No Man's Sky (6/10)

So I played a bit of No Man's Sky last night and to cut to the chase, it was kind of boring. The game is beautiful and I love the idea of endless space travel, but the game is just that, big and kind of empty.

You start off on a randomly generated planet with a minor explanation that your ship is broken and needs repaired. I spent my first 10 minutes of game play trying to figure out how to manage my inventory and figure out how to repair my ship, as the game lacks a good tutorial. It wasn't until my suit started to break down that I figured out how to repair stuff. Once I got a grasp on reading the menus the game started to show it's true colors. This game is an endless grind for elements. Elements are used to repair your space suit, fuel your ship, upgrade your multi tool, so on and so on. The problem is, you have to do this a lot. Every time your ship takes off is uses fuel, so you are constantly trying to find more fuel. Every two minutes or so, your space suit starts to degrade and you need to repair it. The elements aren't hard to come by, but it's aggravating how often you need to be micro managing your stuff!

Once I finally figured out what needed to be done to repair my ship, I was left with another dilemma. The game wanted me to create something out of iron. So I walked around till I found some and started to mine it with my multi tool. Once I had it, I didn't know what to do with it. It took me a few minutes of  fiddling around with the menus to figure out how to craft items. One of the biggest problems I had as a new player was the lack of tutorials to teach me what to do, but I'm a video gamer at heart, so I figured it out. I started understanding how the repair function works and set my sights on my multi tool which also needed some repairs. I found the associated materials that were required for the upgrade and proceeded to create a scanner for my multi tool. The scanner allowed me to push a button that shoots out a radar of sorts and lets you know where important items are around the map. I needed only 1 last element to fix my ship, so I pushed the scan button and started looking around. It popped up on my screen but when I hovered over it, there was a number below it. 10:43. The more I walked towards it, the smaller the number got. Turns out, that's the amount of time it will take you to get there. So I spent 10 minutes traveling to the resource and 10 minutes traveling back just to fix my ship.

After about a half hour of walking around aimlessly, trying to manage my small inventory allotment, and making a 20 minute trip to (what felt like) the other side of the planet, I fixed my ship and was in the air. This is the part of the game I was looking most forward to. I wanted to explore the galaxy like Han Solo with my Millennium Falcon, wanted to shoot down some bad guys in space like Star Fox, this is moment I've waited for. I was let down. The flying in the game feels shallow. Plenty of other games handle planet side spacecraft handling very well, take Halo for example, flying the Phaeton, Wasp, and Banshee feel great, and the game isn't even built around that mechanic. Flying your ship on the planet feels clumsy. The controls feel odd as your left stick controls the ship and the right stick controls your pilots view inside the cockpit. In space things get a little better as you are now able to rotate your ship upside down.

Ultimately the game is going to need a lot of work. There isn't a story narrative to drive the repetition of finding minerals, fueling your ship, constantly repairing and refilling your space suit/multi tool, and flying to the next planet. Many will make the argument that the game doesn't need a narrative, that's it's about the experience. If that's the case then it needs a lot of work, because the experience is comparable to a flight simulator in which you are constantly stopping to refuel your ship and grab a bite to eat to make you healthy again. They would do well to follow in the path of Minecraft, allowing players to build/explore/fight together, I think the game would do well to implement some kind of questing system with the ability to build space stations. Though the game is impressive based on it's pioneered endless galaxy system, it doesn't make up for how empty the game feels.

If you enjoy being in the woods and just looking at nature, this game is for you. NMS has some beautiful planets and some amazing creatures. The art style is great and the ambient noises of ships flying over head or an animal growling in the distance makes you feel pretty immersed. There is a lot of promise for this game and I think the dev team will make this game great in about a year or so. As for now I'll just put the game back on the shelf and hope for a good patch in the future. I'll give No Man's Sky 6 carbon out of 10.

Why I quit playing Clash Royal.

There are very few mobile game that can actually hold my attention. When I first saw KoopaTroopa play Clash Royale on his stream, I couldn't wait to play it. I'm not a huge fan of TCG's and deck building games. They just aren't my speed. But when I saw that each match only lasted 3 to 4 minutes, and that each deck contained 8 cards, I was in. In fact, it's one of the only mobile games that's hooked me into it's in app purchases. I would wait till I got paid every week and spend at minimum $5 for chests. I've probably spent well over $100 on the game since it's release, don't tell my wife, and I've pushed to over 2500 trophies, so I know the game pretty well. I really love the game, and the game-play. So what made me quit? Other players.

I have pretty thick skin. Things don't normally anger me, but one thing that really upsets me is when people treat each other poorly. It's always been something I hate. T-bagging in CoD, trash talking in Rocket League, and even flaming someone in League of Legends, these are all things I cannot stand for. I hate seeing people being treated badly. Don't get me wrong, I understand that video games can be frustrating. I can't tell you how many times I've been sniped by an AWPer in CSGO only to rage quit, but the one thing I have never done is trash talked my team or the other player. Sure, I may place blame on another player in my head or blow off some steam to my friends on Skype, but never do I call out the other player. I almost always receive some sort of boasting or trash talking from the other player. "Get rekt noob.", "Quit playing.", "Are you a dumb @#$% Blizz?" I've received all these phrases throughout my gaming career. It's a badge of honor that I can proudly say that I grew up during the time of Halo 3, when everyone wanted to get some action from my mother. But every game that I have ever played has allowed me to silence those players in some form or another.

Clash Royale has an emote system, much like that of Hearthstone's. There are a few emotes and simple words  that you can send to try to convey your emotions. Most every round of Clash that I play, I start with a "Thumb's up" or a "Good Luck!". When I lose a tower, I may throw out a cry face, even an angry face if the deck I'm facing has a Royal Giant in it! But whether I win or lose, I always say "Good Game". I saw it when I win because I am grateful for the victory and I am respectful to the other player, much like shaking the hand of an opponent after a sports match. And when I lose, I say it to show respect to the player for outplaying me and my build. What I don't enjoy is that the emotes are able to be spammed, over and over and over again.

Lately I have been losing more matches than I win (I've been trying out some new decks), and a lot of the time I see people spamming the "laughter face" over and over again when they beat me. This may not seem like much, because it's not. At the end of match I'm not mad at the player who beat me for spamming the childish laughter or crying face, I'm mad that it's happened for the 5th 6th or even 7th time during my 30 minute gaming session. Yes I'm losing, but I don't need to be reminded of that. Toxic players exist in every game and it's a reality that we all are faced with. My problem is that Super Cell has done nothing to fix it. You see in Clash Royale, there are no mute buttons, there isn't an option to turn off emotes at all.

Why has this stopped me from playing? I like to dedicate my gaming time to games that leave me feeling refreshed and optimistic after a long days work. I don't need some twerp in a video game constantly harassing me after a loss. If you played a game of Catan with your friends, and after the game was over, the winner kept constantly boasting of his victory in your face, you'd probably never play with that friend again. Those are my feelings towards Clash Royale. I have no options to turn off the constant and annoying emotes. I have no way of separating myself from the T-Baggers and Trash Talkers.

I've seen many threads on Reddit and the official forums, asking Super Cell for the ability to turn off emotes, or at least silence individual players. Each time the concern is brought up, you have a bunch of community members telling these players to "grow thicker skins" and saying things like, "just don't let it bother you" and to them I say "Bravo!" If you can play the game and those things don't affect you, good for you, but I know there is a good population of players who would rather just turn the emotes off. It's evident by just one search of "Clash Royale emotes" on Google.

 At the end of the day, I just want to grab my phone and play my $100 plus game in peace. Till they fix the emote system, I can find other games that will fulfill my needs. What do you think? What are your views on toxic players or the emote system in Clash Royale? I'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below!