- I recently played through Doki Doki Literature Club, and it reminded me of Spec Ops: The Line, in the sense that it is a game hard to recommend without spoiling what makes it interesting. Are there any titles for which you feel the same is true? How do you convince others they're worth playing?
- Why is 'wasting the player's time' so often a feature of games, even those that don't have any other reasons for "grinding"?
- World of Warcraft and Modern AAA Game Design
- If there's one tradition I would want removed from RPGs it's normal battle themes
- A mechanic I prefer in place of grinding
- What do you think will take the place of the well-trodden "Ubisoft method" in open world games?
- Has the quality of in-game graphics become less important these days, or has it just become less important to me as I got older?
- doing a minimal viable product for a prototype of games I will be creating in RP form on my own forum...
| Posted: 12 Nov 2017 04:51 AM PST [Note: if you're wondering what Doki Doki is about, it's a free vn/dating sim with some pretty neat ideas, out on Steam. If you think you might play it, AVOID READING ANYTHING ABOUT IT BEFOREHAND. This might include this thread, so you've been warned.] As the title says, pretty much. A game like say, The Witcher 3 is pretty easy to recommend; a friend asks you what makes it a good game, you answer huge world, great story, compelling characters, yadda yadda. On the other hand, what makes Spec Ops: The Line interesting is not its gameplay or its story (at least not in its first beats), but its subverting of expectations, and if you outright tell someone this when recommending it, well now they're expecting the game to do that and the subversion no longer happens, does it? I've had friends who went into it after I praised it for this exact reason and the moment just fell flat for them so they felt doubly disappointed. While being wildly different in terms of message, setting, gameplay, and intent, Doki Doki also runs into the same issue. By telling someone that As a result, I find it hard to recommend it to friends since the only reason I can give is "I know how it looks, but just trust me", and the fact that visual novels are such a... particular genre doesn't help. Are there any other games you feel like you have a hard time recommending, because you know explaining what makes them worth playing might spoil it for them? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 12 Nov 2017 01:16 PM PST About two years ago I bought Pillars of Eternity. I've been playing it off and on, and to this day, I still haven't beaten it, even though I've not even restarted. The game is a slog. It's an incredibly boring slog. I say this as someone who otherwise adores isometric RPGs, and consider the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment) to be some of the finest RPGs ever made. Look at it though, it's no wonder this game is so godawful boring: the game wastes your time at every single opportunity. I just finished a quest. A very easy quest, as a matter of fact. I spoke to an important NPC who lives inside the second floor of her estate. She tasks me with joining one of three factions to attend a meeting. Let's say I want to complete this chain of events without starting in the city itself. 1) Transition from area to city neighborhood where she lives. Loading screen. 2) Walk across neighborhood to her house. Loading screen. 3) Walk three feet to the stairs. Loading screen. 4) Walk clear across house to her room. Talk to her. She tells me to go join one of the factions. I'm already friendly with one. Walk back across house to stairs down. Loading screen. 5) Walk to front door. Loading screen. 6) Walk from house to area transition. Loading screen. 7) Walk from neighborhood edge to building of my faction. Loading screen. 8) Walk clear across enormous fortress area to head character guy. This place is huge, by the way. He tells me he'll take me. Quest updates to return to woman. Walk back across fortress to front door. Loading screen. 9) Fortress to map transition. Loading screen. 10) Edge of map to house. Loading screen. 11) Back upstairs. Loading screen. 12) Walk across house, talk to woman. She literally gives me one line of dialogue to go to the palace for the meeting and quest updates. Walk back across house to stairs. Loading screen. 13) Out the front door. Loading screen. 14) To map transition, to palace area. Loading screen. 15) Edge of map to the palace entrance. Loading screen. 16) Done. Every single loading screen takes about 8-12 seconds. Counting all the steps involved here, that's literally 2.5 minutes of watching loading screen. Absolutely nothing of interest happens whatsoever during any of these steps. There's no fighting. There's no interesting dialogue. There's absolutely nothing. This game would be even more unbearable if I weren't using a mod that strips much of the burdensome nonsense from the game, like the 'fatigue' system - you can rest in inns to get powerful buffs, but your characters get tired as time passes. Well, every single area transition seems to be 8 hours or more, which means your inn buffs are good for about one map distance in any direction. Once you get to your destination, you have to take a nap with your camping supplies... but you can only carry two camping supplies on the harder difficulties. This means any fights in that area that require you to rest takes your only other camping supply provision... and once that's exhausted, it's back to the inn (and more loading screens). This rant so far is aimed at Pillars of Eternity, but these kinds of things aren't unique to PoE. It seems more games than ever are just absolutely aimed at pissing away the player's time, and I'm talking about single-player games that don't even have 'grinding' elements (like pissing away time but telling you to buy some microtransaction to skip the grind). Shadow of Mordor, for example - towards the end of the game it tasks you with 'branding' five warchiefs. There is a specific process to take to brand the warchiefs and it's just immensely time-consuming to do so. There's actually not even a real reason you even need to do this story-wise. They show up to "help" you but you don't even need them because you're so freaking powerful by that point. I find myself less and less interested in games because I simply can't depend on beating a game in a week anymore. It's days and days of boring grinding. Just Cause 3 - enormous amounts of repetitive, easy grinding of blowing up loudspeakers, over and over and over. Ghost Recon: Wildlands - enormous amounts of boring, long-distance traveling. Borderlands games - formulaic gameplay where you go to an area, complete everything, but get given new tasks (that you can't get before) that require you to go back to the area and play through it again, sometimes three times. Revisiting locations doesn't actually give you new enemies or anything, it's the exact same. Dragon Age: Inquisition - I really shouldn't have to say anything here. The whole game was a slog. I really want to sink my teeth into Tyranny but I'm worried it's just going to be more of this same drivel of loading screens, walking somewhere, loading screens, more loading screens, talking, walking, loading screens. [link] [comments]  |
| World of Warcraft and Modern AAA Game Design Posted: 12 Nov 2017 02:17 PM PST A couple months ago, I injured my back pretty seriously, and I've been out of work since. I'm better now, but the past ten weeks have provided me with the rare (and, honestly, entirely unsolicited) opportunity to do more or less whatever the hell I've wanted with my days, provided it didn't cost very much money. One of the things this has given me the chance to do, specifically, is to play more video games than I generally do. Over the past couple of months, I've played more video games than I have in years — more than I'd really want to play, if I hadn't been housebound. I finished Horizon Zero Dawn, I finally checked out The Witcher 3, I got around to playing Fallout 4 and the third Arkham game, and most recently, started Assassin's Creed: Origins, to name a few. You get the idea — I've checked a lot of items off the ever-growing list of games I meant to play, but have nowhere near enough time to, especially because essentially all of these games are incredibly, incredibly long. It's got me thinking, though. World of Warcraft was the third MMO I played, after EverQuest and Final Fantasy XI, and the only one I ever played for any significant amount of time. I've seen countless discussions of how it revolutionized the genre and fundamentally changed MMORPG design afterwards; relatively few MMOs have been released since WoW that do not borrow heavily from its design and, often, as is the case with games like WildStar, its aesthetic. I've seen considerably fewer discussions of how, if at all, WoW's structure shaped the design choices of offline games going forward. That's what I'd like to discuss here today. So the basic question here is, as I said, what, if any, impact did World of Warcraft have on modern AAA game design? I think the answer I've come to seems to be "surprisingly, quite a lot," but admittedly, the narrative I'm constructing here is based upon the games I've played and read about, and is thus built off of an incomplete set of information. I'm really curious what some other readers here, whose experiences with the medium are far more extensive than mine, might have to say on the subject. I'm going to leave it at that for the OP, as this is mostly about discussion for me, but I'm also going to lay out an argument for why I think WoW has shaped subsequent game design rather profoundly in a comment below, if you're interested in that. [link] [comments]  |
| If there's one tradition I would want removed from RPGs it's normal battle themes Posted: 12 Nov 2017 09:09 AM PST Noted not boss battle themes, those are fine and in fact I think are necessary. But for many rpgs you get to hear one battle theme like 500+ times before the end of the game. It takes away from the other music in the game and its insanely repetitive to listen to. I was playing Persona 5, and as much as I like Last Surprise, I'm sick of listening to it way way before the end of the game and probably before the end of any given dungeon. But I will say what I do like in Persona 5. On the final day in any dungeon it plays "Life will change" continuously without interruption. This makes dungeon crawling on those days a much better experience if you ask me because your not constantly having the music being interrupted. Plenty of Rpgs do this exact same thing (Undertale, FFX) and if you ask me its always better when they do this. So yeah essentially I would love to see more games take the Dark Souls or Nier Automata approach where you only get battle music from a boss. Other solutions can also include simply upping the tempo of the current dungeon theme so it feels less jarring. Or at the very least having a bunch of different battle themes if your determined to use them (TWEWY) [link] [comments]  |
| A mechanic I prefer in place of grinding Posted: 12 Nov 2017 01:52 PM PST For rpgs like Pokémon or (hex grid tactics game) or whatever, I don't like grind, but I do like the progression in complexity. It struck me that totally accurate battle simulator basically increases the available units and increases the money you have to spend as you advance through the levels. And if you want to really reach, things like warhammer have unit costs and you can do almost whatever you want if you stay below the right total cost. What if you had a Pokémon game or final fantasy style traditional turn based combat rpg where instead of levels, the available money you had available to spend for creating your team was set based on where you were in the story? You know how at the beginning of some rpg you spec your character? Every battle would be a full team respec according to those resources, basically. It's kinda like rental Pokémon in Pokémon stadium, I guess. (To encourage continuity, part of the cost could be in removing existing specifications for existing team members.) To make the game accessible for the less hardcore, make it so that if you lose, you get a small amount more the next time you try some battle. (This let's you grind out instead of improving tactics, if desired.) Are there games like this? Do you think this sort of mechanic would work? [link] [comments]  |
| What do you think will take the place of the well-trodden "Ubisoft method" in open world games? Posted: 12 Nov 2017 12:02 PM PST As most of you know, the majority of current open world games feature some kind of "tower" or "headquarters" for a region to uncover it with the map, and then after that you explore sidequests in the area, collectibles, etc. I'm pretty sure that this started with the original Assassin's Creed, but generally from what I've seen is ascribed to Ubisoft in general, as (all?) of their recent open world games have had this system, and it has spread out to a lot of other games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, Shadow of Mordor, only mention those because I recently played those, among others. However, I have been getting very fatigued by such a rote method, to the point where I stopped playing Shadow of Mordor and Ghost Recond Wildlands (the rest of the mechanics of those games I found pretty enjoyable), but it's kind of a grind, and I've noticed that on the larger subreddits there are plenty of people who are also not fans of this anymore. This is why I ask the question. Something will have to spring up to replace it, as long as open world games are still popular (and they are). [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 12 Nov 2017 07:08 AM PST I remember being in school and absolutely obsessing over graphics. From childhood all the way through my teens a games graphics were often the very first things talked about with any upcoming blockbuster. As a kid I could only have one console and found myself in constant debate with people about whose console had superior visuals. These days it's almost assumed a game will look good, and unless its visually unique a games graphics are rarely talked about beyond a brief mention. Im 30 now, and as a mature gamer I am far more concerned with the gameplay and mechanics of the games I buy. Is this just because the industry is at a point where good graphics are a standard...or is it just not that a big a deal to me anymore? Do any other older gamers feel the same way? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 12 Nov 2017 07:13 AM PST |
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