Not sure if it’s been done already, but Zelda LttP would be cool. I haven’t played Echoes of Wisdom though I like the art style and could see it working well.
I don’t think Nintendo is capable of doing anything to Link to the Past other than ruin it.
A lot of the Zelda games that got “remasters” mostly had their resolutions and brightnesses increased, to the point that the Wind Waker remake has problematic amounts of bloom. Makes me think someone important at Nintendo has cataracts. So if you want to “remaster” A Link to the Past, run it through an AI upscaler and turn a desk lamp on your screen.
The few that have gotten ground-up “remakes” like Link’s Awakening…I kind of liked the art style they chose, it fit the tone of the game pretty well, going with quartets for the music is a stroke of genius, WHY DOESN’T THE FUCKING D-PAD WORK? The original game was designed for use with a D-Pad and either 4- or 8- way motion. I get that modern gamers might instinctively reach for the analog stick, but bind movement controls to the D-pad too, especially if you’re not going to bind anything else to those controls. Nintendo never doesn’t fuck this up. They made an entire console based on a revolutionary new way to fuck up the controls.
So what you’d get out of a first-party re-release of aLttP is a blank white screen you control entirely with the gyros.
trying to live train AI against your playstyle is both expensive and unnecessary. Hard bots have never really been too much trouble. We don’t really need to use AI to outpace humans in most games. The exceptions would be an extremely long play games like chess and go.
There’s been a lot of use in AI for platformers and stuff like trackmania, but not for competition, simply for speedruns.
It would certainly be nice to have for the fighting games I play. A few have toyed with the idea of “shadow fighters”, but it never really feels like playing against a person. It might get their habits down, but it doesn’t replicate the adaptation of facing a person and having them change how they play based on how you’re playing. If someone could crack that nut, everyone would have someone on their level to play against at any hour of the day, no matter how obscure the game is.
yeah I would like to leverage AI for stuff like RPG NPCs. instead of hearing the same filler lines for 200 hours of gameplay, barely reacting to the context of your game you could have a vibrant array of endless dialog that actually keeps up with your game progress (or lack thereof).
That would be a pretty good use. Llms are a little slow on most home hardware still. Hallucinations could also be a little scary. I wonder if that would affect your ESRB rating, That’s technically it could say anything…
The fear of hallucinations is so great for a commercial company that when square enix tried it on a remake of a detective game of theirs, it became the poster child of how awful LLMs are for videogames, it’s one of the worst rated steam games, it’s like talking to a wall because they nerfed it so hard it’s worse than a normal text parser.
Hard bots have actually been so much trouble, that literally the only way to make them hard at all is to make them cheat by allowing them to operate outside of the ruleset the player is bound by. It’s a humongous issue with every strategy game on the market.
People tend to think of digital things as unchanging and permanent but that isn’t really the case. I’m fascinated by the concept of bit rot and other ways that digital things can disappear or degrade over time.
It’s good that flash is not still an essential part of the modern Internet but its death did firmly cut off an entire era of Internet culture that cannot be experienced in quite the same way.
The official Homestuck site will still let the original SWF files load as long as you have something that can play them. Ruffle works fine. You can also use one of the few browsers that still supports PPAPI plugins (like Falkon) with the official Flash plugin.
But personally I’d say to just use The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, which is more pleasant to read through than the original ever was.
i mean sure, but we’re actually approaching the edge of what can even be considered a game.
i don’t call those games personally. they are vaguely interactive novels. imo a physical choose your own adventure book has more “gameplay” than most of these virtual novels.
i honestly don’t think game is the right term here. these are books with an odd format.
It depends on the VN and its implementation. The existence of things like Slay the Princess, 999, Raging Loop, Phoenix Wright, AI: The Somnium Files, these are all inextricably linked with player participation and choice, as well as very dense narrative.
Then you have ones like Steins;Gate that don't have very much choice at all, that's a lot closer to a book in most respects, but as a blanket VNs are, more often than not, absolutely games.
The thing is some games make the line really fuzzy and it’s hard to draw an exact line where it no longer is a game.
Pyre does have a whole RPG wizard basketball thing going on that I enjoyed, but wasn’t the reason I recommend the game. The more engaging part of the game was the visual novel stapled to it, which was affected by wizard basketball in cool and interesting ways, but inside each scene it’s largely non-interactive.
Disco Elysium also has some RPG mechanics going on, and there’s a city block for you to wander around, but the vast majority of the game is dialogue. It could largely be written as a more complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, but it’s so much stronger as a game.
Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is almost entirely dialogue and telling people’s fortunes, with only brief moments of creating new tarot cards to break up the dialogue. Despite this, the fortune-telling aspect of the game has made it one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a bit.
There’s any number of “walking simulators” that this debate comes up around and I counter that with the fact that Outer Wilds built off the back of that formula to create something unquestionably a game, but built off of gameplay loops largely based around traversal and finding new bits of lore to unlock progression.
These were all successfully marketed to gamers as video games. My hot take is that they’re all games, but with a form of gameplay that some may find too simple for their liking and that’s ok. And the semantic debate over what’s a game and what isn’t is just feels vibes based sometimes.
I’m glad I’ve had a few epiphanies over my gaming time that have resulted in no desire to spend any money on P2W or content skipping.
First one was in the first Turok game on N64. I was playing normally but at some point looked up the cheat codes for things like unlock all weapons, unlimited ammo, and unlocking all levels. There was one weapon that you needed to collect hidden pieces of from each level, and then you only got 3 shots with it that would pretty much AoE clear an area. There was another gun that you’d only find 2 shots of ammo for at a time that was similar. I had fun for a bit running around and shooting those guns at will, but after that it was hard to get motivated to play the game without the cheats because I knew the big weapons were basically just temporary consumables, which meant I’d probably never use them while trying to ration them for moments they’d be most useful. Using those cheat codes ruined the game for me.
The second epiphany was after raiding for a while in WoW and thinking about the loot motivation. It was a circular motivation: you get better loot so that you can raid more to get even better loot. If the loot was the main motivation, then it was pointless because the loot didn’t serve any purpose outside of the game. So it only made sense to do raiding because I enjoyed the process, not because of the rewards. And this applied to most reward mechanisms in games. Taking that logic just a bit further made me realize that P2W is actually paying money to avoid playing a game and short circuit right to getting the rewards, which was kinda pointless when the rewards were meant to improve the experience of playing the game. Either a) you don’t want to play the game at all, or b) you don’t get as much satisfaction from using the better loot or whatever because you skipped the part where you had to do it without those rewards.
And then the last one is finding PvP less satisfying when the game mechanics give significant advantages based on either time spent grinding or paying money to avoid grinding. Did I just win because of my skills or because I’ve acquired better gear? Did I just lose because the other player outplayed me or because they got better gear? And I didn’t even want to give any satisfaction to those who just paid money to win and don’t worry about what it does or doesn’t say about their skills. It’s similar to the line of thought when you know cheating is possible… Did I get beat by someone skilled enough to aim better or someone using an aim bot?
Comparing P2W to cheating is spot on, especially as these are much more heavily advertised and used in PvP games. What really annoys me is when these players, or similars that never go after equivalent players, feel all superior despite showing zero skill
On WoW, I remember playing a few times on instant 255 private servers, back in 2007-2010. It felt so damn pointless to me, especially as the raids still needed you to make a raid group. I enjoyed a portion of the grind, even as a mostly solo player.
My 80-year-old mother is stil hooked on Hay Day (2012 Farmville clone). She doesn’t alarm-clock overnight events any more, but that could be because she can’t sleep through the night now. Got a team of other old ladies around the world for contests, and it’s right on the edge of where I think it’s great that she’s got something to keep her engaged versus might need an addiction intervention.
I’m not usually one for those types of games but I had a lot of fun with the player economy of Hayday. You don’t even need to do any farming, there were always desperate players selling low and buying high lol
WoW auction house feelings right there. Dunno how it is nowadays, but I remember that back on Battle for Azeroth, that was the only way to get the 5 million gold for a super exclusive mount
I really like some of the Halo games for this, especially any levels that don’t involve The Flood. The inventive hit-boxes, slow movements, the vehicles that are fun to just drive around, and the addition of gameplay modifiers, they’re pretty cathartic for me.
I don’t know about nowadays, but back in 2007 when I got bored with Runescape I switched to Guild Wars. Great MMO. Kind of dead playerwise now, but the servers are still up and it is soloable.
Recovered my account a couple years ago with support and providing my og serials. Can’t believe it worked but it punched me in the face nostalgia-wise when I got into it.
I still remember hanging out in a few of them around this time of year when stuff was decked out Halloween themed. Never did beat the expansions. Crazy how little detail the game seems to have by today’s standards 🤣
Guild wars 2 is a very good game, but very different than guild wars 1.
They both avoid the endless gear and level grind, but gw2 is generally easier and less tactical. You can solo most of it. Builds are a little more limited, but it’s also harder to make a useless character.
They addressed the most common problems with early mmos: other players are never a bad thing. there’s no kill stealing. If you’re doing some event to fight off demons that have invaded the town, and other people show up, the game silently scales up a to accommodate more players, and everyone gets credit. it’s great.
I really like it. I don’t play it every day, but I go back to it all the time.
Yeah it does a lot of stuff very good. The only thing I miss is something like chasing WoW raids drops. In GW2 you’re almost always working on crafting/mysticforge/achievements instead. I play a lot though don’t get me wrong :P
I don’t think this means ES6 is doomed. Did anyone play the Civ space game? It was an offshoot one-off experiment that wasn’t really well recieved and they quietly moved on.
My guess is that this game pivoted during development and they ended up with something that didn’t really work and shouldn’t have shipped. The failure to find something good in this experiment may be isolated to this game.
The fact that they released it in the state they did could be more about their workflow and project pipeline/target milestones they need to hit than it is about their ability to execute.
The failure here is in design, ES6 has a tried and true design to follow.
Story and worldbuilding wise, ES6 has a very bleak future ahead. Emilio Pagliarulo, the de facto director of Starfield and lead writer, has shown that no hole is deep enough that he won’t dig it further down when it comes to lack of quality and consistency. Not that Skyrim’s main story was good, but it was certainly better than Starfield’s. There’s also the disturbing indifference of “the world” to everything happening around it. Literally nothing you do in Starfield affects anything outside its own storyline. Hell, shooting up in the air or using fucking space magic in the middle of a city generates no reaction from npcs if nobody is hit.
Point being that they can experiment and do something a little different, I don’t think that the quality of the spinoff indicates the quality of the main franchise.
I think ES6 will have the advantage that it won’t be a procedurally generated world, or at least I don’t hope so.
But it will probably still run on the shitty Bethesda engine that they cling onto for dear life for some reason.
I think it will never actually live up to the hype, expectations are so insanely high, and the longer it takes the higher these expectations rise it seems.
And I bet it will turn out to be another half-assed game that they hope modders will fix. Like the last bunch of games, they all require mods to be even remotely playable, but even mods can’t fix core issues.
My expectations for Bethesda dropped to bare minimum with everything that came after Skyrim.
The problem is Starfield isn’t a one off. It’s the latest in a line of progressively worse games. Every game they’ve released since Skyrim has been worse than the one that came before it.
Since Skyrim? I’d say their quality has been slowly declining since Morrowind. It wasn’t that noticeable at first, since oblivion, fallout 3, and Skyrim were still quite good and fallout 4 was decent. But then fallout 76 was a mess at release, TES blades was shit, and starfield just seems lazy.
Skyrim was at least an improvement over Oblivion. It showed they had the ability to recognize and fix the mistakes of Oblivion and still create an interesting world.
and they ended up with something that didn’t really work and shouldn’t have shipped.
That sure didn’t stop the marketing department, as this game was being shoved in our faces left and right as if it was the end-all-be-all game we’d be playing with our grand children in 50 years.
My guess is that this game pivoted during development
Nah, the game matches pretty well with what Lyin’ Todd said he wanted to make almost 20 years ago
It’s also very clearly their usual design decisions but in a new setting
If anything the issue is that they stayed stuck in EXACTLY their usual development methods: no design document because Emil doesn’t like them, their writers make their quests too, and use an engine that’s absolutely not meant for the kind of game they’re making ON TOP of being ancient and garbage
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to describe games with loading screens of that kind (whether disguised as choke points or not) as open worlds. Sure, they might allow more freedom than a game that stays on rails for every step of the journey, but to me, “open world” suggests something more.
Continuity while exploring the landscape, unimpeded by artificial barriers or immersion-breaking interruptions, is a big part of it.
Almost as important is that the world be interesting and diverse enough that I would want to spend my time exploring it. This is one of Skyrim’s great strengths: It’s full of unique things to discover, most of which aren’t marked on the map (except sometimes when you’re already there), and some don’t even stay in the same place. It ensures that exploring the world and paying attention is rewarding and satisfying. The Witcher 3, on the other hand, is weak in this area: Its world is mostly open, but practically everything in it is a copy/paste instance of a handful of events, and clearly marked on the map. Exploration quickly becomes a tedious exercise in running from dot to dot, doing the same few things over and over again. It doesn’t deliver the satisfaction I expect from an open world game. In a world like that, I get bored fast.
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