The Nintendo Switch and the possible return of cartridge based media
Posted: 21 Dec 2016 08:51 PM PST
So Is anyone else hyped about the possibility of games returning to cartridge format? All I can envision are quicker load times, faster online play, and the return of having sweet ass collections that you can share and trade with your friends.
submitted by /u/TheSmellyPillow [link] [comments]
Online gaming and abusive communities.
Posted: 21 Dec 2016 09:36 AM PST
I've been a player in CS:GO for about a year now, and it has a community I can only describe as toxic. Even in a 5 man stack, playing competitive with people you know, it's easy for frustration to catch and to find yourself fuming at your mates.
COD had its own ragers, of course, and they're well documented as memes of their own. League of Legends, too, has a near bottomless pit of fury to sink into. Hell, I find it hard to think of an online gaming community where the players bite their tongue when the shit hits the fan.
But now there's Overwatch. Now it has its fair share of ragers, and the community does occasionally have a nutter or 3 spring up... but in my experience they get shouted down. "Calm down, man, it's a game. We're here to have fun" seems to be the motto, as opposed to "GG trash team".
So how the hell did that happen? How does this particular team game, enjoyed by so many, have so many less ragers than a game like CS? Where did Blizzard go right, and how can a company like Valve or Riot copy that over?
How do you calm people down?
submitted by /u/squeakypeeky COD had its own ragers, of course, and they're well documented as memes of their own. League of Legends, too, has a near bottomless pit of fury to sink into. Hell, I find it hard to think of an online gaming community where the players bite their tongue when the shit hits the fan.
But now there's Overwatch. Now it has its fair share of ragers, and the community does occasionally have a nutter or 3 spring up... but in my experience they get shouted down. "Calm down, man, it's a game. We're here to have fun" seems to be the motto, as opposed to "GG trash team".
So how the hell did that happen? How does this particular team game, enjoyed by so many, have so many less ragers than a game like CS? Where did Blizzard go right, and how can a company like Valve or Riot copy that over?
How do you calm people down?
[link] [comments]
What modern games and mechanics of today are going to shape and influence future games and their design?
Posted: 21 Dec 2016 04:09 PM PST
In a world where we are constantly saying games are being watered down and becoming easier. What mechanics and games are shaping the way the industry is moving towards. This isn't genre specific by the way.
Looking at point and click adventure games of the 90's to what is now lets say cinematic choose the voice line adventure games. From Platformers being the go to genre, to now FPS.
How do we think modern games are going to shape the industry in both design and future titles?
I think Mobas more recently have shaped the design of a few genres. Overwatch is a good indicator of that for example.
submitted by /u/Unicornsandwich Looking at point and click adventure games of the 90's to what is now lets say cinematic choose the voice line adventure games. From Platformers being the go to genre, to now FPS.
How do we think modern games are going to shape the industry in both design and future titles?
I think Mobas more recently have shaped the design of a few genres. Overwatch is a good indicator of that for example.
[link] [comments]
What was your most disappointing original IP?
Posted: 21 Dec 2016 12:53 PM PST
For myself, it was Brütal Legend.
I still 100% it, because I loved the concept, Tenacious D's participation, and (holy shit) the soundtrack. But, it was not a very good game, when it had every opportunity to be one of the best ever.
submitted by /u/Baryn I still 100% it, because I loved the concept, Tenacious D's participation, and (holy shit) the soundtrack. But, it was not a very good game, when it had every opportunity to be one of the best ever.
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The thing that video games need to quit doing PERIOD.
Posted: 22 Dec 2016 02:19 AM PST
Performance trophies.
You know how a lot of video games have performance trophies in their missions, where you do a mission, and you get a ranking, whether it's a gold/silver/bronze ranking, a letter-based ranking system (S for the highest, F for the lowest, usually), and so on? Video games need to quit using this mechanic. PERMANENTLY.
Here's the main reason why I hate the mere existence and concept of these trophies and rankings. In short, it's a means of the developers dictating how "well" you should perform, which ultimately pads out the game WAY longer than it should be (and NOT in the good way, either). It's where the game is telling you how fast you need to do a mission, or what score you need to get, or something along those lines, before the game just decides to say "okay, you did it well enough", and that is effectively ruining the mere concept of performing well in games at all.
You know what games were built off of back in the earlier days? Score. The majority of the time, if not all the time, games didn't tell you how well you needed to perform. Instead, it just let you build up as many points as you could obtain. You could either be okay with having a low score (as you're not really playing for the points or something), or you can keep trying and see how far you can rank up those points. You know what the games DIDN'T do? Tell you how many points you needed. The amount of points you got was entirely up to YOU, and depended on the amount of skill and dedication you put into the game.
That's what infuriates me the most about ranking systems and trophies and whatnot. I know plenty of people that say that a ranking system encourages getting the best score you can get. That's not true, though. It's not encouraging it, but rather making it MANDATORY. In order to say you've 100% completed a game that includes gold medals and such, you HAVE to get the highest possible ranking there is. Otherwise, you haven't 100% ANYTHING.
I know you're probably thinking that you could just ignore the score and rank you're supposed to aim for, as they're most likely optional anyways, but... here's the thing. When there's a possible objective still left in the game, it's mandatory to complete if you want to 100% it. The entire game as a WHOLE is purely optional, and is merely a hobby that people get themselves into because they enjoy them. With that said, no. Getting the highest rankings is not optional in terms of completing the game, especially when there's achievements that require you to get the highest medals or ranks in every single mission.
Heck, if you even take a look at the very nature of rankings themselves, you'll realize that they really AREN'T anything else besides the developers dictating what score you should get for each mission before you can say you've 100% completed the game. If there's still plenty of points you can't obtain even after you've gotten the highest rank, then doesn't that make the entire concept of rankings entirely USELESS? I would absolutely say so.
Not just that, but think about what goes into the process of determining what's a good score you need to get in order to get that particular ranking. Chances are, they either just come up with it as a pure estimation, or they play the stage a bunch of times, find a reasonably high (but not too reasonably high) score in that range, and say "okay, this is what's expected". What else could it be other than pulling random numbers out of their butts?
This method of determining what a good score should be doesn't usually work for the best, either. Sometimes, there are some missions in the game where you could perform WAY better than the expected score for the highest rank on your very first try. Sometimes, it could take a few tries, but you finally get it. Other times, there might be missions that you just somehow cannot reach the score necessary for the highest rank, despite the fact that you've played the mission maybe 300 or so tries by now, and always miss it by a hair. Yes, I speak from experience. It's not because of skill, but rather because the entire concept of determining a good score for you to get is essentially BROKEN.
Long story short, ranking systems and performance trophies are nothing more than an extremely cheap means of padding out the game length for literally no good reason other than dictation. It shouldn't be up to the developers to determine a set score. Instead, it should be up to the PLAYERS how well they do.
By not having performance rankings, you're making the casual players less frustrated by not burdening them with the means of getting an absolutely arbitrary score, and are allowing those that ARE worried about score to try and see how well they can perform. It's a win-win, which is contrary to the ranking system being in the game anyways, where it frustrates casual players and is useless for hardcore players.
Bottom line, get rid of this mechanic altogether.
Oh, and no time limits either!
submitted by /u/theCguy97 You know how a lot of video games have performance trophies in their missions, where you do a mission, and you get a ranking, whether it's a gold/silver/bronze ranking, a letter-based ranking system (S for the highest, F for the lowest, usually), and so on? Video games need to quit using this mechanic. PERMANENTLY.
Here's the main reason why I hate the mere existence and concept of these trophies and rankings. In short, it's a means of the developers dictating how "well" you should perform, which ultimately pads out the game WAY longer than it should be (and NOT in the good way, either). It's where the game is telling you how fast you need to do a mission, or what score you need to get, or something along those lines, before the game just decides to say "okay, you did it well enough", and that is effectively ruining the mere concept of performing well in games at all.
You know what games were built off of back in the earlier days? Score. The majority of the time, if not all the time, games didn't tell you how well you needed to perform. Instead, it just let you build up as many points as you could obtain. You could either be okay with having a low score (as you're not really playing for the points or something), or you can keep trying and see how far you can rank up those points. You know what the games DIDN'T do? Tell you how many points you needed. The amount of points you got was entirely up to YOU, and depended on the amount of skill and dedication you put into the game.
That's what infuriates me the most about ranking systems and trophies and whatnot. I know plenty of people that say that a ranking system encourages getting the best score you can get. That's not true, though. It's not encouraging it, but rather making it MANDATORY. In order to say you've 100% completed a game that includes gold medals and such, you HAVE to get the highest possible ranking there is. Otherwise, you haven't 100% ANYTHING.
I know you're probably thinking that you could just ignore the score and rank you're supposed to aim for, as they're most likely optional anyways, but... here's the thing. When there's a possible objective still left in the game, it's mandatory to complete if you want to 100% it. The entire game as a WHOLE is purely optional, and is merely a hobby that people get themselves into because they enjoy them. With that said, no. Getting the highest rankings is not optional in terms of completing the game, especially when there's achievements that require you to get the highest medals or ranks in every single mission.
Heck, if you even take a look at the very nature of rankings themselves, you'll realize that they really AREN'T anything else besides the developers dictating what score you should get for each mission before you can say you've 100% completed the game. If there's still plenty of points you can't obtain even after you've gotten the highest rank, then doesn't that make the entire concept of rankings entirely USELESS? I would absolutely say so.
Not just that, but think about what goes into the process of determining what's a good score you need to get in order to get that particular ranking. Chances are, they either just come up with it as a pure estimation, or they play the stage a bunch of times, find a reasonably high (but not too reasonably high) score in that range, and say "okay, this is what's expected". What else could it be other than pulling random numbers out of their butts?
This method of determining what a good score should be doesn't usually work for the best, either. Sometimes, there are some missions in the game where you could perform WAY better than the expected score for the highest rank on your very first try. Sometimes, it could take a few tries, but you finally get it. Other times, there might be missions that you just somehow cannot reach the score necessary for the highest rank, despite the fact that you've played the mission maybe 300 or so tries by now, and always miss it by a hair. Yes, I speak from experience. It's not because of skill, but rather because the entire concept of determining a good score for you to get is essentially BROKEN.
Long story short, ranking systems and performance trophies are nothing more than an extremely cheap means of padding out the game length for literally no good reason other than dictation. It shouldn't be up to the developers to determine a set score. Instead, it should be up to the PLAYERS how well they do.
By not having performance rankings, you're making the casual players less frustrated by not burdening them with the means of getting an absolutely arbitrary score, and are allowing those that ARE worried about score to try and see how well they can perform. It's a win-win, which is contrary to the ranking system being in the game anyways, where it frustrates casual players and is useless for hardcore players.
Bottom line, get rid of this mechanic altogether.
Oh, and no time limits either!
[link] [comments]
What was the MMO with the best quests you've ever played? Also a long rant about action MMOs.
Posted: 21 Dec 2016 06:24 PM PST
You guys, I think I may just hate MMOs. Nearly all of them. I say nearly because there were a couple I played a lot, at what in my opinion was their high point.
The first was Shores of Hazeron, a game about building custom spaceships and flying them around in a big ol' sandbox. It's also managed by one really arbitrary and angry guy, and what was able to be overlooked when it was free can't be now that it's moved to a subscription model. Surprisingly, graphics aren't on that list, although any modern gamer would call them terrible. I blame growing up with an N64. Bad economy and progression are what turned me off. But SoH, while it's not a great game, isn't the kind of game I'm talking about.
The second game I played a lot was PSO2. At this point I'm not really convinced the PSO series is an MMO in the traditional sense, other than having a lobby where you can meet a lot of other people connected to the game. One might call it the extreme end of theme park design: Everything is instanced, the maximum number of people that can be in a non-lobby area is 4 to 12 depending on the quest, and PSO2, much like the extremely similar game series Monster Hunter, requires you to be on a quest to leave town. (I'd also like to point out that this game looks better than its anime did despite having a couple orders of magnitude less rendering time per frame. And the framerate is also four or five times better.)
What most MMOs actually make into full quests, PSO2 reduces to Client Orders, or COs. These are extra sources of money and EXP that can be completed at any point during a main quest. They're usually traditional kill 50 enemies, get 15 drops from an enemy, etc. Some of them exist as big rewards for completing particular types of quests, where the quest is always available but its COs are on a weekly cooldown. TACOs (Time Attack Client Orders) are a series of five or so quests, one for each area you can do a time attack quest in, that give you boatloads of cash for completion, so they're a staple of money grinding, and introduce more players to time attack quests and their esoteric shortcuts than just the people looking to get the fastest run in the game.
The main quests themselves follow a stricter pattern. Usually, when you first make a new account, unlocking all the areas requires playing through a quest where you kill enemies until you reach a certain point total, where enemies are each worth some amount of points, and stronger, bigger ones are worth more. This serves as an intro to that area and the sorts of things you fight there. After completing one, one of the NPCs will give you a CO to clear two main quests, one of which involves doing some sort of mini game which will later show up randomly in the area, and the other of which is usually a fight through the area to a mini-boss. After doing both of these, turning in the CO opens up a free exploration, some EXP and money, and another quest to clear the exploration, which unlocks the first quest for a new area.
The main quests can seem boring when written out, but many of them have a theme of forward progression through an area to do something when you reach the end. Even the point-driven quests generally have some circuit to progress through so that everything spawns, and this is something I didn't know I missed until I played some Blade & Soul, TERA, and Black Desert, looking for a game which recaptured the action MMO feel of PSO2.
It's quickly become apparent that nothing except for maybe BDO is much like PSO2. The cooldown-and-maybe-vaguely-position-based combat in games of that genre is more reminiscent of the single player RPG Xenoblade, or perhaps something like FFXV, than PSO2. What Xenoblade does right, though, almost every action MMO I've played does wrong: enemy groups.
In Xenoblade, most enemies are in groups of three to five, and there are varied types of enemies throughout a map. This means that most battles involve getting aggroed by a group, fighting them all until the last one dies, JRPG style, and then moving on with your day. Each encounter is sort of a one-off challenge, especially since your HP regenerates after the fight, but there is a sense in which you have a series of encounters with enemies on your way through the stage.
I've never really felt like I had a group encounter in an action MMO, because the enemies are either so passive and spread out that I'm pulling one at a time and one-shotting it because what "my level" means to this game is something entirely different than what I'm challenged by, or tightly packed into a mob and aggressive enough that I'm continuously pulling them all in as fast as I can kill them, and I really only needed to kill five of them, and I've got another quest after this that probably says "now kill five of the other ones that you killed by the dozens when you were back there just now."
(I should note that BDO has been more convenient in this regard, but only because the black spirit is a pocket quest-giver, so I don't have to do anything but get to a safe spot before turning his quests in, but still.)
The feeling of physical and metaphorical advancement is totally lost not only because there is nowhere to advance to, but because nothing is a small group that might be considered an encounter. I'm not even sure I can really "encounter" enemies when the only reason I run into them is because I'm in their designated areas on quests to kill a specific amount of them. BDO gets a very small pass on this because all enemies are world spawns and there need to be enough enemies for multiple unrelated parties, but they're all in a single big bubble regardless.
You know what would also be nice? If going somewhere to finish a quest allowed me to actually admire the world that's been specifically crafted for my amusement, instead of the mini-map. BDO gets partial success due to auto-run, but the only real solution I've seen that doesn't involve getting lost due to mistranslation is in the totally unrelated action sandbox game Just Cause 2, where your route appears within the world, on top of the roads, so your view is focused on the terrain and you're not gazing into the upper left corner all the time.
Both a blessing and a curse is that BDO doesn't do fast travel, which means I end up walking or riding a lot, but I also know how I ended up where I am, which I can't say at all for TERA. It ends up feeling a lot like going across high-sec in EVE: A leisurely traversal of pretty stuff that allows you to admire it or check other things in the menus or go do something else.
Nonetheless, I end up going through a lot of "Kill stuff, watch a cutscene featuring nobody I know or care about, report to a dude in the next town, repeat." Because every one of these games attempts a One True Hero story, but the world is so vast that every NPC and their dog has to be a major player, which means the story is everything boring about history class, a list of meaningless names and past events in the name of political intrigue and economics too I guess. Now go save the world!
I never stay in one place long enough to meet anyone anyway, because each town, especially early game when story matters at all, has room enough for two or three moderately sized gokillstuffnearby quest lines before reporting to someone in the next one. I would think this could be a limitation on stuff that can be considered nearby enough to go kill, except that the first PSO's entire first half took place inside a single town with four areas. Also LoZ: Majora's Mask exists and only has North South East West areas, physically connected, and that works too. It's a totally different game, but the entire thing takes place within Clock Town and its direct surroundings.
So despite the fact that I can anticipate enemy attacks and do things like dodge or hold up my shield, action MMOs still feel too close to the black hole of the WoW-inspired traditional MMO for me to really be interested in them, and even though a lot of this is early game content and not necessarily 50+ dungeon gear grinding, I still feel like if all the quests are the same and nothing interesting has happened when I hit level 25, I'm not really going to push myself through until I hit cap to see if it gets better. BDO even interested me with this idea of trade and PvP and crafting like a sandbox MMO, but really it seems like most of that stuff is done by NPCs anyway and anyone actually playing the game is grinding the combat. Not that I have anything against grinding combat, I played PSO2 until 75 after all, but I kind of wanted to see some character-based MMOs take inspiration from EVE or Runescape and have an economy not entirely based on the exchange of loot drops for fashion items.
Speaking of fashion items, there's a total lack of selection. BDO may have the best character creator ever made, but PSO2 has it beat by miles in terms of possible costumes, even if you leave out the collab stuff, and that's before the three-piece costumes they're coming out with now.
I may just go play the whole Souls series and never touch an MMO again, at least not one where your character isn't a spaceship, which would be a shame because I like the idea of interacting with people on a large scale. Maybe just not in practice.
So truegaming, what was the MMO with the best quests that you've played?
submitted by /u/MagmaManager The first was Shores of Hazeron, a game about building custom spaceships and flying them around in a big ol' sandbox. It's also managed by one really arbitrary and angry guy, and what was able to be overlooked when it was free can't be now that it's moved to a subscription model. Surprisingly, graphics aren't on that list, although any modern gamer would call them terrible. I blame growing up with an N64. Bad economy and progression are what turned me off. But SoH, while it's not a great game, isn't the kind of game I'm talking about.
The second game I played a lot was PSO2. At this point I'm not really convinced the PSO series is an MMO in the traditional sense, other than having a lobby where you can meet a lot of other people connected to the game. One might call it the extreme end of theme park design: Everything is instanced, the maximum number of people that can be in a non-lobby area is 4 to 12 depending on the quest, and PSO2, much like the extremely similar game series Monster Hunter, requires you to be on a quest to leave town. (I'd also like to point out that this game looks better than its anime did despite having a couple orders of magnitude less rendering time per frame. And the framerate is also four or five times better.)
What most MMOs actually make into full quests, PSO2 reduces to Client Orders, or COs. These are extra sources of money and EXP that can be completed at any point during a main quest. They're usually traditional kill 50 enemies, get 15 drops from an enemy, etc. Some of them exist as big rewards for completing particular types of quests, where the quest is always available but its COs are on a weekly cooldown. TACOs (Time Attack Client Orders) are a series of five or so quests, one for each area you can do a time attack quest in, that give you boatloads of cash for completion, so they're a staple of money grinding, and introduce more players to time attack quests and their esoteric shortcuts than just the people looking to get the fastest run in the game.
The main quests themselves follow a stricter pattern. Usually, when you first make a new account, unlocking all the areas requires playing through a quest where you kill enemies until you reach a certain point total, where enemies are each worth some amount of points, and stronger, bigger ones are worth more. This serves as an intro to that area and the sorts of things you fight there. After completing one, one of the NPCs will give you a CO to clear two main quests, one of which involves doing some sort of mini game which will later show up randomly in the area, and the other of which is usually a fight through the area to a mini-boss. After doing both of these, turning in the CO opens up a free exploration, some EXP and money, and another quest to clear the exploration, which unlocks the first quest for a new area.
The main quests can seem boring when written out, but many of them have a theme of forward progression through an area to do something when you reach the end. Even the point-driven quests generally have some circuit to progress through so that everything spawns, and this is something I didn't know I missed until I played some Blade & Soul, TERA, and Black Desert, looking for a game which recaptured the action MMO feel of PSO2.
It's quickly become apparent that nothing except for maybe BDO is much like PSO2. The cooldown-and-maybe-vaguely-position-based combat in games of that genre is more reminiscent of the single player RPG Xenoblade, or perhaps something like FFXV, than PSO2. What Xenoblade does right, though, almost every action MMO I've played does wrong: enemy groups.
In Xenoblade, most enemies are in groups of three to five, and there are varied types of enemies throughout a map. This means that most battles involve getting aggroed by a group, fighting them all until the last one dies, JRPG style, and then moving on with your day. Each encounter is sort of a one-off challenge, especially since your HP regenerates after the fight, but there is a sense in which you have a series of encounters with enemies on your way through the stage.
I've never really felt like I had a group encounter in an action MMO, because the enemies are either so passive and spread out that I'm pulling one at a time and one-shotting it because what "my level" means to this game is something entirely different than what I'm challenged by, or tightly packed into a mob and aggressive enough that I'm continuously pulling them all in as fast as I can kill them, and I really only needed to kill five of them, and I've got another quest after this that probably says "now kill five of the other ones that you killed by the dozens when you were back there just now."
(I should note that BDO has been more convenient in this regard, but only because the black spirit is a pocket quest-giver, so I don't have to do anything but get to a safe spot before turning his quests in, but still.)
The feeling of physical and metaphorical advancement is totally lost not only because there is nowhere to advance to, but because nothing is a small group that might be considered an encounter. I'm not even sure I can really "encounter" enemies when the only reason I run into them is because I'm in their designated areas on quests to kill a specific amount of them. BDO gets a very small pass on this because all enemies are world spawns and there need to be enough enemies for multiple unrelated parties, but they're all in a single big bubble regardless.
You know what would also be nice? If going somewhere to finish a quest allowed me to actually admire the world that's been specifically crafted for my amusement, instead of the mini-map. BDO gets partial success due to auto-run, but the only real solution I've seen that doesn't involve getting lost due to mistranslation is in the totally unrelated action sandbox game Just Cause 2, where your route appears within the world, on top of the roads, so your view is focused on the terrain and you're not gazing into the upper left corner all the time.
Both a blessing and a curse is that BDO doesn't do fast travel, which means I end up walking or riding a lot, but I also know how I ended up where I am, which I can't say at all for TERA. It ends up feeling a lot like going across high-sec in EVE: A leisurely traversal of pretty stuff that allows you to admire it or check other things in the menus or go do something else.
Nonetheless, I end up going through a lot of "Kill stuff, watch a cutscene featuring nobody I know or care about, report to a dude in the next town, repeat." Because every one of these games attempts a One True Hero story, but the world is so vast that every NPC and their dog has to be a major player, which means the story is everything boring about history class, a list of meaningless names and past events in the name of political intrigue and economics too I guess. Now go save the world!
I never stay in one place long enough to meet anyone anyway, because each town, especially early game when story matters at all, has room enough for two or three moderately sized gokillstuffnearby quest lines before reporting to someone in the next one. I would think this could be a limitation on stuff that can be considered nearby enough to go kill, except that the first PSO's entire first half took place inside a single town with four areas. Also LoZ: Majora's Mask exists and only has North South East West areas, physically connected, and that works too. It's a totally different game, but the entire thing takes place within Clock Town and its direct surroundings.
So despite the fact that I can anticipate enemy attacks and do things like dodge or hold up my shield, action MMOs still feel too close to the black hole of the WoW-inspired traditional MMO for me to really be interested in them, and even though a lot of this is early game content and not necessarily 50+ dungeon gear grinding, I still feel like if all the quests are the same and nothing interesting has happened when I hit level 25, I'm not really going to push myself through until I hit cap to see if it gets better. BDO even interested me with this idea of trade and PvP and crafting like a sandbox MMO, but really it seems like most of that stuff is done by NPCs anyway and anyone actually playing the game is grinding the combat. Not that I have anything against grinding combat, I played PSO2 until 75 after all, but I kind of wanted to see some character-based MMOs take inspiration from EVE or Runescape and have an economy not entirely based on the exchange of loot drops for fashion items.
Speaking of fashion items, there's a total lack of selection. BDO may have the best character creator ever made, but PSO2 has it beat by miles in terms of possible costumes, even if you leave out the collab stuff, and that's before the three-piece costumes they're coming out with now.
I may just go play the whole Souls series and never touch an MMO again, at least not one where your character isn't a spaceship, which would be a shame because I like the idea of interacting with people on a large scale. Maybe just not in practice.
So truegaming, what was the MMO with the best quests that you've played?
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