True Gaming In defence of Far Cry's towers |
- In defence of Far Cry's towers
- When can open world games be considered "bloated"?
- The Gothenburg Gaming Survey
- Is Far Cry 5 challenging, or just fun?
- Why women play less videogames than men?
- The "gaming" of today
- Sea Of Thieves' currently perceived quality reaffirms my thoughts on the dangers of "service games"
- WI: Video Games had been begun being marketed to girls after the 1980s video game crash?
- Do people still hate the Mass Effect 3 ending? (Spoilers)
| In defence of Far Cry's towers Posted: 28 Mar 2018 07:07 AM PDT Like many, I'm currently playing Far Cry 5. I like it. It's a good game. However, I think that the towers from previous games served a purpose beyond just gating progress; the removal of these towers, combined with the amped-up version of the typical 'Far Cry chaos' in Far Cry 5, is making the game less enjoyable for me. I want to stress just how busy Far Cry 5 is. in every sense of the word. There is no time nor room to breathe. If you stand for 30 seconds to admire a mountain or a bird or a distant fire, you can almost guarantee that there will be a truck hurtling down the road towards you when you turn around. I am now completely numb to distant gunfire because it is so constant. I can't walk past a town without UI pop ups telling me about new characters, quests, challenges, vehicles weapons, companions - it's exhausting. A lot of this comes from how new activities are discovered in Far Cry 5. In pursuit of, I guess, immersion, discovery of activities is ambient. If you walk past a sign for a deer trail, you get a pop up telling you that deers have been added to your map. If you overhear someone talking about a silo full of explosives, it's marked on your map. But Far Cry 5 is so packed with these activities that the pop and swoosh of notifications feels relentless. And just as I've digested the notifications and additions to my map, a helicopter swoops overhead, a truck full of prisoners skates past and they're all firing at me. Again, there is no room to breathe. Sometimes I just want to wander quietly through a forest that I've never seen before and enjoy the view. Which brings me to the towers. They were trite and arbitrary but served more of a purpose than simply gating progress. They provided organisation in games that would otherwise, as in Far Cry 5, be too chaotic for their own good. If I was feeling overwhelmed at the number of routes forward in Far Cry 3, I could stop climbing towers and start ticking things off my list. When I was ready to see more options, I could climb a tower and add them to my list. I was in control. In Far Cry 5, the absence of towers means that, on my way to do activity A, activity X, Y and Z pop off. Perhaps I'm old but it is draining in a way that I've not really experienced before. In a game where the minute-to-minute action can feel so chaotic, towers brought a level of control to the metagame (is that the right word?) that is sorely missing from Far Cry 5. [link] [comments]  |
| When can open world games be considered "bloated"? Posted: 28 Mar 2018 11:00 AM PDT After finally grabbing all the moons in Super Mario Odyssey, I realized that a large number of the power moons I had collected in the dozens of hours I've been playing were mostly just giveaway moons. To start, Super Mario Odyssey is an extremely well-designed games, filled with many of my favorite kingdoms in the whole series, but at a certain point, I started to get that tedious feeling of the game becoming a collect-a-thon. While I know this is what Mario technically is, the game was no longer as fun as those moments where you enter Kingdoms for the first few times. Until then, I just felt like this stemmed into a more common issue with how open world games are designed. Even though The Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid V were my favorite games of 2015, I think some aspects in their design falll under this issue. They're both still amazing open world games, definitely one of the best, but in my opinion, they feel somewhat "bloated". In Super Mario Odyssey, the quarter of my playtime were used on remaining moons after those post-game challenges. That quarter unfortunately began to feel like padding, something I never would have expected from a Mario game. I felt like it never reached that transcendent level i.e. original Super Mario Galaxy, just because it really became repetitive. It was just too much, even for completionists. Nintendo was smart letting gamers finish with a third of the moons, because they seem to think that padding really needed to fill up all that open space for the kingdoms. Meanwhile, in The Witcher 3, the quests, particularly the optional ones, are very well-written but some aspects started to grate on me. The investigation mechanism brings down the experience to a halt, for sure. Especially since Witcher sense, is basically a system which involves no player involvement regarding the gameplay aspect. It's an incredibly tiring formula which ultimately constitutes most of the content of both the main and side stories. This was even worse in the main quests, where most of it all boiled down to cutscene --> detective vision --> kill monster --> go back to NPC. It didn't help that the combat and the mechanics were pretty meh on the whole, and even though they had visual variety, fighting different enemy types had no substantial difference. Looking back, I could have searched for which quests were worthwhile since I agree for a fact that most of my favorite side quests in RPGs could be found in this game. It's just a damn shame that I had to stumble through some okay ones along with it. Writing this, the writing and character development is what made The Witcher 3 stand out, for sure. Another game I mentioned is Metal Gear Solid V. Probably the best stealth game ever made, by a distance. Yes, it might not be finished. Yes, it's light on story. No, it's not the worst Metal Gear game. It's in the top 3, definitely. The problem is that, with the original content's length, why was adding that many side ops, though still enjoyable with the game's mechanics, seen as necessary? The enemy outposts had great level design, but why add the long distances of nothing, with the occasional enemy convoy? Why did they decide to add a lot of gameplay content but without the story context that usually comes with it? Metal Gear Solid 4 received backlash for too many cutscenes, but this one just steered in the opposite direction way too much. The main draw of the open world is tactical freedom of approach, yet exploration has essentially no purpose in the open world. To make things worse, side ops exist basically just for grinding materials and maybe try out new playstyles. Anyway, I'm rambling at this point, what do you guys think of how these games handled the open world and when do you consider open world games too bloated? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Mar 2018 01:45 PM PDT Dear r/truegaming, My name is Theo Toresson and I am a student of Science in Psychology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden - currently writing my master's thesis. The survey aims to gain understanding of the different aspects of gaming that affects psychological well-being. The moderators of your subreddit have been kind enough to let me post this in your sub. The survey will take about 10 minutes to complete. I hope that as many of you as possible want to help me by doing this survey, because in order to make something out of this I hope to get data from a broad variety of gamers. Also, you should feel free to post this survey anywhere there might be gamers - to friends or on forums, twitch, twitter facebook etc. So if you have a few minutes to spare in between games, use it for this survey - it's for (actual) science. Thank you for your time! LINK TO SURVEY: https://samgu.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2rvhBqqSVrTycC1 All the best, Theo Toresson, Master of Science in Psychology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FAQ: I have received a few questions and comments on the survey. I can't change anything in the survey due to the fact that it would corrupt the data. Please refer to the FAQ below should any confusion occur during or after the survey. I live in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Hong Kong, Faroe Islands or United Kingdom – where is my country? The list is lacking a few countries. You can choose any country on the list as long as you make sure to specify the correct country in the very last question of the survey. If you live in England, Scotland or Wales, please select Great Britain. What kind of device is Nintendo Switch? And what if I play my most played game on both console and computer? Choose the way you play the game the most. Switch can count as either portable device or console, answer according to your most frequent type of usage. You ask for streaming, but what about Youtube and other sites for non-streaming video content related to gaming? Use the "other"-alternative on the question about gaming related activities and fill in your preferred alternative in the corresponding box. For the content to count as "streaming" in the other questions of the survey however it has to be live (e.g. live on Twitch, Mixer or Youtube LIVE). Some genres are unrepresented, for example fighting games, what can I do? Use the "other"-alternative and fill in your favorite genre in the corresponding box if it's missing. You ask for money spent on games each week, but I only buy one game each month, is my spending 0? No. Calculate your weekly expenditure by dividing your monthly by four, for example. How can you know that my mental and physical health is related in any way to my gaming? I can't. Your hand injury might be because of an accident you had yesterday. You should still fill in the box, because even if I can't see the underlying causes of your health (as an individual), I can analyze it on a group level and look for patterns among thousands of replies. If there is no connection between a particular way of gaming and a particular mental or physical state, I won't find any connection. There is no need to worry that you're messing up the data! So try to be as honest as possible in the survey, even if you know that your state is not related to your gaming. The questions in the end seem focused on the negative side of gaming. What is your motive? I am a gamer myself, and have been for all my life. I have had several amazing experiences with games, and also a few bad ones. Gaming has many positive effects, there is research to support that. For a minority of people, gaming can have negative effects (just like alcohol, work, sex, candy, exercise, therapy, TV, horseback riding or really anything that can be enjoyable). This particular study is done to explore correlations (not causality) between different kinds of gaming, social and mental health problems (I myself work as a therapist, therefore my focus). Neither I (the author) nor the institution is biased towards gaming in general in an either positive or negative way. Will I get to see the results? Yes. The thesis will be in Swedish, but I will post a summary of the results in all subreddits that have been participating in the study, most likely sometime in June 2018. What is your favorite game? No one has actually asked me this, but for the record it's Super Smash Bros. Melee! I have more questions! Feel free to send an email to gustoreth@student.gu.se and I will get back to you as soon as possible. [link] [comments]  |
| Is Far Cry 5 challenging, or just fun? Posted: 28 Mar 2018 01:22 PM PDT Far Cry 5 looks like a really impressive feat of game engineering, but I've been on the fence because I'm not really seeing any AI improvements from Far Cry 3's mechanic. Enemy senses seem a little dull, ammo and equipment too easy to come by, and the player is simply too bullet-spongy. I also worry the player has too many tools at their disposal, and too many avenues of entry for combat situation, so that the fighting looks, while visually impressive, a too little easy. Are features like the bear and coordinated ally snipers a necessity that gives you a much needed edge in combat, or does it make an already easy fight even easier? As a sandbox it looks really fun, but with so much of the gameplay centered around combat, if there's not much actual risk or challenge I can't see myself playing for more than 10 hours. [link] [comments]  |
| Why women play less videogames than men? Posted: 27 Mar 2018 11:24 PM PDT Hi So I have heard about the study which says something half of the gamers are girls, however this study includes the casual mobile games as well. What I have seen in my life is some girls play Candy Crush for 10 minutes a day or Sims twice a year. I am not talking about these players. I am talking about players who go home from work and do play 1-3 hours with WoW, LoL, Dota, FPS games, singleplayer games anything. Okay so you might tell me Candy Crush is still a game. The answer I am looking for is why men play way more with their games than women? Several factors I am thinking of, however I just pulled them out of my ass:
These are just thoughts from me, I am interested in your perspective. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Mar 2018 12:06 PM PDT Having been a gamer for over thirty years I've seen a lot in the industry change and evolve for the better and for the worse, really. Games struggled for a while to be considered as art, unfairly. Now it seems as though, after a good while of them being treated as integral creative projects the industry has, for some part, followed a wayward path in regard to those titles that are built around addictive gameplay. And nothing more. There's no real substance there, just mechanics designed to keep the dopamine firing, the online purchases rolling in, and the 'player' 'playing', with no real satisfaction at the end of it. (Why would they risk anyone feeling a sense of achievement?!) Of course gaming on the whole has always had that 'hook' component implemented in certain titles but it's in so many of them now. It's not just the online competitive games, there are of course other titles that are designed in such a way that the numbers get their hooks into the gamer and have them take on the role of a donkey who's following a carrot dangling in front of it. Even a lot of adventure titles that are extremely long, seem to have been designed to BE an extremely long title. The rpg's, etc of yesteryear of which the huge story and immersive experience pretty much needed to have seventy/eighty hours to get through it all, aren't around as much. Or at least as prominent. This may seem like a dated 'rant' but it's a situation that's grown to such huge proportions I don't think it's as apparent as it should be. I think these empty, greedy experiences will have their day and start to lack in popularity, but I wonder what it'll take for that to happen. I'm under no illusion that they're pretty much here to stay in a lot of ways but I wonder if the growing popularity of retro gaming and indie gaming is, in part, because of these 'fast food' games. Every cloud, I suppose.... [link] [comments]  |
| Sea Of Thieves' currently perceived quality reaffirms my thoughts on the dangers of "service games" Posted: 24 Mar 2018 12:52 PM PDT https://www.reddit.com/r/JimSterling/comments/7tnqu0/xbox_game_pass_concerns_me_for_the_potential/ Here one of my main points was basically that these "service" games are designed less around being an actual game, and more around being a vector for monetisation and some laughs with friends. Xbox Game Pass facilitates that model to the nth degree, meaning that new releases almost completely sidestep the 60 dollars worth of revenue from a standard game sale. Sea Of Thieves is one of 3 "big" Xbox exclusives to come out this year, and we already know State Of Decay 2 is going to be a mid budget game. Which, in a vacuum, isn't a bad thing, but there's a reason why they're offering it up for 10 bucks on game pass. It's probably not very good, and if they aren't putting microtransactions in now, you can bet they will in the future. Microsoft generally seems to be pulling away from making games the "traditional" way, and is trying to push the industry in the streaming "service" direction. A direction I don't think many on this sub want. Sea Of Thieves perfectly represents what "live services" are increasingly becoming. Trend chasing, incomplete games that don't really have a leg to stand on unless you're messing around with your friends. The industry isn't going to learn that it won't work until we start seeing the same number of failures we did back when every studio and their dogs were making FPS games in the 7th gen, or MMOs half a gen before that. Even Epic can't tell you why Paragon failed. Even though it's blatantly obvious. I do expect Rare to close down within the next few years. [link] [comments]  |
| WI: Video Games had been begun being marketed to girls after the 1980s video game crash? Posted: 25 Mar 2018 04:34 AM PDT |
| Do people still hate the Mass Effect 3 ending? (Spoilers) Posted: 23 Mar 2018 09:46 AM PDT I recently did a full trilogy playthrough, (ME 1,2, and 3 with all plot dlc,) and had my character and decisions carried through each one. I read how the ending went before the extended cut was released, and that was definitely deserving of the backlash, but I wonder what the community thinks of the series after the extended cut. Did you enjoy it? Did you feel like the decisions carried over well? What could've been better? [link] [comments]  |
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