I'm Done Punching Trees and Grabbing Rocks in Video Games | Hacker News Reader

I'm Done Punching Trees and Grabbing Rocks in Video Games

kotaku.com

41 pointsPaulHoule88 comments

This is quite a poor take.

Punching trees and grabbing rocks is what lets games feel open. Games of yore were all about checkpoints. A story on rails. Fetch quests follow, but punching trees and grabbing rocks are a sort of procedural, emergent fetch quest that takes relatively very little developer time. Not to mention nearly infinite replayability in many cases. In some genres, like RTS, resource collection becomes a strategic pillar, open for experimentation and optimization. Isn't that just punching trees and grabbing rocks?

Compare the rise of games like Minecraft of Cookie Clicker. They both have emergent gameplay loops that involve rote resource collection.

Palworld is sort of the confluence of these genres where the goal is to automate resource collection to a large extent. It clearly works.

You can be done with punching trees and grabbing rocks but it's here to stay in one form or another. It's an essential component in most (but not all!) games, and for perfectly good reasons.

Enjoy a balanced diet. Everything in moderation. Play a pure puzzler or a story game or a card game or an RPG or a shmup or roguelike or a brawler or a sim. No need to hate on this very popular mechanic. It's a good one. There's plenty of fresh games that don't lean on it.

That being said I could maybe feel slightly bad for game reviewers who end up playing literally every tree-punching rock-grabbing game in a calendar year but that's what they signed up for. So I don't feel bad at all.

"but punching trees and grabbing rocks are a sort of procedural, emergent fetch quest that takes relatively very little developer time"

I think you perfectly described why I hate most in-game crafting. It feels like cheap filler content to increase play time.

"Games of yore were all about checkpoints. A story on rails."

I love that. I hated AC Origins for its open world and I was relieved that AC Mirage was much more linear.

> It feels like cheap filler content to increase play time.

That is true in combat games that tac on crafting afterwards, but in these games the gathering and crafting is the main content and the combat is filler. If the gathering and crafting didn't have any sort of nuance or interesting quality to them the game wouldn't become popular, you might not like that sort of gameplay but it is hardly just "filler" content.

Games journalism is nothing but poor takes.

Minecraft is still the most bought, most played and most watched game. This journalist wouldn't know fun if it creeped up on him and exploded in his face.

There are things I usually skip in single player games. Inventory management: If your game allows to pick up junk everywhere (Skyrim, Cyberpunk, Witcher, ...) your UI is shit I will look up ways to cheat these.

The last two Zeldas are awful on Switch. On PC I can fix everything I dislike about the games and tweak them to make them enjoyable.

On PC I can fix games. This is likely the main reason I'll never be a console/phone gamer and why I have a Steam Deck.

I have never enjoyed crafting. Grinding for material is also on my list (games like Monster Hunter)

Inventory management in the Resident Evil remakes are good examples of proper inventories and UI for that purpose. That way it's properly part of the gameplay and not "annoying hindrance" like Skyrim.

For me, that's garbage. I identify that as "farming" and it immediately triggers my "drop game timer", if I don't start having fun within 30 minutes of being thrown into a "gather rocks and punch trees loop", I drop the game due to poor design and refund. I'm too old to play "padded" games,I want only good quality stuff.

Yes most mmos and survival games are terrible at this, I'll never forget one of the quests in world of warcraft as a high level death knight "go gather wolves poop": I just defeated an enormous beast and saved a town, now I gather poop?

Checkpoints and story, give me that.

Or even better, give me a well designed gameplay loop, then gathering resources won't feel like a chore.

Automated resource gathering doesn't count, I'm fine if I'm not actively gathering: dyson sphere program is a great game.

For what is woth, I consider most open game terrible. Exceptions have farming items as secondary, not primary (e.g. Elden ring)

Palworlds gathering doesn't feel like a gathering chore, you don't spend much time gathering stuff you mostly spend time exploring and catching monsters or organizing the monsters work.

It wouldn't have become so popular if it is the slow kind of grindy chores you talk about, in general the most popular such games has a lot of things to make it not feel like a chore because most people don't like chores.

But a game reviewer can't really pick what they play, they have to play new shitty games that will never be popular all the time and then I can see how you start to associate these things with chores.

Agree, but disagree on the popularity argument, Ark was very famous and there was a crazy amount of grinding.

That being said, I'm not into pokemon-like games anymore, I suspect the automated battles are not my thing anymore, the fights are too dull and don't endanger you

This isn't a pokemon like game though, it is nothing like pokemon at all except the design of the monsters. Palworld is Ark but without all the grinding and pokemon instead of dinosaurs, but add a factory aspect where you can automate everything with those pokemons unlike the ark grinding and add a lot more content like bosses and events and npc's.

Arks niche at the time was taming dinosaurs, today that isn't anything special but Palworld take that concept and makes everything much better about it and around it. Other than dinosaurs that Ark is the worst survival game I've ever played, but the dinosaurs is what makes that game tick, and you don't have to spend much time on other aspects of the game.

I see, from my understanding there was still a bunch of times "wasted" fighting dull monsters, but if that part is limited, it might be more appealing.

Not sure I'm interested in the factory aspect though, I feel Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program already excel at that

The factory isn't like factorio factories, it is more like rimworld where the monsters go and do the tasks they are fit for and ferry items to where they belong.

So the main gameplay loop there is you have tasks you want done, you go out and search for and catch monsters that can do those tasks and then build out more and more. You don't have to do a lot of focused thinking like in those factory design games, such games takes too much effort to be as popular as palworld.

I see, it's worth a shot, different from what I used to. I haven't played rimworld yet because my experience with prison architect wasn't the greatest (no idea what to build or why)

It reminds me of the epiphany I had while playing strategy games - it began to feel like mucking around with a very large spreadsheet or database, and then it was difficult to see what separated my hours playing them from actual work.

This is what makes Zachtronics games so devilishly good and horrific -- they are the asymptotic expression of work as games. You can't not see it.

Zachtronics is getting to roleplay the job I want to have instead of building enterprise CRUD apps. I get pride and self-worth from my Zachtronics work and money from my day job.

(I went into IT because I liked solving challenging problems, not because I wanted a lucrative career.)

Is it him that is seeing an asymptotic expression of work as games, or you who are seeing an expression of his games as work?

In other words, what's so bad about games looking like work, or work looking like a game, if they're deep, fun and engrossing? If the job or the game is terrible, discard it: maybe the real difference is we can't always discard the job because we need to survive.

That's what makes it art.

I took one look at Zachtronics' TIS-100 and similar games and decided I'd rather learn actual ARM assembly language. At least I'd wind up with a usable real world skill at the end of it.

FWIW, I would consider the problem solving in exceptionally constrained environments to be the gained skill. The language is just one of dozens you'll learn as a developer or engineer.

Having coded in environments that would be considered tiny by modern standards, the constraints in Zachtronics' games don't meaningfully resemble real world constraints.

You're absolutely correct. But as they say, if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.

It doesn't have to resemble real world constraints to be a useful exercise.

Yeah, sometimes I have the realization that I don't need to open the game at all, I can just play the game in Excel.

Don't ruin it for the rest of us!

I hope that means you turned your hobby into a job and you're now a professional spreadsheet designer :)

Yes, exactly.

Gaming scratches the same itch as coding.

I remember being most productive at work when I was also indulging in Factorio. Maybe I should get back to both.

High reflex games don't scratch the same itch, thinking of Hades: prediction and reflexes are not something I encounter at work

I did a lot of calculations while playing Satisfactory to optimise my production line. Getting every part of a production line tuned just right was amazing. No regrets.

I wish there were more games like Advance Wars that are turn based and have a character like chess. For one thing you can play a game like this on a portable while walking or riding the bus or spinning at the gym because you can always step away from it. It is all about how a small set of elements recombine in carefully designed levels.

I like the Fire Emblem series but they come across as less legitimate as the elements of RPG grinding, character attributes and equipment management are introduced. Fire Emblem tries to introduce a "weapons triangle" with a rock-scissors-paper element but it's not very meaningful because it gets overwhelmed by the scaling of high level characters.

And then there's those of us who play EVE Online or Prosperous Universe and lean into spreadsheeting hard.

I think this happens with any game - or in fact any life skill actually. In the beginning everything is novel. You play for fun, you enjoy the activity. And after you've done it for a while, you decide you want to be a little bit better. And to get better, you start having to do work - real work. You have to start repetition, you have to start crunching numbers etc. to get incrementally better.

So much this. I used to love playing games as a kid, but now I watch game demos now and all it looks like to me is work. Someone/thing telling me to go do this and that. Keep track of all my work so I can be assigned more of it. I might as well just go code something.

I think the key to longevity with these survival games is multiplayer. Being creative and spending time with friends adds a lot of motivation/meaning to an otherwise stale resource grind. If you punch down 999 trees in a virtual forest and no one is there to see it, couldn't you have just edited the save?

Personally, there are three core reasons that motivate me to play a game nowadays:

- Competition / Socialization

- Narrative

- Novel mechanics/puzzles

The latter two are also more meaningful if I can discuss them with my social circles.

If you're working on a game concept, I think the most important question to answer is: "What is a player going to be able to take away from this experience?"

Did a player get to experience a narrative through a new perspective? Maybe they optimized a system or developed a skill better than XX percentile of other players.

At the end of the day games are made for people and it's hard to separate people from societies.

Crafting games in general are just tedious. I loved the concept of Subnautica or the raw brutalism of The Long Dark, but both of those games were just variations of punching tree games. It's a genre I never enjoyed, and which I too have started to avoid completely.

Between MineCraft, Ark, Satisfactory, DSP and now Palworld I bet I have 1,000 hours into tree punching games which is kind of nuts to think about. Really scratches the itch for me.

No Valheim?

I get it - you only punch the tiny trees, or just pick up branches and skip right to an axe :) But the progression / natural draw of discovering new things to craft as you touch new items is really good. And excellent procedurally generated worlds to explore.

Loved Valheim!!! Forgot about that one too.

I wish my friends enjoyed these games, as I'd have double the hours in. Playing solo does put an upper bound to how long I enjoy them.

Yeah and Valheim's multiplayer (at least for our group) kind of sidesteps the "grind" issues because we each tend to like different aspects.

I'll happily chop trees and mine all day, others like farming/animal husbandry, building, cooking, foraging, etc. All of us like exploring, boating, fighting bosses together. And we're all happy to craft/upgrade/repair our stuff.

That's the dream

Yeah Minecraft (FTB, ATM, any kitchen sink modpack really), Satisfactory, DSP, Factorio, now Palworld. Thousands of hours myself I imagine

Stay away from Factorio if you do not want to double your number

Forgot Factorio!

Crafting games peaked with Kingdom Of Loathing [1], no-one can convince me otherwise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Loathing

I also love that game but that's hardly how I would describe it as of late. It has become more of an optimization puzzle where you try to run through the game as efficiently (which does not necessarily mean "as quickly") as possible and has gotten shockingly deep and increasingly challenging to solve, which I guess shouldn't be surprising given that it's been continually worked on for 21 years now. All that to say that maybe puzzle game devs (and aspiring comedians) have more to learn from it than survival crafting ones.

IME, most of the tedium comes from the "inventory management with a crappy UI and arbitrary limitations" minigame (really "maxigame"). It is also related to the treadmill aspect of progression being a simple repetition - craft X stuff so you can craft the better Y stuff. It bores me quickly, but I know there are people who get off on this aspect.

Conversely, the RPG treadmill of kill X mobs to get stuff that will allow you to kill Y mobs can keep my interest for a long time and I get enough enjoyment to suffer through the obnoxious RPG inventory management pain.

> ultimately they all open with you (possibly naked) punching trees, collecting rocks, and scrounging around to survive. This was fun and exciting in Minecraft years and years ago. Today, it just feels like busy work

In a different genre of games, I'm done buying a new Gran Turismo or similar games, start with an empty garage, do all driver license, make money and slowly buy better cars and unlock tracks and challenges.

Do it once, it's fun. Do it twice, it starts to feel like wasted time. Do it one more time and I'm like "I pay you more but give me a fully unlocked game, I have better things to do than that." And I actually found better thing to do, proof is that I don't buy any new game and I keep playing the old ones.

Maybe it's because I'm older and see the arc of time especially in video games, and even though this is a transitional generation in gaming it's really a great time to be a gamer. Find a streamer that has similar taste to you and see what the are playing. I would recommend variety gamers rather than pop streamers. I'd also avoid garbage tier corpo-blogs for gaming news and reviews.

Your post would be much more useful with links to what you feel the "better things" are. Help us "avoid garbage tier corpo-blogs" by giving some examples of quality content.

Streamers. All the news sites are at best AI dumps.

ChatGPT give me the 100 top actions games... ChatGPT using that list give me a list for Xbox, Ps5, Pc, and Switch.

Every gaming site now 34 best Xbox action games 37 best Ps5 action games 41 best Pc action games 21 Best Switch action games

It is one of those quick dopamine generator mechanics where you feel like you are always making progress / getting rewarded no matter how mundane or mediocre the content really is.

I think this is on the money but it's more than that. It's a way to make progress incremental, which broadens the audience without punishing loyal devotees.

Think about older games where you could get stuck for hours at a time and make no progress. Many people shelve the game when that happens (even post Internet when you can just look it up!). Instead I can hop on these games and punch trees for 20 minutes and take a break. Progress was made! In more narrative heavy games it fills the space while you figure out what's next. Take BotW.

You're right about dopamine. Good gameplay design keeps the player engaged with a short but recurring gameplay loops. If the loops is too long or too short, or too frequent or infrequent, it doesn't work. Finding the balance -- especially when there are potentially many loops interacting -- is the key.

Tetris, Pac-Man, Mario, Street Fighter, Minecraft, Halo, Fortnite, Palworld -- all nail this. There's a tempo and a rhythm to the game, you experience highs and lows without bottoming out (getting bored) or overflowing (burning out).

We are generally on the same page but I don't necessarily agree that it is "good" game design even if it is successful at least as someone who looks for richer experiences in games than quick and recurrent rewards.

I don't mind the occasional tree-punching, but holy hell why does every game seem to need crafting now?

I'm playing Starfield and I'm just refusing. I'm not crafting anything. I'm not building outposts. Don't give me homework when I want fun.

It beats walking around and shooting Zombies. I’m so over gun based video games, when literally anything is possible.

The same can be said about many other games. "It beats racing over the same track hundreds of times just to see your best lap time improve by 0.2s, allowing you to buy another car to try everything again (but in another car)".

Punching monsters isn't much more fun than punching trees, especially when all sorts of monsters gives the same reward like in many looter shooters. In a crafting game you punch things because you want the specific loot, in a combat game you punch things for no reason other than the thing being there, that distinction makes a massive difference.

And at the end of the day you're just pointing and clicking on various things with your mouse in both types of game...

(Modulo controller users, of course)

I think this is fine as a criticism of the survival-crafting genre games, they are not for everyone. Personally I never liked them, not because of the crafting but because of the sandbox style. I rather follow a long quest, a story or anything else than build a world from the emptiness. But once again that's fine, each to their own. Probably the Dragon Quest Builders games the only one I enjoyed because they are like a good mix of Minecraft but also having a long story quest and goals to follow.

On the other hand the demand for these games still shows that the survival-crafting genre is still not 'done'. There is a huge market for them. Yet AAA studios for some reason don't want to touch them, most of these games are made by small studios and indies released in Early Access.

Seems like this is aimed at Palworld, and in that game at least one of the points is to get your pets to do the work for you.

Of course, you have to grab the initial rocks/brances for yourself :)

I'm not so much into this game myself, but my kids are all over it.

It's aimed at every punch tree/grab rock game that's come out recently. They may not be as popular as Palworld but they're still being made. It's insane.

If they are popular and sell well, it‘s only natural they‘re still being made. I wouldn‘t consider that to be insane.

"Seems like" is a strange thing to say considering it's referenced quite blatantly in the article. Which you read before writing this, I imagine.

Completely unrelated to this, the one HN rule I disagree with is that you're not allowed to call out commenters for not having read the article.

Of courses HN wouldn't be the place it is if commenters actually read the article. It would be something totally different.

For all we know that rule is load bearing.

For what it's worth, I actually did read the article first :)

Imagine reading an article and missing the subheading AND the first sentence.

It describes Lego Fortnite more than Palworld I think.

Game journalists are truly just bitter complainers. They took a political turn and just got consumed with complaining. Many of them lament the fact that they have to play so many games of low quality and then just treat the entire body of gaming as a chore. Consolevania has always been the epitome of gaming critique because they really only play games they like, or hate but enjoy because it's so bad it's funny

Jaded gamer who wants to skip the game and go to some twitch battle or something?

You don't like the games, you're tired of them? Go play a different one.

New gamers have to start somewhere. They're not starting at expert level with all the skills. Punching trees, husbanding resources, building stuff.

Nothing wrong with it. It's not good or bad, it's just there. If it was fun and now it's not fun and the game hasn't changed, then guess what?

It's not the game.

The tree is the quintessential UGC (user generated content) concept, there will never be a better way to communicate harvesting/building mechanic.

But the real end goal is to make the world persistent across thousands and hopefully 10s of thousands of real-time action players.

The problem is that we now have billions of humans building non-persistent and pervasive worlds that disappear!

It's time to hit piles of salvaged scrap in Foxhole with a hammer.

Or search every draw, tool chest and rubbish bin in the world in one of the thousand extraction shooters about to launch.

I thought you are going to talk about looking for iron, aluminium and copper in above mentioned game.

I've heard people say "draw", but I always assumed they still spelled it as "drawer" and it was an accent difference. My wife says "crick", but still spells it "creek". I'm curious if this is typical for folks from the north east.

You’re right and I just spaced on the proper spelling when I wrote my comment!

Do it. The war effort depends on it!

One day I hope FPSes come back in style.

There's been loads of boomer shooters released if you're counting those?

I miss story based single player FPS games so much. Especially the WW2 ones.

I hope FPSes (and 3rd person action) that you can play without a damn controller come back in style.

Apex and valorant still popular now

These essays are typical of a mid life crisis when a gamer looks back at 25,000 hours spent mining digital oar and then wonders if their real life would have been better had they done something with themselves.

Is this a "gaming is a waste of time" comment because I would argue that gaming is still better than passive forms of entertainment and never really understood the stigma specifically for games in the entertainment space.

I wonder if it's because the active nature of gaming tricks people into thinking they would've spent that leisure time doing productive things, and not realizing it's actually leisure time?

So once they start getting bored of the leisure time, their first reaction is to just keep doing it more to try and get the feeling back - which winds up feeling like work.

Which is pretty much exactly what my 2 year old does when he's tired: he doesn't know he's tired (or bored, or hungry) so he just tries to play harder to solve the problem for himself.

Nope, it's just a normal thing that happens when an (especially western) mind continues to wonder about further ways to satisfy the desires that gaming fulfills.

Better to build a garage, plant a row of trees, or steward a community organization. Something that you can show your kids and be proud of. Open source software work even.

Some entertainment being necessary, I feel the vast majority of people do it too much.

>Some entertainment being necessary, I feel the vast majority of people do it too much.

Certainly but what I really wanted to highlight was passive entertainment versus non-passive entertainment where gaming has shown to potentially have cognitive benefits [0]. Though I highly doubt all games are equal when it comes to this and I'm sure some are even destructive in how they abuse people's reward systems.

Games like Turing Complete can even teach about how computers work from a transistor level.

[0] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/video-gaming-m...

anecdotally I have known a lot more individuals who were ruined by MMORPGs than any other passive entertainment I can think of; gambling levels of ruined -- 'lost the job and the wife and the kids and i'm coordinating this raid from a laptop in a mcdonalds lobby' levels of ruined.

i've known binge watching cinophiles that have called in sick the next day occasionally , but I don't know of any that lost it all from the hobby.

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