True Gaming What Mass Effect 1 Did Right |
- What Mass Effect 1 Did Right
- Discussion of Old Gems and Absurdly Good Niche Things
- What is your Gjallarhorn Moment?
- How can developers make a balance between making the game challenging without making it punishing?
- What makes game areas memorable? Why do so many 90s games stick in my head?
| Posted: 18 Aug 2018 04:09 AM PDT In terms of shooting mechanics and visuals the 2nd and 3rd ME installments were obviously better, but they never captured the atmosphere ME1 had. ME1 let you know it didn't care about your immediate gratification. If you wanted to get somewhere on a planet or on the citadel you had to learn its layout, you have to adapt to the world, not the other way around. You were a small part of something bigger and no one cared enough to make things convenient for you. You have to hassle with people endlessly just to get anywhere because you're a nuisance to them. Even though ME1 wasn't a a huge open world sand box by any means, it still felt big, bigger than games like Skyrim and Just Cause just because of the way it presented itself. In ME2 and ME3 you were a big hero and everyone loved you. Even though ME2 especially had lots of planets to visits it still felt small. Everything was just handed to you: the objectives were linear and straightforwards and the "boring" parts of the hub worlds were taken out, this is pretty obvious on planets like Omega where basically half the planet or more is a nightclub. Honestly I thought the sheer amount of emptiness in ME1 took away from the pacing, but it was still fine. ME2 and ME3 went way too far in stripping ME1's richness. [link] [comments]  |
| Discussion of Old Gems and Absurdly Good Niche Things Posted: 18 Aug 2018 12:32 PM PDT Hi there! I hope your day is going well. So, anyone here into Armored Core, maybe Ogre Battle, or just a lover of all manner of games that never ever got to see the light of day? I know I sure am. Quite frankly, a while ago it occurred to me that almost every dang thing I loved was either a complete nonstarter, or got screwed over by some bizarre circumstances out of anyone's control. A good example: The aforementioned Ogre Battle. This is a series that defined a lot of the norms of the SRPG genre, one that eventually gave birth to the awesomeness that was Final Fantasy Tactics. However, due to a translation being delayed, FFT actually more or less killed the series in the west. In fact, it's been assumed to be dead here by the JP folks so much that they never even let us have the digital re-releases. Why? Well, FFT hit the west and blew peoples' minds. However, they didn't know that it was actually originally supposed to be the sequel to Tactics Ogre, LUCT, or Wheel of Fate, depending on the region. It's basically like if You mashed Game of Thrones and FFT into one, and made it surprisingly believable. Point being, it was a dang masterpiece, and the suits saw this. So, they told him to take the sequel that was planned (Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre are different sides of the same series, by the way), and turn it into a FF game. Thing is, the SNES version of that game never made it to the west, and fans of the original March of the Black Queen wanted to see more of that universe. Well....the translation got delayed, it came out after FFT, and people assumed it was a knock off, killing it's chances of getting a fair shot (It actually had a ton more in it than FFT, funnily enough). Alright, but then they remade it on the PSP, surely this time it got it's due, right? Well....kinda. It sold decently, but many fans ended up dropping it before the end because of a strange decision from the higher ups to demand that some balance changes needed to be made exactly like in FF11. Bear in mind a lot of these made NO sense whatsoever, like the chance for crafting to fail obnoxiously often for required and tedious things...when there's a system to save anywhere. The weapons were weirdly balanced, and there was just way too much MMO-esque meta gaming when it game to end game. Most people dropped it way before end game, and that was just tragic, since the setting, writing, and presentation were top friggin notch. Well, thankfully an amazing modder stepped in, and created a mod called One Vision, which fixed the ever-loving christ out of that game, into what is now easily one of the best SRPG experiences out there, and it's not even at 1.0 yet. Dude's a legend. Preposterously niche enough for ya? You'd think a 20 year long series by the same people, and using the same mechanics to some degree of Dark Souls would have been given a shot here. Well, they did...kind of. Many people played the PS1 game, many played 2, and For Answer. Most people never played the 11 other games in the series. Well, a number of reasons. For one, the only ones that sold are the one they actually bothered to advertise. Despite being an absurdly long series, even some of the best entries in the series were lucky to even get commercials. For another, the fans had a bad habit of doing exactly what Dark Souls fans do. They would take the hardest game of the series, show it to their friends, and say "look how hardcore I am", instead of giving one of the better starting points, and showing off all the cool and crazy mechanics in play here. We're talking about a series about giant, fully customizeable war mechs that often fight moving robotic cities, massive AI armies, and even has a sense of humor, but never sold worth a crap. Point being, if You like discussing this absurdly specific stuff, I would like to let You know that I've been working on a site for all of those high quality, but low sales situations out there, and am always looking for more feedback. So, if this sounds like Your kind of thing, drop on by! Sincerely, Coffee Potato, loving purveyor of the digital junkyard [link] [comments]  |
| What is your Gjallarhorn Moment? Posted: 18 Aug 2018 08:34 AM PDT Hello. I wrote this earlier for PC Invasion. It's about Destiny players celebrating Gjallarhorn Day. Say what you will about the game, and I know folks have their own opinions or heard stuff all over the internet about it... that's neither here nor there. The idea is simply celebrating something momentous or surprising in the games that we play. In the case of Gjallarhorn Day, it was the moment when an NPC (Xur) sold a weapon once again. A weapon that was so spectacularly amazing that it changed the landscape of the game's PvE content. There are probably some of you who've seen players who had genuine reactions of shock and surprise (and hyperventilation) when they had a Gjallarhorn drop in the wild, or when Xur sold it again. ——— What I'd like to know is: What is your Gjallarhorn Moment? By this, whether we wanted it or not... ahem... whether you played Destiny or not, was there a particular moment in any game when you finally obtained an item — a weapon, an armor, an artifact — something you always wanted with like perfect rolls and all that. A moment that you have waited a long time for, and seeing it come to fruition. What was that moment? Item? Situation? Thanks for joining the discussion. [link] [comments]  |
| How can developers make a balance between making the game challenging without making it punishing? Posted: 18 Aug 2018 04:27 AM PDT This video that challenging games provokes players to want to try again and play more while punishing games want players to quit their games because it is too unfair and too enraging to even be able to finish the first few levels of the games in the first place. And this is why video games often add these additional challenges to make the games feel more rewarding while also extend the play length, while more punishing games often do the same but with more stress-provoking outcomes. So how can developers make a balance between making the game challenging like adding a long learning curve that requires practice, research (like looking through wikis or youtube videos) and lots of skill and maybe even luck, without making the game too challenging to the point that it will be punishing like having luck in the favour of the player or making the AI or NPCs way stronger than the player or having more advantages? This is something that I often questioned a lot because many games are known for their punishing gameplay which make you very tempting to rage quit but at the same time, they make you want to play more and challenge yourself like Dark Souls or XCOM or FTL or the Civilisation games or any games made by Paradox Interactive. These games also have a high learning curve and require tons of practice, working through adversity and stress and making lots of mistakes, but the punishing factors that are not in your favour are often way better than you and more advantagous to the point that it feels like you are either lucky that you manage to win or persist, or makes you feel that you really worked hard to progress just a little further and definetely feel like you earned it [link] [comments]  |
| What makes game areas memorable? Why do so many 90s games stick in my head? Posted: 18 Aug 2018 10:01 AM PDT This thought hits me sometimes. I realize that I can close my eyes and play through the entirety of MGS 1 in my head. I feel like I know almost every crevice of that game, where the items are, what story beats happen there, without having played in years. But I played MGS4 much more recently, and I can't "pick out" a single distinct area from it (except Act 4). Same with Mario 64 and OoT, I know that I know every inch of those games back to front, but the most recent version I've played (I don't have a Switch), Galaxy 1 and 2, and Skyward Sword, just don't "stick" in my head. I don't know if I could pick out the Gusty Gardens world more than the Bumblebee world, but I could write a doctoral thesis on the difference between Cool Cool Mountain and Snowman's Land. It's something intangible, but it feels to me like game areas in that time period just had something special to them. Like take this painting of an area from Chrono Trigger. Everyone I know who's played Chrono Trigger knows that area, where you're climbing up on the right side of the screen and see the chest on the left across the river. Hell, it's famous enough that someone decided to make that painting. Why does something like that just stick with us, and it seems it's stopped happening? The easy answer is that it's just nostalgia. We were all young in the 90's and played the games to death. Now we're older and we can't get into games like we used to. So things like iconic level design don't stick with us like they used to. That may be partially true. Back in the day, a sprite that came on screen that was bigger than a sprite was supposed to be, or did something that a sprite shouldn't do, was enough to stick with you or scare you. So does that mean games still have this quality and kids playing them today will have the same iconic areas and scenes? Maybe I seem grumpy but I just can't imagine that in 20 years a someone will paint a watercolor like that Chrono Trigger image about an iconic level in Skylanders or LEGO Star Wars or something. There seems to be a je ne sais quoi about level design from that time period that sticks with me and people like us on this subreddit that eludes me. What do you guys think? [link] [comments]  |
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