Fast travel remains a staple mechanic because game devs:
Often can’t figure out a way to make travel itself into a gameplay mechanic or experience that is varied and interesting.
Keep designing checklists of things for the player to do, with games built around them, as opposed to inverse of that… which trains players to just be checklist checker offers.
There’s no point to having an open world if it is not engaging or interesting, so… when your open world lacks depth, you end up in a nonsense situation where you have a poorly designed feature, with essentially a ‘skip’ mechanic for said feature.
… Why bother with the feature, at that point?
Hell, even the Rockstar games would give you interesting dialogue, in transit… not really gameplay per se, but it is generally engaging, can help with action intensity pacing, and of course, give you the story.
There are so many ways you could gameify or at least make travel itself more interesting.
Do that, and fast travel becomes near totally pointless.
Realistic open worlds are generally boring, to most players.
Thats why almost no popular open world games have realistic distance scaling.
Skyrim, for example, is a teeny tiny place, compared to how large the lore describes it as, everything is scaled in a kind of exaggerated way, same with all GTA games, even RDR and 2, they’re not even close to being realistically scaled, they’re scaled based… basically on an estimate of a player’s average attention span.
You want realistically scaled?
Go play an ARMA game, and just go on a hike, over a close to one to one scale replication of an actual island or penninsula, for a real world entire day.
Yeah that shit’s boring as fuck to most people.
… But I did not at any point say that a good open world is a realistic world, or anything like that, but thats what you appear to have read, out of what I wrote.
Fascinating.
Anyway, what you should do to make an open world that doesnt suck, is make it interesting, in an actual game mechanical sense, not merely ‘pretty’.
Maybe as you travel, enemies of one kind or another have a chance of spawning nearby and cresting over a hill or emerging from a forest.
RDR2 does shit like this very well, oh I’m just gonna relax, trot along, enjoy the scenery… and … my throat has been ripped out by a pack of wolves, goddamnit.
Or you go for the Bethesda approach and have 500, one time discoverable locations with basically some kind of a mini dungeon or staged scenario you can wander into.
Or you can do the Kenshi approach, no real questlines, just simulate the entire world as a kind of sandbox that tens of thousands of other npcs live in, do their own thing in… with actually closer to a realistic sense of distsnce scaling… and just give the player save states and the ability to fastforward or pause time, by default… and maybe they bumble in to some particularly interesting people, or maybe its oops all beakthings, or maybe you’ve now been enslaved by either cannibals or the Holy Nation, while you were afk for your literal 12 mile hike across the map.
Or you could just make some kind of game where fast travelling requires the player to engage in something on the order of a hacking/lockpicking minigame, to… keep the wheels from falling off or something, I dunno.
Maybe vehicles are simulated in some kind of way that… if you’re reckless and innatentive, you’ll break em, and now you’re fucked, in the middle of nowhere. State of Decay 2 comes to mind, sort of.
Point is… there are many ways you can make travelling itself into an engaging, alternate form of the game itself, or a kind of minigame, or a way to experience some kind of story or plot development, or reward the player for picking up on contextual cues during transit, punish them for missing them…
Hell, make a minigame out of trying to pick a song to listen to that your npc companion doesn’t hate, throw in guitar hero style karaoke minigame, why the hell not? maybe it can boost or demerit your relationship with that npc, land you on different paths of a branching storyline.
… Travel doesnt need to be realistic.
It just needs to be more interesting, rewarding, engaging, than skipping it.
Ok serious comment: That’s a damn good review. And a surprisingly good quality device that’s a little ahead of its time.
I’m impressed that you reached out to devs, contrasted with other handhelds, and tried so many different games. That’s almost everything I’d want to know.
What kind of battery life does it get with various games? Sorry if I missed that. I expect ARM is a lot less power hungry than x86.
Thank you so much! It’s always a bit of a nervy experience when I’m sharing a review. Even more so when I linked it in their own Discord, because if anyone will rip through details and point out flaws…its gaming fans. So hearing this? SO kind of you!
I’m lucky that I manage to somehow convince all these people (the devs and other creators!) that they should in fact be friends with me, and that they’re all kind enough to listen to my requests. In fact, the PortMaster team are going to let me interview them soon, so that’s something to look forward to!
Battery depends on settings, like always. But one example was Nier: Automata with high settings across the board, for around 1:25 playing, it took just under 20% of battery. But that’s because I pushed the settings. Emulating PS2 it coasts, but best to limit to to say 2.5x upscale (obviously), unless you’re going for a full 4K in a monitor. And further down, the old systems will go for eons. Android native games gave me 7ish hours at the highest settings I could opt for? While running at 120FPS and not dropping a single frame.
Take this with salt, because I’m hopped up on codeine waiting for Tuesday when I can get tooth pain sorted!
To the best of my understanding, AMD/Nvidia/Intel each run their own forms of architecture (eg. AMDs RDNA) which are probably closest to RISC for simple instructions and SIMD/SIMT (single instruction, multiple data/threads) for more complex vector calculations.
Not gonna lie, the concept “pushing the enemy back without killing it and having infinite ammo” sounds pretty interesting to me, like an Vampire Survivors but the enemies never die, it would be pretty hard!
Reminds me of that one enemy (in form of a ghost) in Phasmophobia, a Deogen (if my memory serves me correctly). Unlike the rest of the ghosts which only know your location based on any noise you make, any interactions you make with certain objects, or if you are in its line of sight… This ghost ALWAYS knows where you are, except it is really slow.
I love/hate the idea of an enemy slowly making it’s way over to you from across the map, and you can’t see it, but it can see you. * shudders *
It would be pretty neat to have a game based solely around prolonging your inevitable demise, trying to survive for as long as possible, maybe with roguelike features such as rng and differing runs.
I love the deogen. I was just playing phasmophobia last night and encountered one or two of them. I love that it flips the game on its head. Quite literally every other ghost wants you to hide somewhere, usually in a tight spot like a locker or behind a cabinet so the ghost can never get line of sight on you. But for the deogen that’s the exact opposite of what you should be doing, and if you don’t know that or don’t know it’s a deogen before it hunts, you’re screwed. Nothing gets my heart pumping like hearing a ghost rapidly running towards my exact location like Usain Bolt as I realize what it is and desperately try to escape my hiding place before it traps me.
Fun thing about the deogen is that it’s the second fastest ghost in the entire game, and then it slows down to be the slowest ghost when it’s extremely close to you. So you can’t safely hide anywhere, no matter how far away from it you are. By the time it’s near you, the deogen becomes slow enough to out-walk, but if you manage to back yourself into a corner? Good luck.
However, I haven’t played the game in quite a while (despite it being one of my most played games) since imho the devs did a great job of royally fucking up the game. With the direction they took it, I just get burned out when playing it after such a short time nowadays.
Bear in mind this example is one of a long list of things I believe they got wrong: I initially thought the equipment overhaul was a good idea, except after having played for over 100hrs I don’t feel like grinding to get all my old equipment back again, especially after so little has been done to make the core gameplay more interesting.
Anyway, sorry, rant over, used to be one of my all time favourite games.
I was also a big fan of the gear overhaul initially, until I saw how it was actually implemented and really came to dislike it. I just don’t see who it’s here for. It screws over newer players who are stuck with really poor gear, making the already punishing learning curve the game has significantly worse, and it screws over any experienced players by punishing anybody that actually wants to interact with the level prestige mechanic once they do get themselves to level 100. Meanwhile anybody who doesn’t prestige just permanently has even better gear than what previously existed and never needs to worry about the other tiers. And since there’s no reward for prestiging aside from a cosmetic badge, why should you interact with the system at all? Overall it was a poorly thought out and unbalanced update.
While some updates haven’t been great and some things desperately need to be reworked, I’ve still been really enjoying the game. Once you get to around level 40 and unlock all the original gear, you can largely pretend the gear overhaul never happened. The newer maps and map reworks are awesome (aside from the new-ish lighthouse map point hope, that thing sucks), and I don’t play frequently enough to get too bored of the basic gameplay loop. Playing on nightmare where you only get 2 evidence helps since it adds a bit more strategy to each round than just getting 3 pieces of evidence and leaving. The newly reworked media evidence is pretty fun too, where you get rewarded for getting videos and pictures of unique forms of evidence rather than taking 10 pictures of a pile of salt that somebody stepped in.
I just mash mod key + backspace on hyprland to kill it haha. Bye mfer!
But also sometimes lately hyprland hasn’t been playing as nice with steam games and my mouse doesn’t interact with the game. The fix I found is to fling the steam client over to the other monitor. Works I guess. Linux problems lol.
Relatedly, I’ve noticed ports of console games, particularly by Japanese devs, and especially Sqeenix, not actually having an option to quit to desktop. Sometimes hitting Esc will pop a plain system theme window with an option to close the program, but I’ve seen ones that didn’t even have that and had to be killed externally. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but even exiting DragonQuest 11 is a pain.
This is also hella common in a lot of online or multiplayer live service games recently. Forces you to alt-F4 if on PC. Especially bad with Sony’s playstation ports; they treat it like you’re on the PS5 and can just switch games to automatically close the running one.
I just want to let you know that when I was director of production at a multimedia studio, one of the rules in my ux design “bible” was that an interface must never present an “are you sure” prompt to a Quit action. Yes there were fights over it.
Historically, it was conventional to have a “you have unsaved work” in a typical GUI application if you chose to quit, since otherwise, quit was a destructive action without confirmation.
Unless video games save on exit, you typically always have “unsaved work” in a video game, so I sort of understand where many video game devs are coming from if they’re trying to implement analogous behavior.
There’s a roguelike I play, which combats save-scumming by only giving one save slot per character. And so the only reason to save the game, is when you’re done playing. So, you hit Ctrl+S to save, and it instantly quits as well. 🙃
Which is interesting, because at least for me, the main reason I try to save often like that is because of games like bethesda games or other games that don’t autosave and will crash, losing you HUGE amounts of progress.
Ah yeah, it does auto-save regularly, too. But I don’t think, I’ve ever seen it crash without me doing some out-of-game fuckery. 🙃
Well, and of course, losing progress is baked into the gameplay of a roguelike, so whether your savegame corrupts or you die yet another stupid death, you just start another run and you’re right back into the action.
It’s a well-designed game, and he documented much of the development process on YouTube. It has a dopamine-laden primary gameplay loop that involves either manually piloting your ship around a star system to complete missions, or letting the autopilot fly while you run around your ship making repairs as needed.
I wouldn’t say it’s fun, but it’s not necessarily supposed to be fun, in the way that Papers Please is not meant to be fun. It’s mostly about the living as a star freighter pilot. What plot there is is driven by other characters coming in and interrupting the drudgery.
But I love playing it before bed. It winds me down nicely. And it’s perfect for the Steam Deck.
I used to use Stardew Valley as my wind-down game but I found I was staying up much later because “just one more day-itis” sets in. Starstruck Vagabond I can just save and put down whenever.
Edit: Oh, also it’s tangentially related to his Jacques McKeown book series, Will Save the Galaxy for Food, Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash, and Will Leave the Galaxy for Good.
I didn’t play Detroit for so long because I expected it to be like most other interactive movie type games where you maybe make 3 total decisions that actually have an effect on the whole story. Checked it out on PS+ and still felt that way up until I finished the first level and it shows the fucking massive decision tree of all the possible choices you could have made in that segment and was blown away. Hella them I didn’t even notice were viable things I could have tried.
This is what these kinds of games should be. It’s fucking amazing. It actually gives replayability to something that, in the past, was more of a one and done deal.
Bruh, yes, I know exactly what you mean. I’m actually getting ready to replay D:BH again because the last time I played was about 1.5+ years ago, and I think I’ve finally forgotten all my decisions. My husband said I got one of the best endings he’s ever seen someone get, and I really didn’t want to be tempted to answer everything the same. There’s SO MANY ways that game can go/end, and I want to explore them all!
I made the mistake of playing Until Dawn first, then D:BH, and then I downloaded the Dark Pictures Anthology and played 2 out of the 4 of those. I’m sure those would have hit different had I played them first, but knowing that the ending is ultimately the same no matter which direction you go definitely ruins the replayability. All 4 run into the very issue you were worried about with Detroit.
I’m aware of Valve being very generous with warranty/replacements of controller hardware for the Index. Even years after the warranty is up. But I think this is because of the major durability issues and known defects that the Index Controllers have.
In any case, Valve seemingly has lost money on a certain percentage of Valve Index kits/controller hardware. Based on how many people I know, including myself, who have gotten replacement hardware from Valve. Sometimes many times for recurring issues.
But I’m not aware of Valve doing the same for the Deck.
Edit: and you can tell they focused really hard on making the new controllers more durable:
No charging port to melt
durable sticks that won’t start drifting
No special finish on the controller that can be worn/scratched away
No internal battery to go bad
seemingly far fewer delicate parts
Funny point on the melting charging port. 2 years or so after the Index came out, SteamVR started warning using with a status dialog that told users to stop charging their controllers while they use them. They never accounted for long play sessions and people who would want to charge while playing.
The steam frame controllers use AA batteries, the steam controller has a lithium ion internal battery.
Also it does have a USB port but the primary charging method is via the pogo pins. But obviously you might want to recharge from a wall outlet so they also include a USB port. But that’s obviously going to get used far less often than it would otherwise.
Just don’t overdo it. I’m not a native speaker and I don’t know if OP’s post is generated, but the dash in the third bullet point really serves no purpose. The first dash could be replaced with a more appropriate colon.
My wife played that game for longer than I’ve played most games, and she only ever played it with a controller. She also liked Littlewood, Disney Dreamlight Valley, and Cozy Grove; she only ever used a controller for them.
Yeah I tried playing it on console but it was pretty garbage compared to kbm. There’s a reason I’ve got about 30 minutes on console and 700 hours on kbm.
I also feel Stardew works insanely better on KBM. Terraria too. I WANT to use controller and sit back and be comfy, but I just feel like I’m fiddling more and not as relaxed as point and click.
I never tried with KB/M so I can’t say. But I never really felt it was deficient. Selecting stuff from the menus certainly would have been faster with a mouse, but it was perfectly tolerable. If anything, like animal crossing, it adds to the slow play.
Give Spiritfarer a shot, full controller support and even a bit of harvest, fishing, and adventure to boot. 30 hours easy if you take your time, more if you want. Super chill game.
I ran into this long ago in Ultima Online and Everquest days. "Balance" does not mean "even", guys. Sometimes a overpowering thing needs to be overpowering, and "balance" it in some other way. The term "nerfing" was created in UO for this very act of devs bending to the will of whiners instead of reexamining the game dynamics (if any change was needed at all).
Most will be fine, except for some recent multiplayer stuff with invasive anti-cheat whose publishers choose to go out of their way to prevent us Linux users from being their customers.
areweanticheatyet.com is another good resource to consult, I actually mostly use this site these days. As long as anticheat isn’t involved, I reasonably assume proton will run the game wonderfully.
This ☝️. Very rarely I may have a temporary problem with Proton that usually gets fixed or patched but if it’s a MP game I always check this site first. I’ve been gaming on Linux exclusively for 2 years now.
Expedition 33 is very good at what it does. It’s a great experience, well worth the money (though I found combat to be repetitive over time) and as others have already explained, a lot more artistic.
BG3 however was a mind-blowing game for me. The amount of choices you have at every point was something I’d always wanted, and I’d always been let down.
I still think about E33s story often after my ~20h playing it, but for BG3 I really wish I could play it again for the first time, after having played over 200 hours already.
That first big bad nevkron was like the asylum demon in dark souls for me. Yeah, he kills you in one hit but he’s not impossible. Also I didn’t know you could just not fight them again. I though I was stuck cause the failure screen just gives you two options of retry and something else. As a souls player I saw “retry” and nothing else. Took maybe six tries, but the combat was more intuitive afterwards(at least the parry)
A bunch of characters in Apex Legends are canonically gay, trans, nonbinary, bi, pansexual, and Mirage. As a hero shooter, I guess there’s no real “main” character as such.
Aloy in Horizon is pretty much there if the Burning Shores DLC is any indication, although she seems to be a work in progress as a fully developed person.
I remember when dinoflask did YTPs of Overwatch’s lead designer, he poked fun at how, whenever the game needed a progressive image boost, they would retcon a character to be gay at random. He sentence-mixed something like “Our fans are always wondering who’s going to be gay on our next update.”
I have an example that’s not gay, but trans - one of the two protagonists of Tell Me Why is a trans guy. (The other protagonist is his cisgender twin sister.)
I remember reading about that because I went on a SA2 Chao Garden binge at one point and really got into trying to get a perfect flying one, I even went and played a bit of Into Dreams and read the wiki.
It’s because they’re “dream beings” and don’t really truly exist so they have no gender.
The MISSING: J J Macfield and the Island of Memories is a great one.
EndingPsyche. Though much of the dialog and written messages could lead you, like myself, to believe Macfield is a closeted lesbian undergoing community/family abuse for her quiet obsessions with a girl…it’s actually the less common form of LGBT. Macfield is a closet trans woman; much of the game’s horrific bodily mutilation themes take a stand-in for the dysphoria of being uncomfortable in her own masculine body. Of course, many of the same types who’d retch at a gay protagonist would throw up at the idea of being someone they didn’t identify with - which ironically is exactly what the game is teaching you.
In baldurs gate 3 people of the same gender certainly hit on you. Basically all romancible characters have player characters as their sexual orientation
I will ask a different question. In how many mainstream games can you actually confirm the main character is straight? Sure it may be more than the two examples of gay main characters, but still very few compared to where it just doesn’t come up.
Pretty much every GTA, Duke Nukem, the Witcher series, the God of War series, Yakuza, Unchartered, the Final Fantasy games, the Super Mario games (including Donkey Kong), even Pac-man… and that’s just the ones I’ve played. Then you’ve got virtually everything featuring Disney characters, Star Wars, as well as most other TV and movie tie-in games (of which there are many).
That’s the thing about defaultism, is you can play a straight character and not even remember you’ve done it because it’s just the default. I’ll bet you didn’t even notice that Pac-man was canonically straight, and yet if Ms. Pac-man was instead called “Pacman’s Husband Steve”, suddenly Pac-man’s one defining trait would be his sexuality.
If nothing else, you’ve provided an object lesson in just how true OP’s meme is.
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