Minor spoilers: Universal Paperclips has an ending. That being said: Universal Paperclips is probably the best clicker-game I've ever played and I highly recommend that one. Ex: Factorio's "Rocket-per-minute" bases, or doing 500 quadrillion damage-per-second in Clicker Heroes. People like it when numbers go up, and people like it even more when numbers go up dramatically. Ultimately, a good clicker-game / idle-game is a text-based management sim. Guilds + chat to encourage collaboration? Check. Pay-real-money for minor benefits? Check. On the other end, I've played Clicker Heroes, which is about as idle-game as you can get. With a good enough setup, you can leave even when Biters are active (as long as you have enough bots to auto-regenerate your walls and rebuild your base as it is attacked).īut no one here will ever say Factorio is a "Bad" game. Your factory continues to produce even when you leave the computer on for hours. I've played a lot of idle games, and I think there's a spectrum from dumb to managerial.įor example, Factorio (especially in peaceful mode) almost certainly qualifies as an Idle Game. Been a long time since I ran this, but I probably still have a save. Utterly free, unconstrained, ever adventuring (so long as the app is running). Make a character, and let them free amid the virtual. > Progress Quest removes any player input beyond character building as a critique to contemporary role-playing games. Universal Paperclips is probably the most broadly known version of this expansion of gameplays, of shifting paradigms. The game is about setting up loops within the current bounds of what you can do, and over time these paths become simpler & simpler for your character & your potential expands beyond this current sphere of the game. I'm playing a semi-idle game Loop Odyssey now, where specific actions ("talk to this villager") take less action-points (mana) the more you loop around & talk to them. Whenever the system changes and players encounter a new cycle of exploration, experimentation and optimisation, a new beat in the narrative unfolds." > "Our interviewees further conceptualised the progress in idle games as a narrative that is intertwined with system changes (Theme 3) or “paradigm shifts”. In many ways, we've let simulation run amock outside the human realms with the recent uprise in Machine Learning: let the computer play virtual games with itself to minimize loss, in deeply far off spaces humans can not even comprehend. I mean, like, so much of the idea of computing that were exciting were about simulation. On the other hand, here's a game like Melvor idle - true idle in spirit with little differentiation between online and offline, no resets, no gambling, yet still with plenty of depth around optimization. Worst offenders I tried are NGU idle (overwhelmingly positive steam rating), Trimps, the perfect tower, which aren't actually idle, but rather incremental.Ī good rule of thumb is - if having a bot for a game would put you in a massive advantage then it's not an idle game, but rather an incremental game - a genre that is designed to be played for 'idle' amounts of time (forever basically) but actively, so will likely feature as many dark patterns as possible to keep you glued (and paying). Idle games can have lots of addiction inducing dark patterns:ġ) resources you can buy with real money Ģ) massively increased rewards due to active gameplay Ĥ) reset-based system when you're grinding to reach some some level, only for everything to be reset for some incremental reward.
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