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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • There’s another thread just like this one posted 2 hours earlier in this same community, fyi.

    Just gonna copy my comment from there:

    The Isle is honestly pretty bad in many respects. In fact, it’s such a mess that I need to clarify which version I’m even talking about, because there is an OG version and an on-going complete rewrite, prompted by them having fired their only coder and no longer being able to understand their own codebase.

    The OG version was special. It was very simple, quite buggy and in a constant, obvious state of plans-and-hopes (being EA), but it had a unique atmosphere - the only true survival-horror to date, as far as I’m concerned/aware (only rivalled by some of my experiences playing DayZ, back when it was still an Arma 2 mod).

    Playing a herbivore, resting/hiding in a bush in the pitch-black darkness of night with only limited night-vision letting me see my immediate surroundings and footprints on the ground, the sound of a massive, rumbling carnivore sniffing for traces of food was quite a thrill. Not to mention the moments after when a pair of jaws around my size suddenly emerge out of the darkness.

    That kept me playing.

    Then they stopped working on that and began their rework from the ground up. The rework (which they call EVRIMA) has (or had) no day-night cycle (always daytime), went from being set in an arboreal environment to tropical jungle, and had two playable dinosaurs (one herb- and one carnivore) of about equal size. No creepy nights, no asymmetric gameplay, no horror elements, different feeling in both how it feels to play and how it looks, and it also ran like crap on any device.

    They’re slowly working on it; it has some more dinosaurs now etc, but last I played, it still didn’t feel the same and it was still buggy and severely incomplete. What emergent horror elements one might get out of the reworked version I feel are but shadows of what could have been.

    And yet there’s none other like it.

    Edit: I believe the current version does have night-time, but it doesn’t (or didn’t until recently) have night-vision and IIRC the nights are not as horrifying.


  • The Isle is honestly pretty bad in many respects. In fact, it’s such a mess that I need to clarify which version I’m even talking about, because there is an OG version and an on-going complete rewrite, prompted by them having fired their only coder and no longer being able to understand their own codebase.

    The OG version was special. It was very simple, quite buggy and in a constant, obvious state of plans-and-hopes (being EA), but it had a unique atmosphere - the only true survival-horror to date, as far as I’m concerned/aware (only rivalled by some of my experiences playing DayZ, back when it was still an Arma 2 mod).

    Playing a herbivore, resting/hiding in a bush in the pitch-black darkness of night with only limited night-vision letting me see my immediate surroundings and footprints on the ground, the sound of a massive, rumbling carnivore sniffing for traces of food was quite a thrill. Not to mention the moments after when a pair of jaws around my size suddenly emerge out of the darkness.

    That kept me playing.

    Then they stopped working on that and began their rework from the ground up. The rework (which they call EVRIMA) has (or had) no day-night cycle (always daytime), went from being set in an arboreal environment to tropical jungle, and had two playable dinosaurs (one herb- and one carnivore) of about equal size. No creepy nights, no asymmetric gameplay, no horror elements, different feeling in both how it feels to play and how it looks, and it also ran like crap on any device.

    They’re slowly working on it; it has some more dinosaurs now etc, but last I played, it still didn’t feel the same and it was still buggy and severely incomplete. What emergent horror elements one might get out of the reworked version I feel are but shadows of what could have been.

    And yet there’s none other like it.

    Edit: I believe the current version does have night-time, but it doesn’t (or didn’t until recently) have night-vision and IIRC the nights are not as horrifying.



  • Well I don’t know what you are referring to, but I’m not going to argue about your perception. I listened to the whole thing again (there are usually things that pass me by the first time, so I don’t mind doing that for the interesting episodes) and I don’t know how he could have done a better job at steering the conversation. He’s a podcast host; he needs to pick at the parts that are of particular interest to him and his audience in a limited amount of time, as well as keeping the level of technicality just right so as to be digestible.

    For someone familiar with the topic, it’s natural to feel like they could have gone on about something at a more advanced level, and for someone entirely unfamiliar, it’s natural that they would want to linger on things they don’t quite get instead of moving on to something else.

    Anyway, I’m not really going anywhere with this. Just curious about your perception since I tend to think of SC as someone quite smooth and approachable around people (unlike me). I guess even he can’t be smooth enough for everybody all the time.


  • I’m relistening to that episode now because I’m curious about what it is you perceived.

    He interjects sometimes to help tie things together (“and this is interesting because of [earlier observation]”) or to adjust the level of technicality to suit his intended audience (“we’re allowed to use the word torus here”). Not all Mindscape guests have a solid feel for the podcast and default to giving popscience breakdowns with analogies and leaving out technical jargon, and so he has to set the bar a bit by explicitly allowing the introduction of technical terms and bringing together of complex related topics.

    Don’t know if that’s what made you feel like he was trying to show off.





  • A game can offer an experience that leaves the player feeling satisfied or at least content with how they spent their time. There is a large space of possible interactive experiences that extend far beyond the simple dichotomy of fun vs educational or productive.

    A game can certainly be considered predatory if it exploits psychological vulnerabilities to hook someone on engaging gameplay that gives the player very little in return in terms of fulfillment or mental recovery. Whether or not it takes the opportunity to swindle the player on top of that is a matter of degree in severity. Wasting a player’s time (or worse, induce stress or other harmful mental states for no good reason) is not a particularly nice thing to do.