True Gaming More often than not, I find myself disliking Silent Protagonists in Story-Driven games. |
- More often than not, I find myself disliking Silent Protagonists in Story-Driven games.
- Portraying frustration in games
- Short stories, short films, "short games"?
- Let’s try this again: what are some of your favorite non-combat mechanics and why? What feeling do they capture/experience do they simulate that you didn’t expect from a video game?
- Let’s talk about Skyrim
- Luck and Failstates
- do you think smash bros. is a competetive fighting game?
- Is the industry regressing in terms of innovation?
| More often than not, I find myself disliking Silent Protagonists in Story-Driven games. Posted: 03 Sep 2018 08:05 AM PDT While of course games like Super Mario are not about the story, at all. I personally think that games where the story is a big deal (Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, GTA 3, Bioshock) usually lose something when the protagonist is just silent. And by silent I don't mean not having voice lines recorded, many CRPGs allow you to choose what the character is saying, even if there is no audio. * Possibly GTA 3 is the game that this bothers me the most, there is something totally lost when you're in a GTA game and all you are doing in cutscene is listening and nodding. And this is one of the reasons why I think GTA Vice City was so impactful and important and is usually way more remembered than GTA 3. Games like Zelda where much of the story is almost told as "legends" and the sequence of facts or opinions/personality of the protagonist doesn't really matter are not something that bother me very much, but a game like Chrono Trigger where the World around you is upside-down and you're thrown in very complicated situations, being accused of things or having to deal with party members, the protagonist being silent is something that gets to me. Half-Life is somewhat of an weird exception, since the first one does it's best to always remind you that you're in a videogame (the same guard everywhere) it wasn't something that bothered me at all, that and the fact that you're mostly in situations where there is nothing much to say other than "don't go there!". On Half-Life 2, it sort of bothered me a little more, as I felt speaking about some stuff to the characters was a important, but I think it gave us the feeling of being just a puppet around this world and it sort of matched the storyline. But if I had to choose between "all games now have silent protagonists" vs "no game now can have a silent protagonist" I would choose the second. I would of course find very weird to see Link speaking, but I think there is much more to be lost if Tommy Vercetti never said a world. One thing that I personally feel is that silent-protagonists usually have the opposite effect intended: I don't feel more immersed in the story when my character doesn't speaks, I feel much more like a 'distanced observer' just watching the events of this world. But what about you? Did I miss some game where the protagonist being Silent is a big plus? And how do you feel about silent protagonists in story-driven games? edit: * For clarification purposes, by CRPGs I mean games like Fallout 1, 2, 3 and others alike [link] [comments]  |
| Portraying frustration in games Posted: 03 Sep 2018 05:46 AM PDT Sometimes, a game feels the need to let you experience the frustration that your character feels. The idea being that when your character overcomes whatever event was frustrating you, the player will experience a sense of pride and accomplishment. I contend that this does not work. Here are 2 examples. Spoilers for Undertale and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Undertale Near the start of Undertale, after the brilliant introduction with Flowey, you meet Toriel. Toriel is overprotective and doesn't want you to get hurt, so she makes you walk though some ruins while disabling any puzzles. You spend ages walking and doing nothing. At one point, Toriel literally holds your hand and walks over a spike puzzle while you can do nothing. Presumably, the idea here is to show that your character is getting frustrated by being constrained. Then when you have to fight Toriel, you can feel good about the freedom you have 'earned'. In practice though, when my wife was playing, she actually said "I don't like this game, can we play something else?" Luckily, I had been spoiled on the internet, so I told her to keep going. Undertale is now one of her most liked games. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance Throughout the plot of FFTA, the influence of the judges are ever present. In gameplay, one way they affect the world is through the Law system. Each ingame day, the Law changes to determine which moves and abilities are banned in battle. You have to play with this system for many hours, constantly checking the law to see if you have any conflicting abilities and if you need to change classes or even party members. Then,about halfway through the game, you meet someone who can create anti-law cards. Allowing you to nullify certain laws. The game keeps telling you that this is a great accomplishment. In practice though, many people got frustrated by the law system and put the game down. I kept going though because I liked other aspects of the game. In both of these it didn't matter that the character would eventually overcome the frustration because we can always take the meta decision to stop playing the game. Are there examples backing this up or examples where you (the player) are made to feel the frustration of the character without making you want to put down the game? [link] [comments]  |
| Short stories, short films, "short games"? Posted: 03 Sep 2018 07:43 AM PDT Most of our single player games are hour-long, coherent experiences usually bound to one story. The short ones, mostly indie games, stand on their own and are often seen as experiments. For example, Portal 1 was about 3 hours long, but as it got popular Valve apparently thought they could now publish "the real deal" and made a Portal game of average length. I wonder why no one deviates from that. Short stories and short films have been around since forever, but explicitly short games are usually niche and lack a larger creative context. I could very well imagine an "anthology" that costs as much as one regular game, but contains around 6 shorter games with an overarching theme, or set in one universe. Maybe even made by different studios. Wouldn't that be interesting? What's so different about the video game medium that we rarely do something like that? Only examples I could think of are story-DLCs (which are bound to a normal-length game, though) and Fan-Mission compilations like they are done for Half-Life 2. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Sep 2018 01:28 PM PDT Aside from the obvious non-combat genre alternatives (puzzlers, sports games, music games, walking sims, text adventures, point-and-click, construction and management sims, etc.), what games have you played with mechanics/systems that felt innovative and impactful that didn't involve any combat, and why do you think they were successful? Papers Please, Her Story, and Everything stand out to me as games that defy obvious genre classifications and mechanics tropes. I can't think of any other game analogous to the experience of Papers Please; Her Story takes the text adventure genre into completely uncharted territory, contextualizing all of your input as search queries in a database; and Everything's closest counterpart Katamari Damacy (and its army of clones) is worlds apart from the philosophical intent of the former. Excited to hear your favorites and why they resonate with you! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Sep 2018 02:13 PM PDT The game was pretty amazing when it released, I'll give it that. While buggy, it was a huge open world fantasy rpg experience, and was fun at first. But the remaster is... the exact same game with a multitude of bugs still. The only improvement is graphics and on the newer generation of consoles, they could have been so much better. In the year 2018, Skyrim is not a good game. It's got a shit combat system, many many bugs, and very repetitive missions. Yet I still hear people saying they will buy the remaster on the newest console it's released on because "the game is so good". I don't get it. Does anyone else agree with me? Or am I in the minority? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Sep 2018 09:03 AM PDT I am currently in the middle of a playthrough of Persona 5, and I'll say off the bat that I absolutely adore the game. It has an amount of strategy that I can appreciate, while keeping battles fast and fluid and providing an interesting story to keep me going. But it's those battles that sometimes throw a wrench in my play, and it's what I want to talk about here. If you haven't played Persona 5, there are 2 things you need to know.
The issue immediately becomes apparent. You're playing through a long stretch of game, far away from any recent save point, and you find an enemy that has one of these instant death attacks. Many of these enemies have no weaknesses, and have just enough health to withstand your attacks long enough to get one of their own off, and that means that in any of these battles there is a chance that you will instantly fail with no way for you to mitigate it. Now this isn't the only game with instant death attacks. Pokemon also has a small set of moves with a low chance to instantly KO the opposition, but the difference is easy to see. In Pokemon, no one member of your collection can cause an instant blackout. You need all of your pokemon to be hit by these moves to lose, and the chance of that happening is so astronomically low that it basically will not ever happen. There are some action games where enemies have attacks that if not dodged properly, immediately kill you and send you back to the start. However, in all those games you have a chance to at least dodge, block, or simply stay out of their way. So this makes me question why these spells are in Persona at all. I can understand wanting to implement an element of stress and danger, and it certainly provides that. Whenever I see one of those enemies that has one of those spells I immediately panic, and the stress does add a quality. However, the fun of that stress does not equal the frustration of having to go all the way back to the previous save through no fault of my own. Why could these attacks not simply have lowered your health to 1, keeping you alive but making death imminent? Or why make the player character the only one to trigger a fail state, even if you have a dozen ways of reviving them? So what are your guys thoughts? Does this kind of luck have any place in video games? Does the element of danger outweigh the frustration of failure simply through chance? [link] [comments]  |
| do you think smash bros. is a competetive fighting game? Posted: 03 Sep 2018 07:02 AM PDT so i've been reading various comments/posts (mostly from /r/Kappa anyways) and there's a huge debate if smash should be in EVO or not if smite can be a MOBA , shouldn't smash be a fighting game? my argument is that it is made competetive by the community by making special rules what's your argument/opinion? [link] [comments]  |
| Is the industry regressing in terms of innovation? Posted: 02 Sep 2018 09:09 PM PDT Gaming in the 2000s is a treat (Despite I was born in the year 2000). Fun and finicky games, full price, stories are not told in unstoppable cutscenes, gameplay is solid and intuitive. Fast forward 18 years later, all the games are striving for the same old shooter mechanics (Cover, insta-kill melee attacks, brown and yellow graphics) or some Naughty Dog style mature walking simulator like God of War (Unskippable walking sequence, walking, and more walking. Oh and tacked on gameplay mechanics that don't fit in) Gone are the days of full priced, one time pay games, and replaced by online only, toxicity fueled multiplayer shooter, or full priced AAA, big budget, Sony walking simulator that's all about style and no substance that always centers around a father figure that doesn't innovate other than "save the child". I mean, is this how we should strive for? [link] [comments]  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from For those who like talking about games as much as playing them.. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
Post a Comment