True Gaming What's your favourite single sitting game? That is, a game that takes one sitting to complete. |
- What's your favourite single sitting game? That is, a game that takes one sitting to complete.
- Selling games on a *SPOILER* tag, and what they could do differently
- Has 2017 Really Been one of the "Best Years of Gaming?"
- I feel like the issue with video game movies being mostly all bad is obvious, and 'easy' to fix
- Why are there no true open world games?
| What's your favourite single sitting game? That is, a game that takes one sitting to complete. Posted: 01 Dec 2017 12:37 PM PST I know, a sitting can mean a lot. It either means me bumming out an hour of Roller Coaster Tycoon before bed or binging 12 hours of Zelda in one day. But I mean a sort of average sitting - the kind of time you'd spend on a short TV show binge or watching a long movie. So games that are 2-5 hours in length. With my spare time dwindling, I only get a couple times a year to really get deep into a long form game - so I enjoy playing shorter games to get my kick and have a little experience. My favourite I've played recently is Oxenfree. It's got a small scale, big scope story and while the characters are written a little older than they're supposed to be, the drama is good and the voice acting is on point. I played it during the holidays with my sister - we played for two hours, got dinner, came back and beat it in the next two hours. What are some good short, single session games that you've played? [link] [comments]  |
| Selling games on a *SPOILER* tag, and what they could do differently Posted: 30 Nov 2017 05:07 PM PST "DUDE! You HAVE to play JRPG Quest 8!" This is a problem not relegated to JRPGs, but the issue came up as I was researching certain ones to buy. I was searching and searching for a gameplay reason to be invested in these games, and found that overall, there just weren't many salient selling points to these games - not unless you were either a series fan, or you somehow already had some idea of what was going to happen. When the core reason to play a game is story-related, and that story relies on either "shock moments" or "twists", it becomes really hard to make a 30-second, or even 30-minute, sales pitch on the style of the game. I've ended up skipping on quite a few games considered "Must-play masterpieces" by much of the gaming community, and sadly some of my skips even include "Underrated tragedies" that sold poorly and aren't likely to get a sequel. So it's come to the point that I actually have some investment in solving this problem. I also have some idea of how this could be countered. One thing that comes as an advantage for gameplay-focused games (to take as an example, Zelda: BOTW, a game whose plot is "Ganon is bad. Help Zelda!") is that even if you can't explain what's going to happen in a two hours of sample gameplay, you can describe it in brief. "This is your big open world. There are shrines, quests, korok seeds, and various secrets!" Showing a little open-ended fight with some bokoblins will give you a general idea of the appeal of the game. And just seeing the landscape pretty much maps out your opportunity space. But, fixing this issue isn't simply a matter of ensuring all good stories have excellent gameplay to them, or by announcing the twists ahead of time. I also play games for story, and have picked up quite a few I thoroughly enjoyed. Why did I make the $60 bet on them? One way stories can work is by having a premise that is handed to players directly in marketing. Ghost Trick: You're dead. You can manipulate objects in the world, and you can even rewind time past someone's death to try to save them. Interesting, right? But the BEST part of the game is when spoilers. Steins;Gate: The characters inadvertently invent a time machine that can send texts to the past. They learn this when the main character sends a text to his friend after a disappointing lecture on theories of time travel, and the moment he hits send, the crowd around him disappears, and a huge crashed satellite appears on the building behind him. But the BEST part of the game is when spoilers. These early glimpses invite mystery, and set up some premise for the future. It gets players thinking creatively about what will happen next, and perhaps a bit more eager to investigate further by buying the game. On the other hand, something I tend to see in a lot of mysterious fantasy games is opening mysteries that are so nebulous (eg, "a black creature materialized from nowhere and swallowed my sister whole! When I tried to chase it I got a piercing headache and collapsed") that they invite no intrigue because they're simply so open-ended. They don't have questions like "Why does nobody remember my grandfather's existence?" but questions as generic as "What the hell just happened?" Tying in with the story very closely is the characters, and this can be a core reason why people buy a game even if their appreciation for the story thus far is limited, or perhaps the story does not exist at all. Overwatch is a great example of selling a game based entirely on character designs/backstories, without even having a solidly defined lore to begin with. It was very important that the Overwatch webpage let people read the full description and origin of each of the game's heroes, since their many designs were what sold people on the game. It's also important that they were so varied. Even though I'm not Indian or religious, having an autistic Indian architect and a robot monk were really cool ideas to me. Another way to make stories easier to access is digestability. Some games are about epics that last 80 hours and then some. Some games that rhyme with Ringdom Smarts aren't even FINISHED with their overly long stories yet. Some players may continue to show interest in the core mystery even if it takes a long time. For other consumers though, it's easier to allure people into it when they can more clearly see an opening "sub-story" and it follows a process of opening, buildup, conclusion, maybe even with its own small villain, all in the space of a small quarter of their total runtime. Some games that follow this formula include Phoenix Wright, the Project Octopath Traveler demo, Persona 5, Ocarina of Time, and plenty of others. Finally, there's something to be said about reducing early complexity of a game. I actually think that this works well for both gameplay and story; only very slowly adding new concepts to the player's mental library of the world. Anytime I play a Tolkien RPG these days, I tend to just skip its opening cutscene (oft narrated by an old man) completely, and I feel completely justified in doing so even if I care about the story. Generally to keep my mind centered, what I want to know about first is my character and his/her origins; THEN the first area I'll be travelling to, and THEN the broader concept of what's going on in the world and what happened 100 years ago. I actually have a lot of appreciation for openings like Final Fantasy 7, which provide some immediate context and conflict with little subtlety, slowly build as the hours go on, and don't actually even get into the fact that Cloud is an amnesiac until many hours later in the story. An important part of this low early complexity is that it should be appealing without the need for big spoiler tags. So, in summary, tips for a story that doesn't need players to just trust the writer knows what they're doing:
I'd also very much like to know in the comments whether people have feedback to these rules, whether other people encounter the same problems around story-based games as I do, or if you believe I'm sorely mistaken in my beliefs or logic around story design. It would also be nice to get examples of games you feel carried these concepts very well, or very poorly. [link] [comments]  |
| Has 2017 Really Been one of the "Best Years of Gaming?" Posted: 30 Nov 2017 09:28 PM PST I just watched a TeamFourStar clip about a series of Dragon Ball game reviews they're making for December, and in it one of the presenters stated that 2017 has been one of the best years in the history of gaming. This comment had a lot of impact because I've been gaming since the 8-bit era and yet had no idea what he was talking about. I've done a little searching online for the reasoning behind this statement, but in spite of seeing similar sentiments elsewhere I've found nothing that has challenged my general feeling of "meh" regarding most of the games that came out this year. I'm primarily a PC gamer and I check the Steam store and GoG.com weekly for new releases. I've only felt excited about new games a handful of times this year, and all of them turned out to be disappointing (Andromeda, Tides of Numenara and Elex being just three examples). Some games I wasn't excited about look promising, like Nier (I'll wait for the price to drop from ¥8500 (I live in Japan, so that's $75 US) and Divinity Original Sin II (wasn't excited because the first game put me to sleep). Promising, but not exactly awe-inspiring. FPS don't really do it for me anymore, and I guess that might be largely responsible for my feelings of "meh." I imagine if I was a FPS gamer (particularly on consoles) I'd be more impressed with the year's lineup. I find a lot of enjoyment comes from indie games, and there have indeed been some good ones standing out from the usual mountain of garbage and perpetually-alpha pet projects, but again - nothing stands out to me as someone with three decades of gaming under his belt. Meanwhile the gaming community seems at its least content this year, with constant complaints about shady business practices. Hearing that 2017 has been a phenomenal year at the same time seemingly everyone can't stop talking about the Battlefront II fiasco is a bit jarring. Is it because of the Nintendo Switch? I don't know much about it except that most of the boys in the classes I teach want one for their birthday. My general perception of it so far has been that it's off to a shaky start. Do I have the wrong idea? VR looks promising but looks like it needs a bit more time to catch its stride. Edit: Is this a case of console exclusives thoroughly beating-out PC game releases? In other words, has 2017 been fantastic for consoles but only average for PC? Should I use the money for my planed GPU upgrade in 2018 to get a PS4 instead? Thoughts? Edit 2: It looks like if 2017 seemed mediocre, then the answer is to get a console. I consider my initial question adequately answered, so thanks for the input! [link] [comments]  |
| I feel like the issue with video game movies being mostly all bad is obvious, and 'easy' to fix Posted: 30 Nov 2017 09:27 PM PST I don't know if this is the place for this. Figured this audience is the ones that hope we get a good video game movie one day. There have been many video game movies made, and for the most part they have all been underwhelming. Everyone says it's hard to make a good video game inspired movie, and I'm not so sure that is true. Out of all of these underwhelming, or otherwise failures, none of them were direct frame for frame of the actual video game story. They always spin some new story using the key points of the game's story. I guess I'm just thinking it's a bit weird that we have all these failures at the box office, but all of them had stories inspired by the games. Why doesn't someone just do this? [link] [comments]  |
| Why are there no true open world games? Posted: 01 Dec 2017 01:39 AM PST So this might seem to be a weird title, or a contrived one at best. I understand that, but I wanted to make a point. There is such a thing as a sense of marvel and wonder through discovery. Who hasn't been awed when they explored nature and stumbled upon something of interest? You spend hours hiking, and you saw plenty of pretty things, but only one very special thing. You spent hours getting there, to see this single thing, and, well, the trip makes it. If you could see directly, there would be no awe. The trip makes the experience. This is something lots of us can relate to, and yet, has any game come close to this feeling? Or, rather, has there been a real vast open world game that captures this feeling? I've got some examples that really try to represent the sheer size of a true world - Fallout 1&2 Arcanum have a huge world, but you cheat by fast travelling everywhere. But they are exceptions. There is such a thing as a too crowded open world, and that's exactly what happens in mainstream open world rpgs - Skyrim, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3 (yes, I so dare to criticize it) are too crowded, to varying levels, too small and their worlds don't feel real (The Witcher 3 is of course less victim to this, but still, there are a loot of repetitive quests that don't really add anything and detract you from the immersion.) Most open world adventure games fit in the same category (Horizon say.) So where are the games where you can't fast travel, where you have to plan every trip, and that thus makes it worth it? The most mainstream ones I can think of are Minecraft, Elite: Dangerous and Zelda:BOTW. I can't really speak for BOTW as I haven't played it, but Minecraft and Elite offer huge worlds. Yet, they lack what makes games interesting as they are in the complete opposite direction; their huge worlds are only that, huge, and the 100% procedurally generated content doesn't make it super worth it. Why isn't there such a thing as a hand-crafted yet big open world? Hand-crafted quests, but disseminated in a clever manner, not a crowded one. I think I've ever really felt like I was taking on a journey in a game in one; and that game is STALKER. The world is dangerous and, albeit not very big, every trip being so dangerous makes them a journey. And you don't get assaulted by a compass that tells you what you can do, you only are trying to survive in this hostile yet beautiful panorama. So why is it that a FPS that is barely open world be the best candidate to "immersive open-world RPG"? I shall put a note that Dark Souls I has this same feeling in some ways, but it is also barely open. Why is it so hard for game companies to try to recreate this feeling? I understand that of course this kind of experience is demanding, and most players don't want to spend 30 minutes just to travel to get to a quest. Yet, when games try those kinds of content, they can be the best thing ever, if you're willing to put the time into it. So here is the question, why are there no "true" open world games? But maybe there are games of this kind that I've managed to completely avoid during my gaming years. I hope so, that'd be an amazing thing to discover. [link] [comments]  |
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