True Gaming Game of the Year DLC collections ruin the experience |
- Game of the Year DLC collections ruin the experience
- What schools should learn from Super Meat Boy
- Pairing video games with other texts and media
- Any gaming chairs like DX Racer, AK Racer etc that have removable covers and foam seat?
- I've been anxiously awaiting this book that comes out in a few months
- Playing Final Fantasy XII again 12 years after its release has given me a new appreciation of modern game design and is making me rethink the idea of having a backlog
- Is "open worlds" a buzzword now?
| Game of the Year DLC collections ruin the experience Posted: 02 Jan 2018 02:58 AM PST Game of the Year DLC collections ruin the experience. I realize I may be late to this party, but I recently picked up the complete Shadows of Mordor and Dishonored DLC collections which include all content you could get when you pre-order the game from various stores. These are typically just a few bonus items. Maybe one or two of these bonus DLCs wouldn't be so bad, but when you have all of them it spoils any sense of gear-based progression in the early game, or in Shadows of Mordor's case, the whole game. Shadows of Mordor has a rune system which allows you to equip a rune for each weapon that gives you some kind of bonus. These runes drop from enemies, but also there are quests that give you more powerful runes. Completing all these quests give you a very powerful rune for each weapon that includes a capstone ability. You know what you get from Shadows of Mordor pre-order DLC? Runes. Powerful runes. And even the capstone ability runes that you get for completing all the quests! The effects are two-fold. First of all, it makes almost every single early rune you get from enemy drops inferior to the ones you start with, ruining any sense of excitement from getting a rune. Second, there's no point in completing those quests because you already have the ultimate reward! I've only just started Dishonored, but this magic guy said there would be 3 bone shard slots, implying that the choice of which to equip would be meaningful, but instead I have 7 slots and 12 free shards to start with that come from DLC. I can only assume that they will be better than just about everything I find in the early game. These pre-order DLCs only make the game worse. I can understand the need to make them powerful enough to encourage a pre-order, but the devs still have to make the game assuming the player won't have them. The obvious solution is to not play with the DLC enabled or skip the overpowered bonus items, but this is not always possible to do and I won't always know what's part of the DLC. TL;DR: DLC collections have OP items that ruin the sense of progression [link] [comments]  |
| What schools should learn from Super Meat Boy Posted: 02 Jan 2018 05:14 AM PST Do you know one reason I've always loved platforming games? It starts from the first few uncomfortable hops. You jump around, trying to orient yourself, get a feel for the physics. If you're lucky, you get a few safe levels where you can get to the end without real danger. Sooner or later, though, you miss a jump, fall flailing to the ground, or onto spikes, or into a bottomless pit. A few moments later, you're up, trying again. You can try as many times as you want, but ultimately, one thing is clear: if you want to get further, you're going to need to get better. There's no way around it--no level grinding or consumables or difficulty select to push you past a dangerous bit. Often, you have no more to work with by the end of the game than you do at the beginning. Every time you fall short, you know it's your fault. A platforming game, done right, will guide you from clunky, careless movement slowly and smoothly towards mastery of a system. Super Meat Boy is one of my favorite examples of this. You start out with a minimalistic tutorial hopping through a few simple obstacles, and end up flying through long, buzzsaw-filled labyrinths that require near-perfect execution. At their core, Super Meat Boy and platformers like it are games about learning. These games demand execution. They coach you until you can rise to their challenges. You could argue that the skills they teach aren't particularly transferable, but that's not terribly important. What's important is that they teach those skills really, really well. My aim here is to start a discussion on why they teach so well, and what schools can learn from them. Why? Honestly, I feel that the common education model in schools is fundamentally broken, and games like Super Meat Boy are a step in figuring out why. The most important point where Super Meat Boy succeeds and schools fail is in the flow of the game: If you don't die on a level, it takes seconds to beat. You move on wasting almost no time, pausing only long enough to watch a satisfying cascade of every failure (more on that later). It's only when you're stuck on something, when you need a bit more time, that those seconds stretch on into minutes, or hours, of working out the details until you're ready to progress. This means that even the easy parts are fun. You do well, you're rewarded with quick progress pushing you towards the next point that challenges. Every player is constantly being pushed to achieve more and more. There's never a point where you can sit back and say, "Okay, I guess I've learned all I'm supposed to." Schools, in contrast, are built on a monolithic model: Every lesson is taught at the pace of the class. If a student masters a topic quickly, they are rewarded with the chance to sit there, bored, watching thirty other students work through the material. If they need more time, the teacher can only hold back for so long before pushing the class ahead. Imagine if, on every level of Super Meat Boy, you were paired with a dozen other players, and the game allowed everyone to progress only when six had won. Half the players would get to sit around watching the end cutscene again and again, the other half would find themselves rushed from level to level before they had a firm grasp, falling further and further behind. Let's go back to that end level screen. This is one of the most brilliant examples I know of game design. It removes the sting from every failure, increasing anticipation each time for the final moment of watching a hundred doomed Meat Boys falling into a dozen deathtraps, getting further and further along, with one finally pulling through to the end. What's more, it encourages the player not to quit before completing a level--if you stop and exit the game, you've lost your chance to see it. Failure is expected in Super Meat Boy. It costs a fraction of a second to reset, and nothing more. Each success is built on a pile of mistakes and carries the reminders of growth. Back to schools. Often, even missed questions on homework are penalized. A failed quiz early on can mean a lost opportunity for an A through an entire semester. A failed test at the end can have disastrous consequences. Each small failure leaves a permanent scar, and students learn to dread it and avoid it at all costs. There's no joyful cascade at the end, reminding a student how far they've come. It's as if someone is standing behind them as they go through levels with a pencil and clipboard, "hmm"ing at every missed jump. One final, quick lesson: the branching paths and collectibles. Super Meat Boy is full of hidden levels, a hundred bandages acting as optional additions, and a reimagined version of every level adding additional challenges. Sure, you could just rush through the base game and move on, but if any player is hungry for more (or gets stuck in one path and wants to try something else), they have plenty of options, as well as chances to practice old skills in new contexts. In most classes, not only are students progressing at a set pace, they're on a set path. There's no room, or time, to revisit old skills, and little chance to branch out and progress through the course in a different direction. If something on that course isn't working, for whatever reason, the student is told to suck it up and get through it. None of this is groundbreaking. Super Meat Boy isn't the only game to teach a skill like this. The tools it uses are well-entrenched within game design. By and large, they're common sense. Common sense or not, though, they've been slow to bleed into other contexts. Games are getting better and better at teaching us how to learn, but a lot of the lessons simply go missing elsewhere. Plenty of people see the potential, especially in education, but most solutions end up trying to toss a couple of surface-level features in and call it a day. The potential is so much greater than that. The bottom line is this: If school were a game, nobody would play it. It violates basic principles of game design, expecting students to stay engaged and motivated while dragging them along a set path at a uniform speed and punishing them every time they stumble. Parents and educators worry about kids spending time on games instead of school. There are many reasons, of course, but I think Super Meat Boy teaches a big one: games get the learning process right. They provide a steady, varied stream of challenging activities at the speed of the individual, and give each player as many chances as they need to succeed. And until schools catch up, is it any surprise that students, both the brightest and the typical, are overwhelmingly negative about school? tl;dr: school should take a lesson from platformers, looking like this and not like this. [link] [comments]  |
| Pairing video games with other texts and media Posted: 02 Jan 2018 03:59 PM PST https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/videogamepairedtext/ Over the past few years, my friend has been documenting as he pairs various video games with other texts in the form of books, TV shows, podcasts, etc. He has a background in video game studies and I find his insights super interesting. For example, this one on Zelda: Ocarina of Time with Shigeru Mizuki's manga Kitaro What do you think? Have you ever paired a video game with any other forms of art/media to get a different perspective? [link] [comments]  |
| Any gaming chairs like DX Racer, AK Racer etc that have removable covers and foam seat? Posted: 02 Jan 2018 03:29 PM PST I've had an AK Racing chair for 3 years and I love it but it annoys me that I cannot remove the covers to wash them and the foam seat cannot be separated from the chair, it just makes it very hard take to the dry cleaners. Anyone have any suggestions of similar chairs which have removable covers and seat? Thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| I've been anxiously awaiting this book that comes out in a few months Posted: 02 Jan 2018 06:34 AM PST Sorry if this sounds like an ad, but I swear it isn't. I heard about this somewhere online months ago, and I'm anxiously awaiting its release. The Minds Behind the Games is a series of interviews with game designers from the early days of gaming to today. Hopefully the price comes down a bit on release, but as a big fan of Masters of Doom I think I'm gonna love this book. Anyone know of any other similar books? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Jan 2018 04:54 PM PST Back in high school, I quit Final Fantasy XII after about 25, maybe 35 hours or so. Even then, I couldn't think of why I had suddenly stopped playing, and I never bothered picking the game back up again. Now, 8 hours into the updated PS4 version, having just reached (I think) the point where I stopped playing before (!), it's almost painfully obvious why I stopped. FFXII is one of the last old-school AAA titles. It has save points, but no auto-saving or checkpoints. This particular area has you cross a massive desert with no save points for a long time. Because it's an open world, it's easy to think that you should explore and try to find everything, rather than come back later (using, say, the gate/save crystal teleportation system). And when the new enemies you come across seem only slightly more powerful than the one, it's tempting to just let yourself be distracted by optional side areas. Then strong stuff spawns on top of you, kills you, and sends you back to that save point from 20 minutes ago. That's probably what happened. I got caught up in the Sandsea, got killed, and ragequit the game for 12 years. The thing that I didn't mention is that the PS4 version has a turbo button that can toggle running the game at normal, 2x, or 4x speed. So that 20-minute penalty would actually look more like 5 minutes, assuming you didn't spend a ton of time customizing stuff (which you generally wouldn't be doing too far from a save point anyway). People complained about the game playing like an MMO, but as a fan of FFXI back then, I loved that I had a single-player way of enjoying similar gameplay with a more engaging storyline. The game's Gambit system allows you to come up with as individualized a playstyle as you want for each individual character on your team, and unlocking slots and targets as you go allows you to sort of ease your way into using it. You're telling the game to play itself, yes, but you can't simply set it once and forget it. You have to keep updating it as enemy tactics change, and it basically allows the designers to make the battle system interesting without bogging down common/frequent enemy encounters with repetitive administration tasks. But combining the Gambit system with the turbo button makes this game play like a dream. And the zodiac job system is a massive improvement over the original, which I remember had me giving everyone the ability to cast Cure on themselves, etc. Overall, this game just has a really nice core loop. Select and equip your party, configure their Gambits, go out adventuring, update your Gambits to suit the enemies you're facing, continue adventuring and gaining LP/loot, then sell the loot to pay for upgrades, and cash out the LP for new abilities before you slot them into your Gambits and head out again. And you have the turbo button for when you don't really need to watch the action and change the flowchart, or when you're running around a lot. All of that strikes me because the game is just so much better now than it was in its first release, but that first release was still critically acclaimed, and it also sold well. But today? I'm not sure it would've moved as many copies, given its shortcomings compared just to the updated version, much less its modern contemporaries. It's odd; I'm not sure if it's best to play a game at its release, when it's most culturally relevant, shortly after, when it's been patched a few times, well after, when it can be bought with most/all DLC at a discount, or even past that, when it's been remastered/ported to a newer platform. The rub is that, while games are generally better the farther along that path you play them, it's not certain that the game will ever reach the later points, and it can actually be the case that a game gets worse over time, as its shortcomings become less and less tolerable. Because as much as I enjoyed playing this game before I grew tired of it when it was new, I can guarantee that I would not have lasted nearly as long playing the original version today, not when I could be playing its modern competition instead. [link] [comments]  |
| Is "open worlds" a buzzword now? Posted: 02 Jan 2018 01:52 AM PST When I think back, Personally it seems as if every singleplayer game is jumping on the "big open worlds with millions of miles to explore", without actually making the world alive and intresting in the first place. [link] [comments]  |
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