True Gaming Star Fox 64, A Literal Casual Filter, Meaningful Choices, and The Cinematic Experience |
- Star Fox 64, A Literal Casual Filter, Meaningful Choices, and The Cinematic Experience
- The issue of historical accuracy and authenticity in video games
- Side Activities for Motivation in Open-World Games
- What do you think about auto-dynamic-difficulty?
- Clean Xbox Tags & OG Tags , Hmu on kik: @Pattern.
- Decision making in games: Why do I think that banner saga's decision making system is the best one so far, and why do I think that today's games resembles junk food.
- Like mobile phone chargers, should there be laws to encourage console controllers to be cross-compatible?
| Star Fox 64, A Literal Casual Filter, Meaningful Choices, and The Cinematic Experience Posted: 03 Apr 2018 01:29 PM PDT Over the last couple of decades there have been multiple games that have tried to capture the essence of watching a movie when playing a game. I'd like to shine some light on a game that I feel captures that feeling, while at the same time providing engaging game play that goes beyond choose-your-own adventure mechanics and same-story-different-dialogue payoffs. A game where how you play can significantly change your journey. A 21 year-old game called Starfox 64.
With some basic points out of the way, I'd like to call attention to the world map of the game, a map I affectionately call The Casual Filter. Each stage is completely unique with it's own assets, dialogue, and challenges. Starting from Corneria, the player has two victory conditions. One for skilled players, and one for those good enough to survive, but not good enough to meet the 'hard path' victory condition. This multiple win condition pattern repeats itself through the game, allowing the player to claw their way to the top from the near bottom as late as Sector-X or fall back to the easy path if the hard path is just too much to handle. It is an ingenious piece of game design that rewards skill and offers accessibility, albeit flawed as many would agree that 'easy' stages like Titania are much harder than some of the Medium stages. There are so many variables in this game and character interactions that only take place if you visit certain planets or save certain characters that you can play through the game a dozen times and not have the experience be the same. At the same time, it differs from rogue-lites like Faster Than Light and Binding of Isaac by having a more coherent plot and no randomly generated content. It is a perfect storm of digestible, varied yet predictable game play, and I feel it is a shame that we have not seen much like it 20 years after. The game may very well have been a product of it's time. The expectations the players have on graphics in this day and age just don't line up with the time it takes to produce such graphics. Star Fox 64 was visually quite simplistic, even for it's time, and I just don't think developers these days have the heart to create 8 unique stages with unique assets that may never get used. Still. I think it is perhaps the game that merges the feeling of a movie-like story with solid game play where skill and decision making matters greatly to the experience. I'd love to hear your thoughts about the systems and other games that may have used similar structures. [link] [comments]  |
| The issue of historical accuracy and authenticity in video games Posted: 03 Apr 2018 06:56 AM PDT I want to share this video in light of the Kingdom Come: Deliverance controversy because of the whole historical accuracy thing. Being a history enthusiast myself, I do agree that making a historical period accurate is incredibly hard. There are so many things that the developers have to take care of, countless factors that are not influenced in the time period in a direct manner and for that, the game will take forever to develop and will risk to appear as somewhat boring or uninteresting as some people have called Kingdom Come Deliverance as that becuase of the developers' goal to make it historically accurate. So because of that, developers try to make their historical games as authentic as possible while still able to appeal to as many people as possible. This is a bit jarring to me because in the video, there are lots of dislikes which I find it confusing because I do agree with the video that making a game historically accurate is hard so authenticity is often taken into account. The problem with this is that how can define a historical game authentic? Maybe there were little black people around in Bohemia in early 15th Century (I cannot say much because despite I am a fan of history, medieval history never really appealed to me) but does it make it historically authentic to not have any people of colour appear in the game? Same thing that I have with other games which take place in historical settings such as COD WW2 has a female soldiers - it is authentic in some areas because female soldiers did exist in the case of the French resistance, the Polish resistance and the Russians, but there were never any female soldiers fighting in the front lines in the Allies side of the war (no British or American female soldiers) Or another game does not goes in a shady line of authenticity is the Assassin's Creed franchise and the Total War series. I play those games because they often portray historical settings as accurate as possible but they of course alter historical settings in certain ways such as Pope Alexander VI was indeed a very controversial pope and fathered many children and Cesare Borgia was ruthless but there is little evidence to show that he had incest with his sister. Honestly, the whole topic regarding historical authenticity is a very controversial subject where there is a shady and murky where one can define a historical setting as authentic or non-authentic despite the creative liberties that developers have in order to make their games as appealing as possible [link] [comments]  |
| Side Activities for Motivation in Open-World Games Posted: 02 Apr 2018 09:29 PM PDT Preface: By "Side Activity" I particularly mean systems like Gwent in the Witcher 3 and base building in Fallout 4. I've found personally these can greatly help my motivation for progression in open-world games; I was thinking about it recently and wanted to discuss. To start out, I must say that I'm someone who's prone to spending a good chunk of time on little diversion-style activities in games, i.e. fishing in Zelda games. I find they can provide some respite from the core game play loop that I enjoy. I am also someone pretty strongly susceptible to open-world fatigue. As I get further in games, I will start to recognize the patterns in the game-play loop and it'll start to feel repetitive and tedious. Frequently, I begin games as a bit of a completionist but by the end just have to push myself to finish the main story for the sake of experiencing it. Now, games have many systems to keep you playing to combat this fatigue--including character progression (levels/loot), narrative advancement, and intrinsic game-play enjoyment. However, the one strange system I've found that often helps keep me playing are extra activities such as Gwent in the Witcher 3 and base-building in Fallout 4. These often feel a little tacked-on in terms of the big picture of the game and yet in these particularly cases, I've found they significantly increased my motivation and purpose for exploring new areas. In the Witcher 3, a small town with little going on at least means a new shopkeeper to play and a new card to get. In Fallout 4, even the junk loot can be turned into materials to work on a settlement. Afterwards, the activities themselves provided an extra something to do that breaks up the routine of the core game-play loop. Even if the activities seem unimpressive in a vacuum, I found this aspect and how they loosely tie into game play progression in the other systems (i.e. exploration, loot, etc.) to be oddly compelling. To kick-off discussion:
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| What do you think about auto-dynamic-difficulty? Posted: 02 Apr 2018 11:14 PM PDT
Source: Destructoid It's quite an old essay which originates from 2008, I asked myself, how much the videogame industry advanced in this regard and the result is rather poorly. But don't misunderstand I'm quite relieved about that. There's a thin line between, too hard, to easy and just right. Because every player is different, as mentioned in the article, developers tend to calculate the difficulty for the player via an algorith or an AI which changes its behaviour. There are 2 issues I see with that concept:
I think it's pretty naive to think that an algorithm or some smartass AI should be able to read exactly the skillset of the player and its growth. You can't let another player, play with your save file because it could change the overall difficulty of the game, there are enough situations where such a system could have no information about. Even then, it's an ginormus task where the chance of an pay-off would be rather small. For me it's much more satisfiyng to see that I was able to overcome my own boundaries, if I'm not able to overcome a fair challenge, I'm the one who has to adapt, not the game. Honestly I think dynamic difficulty was always a bad idea and fails to set clear borders, unlike simple difficulty options can. Perhaps you can enlarge my horizon. [link] [comments]  |
| Clean Xbox Tags & OG Tags , Hmu on kik: @Pattern. Posted: 03 Apr 2018 04:11 PM PDT kik: @Pattern. Aright Firmed Callbox Backends Ointments MedEx Promotin Catio Unroller Wippen L85A1 Sarus Evins Zepx A Bully ( All For Sale ) Hmu on kik for more info on the Tags ! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Apr 2018 02:39 PM PDT I don't know if games were as formulaic, as they are now. If you played at least few open world games, you know what to expect: Bandit camps, safe houses, merchants, liberating outposts, tons of icons, "do A and I will give you B", every game series has it's own formula that it follows, but they all share a lot of commonalities. One thing that most role playing games share is predictable decision making system that magically tells you what will happen or it will be so dumbed-down and obvious that it won't even have to tell you what will happen. You pretty much always know what will happen if you will pick A or B answer. Developers wants you to know so you could "know what decision to make" and "role play" and get the results you want. So what does banner saga do differently? First of all, often you don't know the outcome of your choices. You find some food, people start feeling sick soon after, will you throw it all out? will you keep it all? will you let some of the people eat it and check if it's truly bad?, etc. You don't know the outcome, maybe majority of food is actually good. In the end of the day, it's your decision to make and because of your decision, your caravan might suffer, people might die or maybe your people are starving and that food is crucial, it's your responsibility. In banner saga, there is often no "good" or "bad" choice. Events come up during your journey and your decisions determine the outcome which may as well be completely different from what you expected it to be, because the game is not bending on it's knees to serve you all the choices and outcomes that you would like and expect to get. There is always a sense of mystery, sense of realism. It feels like you are in that world, that world that doesn't allow you to cure cancer because your "medicine skill is 100", or that world that hooks you like a good book in which you don't know what will happen. In the end of the day our games becomes like junk food. You know what you will get, you know what outcomes your decisions will bring. You know which NPC is a "good guy" which one will always help you and which one is your villain. It's not that there are no real consequences for your actions, it's that they are always formulaic and designed to be what you expected them to be. That's just my thoughts I wanted to share. If anyone has any of their own, please do share if you agree or disagree, or have your own ideas. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Apr 2018 01:41 AM PDT In the past, mobile phones all had their own unique chargers with unique plugs. It was extremely annoying. Then there was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply It's a voluntary standard, so no-one is forced to do anything. But I assume government had a hand in getting all the companies to the table and negotiating the outcome. And now all phones charge via USB. Along with almost all other portable devices. Now that most controllers are USB / Bluetooth anyways (and work on PC), there should be a similar effort to make all the console manufacturers agree to let their controllers be cross-compatible. Sure, different controllers have unique features (like the DS4's touchpad, or the Wii U's touchscreen), but there's no reason why the functions that are shared between controllers can't work on every console. (ABXY, L1-3, R1-3, DPad, Analogue Sticks, Select, Start) To be even more consumer friendly, the console makers should include a control remapping feature in their console OS's (like the one steam has.) So you could map the DS4's touchpad to the touchscreen features of the Wii U, or stuff like that. This is also a big deal for fightsticks, HOTAS, steering wheels, etc which never actually change but often don't work between different consoles (unless you get an adaptor.) [link] [comments]  |
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