But horror isn’t CoD. I will never be that big. But Konami thinks it can be, and will either sacrifice the quality of the games in order to appeal to a wider audience, or keep the games as scary as they are, and fail to meet their own unrealistic expectations.
The scariness of the games is an additional complication that AAA publishers don’t seem to get.
A bad Call of Duty still lets you click heads and scream slurs in a match lobby.
But make a horror game that isn’t scary? Or even the wrong amount, or type of scary? Complete failure.
If you target hardcore horror fans, your game has to be good enough to scare them, and you’ll never be able to sell to everyone. And if you can’t scare the hardcore fans, you need to be interesting enough for the casual fans to buy in. Getting both is near impossible, which is why indies do so well in the genre. It’s REALLY hard to make horror for everyone. Usually, a horror game interests only a subset of gamers.
And when you have a franchise, every new game needs to figure out how to scare people who have played the previous games. Or else interest them in other ways.
Horror is really easy to overplay. If your game is too long, the scares stop working because the player gets used to them. If sequels just do the same thing as the last game, entire games can stop being effective. And once you start trying to reinvent things every game, they can end up losing their identity (see RE5 and 6).
Doing this every 12 months? Just no.
Resident Evil is an excellent example. Capcom has tried and failed to increase release frequency, but titles that actually sell are about two or three years apart no matter what they seem to do. And that is WITH their new formula of using two completely different styles to reduce the sameness of the titles.
If Konami wants to release more games, they should tap their other IPs, not oversaturate the already crowded horror genre even more.
I feel like another option for horror is to spam the effort. Literally have 5 to 10 studios all making horror games, with a fraction of the budget. One of the big successes in horror is that some of the best ones were made with large restrictions on technology, effects, budget, etc. If you search the “Survival horror” tag on Steam, there’s a pretty large wash of games succeeding in the space now.
You could also note how many “horror-focused” Resident Evil games go through some form of reset where you lose your buildup of equipment, or change pace. They recognize that the genre isn’t well-suited for a constant escalation of power until you fight god, the way JRPGs do. Thus, people who enjoy those games are more likely to munch through them like doritos. Many streamers even have nights where they will buy some half-dozen of the games on Steam and just keep going through them.
i just went and did the tutorial, which i avoid like the plague due to being drained by it.
Yup. God, Starbound has so much missed potential by focusing so heavily on a bad story. It’d be one thing if it were there in the background, but you’re basically forced to play through it every single time. The dungeons are extremely repetitive (this would have been a great chance for some procedural generation), the boss fights are way too easy, and the whole portion of the game where you just search for relics to scan isn’t fun or interesting at all. Not a great design decision for a sandbox game that should otherwise have a ton of replayability.
I think the story is a point where people unfairly criticize the game, personally. After the tutorial dungeon you don’t have to engage with it whatsoever.
The parts where you have to search for relics between each dungeon are meant to encourage exploration and remove the pressure of the story. It’s the game saying “now go do whatever and have fun!” and you make progress toward the story just by playing normally, as you come across settlements belonging to the particular species you need to scan.
If your goal is to speedrun the story and drop the game, then yeah those parts are annoying, but if you want a sandbox game where you are free to do anything you want, then I don’t really understand why people complain so much about those parts of the main story.
Honestly that’s a fair point. It’s been a long while since I’ve played Starbound, and even longer since I played it vanilla. Forced is definitely not the word I should have used, but I do remember feeling constantly pushed towards completing the story because I enjoy fighting bosses. I also remember genuinely hating engaging with it any time I did. Nothing like searching for an hour for floran relics only to find a planet with two less than I needed. The game desperately needs a way to track down a specific species’ settlement. It just wasn’t fun in the slightest, and I would have preferred no story over what the game got. Boss fights are fun (even if I think most of Starbound’s are too easy), and it sucks that you’re forced to progress through the exact same lame and repetitive repeat of the story between each boss.
The tutorial dungeon is the worst though. A true pinnacle of terrible sandbox game design. It ain’t short, it’s the exact same dungeon every single time with the same enemies and loot, and it’s strictly required to make any progress whatsoever.
No disagreement with me there, I think the linear dungeons were a poor choice and the game would benefit from a way to track settlements by species.
Personally I dislike boss fights in these sorts of games (the main reason I don’t like Terraria anymore is the focus on bosses, and everything you do is just to prep for the next boss), so that’s likely a big part of why the story doesn’t bother me since I just mostly ignore it or do it passively. But for someone who enjoys the bosses and seeks them out, I can see why it’s more frustrating.
But I completely agree that the tutorial dungeon is the worst. I hate doing it whenever I play vanilla to introduce a friend to the game, and the “skip intro” option on character creation really should skip right to after the dungeon. Or alternatively it could have been designed to be more fun or interesting on repeat playthroughs
The relics are probably the furthest i’ve ever gotten in the story. I like the settlement portion, but when i get to the story it’s just a slog. If there’s something I absolutely need from it, i just use console commands to skip as much as possible. It’s really the weak point in the game
Man those games are great. I recently-ish tried out one of the decompiled versions of the original after the source code leaked. It's still a lot of fun
What you describe is a huge part of vehicle racing in general. Getting into a flow state is fast. If you can stress an opponent out enough by threatening to overtake or even just keeping up, you can very often push them to start taking bigger risks and to drop out of that flow state
Oh yeah VR racing is awesome. If you can afford one, I highly recommend getting a steering wheel with haptic feedback. They have motors in the wheels that will make it pull back to center to straighten out, just like a real car does, as well as interface with a lot of the games directly so that the wheel will shake a bit as you are hitting bumps in the road. I have legitimately never been as immersed in VR as I have been with one of these wheels.
The Logitech G920 is the one I have, looks like it’s on a good sale right now on Amazon too.
I’ve been thinking of getting one! I have a force feedback airbus flight stick and it vibrates on take off or when I deploy flaps for approach and landing. Very very cool
I pre-order games I know I’d buy on launch. Some titles I just know I’ll play, regardless of reviews - E.g. Sequels to games I love like the Witcher 3 or any of the Dying Light games.
I’ll also do Early Access if I want to play the game early and am okay with jank, E.g. Hades 2, Windblown.
I actually liked Dying Light a lot more before the multiplayer update rebalanced everything. God damn single player game is now balanced for two people, even when you’re solo.
It's a purely narrative game, the original version (this is now a remake of a remake in a new engine) was made in RPG Maker but without any RPG elements. Walk around, talk to NPCs, watch the story unfold.
The one big thing it has in common with Undertale is that the less you know going in, the better. If the art style and vibe is enough to get your attention, go ahead and give it a shot, go in blind.
Enshrouded - it’s an action RPG/survival crafter/base builder that’s quite addictive. I’m surprised that it’s not more well known, because it’s incredibly fun. :)
Even though it’s early release, there is a TON of content already. It’s well worth buying now. I’ve got 600+ hours into the game (a lot of which was building sweet bases and had nothing to do with the quests, but yeah…), myself.
Hey, this one looks like it might be up my alley. I typically play more action based games, but I like to try and branch out now and then too. Thanks for the write up!
Never. I hate the preorder exclusive bonuses; it’s anti-consumer bullshit, especially in an age where every game is available as a digital download, even the physical copies usually require downloads. Publishers are enticing customers to pay while hype is high, before the product is actually available, before quality has been proven and before reviews are published.
I hate gift cards for the same reason, you’re giving money to corporations before they’ve provided anything to you.
Hold on to your money, wait for reviews, then pay them for the finished product if you still want it.
I also think the rising launch prices of AAA games is bullshit, especially for singleplayer games. I’ll usually wait for a decent discount.
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