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Archive Waking Titan
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Great Job @kyle-culver , happy to have a staple of humanity such as yourself conversing directly with the digital shade of a dreamer. Was nice to not only learn more about Eun Ha but learn a little something about you in the process too :slight_smile:

Spending more time in the simulation these days I seem to be missing these events as a result :slight_smile:

@Emily though I won’t get a chance to talk to these dreamers, could you let them know, that when they wake up, Todd’s buying them a round of Pints in his local…

And for the youngsters who can’t drink a Guinness and/or Whiskey with me?

  • a voucher for fortnite cosmetics for Simon,

  • a pass for the zoo with permission to help the keepers feed the elephants for Toby

  • and a huge collection of first edition Sci Fi novels and comics for Claire

Yes, those of legal drinking age are getting the short straw I know… That’s life :slight_smile:

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83

Next sessions should be more instructive. We need more informations about how W/RE proceeded to start the experiment and tell to the dreamers to hang on to their strongest remembrance. They need a fix point to find a way to come back.

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84

awesome ? really ? did it move along the ARG in anyway or did i miss something ?

I think think the intention, or at least I hope the conversations with Dreamers are a clever approach to allow players to interact with what I hope will be in game characters that drift in and out of a player’s gaming experience. I have been hoping for a video game and ARG that interacts directly with players and blurs the lines of developer storyline and custom player storylines, that maybe we can set up for each other.

This approach hopefully is experimenting with developing character backgrounds with a new kind of ‘procedural approach.’ Characters could completely change over time affected by interactive story development and so they can give us ‘real’ goals that hopefully keep us surprised and entertained with the branching exposition. Maybe as individual solo players we uncover branching storylines that affect other players we can choose to get involved with or not.

No Man Sky has been weak in involving story ever since launch. Everything else has been astonishing and gradually polished. Story though is absolutely the key to everything. If you are a character in a game or film you need an ultimate goal.

Once that is complete then another and another. But the overall arch of the story goal ought to be bigger than the sum of the parts. If there is a good story it will absolutely knit all the elements of the game together. Maybe a procedural learning AI is being developed to keep track of character development and serve up linked story threads on demand. That would be exciting or worrying and extremely complex to achieve!

Any story that goes on and on should be careful though not to fall into the banal and mundane of a padded out TV series, like that based on a critically acclaimed two hour blockbuster. The No Man Sky story does need planning, as it can’t just be random ‘role play’. The short format keeps things concise. Story needs to be concise. Things said should only move the story on for example.

Already I see potential for characters here in the ARG to give us more involving reasons to do the missions we are currently presented with in game. If we believe in the characters, we may believe returning to the Mission Board for the 500th time will be rewarding in more ways than another pile of units. We can also with NEXT hopefully group together to achieve those developing ‘goals’.

It might seem chaotic but it is at least a new approach to story development I haven’t experienced before, so here’s hoping once the update lands the characters we are involved here with in the ARG, might have a real purpose in the game one day and will make sense to the new player who knows nothing about the ARG.

Hopefully like any memorable film or play, characters will have depth that drive the game story forward. They need a back story but the character on the surface doesn’t need to be presented initially as too complex to its target audience. Gamers are not the most patient audience. A careful balance on character reveal has to be reached, to avoid broken gameplay and story weariness. Should they want to know more about the characters what better way than having the possibility of talking to them in game and being rewarded with unexpected twists and turns to their gaming experience in return.

Hollywood ‘A’ listers please form an orderly queue for some improvised character development. Hollywood studio moguls take note…

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85

i have OBS ready!

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I think the sentiment among many people is they would rather Hello Games just tweeted out concept art and other teases for the upcoming update instead of hiding them behind ARG puzzle gates.

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87

That’s sad.
Edit: exclude me out of your pool of ‘people’, please. LoL!
I mean for content creators like yourself and others, it’s an opportunity to give your viewers additional insight with some personal flavor attached.

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88

Bah, that sounds like any other developer, why be like everyone else when you have your own ideas of what to do?

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89

I’m not really one of those people either. And yes, full disclosure, Waking Titan has gotten me a lot of views and subscribers on my channel. I just don’t want to ignore the viewpoint of quite a few people who feel info on the updates is being held for ransom by an ARG, like @DarkbyDesign .

The first Waking Titan was really good and gave us tremendous insight into the lore of No Man’s Sky and taught me and others about simulation theory and the concept of the Singularity. This 2nd Waking Titan, however, hasn’t taught me as much and I and many others are starting to experience ARG fatigue since it’s been going on for half a year now.

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90

The mindset that information is being held for ransom by the ARG isn’t right. I mean if you think back to the Foundation and Pathfinder updates we got no information at all before the updates released…so if it weren’t for the ARG we’d likely not be getting anything at all…that’s just how Hello Games want to do things and I can at least understand where they’re coming from given how the launch went for them…even if I think it’s really bad for the Xbox version to launch without any marketing. But nobody can say they lied if they never promised or said anything about the update before it launched.

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91

I don’t think it’s being held ransom by an ARG, I think if it wasn’t for the ARG, we wouldn’t be getting anything from HG at all, they’d just be their usual quiet selves and deliver content when ready.

Before the game released we got very little info from HG directly except for the obligated press junkets and ad trails they had to do as part of their deal with Sony.

I think most people’s frustration is coming from expectations they have of what is, at least to me, the new media standard. Which is, tease, tease, tease, show, show, show, give, give, give, ad nauseam. Marketers are too busy trying to make noise above the rabble and get noticed that even youtube algorithms are changing to match it.

Which is to say that, your idea or vision having a unique voice that captures the interest and imagination of people without having to scream about it is hard, really hard, but dammit we all want to be millionaires and psychology studies have shown our greedy hearts the shortcut; turn entertainment into a drug. Just be super loud, invasive and easily accessible and keep the rumor mill and news mill running, we’ll make great day one sales which is all the shareholders care about it, after which we’ll turn our back on all its criticism and start fleshing out a sequel.

So I’m glad with the ARG, in fact I’d be just as happy to get nothing from HG at all until NEXT releases.

I guess HG came to a decision, do we pay the same type of mindsets that are corrupting all aspects of life, in this case the greedy old school dinosaur marketers, or do we pay this passionate company doing creative new and engaging things with advertising that doesn’t use human psychology against the population to sell more selfie sticks or cheap tricks?

It’s safe to say HG went with the types of people they’d like to see colonise space.

For more of an in depth discussion on Hello Games, their approach to advertising and marketing, this old interview from 2016 should shed some light

In short, their stance on marketing is “overall, we don’t give it that much thought at all.”

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In the first Waking Titan, a lot of people were under the illusion that they had to complete the ARG in order to “unlock” the NMS update, as evidenced by people in the final Twitch stream demanding that they “give them the update already”. It was actually the driving force behind motivating many people to participate.

Now, we have a release date for the update, so it is no longer a sentiment of “we have to do this ARG to get an update” (though that was never true), so instead, they’ve had to provide a lot more clues about what’s actually IN the update in order to motivate people to participate in the ARG.

So what really is Hello Games’ reason for doing Waking Titan? You, Darth, have said it’s not an effective way to market NMS to people who don’t play it, and I agree. Is it just to get us to participate in an ARG? To educate us about the science behind the themes of the videogame? Is it just some kind of fan service to entertain and keep us occupied until the update? The purpose of this ARG is unclear and seems to have lost sight of it.

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93

For NEXT much more than for Atlas Rises I think Hello Games felt like they had to do the ARG so that their existing fanbase wouldn’t walk away thinking they abandoned the game since it will have been close to a year since Atlas Rises when NEXT launches…that’s about three times longer than the time-span between the previous major updates.

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94

Personally I’d be happy to let people who think and act that way walk away from the game, never to return. They’ve a very toxic, black and white, relationship with the entertainment industry.

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Oh come on Mac. The whole point of an ARG is that it stretches the boundaries between fantasy and reality. You’re only fooled by it because you choose to be. If you join in, you’re a willing partner in the story.

If people don’t like it, they can just ignore it. Nobody’s forcing them to join in, and, as you said, the update will arrive anyway.

In the meantime, some of us are quite enjoying the free entertainment.

Complaining about the ARG is a bit like complaining about your pub giving away free beer. If you don’t want any, don’t take it.

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96

I’m this way, I liked the first half/season of WT. I don’t want to complain, but I’m not as engaged. I loved the latest bit, traveling through portals in-game. I really wish they did more of that.

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97

Can we get back on topic now?

I think we should get a list of dreamers and some keywords/topics relating to each one specifically. We need to have some questions ready for the next set of conversations.

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98

The topic long since finished…the five brief conversations/streams happened and that was that…there wasn’t really much there to talk about…we didn’t really learn much, if anything, about the dreamers from them. We didn’t really have any time to try to prepare questions or anything like that.

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There will be more. Try reading next time.

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Well, not yet they’re not…when they happen there will likely be a new thread so people will get ready.

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Nothing wrong with being prepared. I see no reason not to start thinking about it now.

Especially after all the complaints about the short timeline.

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