Light No Fire is another interesting game announcement coming from The Game Awards 2023, coming from Hello Games, the crew that created No Man's Sky.
What is it? A game about adventure, building, survival and exploration together. What makes it interesting, is the claim that the world is literally the size of planet Earth. An open-world survival adventure with "a scale never attempted before". The idea and style of it look pretty great:
Direct Link
I'm excited, but cautiously so. Since we all know by now what happened with No Man's Sky. While it's an objectively good game now, the release state was not what was expected full of over-promise and under-delivering. Hopefully Hello Games learned a valuable lesson on that one. Then again…
Source: X/Twitter.
Hopefully like No Man's Sky it will have Vulkan API support, so that playing it on Desktop Linux or Steam Deck with Valve's Steam Play Proton will give a good experience!
Features:
- A Multiplayer Earth - Carve a life together. Meet players from across the globe, build a life, explore and survive together. Construct persistent buildings and communities, or strike out alone to discover the world for others.
- A Procedural Earth - A truly open world, with no boundaries at a scale never attempted before. A massively varied and dense planet filled with immersive biomes, unique enemies and valuable resources to discover.
- A Fantasy Earth - Light No Fire presents you with an ancient earth to uncover. One where you're not the hero. Thick with lore, mystery and a constant fight for survival. Inspired by the adventure, charm and imagination that we love from classic fantasy.
- An Unexplored Earth - Every mountain can be climbed, and below them lie endless vistas, oceans and continents perhaps no others have seen. Who will climb the tallest mountains, who will find the deepest sea? Set sail across vast oceans and rivers, ride wild beasts through fantastical landscapes, fly dragons over undiscovered landscapes.
Follow Light No Fire on Steam.
Quoting: Purple Library GuyMind you, science fiction usually means "modern North America with a few specific tropes largely derived from Star Trek, Star Wars, and Andre Norton" which seems consistent with my understanding of No Man's Sky.
Even if I completely agreed with that, the things you listed here already seem a lot more diverse than LotR/D&D.
Example: it would seem ridiculous to put the Klingon Empire in NMS. Put dragons in light no fire... oh wait, they did that lol
Last edited by ExpandingMan on 9 December 2023 at 6:35 pm UTC
Quoting: ExpandingManExample: it would seem ridiculous to put the Klingon Empire in NMS. Put dragons in light no fire... oh wait, they did that lol
To be fair, dragons in fantasy stories might just slightly precede LotR and D&D. I mean Gilgamesh fought one, and that story was written something like four thousand years ago.
Your comparison is more meaningful if you can find Hobbits and Ringwraiths in the game.
Quoting: ExpandingManDragons are a thing vaguely on par with "spaceships", or "handguns that shoot beams", not "The Klingon Empire". And how many SF games have "A warrior race prone to violence, optionally with odd notions of honour, who are physically implausibly identical to humans except for slightly different faces, hair and variations in build"? No, they don't call them Klingons; Klingons are intellectual-property-protected to hell and back. But they fill the same roles.Quoting: Purple Library GuyMind you, science fiction usually means "modern North America with a few specific tropes largely derived from Star Trek, Star Wars, and Andre Norton" which seems consistent with my understanding of No Man's Sky.
Even if I completely agreed with that, the things you listed here already seem a lot more diverse than LotR/D&D.
Example: it would seem ridiculous to put the Klingon Empire in NMS. Put dragons in light no fire... oh wait, they did that lol
Don't get me wrong--I'm a science fiction fan. I've been reading SF since before I saw the first release of Star Wars in theatres and thought it was fun, but kind of bad SF. But it's just as cliche-prone as fantasy. Pretending otherwise is an attempt to create a false objective basis to personal taste.
(I actually picked up and read the book "Star Wars", saying on the cover "Soon to be a major motion picture!" a few months before the movie came out. I was like, sure, sure, major motion picture, like that's going to happen.)
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 9 December 2023 at 7:55 pm UTC
Quoting: Purple Library GuyDon't get me wrong--I'm a science fiction fan. I've been reading SF since before I saw the first release of Star Wars in theatres and thought it was fun, but kind of bad SF. But it's just as cliche-prone as fantasy. Pretending otherwise is an attempt to create a false objective basis to personal taste.
I don't entirely disagree, and the only reason it's possible for these things to be genres is that they have these tropes, they're just significantly narrower in fantasy than in sci fi.
Quoting: ExpandingManI don't entirely disagree, and the only reason it's possible for these things to be genres is that they have these tropes, they're just significantly narrower in fantasy than in sci fi.You're thinking of high fantasy which is only one of the subgenres. Understandable, as that's what almost anyone thinks of when they hear the genre mentioned. And even that subgenre is likely to be more varied than you give it credit for.
Fantasy spans the spectrum from Beowulf to Alice in Wonderland, Discworld and (shudder) sparkly vampires. Just like sci-fi has more to offer than just spaceships and lasers and suspiciously humanoid aliens. Basically, if the story builds on magical elements and/or creatures, you can call it fantasy.
Quoting: ExpandingManI'm thinking that because you don't much like fantasy, reasonably enough you don't read much of it. And since you don't read much of it, you don't have much awareness of what is actually out there.Quoting: Purple Library GuyDon't get me wrong--I'm a science fiction fan. I've been reading SF since before I saw the first release of Star Wars in theatres and thought it was fun, but kind of bad SF. But it's just as cliche-prone as fantasy. Pretending otherwise is an attempt to create a false objective basis to personal taste.
I don't entirely disagree, and the only reason it's possible for these things to be genres is that they have these tropes, they're just significantly narrower in fantasy than in sci fi.
But theoretically, fantasy is much broader, since science fiction embraces everything that is possible (OK, plus a few things we agree to pretend are possible, like FTL travel), whereas fantasy allows both possible and impossible things. And actually existing fantasy uses more of that territory than you would think. Jasper Fforde writes about a heroine who learns to enter books by "reading herself into" them, thwarting a villain who plots to ruin Jane Eyre by going into the original manuscript and changing the plot, in a Britain which includes the People's Republic of Wales, which smuggles dangerous cheese into England, and a prime minister running on a platform of developing "anti-smote" devices to prevent God from smiting England if He gets annoyed.
Quoting: tuubiYou're thinking of high fantasy which is only one of the subgenres. Understandable, as that's what almost anyone thinks of when they hear the genre mentioned. And even that subgenre is likely to be more varied than you give it credit for.
Well, it was foolish of me to try to get into this conversation without trying to define the genre, that's for sure.
Regardless, what I see in this trailer does not look to me like a clever or interesting setting, it looks a lot like the kind of thing that you're criticizing me for stereotyping fantasy as.
Quoting: ExpandingManCould be.Quoting: tuubiYou're thinking of high fantasy which is only one of the subgenres. Understandable, as that's what almost anyone thinks of when they hear the genre mentioned. And even that subgenre is likely to be more varied than you give it credit for.
Well, it was foolish of me to try to get into this conversation without trying to define the genre, that's for sure.
Regardless, what I see in this trailer does not look to me like a clever or interesting setting, it looks a lot like the kind of thing that you're criticizing me for stereotyping fantasy as.
I don't think we really have enough information to be sure, but it's not unlikely--I'd say games, especially at the higher budget end, tend to lean fairly heavily on the most, ah, classic imagery, whether in F or SF.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 9 December 2023 at 10:42 pm UTC
Static water bodies feel so damned lifeless in NMS - needs waterfalls and rivers.
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