk/drive/ride to this place
2) Talk to NPC
3) Do an extremely boring task (follow someone, drive somewhere, etc)
4) Walk somewhere else
5) Talk to someone else.
6) Collect XP or another reward.
Yeah. Like, the train heist and other cool gameplay segments were fun. But the missions to go to some random town and talk to someone and escort them back? Horrible.
> the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates.
Yeah. Back in the day, those would almost always be paid expansions... if not whole-ass sequels.
There's a subset of video game players these days who expect years and years of substantial changes to a game. Why, back in my day you had to pay for anything more than a game-breaking bug fix... and you counted yourself lucky if you even got those!
Back in the day, they had to ship complete working games, because the cost to fix it later was too high.
Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time, but the punishment for messing up was severe.
And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves. Those are a lot of value, and there's nothing wrong with them. They even still exist today, though rarer.
Maybe the NMS's updates did amount to one or two expansions throughout the 10 years of updates, but they were done piecemeal. Were it not a game that massively under delivered on release, they could've gone that route.
Sounds like being required to ship a "complete working game" didn't matter much. Weird.
> And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves.
And many were not. Plus, if we ignore shovelware -both past and present- most games these days are way larger than they were back in the day.
Have you ever gone back and played those old games you fuzzily remember through a haze of nostalgia? Many of them [0] would be derided as low-effort asset flips [1] these days. Many of the NMS updates (and tragically many updates to other games) definitely would qualify as "expansion pack"-sized. Some updates are big enough to be whole-ass overhauls. It's _nuts_ how much work some industrious indie game devs put into their games.
It's fine to be angry at how the circumstances of NMS's launch, and be sore that Hello Games is getting any praise after all that. But it's dishonest to refuse to recognize both that a very vocal subset of gamers expects that games will come with months and years of substantial post-release changes provided free-of-charge and that many devs -for better or worse- provide what these folks are demanding.
[0] ...but definitely not all of them...
[1] Granted, all sorts of things get called "asset flips", so the "low-effort" part is the important bit here.
Always having some instance of someone messing up is still substantially different from more instances than not being messed up. So it did actually matter quite a lot.
Now, as someone who is an avid retro gamer, I play plenty of those old games you're talking about. In the very old days, games were definitely shorter, but by the 5th and 6th gen, the gap isn't quite as big. If anything, they're often too large now, but that's neither here nor there. Budgets are bigger, teams are bigger, and most importantly, the consumer base is bigger. So size of games and expansions needs to be looked at relatively.
Regardless, for non-early access (of which NMS is an example of in all but name) and non-live service games, there mostly isn't an expectation that content will be added, only that updates will be made that improve and fix what's there. The exceptions are mostly when there's a pattern of content uodates happening before, or when something is clearly incomplete compared to what's usual for a series. See the Monster Hunter series as an example for both the latter ones.
Overall, it's natural for customers to want things that are at least as good or better than before when technology improves. It's the opposite that should not be happening.
There's a difference between DLC and providing "the base game content" – which No Man's Sky was doing. It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now. They could have cut their losses but it would've ended the studio.
Now they're being touted as a paragon of scrappy game dev. Which is wrong.
> It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now.
I'd argue that it was barely a game at launch, and it's still barely a game today... it has always been a sandbox with very little game in it, and that's fine. [0] But that's neither here nor there.
They released a "game" ten years ago. They've updated that "game" many times and never charged for updates.
That makes those updates free. You can justifiably be angry about the circumstances of the launch, and justifiably be angry that anyone's saying anything good about the devs. That doesn't change the fact that this [3]
And the features they've bolted on "for free"...
is an asinine use of scare quotes. The updates were delivered free of charge, and the price of the base game hasn't been increased to account for them. This makes them free updates.
[0] See the fourth paragraph of [1] as well as most of [2] for a little more commentary on this.
> I think people are regurgitating takes from early in the game's development...
Some are, sure. But -I say as someone who enjoys the game for what it is and still pops in every now and again to mess around with it- there's not much game in the game. Like BoBaitlyn said, it's a sandbox game. It has always been a sandbox game, and there are some folks who spend a few minutes fucking around with the sand in the box, go "WTF, this is boring as shit. I'm out!" and are boggled at the folks who enjoy playing with all the sand.
There's nothing wrong with being boggled or talking about how much you hated the sandbox. Specific sandboxes tend to appeal to specific sorts of people... each one often has its own gimmick that will pull in different sorts of folks. Suggesting that most complainers are complaining from a position of ignorance when they're complaining about a lack of things to do in a game that doesn't have much game in it kinda sucks. I've been playing off and on since v1, and have played for about half of the major patches. Hello Games has added a lot of stuff, but they haven't really added in much game to the game, if you see what I'm saying?
I can see your viewpoint. Some people don’t like sandbox games. that’s fine, I actually hate them, but this game’s additions led me into it gently in a way I’d never interact with say, a minecraft game. However, this is like, a sandbox game on steroids. There’s a strong mmo component of grouping, more being added (per this topic), and playing however you want to is entirely possible. In that regard I consider it one of the better sandboxes I’ve played lately, and I have played hundreds of hours of games like star citizen. I’d wish star citizen approached the game loop similarly.
> Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)
FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1.
IIRC, back in the v1 days you'd give an NPC a species-specific valuable trinket and they'd teach you a randomly-selected word of their race's language. Learning words was useful for when you'd encounter a historical relic that presented an important scene from history, and when you encountered an NPC that was requesting assistance. In both cases, they'd make their speech or request in their native language, you'd be given a few context clues in the form of dialog describing gestures, NPC attitude, etc, and then you'd have to guess what action you needed to perform or resource of yours they needed. If you get it right, you get something nice.
Like many other systems in the game, this got reworked several times into what it is now: "Find an NPC, ask for language assistance, select a category of word to learn, and Bob's your uncle.". I won't claim that either the v1 or current methods of learning language are fun, but the v1 method did consume a resource that was often difficult to come by... so it made learning the language much more difficult. They could have cooked up three whole-ass conlangs and built in gradual language tutorials for each... but that'd be a surprising choice for a game whose most difficult puzzles are "Can you do basic arithmetic?" and "Can you understand which direction this list of numbers is rotating?".
There's never been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both got what they were being told by the story and weren't enraged by the implications gets why. The game's first story (such as it is) is why I'm always amused by people who don't dislike it, but also take it very seriously and want there to be a ton of stuff to do in it.
Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of stuff [0] over the years. I'm amazed that they're making enough money on the game to still be working on it a decade later, but here we are.
> It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that...
Eh. As someone who pops back in for a few hours when there's a major change, I don't mind at all the detailed patch notes.
> Can we move on from this "game"?
Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it.
[0] ...some of which is clearly playtesting for things planned for Light No Fire...
I use LVM on all my non-appliance Linux systems, [0] both servers and desktops. Given that few (no?) filesystems support online shrinking but every one that you'd use as '/' supports online growing, my strategy is to take a fairly conservative guess at how big my various subdirectories need to be and leave most of my available space unallocated. Later on, if I -say- find that I need more space in '/' or '/home', or prevent a blowup in '/var/log' from eating up all the space in '/' by putting that on a separate LV, etc, etc, it's just a few commands [1] and the job's done.
[0] ...someone else has configured the storage scheme for the appliances, and I'm not going to override their choices...
[1] ...and some data copying in the case of backing a subdirectory with a new volume...
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