True Gaming For boss fights in gaming, do you prefer epic, massive-sized bosses or smaller, human/player-sized bosses? |
- For boss fights in gaming, do you prefer epic, massive-sized bosses or smaller, human/player-sized bosses?
- How do you feel about giving a game time to "open up" and become fun?
- Help finding more of a certain genre of game.
- [Spoilers for Multiple Games] [Long Read] Why I think choice-driven narratives are highly limited in how emotionally compelling they can be.
- Have there been any new good Geo-location games like Pokemon Go?
- Anyone else feel like AAA games are on a downward spiral?
- HELP/ADVICE | Which point of view is the best for that kind of game?
- Ubisoft teasing surprises at E3. What do you think they could be?
- I never knew a BAD game could be so damn funny...Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde + Animal Soccer World. Wow, just...wow.
| Posted: 28 May 2018 08:06 AM PDT This is something I've been thinking about as I've been playing God of War and Dark Souls: Remastered. Both games have some pretty fun boss fights and the bosses are typically either giant-sized monsters (the trolls in God of War, O&S in DS etc) or human-sized warriors (Magni/Modi in GoW, Artorias in DS for e.g.). I'm finding that I typically enjoy the smaller-sized bosses much more. Although the monsters have their appeal, in that the fights feel epic and you feel like David vs Goliath taking down a being many times bigger than yourself. However, there's something just very innately appealing about the smaller bosses. They feel more like a duel, a fight between equals that gets my adrenaline pumping. I find that for the bigger bosses, the experience almost feels a little detached as they're so outsized - you're just running around avoiding AoE attacks and getting in a hit here and there. That doesn't mean they're not fun, and in fact, can be quite fantastic in their own right, but I just get that same personal feeling that I do with he "human" sized bosses. They feel like a gladiatorial duel. The fight against The Stranger/Baldur in GoW and the fight against Artorias in DS are two of the best boss fights I can remember in recent memory. Anyone else feel the same? [link] [comments]  |
| How do you feel about giving a game time to "open up" and become fun? Posted: 28 May 2018 10:22 AM PDT I've been playing Prey and it's starting to open up for me. I'm coming around on it. It took about 10 hours, probably closer to 15 hours, for it to actually start opening up. Its not like I wasn't having fun it just wasn't clicking with me, sometimes you just have to have something in click into place in your brain. So instead of shelfing it I gave it time to become a butterfly. Some games take a lot longer. I've heard about Final Fantasy 13 taking about 30 or so hours before it becomes something great, I don't know about you guys, but I don't have that kind of time commitment. [link] [comments]  |
| Help finding more of a certain genre of game. Posted: 28 May 2018 11:50 AM PDT Hey guys, So I've played hundreds of games in my life, but for the life of me I can't seem to find a full list of this certain type of game. I'm trying to better understand those games that sort of function as 3d duel fighting games, where all movement is constrained in an orbit around your opponent. Like, the entire game is spent in a control style similar to zelda Z-targeting. There seem to be a lot more Japanese games that work this way than there are in the west. But I want to play more of them. Examples are Dragonball Xenoverse Pokken Tournament dissidia final fantasy zone of the enders naruto ultimate ninja storm cyber troopers virtual-on i guess Tekken would be like an incredibly low-movement non-flying example mobile suit gundam extreme vs. ---Japanese only games (arcade) -- Gunslinger stratos Magicians DEAD
I've been calling them 'orbit fighters' because there's no good genre name for this sort of control style. '3d fighters' is too broad a term. Also, I mean to include the games for which combat mechanics are highly technical and the main focus, so the 3d zeldas wouldn't be in this group since those game emphasize puzzle solving and exploration much more than combat.
Are there any other games you guys know of that fit this descriptor? I've been trying to understand the origin, development, and strengths and weaknesses of this particular gameplay style (for instance, even though this sort of gameplay is very technical, it's usually nowhere near as competitive and balanced as regular 2d fighting games and I want to understand why), so if you all have any thoughts or opinions about that stuff let me hear it as well. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 May 2018 09:25 AM PDT WARNING: FULL SPOILERS FOR DETROIT: BECOME HUMAN (2018), THE WITCHER 3 (2015)), THE LAST GUARDIAN (2016), TELLTALE'S THE WALKING DEAD (2012), MASS EFFECT 3 (2012), LIFE IS STRANGE (2015), SPEC OPS: THE LINE (2012) AND A WAY OUT (2018) AHEAD. . . . . . There's a survey that one can do after finishing Detroit: Become Human that asks, amongst a number of other questions relating to technology and ethics, whether any scene in the game "resonated" with the player. After answering truthfully by selecting "no" I saw that just over 90% of the total player-base at that point had agreed with me. Now, of course, as with any online poll there's potential for false answers and 'brigading' there but I think that, seeing as you have to finish the game to participate in it, it's a lot more legitimate than your average gaming user review page. This poll had me thinking about my experience with the game, along with many like it I've played over the years, and how few of them legitimately resonated with me in a way many other more linear games have managed to do. I will never forget how I felt upon finishing linear, 'one-ending' games like The Last Guardian, MGS3 or Red Dead Redemption. The same is true for the endings of choice-driven narratives I've played such as Detroit, Batman: The Enemy Within and The Witcher 3; however, whilst with the linear games I mentioned I felt sadness, longing and other such powerful emotions, with the others the overwhelming emotion I felt was just apathy. I personally see this as an inherent flaw in the 'genre' of highly choice-driven narratives of all kinds, especially those that go for a "different endings to the same story" approach instead of the "different endings to different stories" approach of many RPGs (see Fallout: New Vegas or Skyrim). I'll be outlining a few reasons why I think this before illustrating how it can possibly be overcom. Final warning, as this is generally about endings to stories there is a good chance all games I mentioned above will be spoiled so don't read on if you haven't played them yet and care about how they end. Reason 1: Choice-Driven Stories have a tendency to create a 'hierarchy' of endings between 'bad' endings and 'good' endings. There are countless examples of 'bad' and 'good' endings in game, where the former is used as a punishment for failing in some way (either through making unwise decisions or, in cases like Pikmin, just fucking up really badly) whilst the latter is used as a reward for the player 'achieving' some certain goal. In a case like Detroit's, it's abundantly clear that, in terms of narrative satisfaction, the game has put its 4 main 'types' of ending into a clear heirarchy. You have androids winning peacefully at the top, androids winning violently and androids losing peacefully in the middle before the 'worst' ending where the androids lose the war and the main characters die. The same happens in The Witcher 3, where Ciri becoming a Witcher is the clear 'good' ending and Ciri dying before Geralt commits suicide the clear 'bad' ending. Now, that's not a problem in and of itself, but I believe that the knowledge that there is a bad ending where satisfaction with the time you've put into the game is not guaranteed quite heavily influences both the player and the game designer's choices. The decision to make these hierarchical endings means that the entire story has to be designed around two wholly distinctive types of narrative; tragedy and 'comedy' (for lack of a better term, I don't know if there's a word for just "happy stories"). This, through my experience, limits the potential for characters to undergo truly satisfactory arcs as players will always aim for that 'good' ending where literally everyone lives happily ever after and nobody experiences that much hardship. In a story like Detroit: Become Human there is no room for heroic sacrifices or other such tragedic elements for anyone but a few side characters as that would "reward" the player for an action that, by the virtue of common game design, is seen as 'bad' in the grand scheme of things. Imagine if, for example, Obi-Wan's death in A New Hope was something that could have been avoided "if the player had just chosen the right thing/done those QTEs," the current path where he dies and become a martyr to Luke's development as a character would make the audience feel cheated instead of satisfied. Reason 2: Game Making is Expensive and Time Consuming So this is probably the most subjective point out of three in terms of how it affects me, but it's also the most easy to evidence by sheer fact of life. The truth is that, as the number of choices and branching paths in a game increases, the potential for budgetary and time constraints to rear their ugly heads becomes exponentially more likely. Time and time again I've found that the endings to highly choice-driven stories end up falling into a few main categories (that can be combined), they use a slideshow of cheap-to-produce art, they create a single, very short cutscene that does nothing but explain "this is the end, gg" or they focus heavily on one ending whilst ignoring the others. Good examples of this include Mass Effect 3, where massive universe-changing decisions were reduced to choosing your favorite colour (and, later, to a slideshow) and Life is Strange, where the 'sacrifice Chloe1' ending has multiple scenes, an original song and plenty of unique assets whilst the 'sacrifice Arcadia Bay' ending recycles both a map and song the game used before. What this essentially leads to are endings and storylines that simply can't have the same attention in both writing and production values that one may find in an ending to a linear game such as Uncharted or The Last Guardian. Even the most high-budget recent example of this, Detroit: Become Human, falls into the same trap, albeit in a less obvious way. In my ending one character died with no dialogue or any emotional weight whilst the other two had happy endings that could have easily been replaced with a "You won!" screen. The same goes for many of the other branching paths in the games, because there are so many they can rarely have the same kind of attention to detail seen in other, more linear games. This often leads to stories with emotional satisfaction tied directly to just how many branches there are, and the issue is only made worse by the fact that those branching paths can only be seen by replaying the game (or chapter) with most of the surprises and characters already spoiled for you. Reason 3: Choice-Driven Stories Can't Definitively 'Say' Anything Now this is, in my opinion, the biggest issue with choice-driven stories is that they pretty much remove the artist's ability to say something with their art. They can create questions, but they can never answer them nor can they really elaborate on them. This is because, in the genre, those answers are handed over directly to the player. In Detroit: Become Human, the question is the one asked in many other stories before of whether Androids can truly "become human". The answers, however, aren't related to that; because the game needs branching paths it must place its answers in a very basic "who wins, Androids or Humans?" dichotomy. This is evidenced on the back of the box where the story isn't based on the fundamental philosophical question of Androids, but literally "how far will you go to be free?". This also ties in with my first point on how 'hierarchical' choice-driven narratives tend to be; because the game must give 'happy' endings to the player unless they truly fuck up both choices must be equal. This, then, brings me to my final issue with choice-driven narratives, how they cannot make a statement about anything truly controversial as they are intrinsically linked to the player's choices. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Spec Ops: The Line and, more specifically, its White Phosphorous scene. The scene is one of the most powerful in gaming, and is a direct critique of both American Imperialism and war fetishism in video games; it was, however, criticised quite heavily for how it didn't give the player a choice in the matter. I would argue, though, that if the player had been given a choice then the scene, if done as a 'punishment' for the player, would have gone from a harrowing statement to a mere 'bad ending' to the scene. This, again, happens in Detroit. Because it is tied so heavily to player choice the game is not able to make a definitive statement on whether pacifism or violence is the way forward; both sides must be equal and the failure of both choices must be down to player failure instead of moral failure. I'd also like to bring up a point I've been thinking about for a while now, and that is how a lot of these choice-driven games deliberately shy away from real-world controversial issues. Imagine, for instance, if Detroit was not about an ethnically diverse group of robots but about American slavery in the 1800s, it would be farcical and, quite frankly, offensive. It would essentially state that slavery would have ended if only African Americans, in this case being the player, "tried hard enough" or "made the right decisions". It would reduce the racism and dehumanization throughout America at the time into not a systematic, irrational issue but a 'temporary lapse in judgement' as it's equivalent is shown to be in Detroit's 'good' endings. Since a tragic ending to a choice-driven narrative is considered 'punishment' there is no room to make a definitive, tasteful statement on the tragedy of the era. It's no coincidence, in my opinion, that most choice-driven narratives either take place in a fantasy/sci-fi universe or focus their points on relatively safe meta-commentary on games. However, Not All is Bad So if you've read this far you probably think that I believe choice-driven narratives to be a completely lost cause when it comes to creating a compelling narrative. However, this is not the case. The Walking Dead, for example, had one of the most memorable endings in recent memory; it did, however, do so by limiting the actual choices that could be made. What this says to me is that choice-driven narratives can be compelling if they still keep at least some level of inevitability, whether that be the happy ending or a tragic one. Another example of a compelling choice-driven narrative is, in fact, not really choice-driven. A Way Out ends with the two player characters, both being played by seperate people, being forced to fight each other to the death due to a fundamental and, most importantly, inevitable clash between the two characters. The ending is highly different based on the outcome of the fight yet both endings are equally compelling as they are naturally created through player ability instead of simply whether they can choose the right things/get the QTEs right. If there was a way to save both characters the issues of heirarchical endings would be bought back, and the 'failure' endings wouldn't be nearly as tragic as they were not inevitable. What both of these examples show, to me, is that inevitability is, at least in some way, key to a compelling narrative. Choice-driven narratives without at least some form of inevitability have little ability to make truly definitive statements on either character or theme as they are tied to the hierarchy of 'good endings' and 'bad endings' which, generally, lead to very basic conclusions. Whilst games such as Detroit: Become Human can be impressive in just how many permutations of the same story they can show, they bring up the age-old issue of quantity over quality. I personally feel that, in most choice-driven stories out today, the latter is rarely achieved. If you've got this far, thank you a lot for reading! I know this was long but I felt that, to make my point, I couldn't just state my opinion as if it were fact with no other evidence. If you agree or disagree please try to back up your opinion with good evidence. Again, thanks for reading! [link] [comments]  |
| Have there been any new good Geo-location games like Pokemon Go? Posted: 28 May 2018 02:41 PM PDT So my area is finally experiencing early summer and I've been outside more and I remembered how much fun Pokemon Go was in it's prime and when Raids were first introduced and that made me want to play another Geo-location game. A while ago it seemed like Go was going to inspire developers to create a new Genre but it's been kinda quiet for 2 years. Now obviously nothing huge is out but I'm wondering if there were any good geo-location games out now that I can try out? I know about Go's predecessor Ingress but I'm wondering if there's anything else. [link] [comments]  |
| Anyone else feel like AAA games are on a downward spiral? Posted: 28 May 2018 01:57 PM PDT Every year I lose more faith in AAA gaming companies, but mostly just EA, Activision, and Konami. They all used to make great games, but now their once beloved franchises now seem like cheap, soulless cashgrabs to make as much money as possible while doing the smallest amount of work. I feel like so many games have gone down this path, (Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Battlefront, EA's sports games, and more). It is more than that though, these companies put their developers through horrible time constraints, and make their development teams go through hell to push out another yearly release. If i'm wrong, then please tell me because I am genuinely concerned about the state of AAA games. [link] [comments]  |
| HELP/ADVICE | Which point of view is the best for that kind of game? Posted: 28 May 2018 05:44 AM PDT Hello all, I have started making a game and after a lot of mechanics and such, I came to a point where I need to pick the appropriate point of view for my game to have (in order to make the next mechanics suit the perspective). I am making a game where you control a person in hell and he has to continue walking through randomized levels with different effects to get to his goal. I am not sure about the viewing point of the game as first-person is more for shooters and the game isn't really combat oriented. I also thought maybe third-person but (as it is one of my inspirations) it might feel a little too much like a souls game in terms of gameplay (dodging, attacking with melee, and adventuring and such). I also though a fixed point for the camera, in a 45 degrees angle from the player (somewhere in the ceiling) (static camera where you can see the player moving from an angle). What view is the best for my game? Do you have other ideas for the perspective I could use (maybe something I didn't think of)? Thanks in advance to all commenters, Ethan EDIT: The player would be able to walk, run, dodge, and attack in 3D many demons and stuff, while also being able to explore the different items in the rooms [link] [comments]  |
| Ubisoft teasing surprises at E3. What do you think they could be? Posted: 28 May 2018 05:38 AM PDT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ1-nN1mQ48 The video confirms a few of the games Ubisoft will show during E3 2018. At the end of the video, there's a short tease for "a few surprises" for their show. The only "surprise" announcement I can see coming is a new Splinter Cell game. There are already a lot of rumors around it. What other "surprises" can Ubisoft have? A new Nintendo game like Mario+Rabbits? AC 2019 (not much of a surprise)? Genuinely curious. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 May 2018 12:35 AM PDT Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde - Starts @ 00:15 Mins https://www.twitch.tv/videos/265603371 These "games" are bad. You've been warned... [link] [comments]  |
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