| Why there was no successful Minecraft clone ? Posted: 19 Dec 2017 05:34 AM PST Like it or not, success of Minecraft is unquestionable. Over the years many game companies tried to replicate the formula of simple lego-like building, fully interactive world, survival, and perhaps improve it by adding MMO like servers, more RPG elements and many other improvements. Games like Cube World, Sky Saga, Boundless, Stellar, Cubed, TUG, ... among many others. Yet almost all of those games either ended mid development, or launched to EA and nearly abandoned afterwards. Except mysteriously discontinued Cube World that gained lot of popularity. And Skysaga that was almost ready to launch but closed due publisher dispute. None of these games managed to get anywhere. Why do you think these games performed so poorly ? Why despite large interest and attractive theme, no developer managed to publish anything remotely good ? submitted by /u/Lobotomist [link] [comments] |
| Thinking of remaking Bushido blades. Discussion. Posted: 19 Dec 2017 07:00 AM PST Hey there /r/truegaming I'm an indie dev on UE4. I have a decent knowledge and budget to make a full game that can be completed in about a year. Apart from already watching countless youtube videos and have played that game for endless hours with my friends I have a quite detailed information of its mechanics. Yet i'm unsure of pursuing this journey as remaking is kind of stealing in my mind and I'm not very comfortable with that idea.(or even paying homage, its kind of re-imitating the mechanics) Are you interested in a playing a game like bushido blade in 2018 ? What points or features do you think should be added to enhance the experience ? submitted by /u/IronBoundManzer [link] [comments] |
| Having an unprepared/unqualified developers to create big games - Should this be done or not? Posted: 19 Dec 2017 03:14 AM PST I am writing this becuase I am somehow noticing a trend that some of the most anticipated games like the Division and Mass Effect: Andromeda had very controversial launches becuase of the poor quality and the amount pf bugs and glitches that players encountered. I know that I am not familiar with gameplay development but I somehow to not see giving untrained developers to make big games as a big no-no. One example of this is the developers of the first Witcher game. They admitted that they had very little experience game development but despite their lack of experience, the first Witcher game had decent quality and was actually playable. This actually gave CDProjekt the proper feedback that was needed to create a much better game which the second Witcher game was known to have better mechanics, more deeply integrated gameplay and better quality overall ... which later gave them even more feedback on how to make an even better game later on. To me, giving untrained developers to creativity to create as much as a good game as they can is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it, maybe it does not. At least developers will learn from their mistakes and move on onto the next project. However, having a developer that is very unfamiliar with the type of game of that they are told to do (Massive Entertainment was mostly familiar with RTS games) and EXPECT to instantly pull it off and be able to create the next big thing as The Division was marketed to be, that to me is a thing that I would have stayed away from if I was a Ubisoft businessman. Depsite that I am actually playing the Division now becuase the Gold Edition convinced me that the game was good and less of broken mess than it was before, I avoided buying the Division becuase of its negative media coverage and when players mentioned how unfair the DarkZone mechnics are. I would not be very surprised that people still think that the game is broken or does not deserve media coverage even though it is technically in a better state now becuase something about video games as of late is that first impressions count a lot when you are actually selling a product, especially a product that was hyped. I do not really blame the developers for its mediocrity becuase just becuase that developer is not familiar with that kind of game, does not that the game will suck. But I blame however the ethics behind this choice becuase if Ubisoft really really wanted to create the next big thing then it would have been better to have more experienced developers do the hard work while the less experienced will at least know the basics or do the less complicated features to at least be familiar with the game in case Ubisoft asks to create another MMO-like game in the future To me, having an inexperienced developer and tell them to create the next biggest thing in gaming history was too much of an expectation to accomplish. It would have been better if were involved in minor roles and allowed the more experienced to do the heavy work so that in future MMO-like titles or perhaps in the DLC or sequels of the franchise, these inexperienced developers will eventually get the experience needed for that particular game development submitted by /u/sammyjamez [link] [comments] |
| Gaming mysteries that require game updates to solve are cheap and unfulfilling Posted: 18 Dec 2017 08:53 PM PST The two examples I'm most aware of, are Elite Dangerous and Grand Theft Auto V. In Elite Dangerous, the developers slowly started adding hints to an alien race through game updates. It started with things like strange broadcasts, odd monoliths or ruins, even an unexplained encounter or two. These things alone are all very cool, but each part of the mystery was just added through updates each time. You as a player could not encounter something strange, investigate, and come to a conclusion. Even the community could not reach a conclusion. It all just led to speculation, before eventually the game was updated with more events each time. There was no mystery to solve, or solution hiding. All the community could ultimately do is speculate and wait. I think GTAV did it even worse. The hints have been even absurdly vague and cryptic, and there might not even be a "solution". None the less, we had unexplained points on maps, the infamous mural, and countless other details that barely connect, yet have been added to and expanded upon with each update. What is the appeal of a mystery that cannot be solved until the game developers give you the answer? No matter how hard you look, no matter how hard a community tries, there just isn't an answer available. Of course, if the answer to the mystery is in the game as is, then it can be datamined and the mystery "ruined" for a community. But I do think teasing a mystery that has solution at all is a bad answer to this problem. And this is without getting into mysteries that require scouring game files for hints, looking at images of soundwaves, etc etc, all without an available solution. It could be said that this isn't all that different from only having the first entry of a series, with plot threads and unanswered questions left for sequels. But with those, you KNOW that the answers probably aren't all available yet. It's obvious that you don't have access to all the information. As opposed to searching in a game for information that just hasn't been added yet. How does everyone else feel about them? submitted by /u/FurryPhilosifer [link] [comments] |
| 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 [link] [comments] |
| 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 [link] [comments] |
| Why is Resident Evil 1 seen as a classic? Posted: 16 Dec 2017 02:55 PM PST A lot of people say Resident Evil 1 is a classic, one of the best games ever made. They love it for its atmosphere and gameplay. So when I noticed that I owned the Remastered version of it on Steam (kinda forgot I got it from a Humble Bundle), I immediately started playing. After about 6 hours of playing it, I quit the game and don't intend on starting it up again.
I don't wanna sound like an ass (even though the title of this post is kinda awful, sorry about that), but I genuinely don't get why people praise the game as much as they do. The camera system with its multiple angle seemed like a nice idea at the beginning of the game, but quickly became tedious and annoying. A lot of the gameplay involves running from a storage crate to a room with a puzzle because you didn't have the one item you need to solve it with you, when you first found the puzzle. The survival aspect isn't really that prevalent, as healing items and ammo can be found quite often. And the inventory system is just the worst part of it all. The amount of backtracking you have to do because you found an important item, but can't take it with you because your inventory is full, is absurd.
Again, I don't want to sound like an asshole who just ignorantly rambles on about how bad this game is and how stupid every person, that actually likes it, is. There were some things that I actually enjoyed: The "random" moments/events in the game are just awesome! There were a few times, when I was walking through a hallway for the second or third time, when all of a sudden a nearby window broke and four zombies just marched in and all of a sudden, music set in. Those moments scared the shit out of me! The general contrast between silence and tension is incredibly well done. A lot of areas is the game do note feature music at all, while others feature eerie background music. This is especially prevalent, when you first enter a new part of the mansion. You see the animation of a door opening, creepy music starts playing and you hear the growl of a zombie, thats somewhere nearby.
With that being said, the gameplay is so awful that I feel like it absolutely overshadows the positive aspects of the game. Is it because I stopped playing after a few hours? Am I missing something here?
What do all of you think? Why do you enjoy the game (or not)? Because I've been listening to the save room music for the last 20 minutes (which is by far the best thing in the game) and just can't figure out, why this game is seen as a classic. Edit: Just a quick edit to thank all of you for your comments! Didn't really expect so many answers, especially so many well thought out ones! Learned quite a few interesting things about RE1, that put a few of the problems I have with the game in pespective. I guess considering whatlimitations they had to work around when making the game, it actually is kind of impressive what they were able to achieve. submitted by /u/Max_Phintias [link] [comments] |
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