Unlabelled True Gaming Aesthetics: Themed enemies vs. enemy variety.

12/16/2017 06:47:00 am
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True Gaming Aesthetics: Themed enemies vs. enemy variety.

Aesthetics: Themed enemies vs. enemy variety.

Posted: 15 Dec 2017 08:39 AM PST

I'd like to compare and contrast two pairs of similar games, regarding how enemies are designed aesthetically.

Devil May Cry 1: Enemies are visually very different from each other, from puppets, floating reapers, shadow cats, lizard warriors, ice lizards, etc. Different colours, "origins", etc.

vs.

Bayonetta 1: Enemies follow a consistent "angelic" theme, with white / gold being prominent on every enemy, halos etc.

And

System Shock 2: Again, enemies are visually quite different, zombies, robots, cyborg nurses, monkeys, fleshy giants, etc.

vs.

Prey (2017): Enemies follow a consistent "shadowy tentacles" theme, and most are humanoid, etc. And we have the Operators which are all identical except for colour variations.

Which style do you prefer? Do you like more variety or more consistency? Are there other game pairs in the same genre that we can contrast in this way?

submitted by /u/zeddyzed
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Introversion in game design

Posted: 15 Dec 2017 09:38 AM PST

I recently figured out the common thread in most of my favorite games: a sense of solitude and introversion.

Games like Dark Souls, King's Field, Myst, Super Metroid, Tomb raider 1, Thief 1 and Eye of the Beholder are very different, yet they appeal to me for the same reasons. It drops me into a world with very few elements of distraction and require me to figure things out in a solitary fashion. Introverted games are usually much slower and more deliberate in its design. Even an action filled title like Dark Souls seems to be more about being alone in a hostile world than about fighting and action itself.

These games also have very sparse amount of hand holding, which i think is a requirement for creating a truly isolationist atmosphere. When the game is too meta and following you around at every step, it is harder to be immersed. A lack of hand holding doesn't equal difficulty, it just means that you are alone in this world and nobody will figure things out for you. In the age of extensive focus group testing, this seems perhaps archaic to many, yet it usually elevates immersion to a high degree.

There are lots of exceptions of course, from The Witness to Rain World, yet it seems that games with an introvert approach to mechanics and world building seems to be increasingly rare, in general. Tomb Raider 1 vs Tomb Raider reboot is a good example of the development towards a more "humanized" design. The austerity of the first TR game would be a hard sell today, yet it was immensely popular in the 90s. Why were people more accepting of this type of experience before? Is solitude (horror games excluded) simply seen as an outdated aspect incompatible with the expectations of modern game design?

submitted by /u/woolscapes
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Xenoblade Chronicles 2: A case study on how inattention to little details ruin the big pictures

Posted: 15 Dec 2017 01:28 PM PST

Let me start by saying that Xenoblade Chronicles 1 has to be one of my favorite JRPGs of all time, to the point where I bought a physical copy of the Wii game without having a Wii. Although I had trepidations about the direction of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (XC2), I bought the game and am currently about 15 hours into it. In my playthrough, there have been a bevy of issues that have become increasingly difficult to ignore, to the point where I think they deserve calling out.

Before I say what those issues are, there are two counter-arguments I'd like to address right off the bat, especially given the "low" time investment I currently have in the game. In response to "These problems have existed in the last two iterations of XC and are more quirks of the series", I want to point out that the issues I present can still be considered issues; many details are changed in between each game, and I wanted to point out how a legacy 'quirk' can transform into a bigger problem in light of those changes. In response to the point of "some of these issues get better later on in the game or are fixed", I'd like to say that if a problem persists for 15+ hours in a game, I think it still deserves to be labeled as a problem for the sheer amount of time it persists.

My goal in this post is to present to overarching facets of the game, and show you how little problems build up to create big systems that not only stumble occasionally (which can be forgivable), but stumble too frequently to ignore.

[Exploration] An iconic tenet of the Xenoblade Chronicles is the sheer size of the world and setting. There is always something new to explore; either in terms of mechanics, or places, or people, or new things to do entirely. Unfortunately, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 suffers from a stifling barrier of opacity, making exploring new things either confusing or more potentially difficult than necessary.

  • Combat tutorials are explained once, in text format, and never mentioned again. There is no way to revisit a tutorial once it has been presented, so if you accidentally press A and skip one page of the tutorial, that information is permanently lost.

  • The map system is useless. In a game with such a large explorable world, your only three maps are a tiny minimap which only highlights active enemies and quest-required interactive NPCs/items, an obnoxious and slightly larger minimap blown up to the size of your screen, and the fast travel map, which must be navigated to via submenus. There is no way to mark places of interest. There is no way to see where all of your quests will take you; you can only see the one "active" quest and the main story quest.

  • The distribution of monsters and monster levels on any given map are done in such a way that it becomes impossible to free-explore. Monsters from levels 2 through 80 are placed in the same area. In an ideal world, the sheer quantities of areas of high level creatures encourages a player to mark each location as "I'll visit here later". The truth is that the placement actually forces you to travel through open terrain in "lanes". Any deviation from the lane causes you to encounter enemies significantly higher than you and easily capable of one-shotting you. This problem is apparent at the very start of the game. At some point around you being level 5, you start on top of a hill and you're supposed to head to a town on the opposite end of an open plain. If you do not walk a straight line from the top of the hill to the town, you will encounter enemies 10 levels higher than you. And I mean a straight line; if you take the straightest route from point A to B, you will see enemies twice your level to your left and right just by panning the camera. Also, did I forget to mention that in the middle of this route, a level 80 gorilla walks by occasionally and there's nothing you can do to get around it, except wait for it to walk by? Did I also forget to mention that there are level 18 and level 70 birds circling the sky who will fight you if you eye them the wrong way?

  • One of the core mechanics, salvaging, requires you to roll the dice with death consistently. Salvaging is an unnecessary quick-time-event minigame where you press buttons correctly to increase your chances of gathering a higher quality assortment of loot. Unfortunately, salvaging will always summon a monster with it first, that you must kill if you are to open any chests that appear. The problem is, there is absolutely no way to tell the level of the creature that will appear except to start salvaging. If you get unlucky, you encounter a high level creature that kills you, and now have to start over from a pre-set checkpoint. Even worse is that because enemies in the world patrol and walk around, if you take too long to kill the chest-guarding enemy, there is a strong chance a patrol group of enemies will also join the fray.

  • Nearly all item acquisition is locked behind some arbitrary barrier of RNG and rarity values. Do you want new powerful Blades? You have to open a 1-item lootbox for a random chance of a 1 to 5 star "Blade". I call this system lootbox-esque because the Blades themselves have inherent star ratings, just like Japanese mobile gacha games. These inherent star ratings strongly affect the Blade's growth and initial power. Quests frequently require items of uncommon or higher rarity, and the only way to get them is to farm through salvaging or collection points and praying you get lucky.

  • Items are presented to you with no explanation at all, or are explained well after you can first pick them up. Here is a list of item types I picked up before the tutorial appeared or for which an explanation never appeared, and keep in mind each of these items have a different use: Aux Cores, Core Chips, Compassion/Justice/Bravery Boosters, Pouch items, Overdrive materials, Collection Point items.

  • You have to pay to access to a glossary of terms in the game. Each town has an "information vendor". Except the vendor doesn't sell you anything except for a one-liner sentence explaining a term you might have forgotten. I'm not joking about this. It's also a fairly pricey endeavor at the beginning of the game.

[Menu Navigation] Xenoblade Chronicles 2 contains a complex number of ways to power up each of your characters, ranging from perks, to accessories, to skill upgrades, and Blade (aka your pokemon) management, where you do the same as above. In a game where you can easily spend a good chunk of time doing item and skill management, XC2's menu easily drags out the length of the process.

  • Opening menus and submenus is slow. There's a 1-2 second delay between you pressing the button to go to the main menu, and the screen fading to black, then fading into the menu. There is another half second delay between pressing the button to open a submenu, and then the submenu appearing. My guess is there's some backend graphics work being done, as none of the menu has any 3D elements in.

  • The fast travel system (which unfortunately doubles as your only overworld map) practically requires you to know the name of every location you're heading to before hand, because you cannot preview any map. This is particularly bad because Travel menu clearly has room for it; nearly 2/3rds of the screen is empty. Not only do you have to know the continent of your destination (which is understandable), but it also requires you to know exactly what section of the continent you're going to. For example, in the first real continent you visit, you spend a good chunk of time on a mountainous region with multiple levels of plateaus. This region is divided by the fast travel system as "Upper Level - Left" and "Upper Level - Right". How do you know which is which? Well ideally you'd be able to preview the maps of either region but you can't. If you select the wrong Upper Level, you have to check the map to figure out you're wrong, then have to press back and then go to the other.

  • The menu separates "Character" and "Blade" and seems to arbitrarily share or remove features between each menu. In the "Blade" menu there is a tab called "Blade Management", where you can preview blades and their stats. Except you can only have 3 blades maximum, but for some reason you cannot assign blades to characters in the "Blade Management" tab. You have to go the "Character" menu and go to "Engage Blades" which then takes you to a interface nearly identical to the one to "Blade Management". Now what if you want to manage your currently active Blades? Well in the "Characters" Menu, the menu seems to make a distinction between characters and blades, so you can only fast rotate through your characters OR fast rotate through your character's active blades. For some reason, you cannot quickly switch between your characters and their blades in one collective list.

  • The quest menu hides the objectives for each quest behind a submenu. When you open a quest in the menu, you'll see one or more large rounded translucent squares at the bottom of the screen. In order to view quest objectives, you have to highlight the square and then press A, which then reveals a list of the objectives....for that square . An odd design, especially given you could have easily condensed all the squares into a single submenu, or at gotten rid of them altogether.

[Audio] The audio of the game contains major missteps in terms of volume balance, synchronization, and diversity.

  • Enemies have one or two voice lines, and this problem is exacerbated by the sheer numbers of enemies, the frequency of voicelines being uttered, and how long battles can drag out. In an early example, you board an enemy battleship and either have to sneak by a mess hall or a barracks filled with enemy soldiers. If a patrol catches you as you're sneaking, they'll alert all soldiers in the room to your area. This scenario is easily winnable, but takes several minutes. In the meanwhile, you'll have to listen to 8+ enemies cycling between the same two lines over and over again, and the chances of 4 of them either reciting the same line simultaneously or rapidly in sequence approaches 100%, and it will happen multiple times in the course of the brawl.

  • There is seemingly no volume-balancing done whatsoever. Starting and finishing quests begins an unskippable animation and tune that seemingly drops the entire volume of the game to 20% of normal. A certain character named "Gramps" consistently has his voicelines softer than any other person speaking. Worst of all, in cutscenes where the music crescendos (a frequent occurence), the voicelines easily get drowned out by the music, to the point where I'm beginning to believe that there is an extremely faulty volume normalization going on between music and voice.

  • There are desync problems that occur between voice lines and actions in the game during heavy load. While sound effects seem to occur on cue, there is a major issue where in voicelines "queue" up because a character is in the middle of saying filler speech but also needs to say a line from a skill cast. This leads to incredibly wonky timings where a character will say a voice line nearly 2-3 seconds after their skill had gone off. You can easily see this without combat too; if you repeatedly attempt to jump with the player character, the "jump grunt" will delay up until the point where you won't hear the line until after you begin the descent portion of the jump.

[Combat] Xenoblade Chronicles 2 contains a berth of combat mechanics to juggle, from crowd controls, to seals, skill chains, elemental attacks, etc. In theory, the wide variety of tools at your disposal should empower you to find many different ways to dispatch your enemies in style. However, many small design choices and limitations make the system fairly clunky to use.

  • Enemy HP seems to be is balanced on the assumption that you will use every available mechanic at your disposal. While this seems to be okay at glance, the net result is that failing to use your combat tools doesn't reduce the chances of your victory, it just drags out the time until your success. This is particularly sinful because the game actively hides combat mechanics from you in the beginning, which means that there will be multiple times that a fight drags on for a really long time, and you sit around wondering if this is all you do for the rest of the game.

  • The combat system will actively spite you for moving at all, despite also wanting you to do so for positional-based attacks as well as dodging. This is a series of mistakes that ultimately culminates in encouraging you to stand still and take every attack with your face. Your skills are built up with auto-attacks. Auto-attacks themselves build up in three levels. If you use a skill right after an auto-attack, you empower the skill, with damage increasing based on what "level" of auto-attack you just performed. Except moving in any way resets your auto-attack animation and level. So not only does moving make you take longer to gain access skills, but it also makes sure any skill cast is weaker than it could have been. "Moving" also counts as being forcefully moved as well, so enemy crowd control effects are particularly disruptive.

  • Displacement skills (pushback and knockback) are common, and stack upon each other, which means if you get hit with multiple knockback effects (see: herds of the same enemy), you will get launched from the fight. Not only that, but displace far enough and you might be unfortunate enough to fall off an edge or draw the aggro of a neighboring group of enemies. Your enemies have significantly easier access to them since they don't have to respect the Crowd Control chain that player characters do in order to apply them, and even if you could knockback your enemies, that ultimately hurts you because you have to move. And moving is bad due to the points listed above.

  • Skill combos break upon target death and are not retained for use on other enemies. Given how long it takes to build up towards one. This just breaks up the flow very badly and is counterintuitive, given the fact that the rewards for skill combos are AOE finishers and battle-wide effects.

  • 7 years later from the original game; actively engaged flying enemies will still fly off of cliffs, and your AI-controlled teammates will jump after them to their deaths.

So these are my current issues with the game. At its core, I mostly enjoy playing through Xenoblade Chronicles 2, but it also frustrates me that there are many places in which the game could easily have been made better. My conjecture is that the dev team were pressed for time, and did not have enough time or QA to touch up flaws in localization or from player feedback. In the end, I think it hurt them significantly.

For players and non-players of Xenoblade Chronicles alike, what are your thoughts?

submitted by /u/DSShinkirou
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Most interesting gaming related b(v)logs? Specifically about Level/Environment Design, Behind the scenes stuff, Dev Diaries, implementation of new mechanics, how things work

Posted: 15 Dec 2017 02:10 PM PST

Something interesting I stumbled upon today that is also posted over at /r/gamedev: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/

Do you have any favorites? Could be written or in a video format.

Thank you :)

submitted by /u/gamogon
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Good Video game critics? Like MatthewMatosis or Joseph Anderson?

Posted: 15 Dec 2017 11:39 AM PST

I love the content that people like Matosis and Anderson put out. It's thought provoking, Interesting, and Feels genuine. I always preferred my Reviews and Critiques to be from a single person over a company with many employees (IGN, Gamespot, Etc.). it makes you see games under a whole new light, and appreciate them as the art form they are. Anything made by a big gaming site always feels like it's so Manufactored and soulless.

submitted by /u/sweetmeister9000
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Why are so many of these walking simulators overrated?

Posted: 14 Dec 2017 04:46 PM PST

I am fascinated by the idea that games can evoke emotions and experiences unique to the medium. So when I see one of these highly acclaimed narrative (walking simulator) experiences, I tend to pick them up. That said, I have yet to encounter one game in this genre that was worth my time and money and I'm baffled as to why they are so highly regarded. To name my gripes with a few:

Gone Home - Are you kidding me? You have real game reviewers saying that Gone Home is one of their favorite games of all time. It's bland young adult fiction at best.

Firewatch - I was so disappointed in the end of this game. They could have done something really fascinating and out there with the setting but, nope. Honestly I think this game is so highly regarded because of the way it simulates loneliness and a girl actually taking interest in you and being flirty. I'm not kidding.

What Remains of Edith Finch: God dammit I had high hopes for this game. It got so much praise! The narrative is okay, I guess... but have these reviewers never read a novel for god's sake? Or seen a good film? Good narrative has tension, rising action, fascinating characters, unpredictable twists. This game has none of that. Judged against other narrative games, it was good. Judged against other ways of experiencing story, like books or movies, it was bland garbage. Honestly, imagine any of these games as short stories. They wouldn't even begin to work, because there's nothing there.

I know I'm in the minority here. I'm interested to see what you guys have to say. For the record, the games that has demonstrated what good narrative gaming can be best are Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Journey. Both had an emotional arc and drama similar to the best films and books, but could only have been achieved throuhg the medium of video games.

EDIT: Why don't I proofread before I click post?

EDIT 2: It seems a lot of y'all find this post lazy, and some of my comments lazy. This sub really doesn't like lazy, which I will try to respect. Let me respond to the criticism of my using the term "overrated".

EDIT: Alright, settle down. The above comment, was a lazy way to come back at a comment calling me lazy. You don't care for lazy in this sub, and I'll try to respect that.

I agree that merely calling something overrated is pretty weak criticism. Professional critics would probably be wise to strike the word from their vocabulary altogether. However, in the consumer context, overrated can mean that most consumers are being misled into a purchasing decision by overwhelmingly positive critical reception which may be wildly out of line with consumer tastes. When it happens over and over again with a particular genre, it may represent a bias among the types of people who tend to be critics/reviewers, and that's worth knowing.

For example, I once went to see a movie that got 98% on Rotten Tomatoes critic reviews, which ended up being laughably terrible. It was an overly serious film about an artsy Manhattan dweller and her obsession with her little dog. Why did it get such great reception? My guess is that most movie critics are educated urban dwellers who identify with the childless, affluent, Manhattan set and their narcissism. Moviegoer beware.

In the case of walking simulators, there is such a clear pattern of, what seems to me, mediocre work receiving glowing praise and adoration that I wonder if there isn't some inherent bias among game reviewers. My guess is that game reviewers are generally not liberal arts students, and any exposure to narrative or literary tropes in their preferred genre is genuinely novel to them. If that really is the case, it is worth knowing as a consumer.

So, I don't know if the genre is overrated, but it might be. It may be that I'm missing something which people are getting out of these games in large numbers that just doesn't click for me for whatever reason. That's what I'm curious to know and that's why I made this post. Thanks for reading.

submitted by /u/Beastw1ck
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