I lost interest when they became nothing but a shell for micro / macro transactions / "DLC". The base game is already very expensive, but no, here's some more overpriced cars and shit that you can't afford either while you chase the dream of owning a full game with a complete car park.
To your first bullet point, your own example of StarCraft. Rush strategies are usually so all-in that they win or lose in a couple of minutes. If they’re successfully defended, the defender now has such an advantage that the rusher can’t come back from it.
I actually don’t know of a game that’s ruined by an “aggression meta”. I don’t think I agree that it’s a problem. Neither rushing nor turtling is incentivized in StarCraft. The push and pull that the designers wanted from a given match is the optimal way to play, and you’ll find more success chasing that than either turtling or rushing.
I’m heavily invested in the fighting game scene, and the genre’s been getting more and more “aggression mechanics” for a long time now; some might call them “neutral skips”, skipping the part of the game where the two players try to approach each other. There’s a clear reason for why they do this: it’s way more fun to watch. Street Fighter V often devolved into two players left on their last pixel of health, since you can’t kill with chip damage (for the most part), so it was a boring situation of both players fishing for a last hit as the clock ticks down. Now, whether it’s Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, or Guilty Gear, you have a meter that you use on offense and defense. Being offensive rewards you with more and allows you to be more offensive, and being defensive will drain it. You can still have that moment from SFV that was supposed to be tense, but now it’s actually tense, because while that player is defending, the resource that prevents a checkmate situation is draining down, and when it’s empty, it’s basically game over.
Fighting games are a genre where it makes sense to push aggression meta. At times, people have wished that the genre allowed for more defensive counterattacking, but it’s not hard to predict how that would look in effect; two players both staring each other down waiting for the other to make a punishable move.
Basically, fighting games don’t have other mechanics outside of direct combat interactions that allow for fun decision-making. There’s fringe stuff like when someone has power-ups that don’t require landing hits (eg, Phoenix Wright in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3) but they don’t involve much decision-making.
I think the only time rush is an issue in games like Starcraft, thus making it an example, is at the low level of play where people don’t know how to react. So, once players get experience in the mechanics, it’s basically fixing itself. Other games can sometimes have that issue at all levels of play though.
There are tons of decisions to make at any given time in a fighting game outside of trying to be on offense. That’s why it’s more of a recent trend to add mechanics to incentivize aggression. And yes, the fact that rushes tend to only terrorize lower levels of play is why it’s more of a gimmick than a feature.
Still remember playing it back on ps2… Imo one of finest R* release and for open world genre.
But what elevates me most is the PC release with countless mods resulted off it. Did have good time playing SA-MP & MTA SA back in 2012-2015 on and off… Basically custom SA Multiplayer client that lets you connect to server and play with dozens or even hundreds of ppl within a server, met couple of friends and joined Clan that still connected to this day.
Also this game was the game that introduce me to game modding and also as game modder (made dozen of stuffs for SP and MP maps).
As an American, now living in Canada for the past 20 years, I am really not into the winter area in games I’m currently playing PoE Deadfire Breath of Winter and I want to go back to the beaches and kill stuff :D
I remember when Skyrim came out I was living in a drafty house with no heat in a snowy winter. I was wrapped in like 5 layers sitting at my PC going “Why couldn’t this have been in a desert” lol
Hahaha, I’m talking about an entirely different game. I read PoE and thought you meant Path of Exile. The main mechanic in the end game is running “maps” which are like dungeons with specific environments. Beach being available this league.
I definitely spent way more time on this than I should have. I had to dig out my N64 controller and take those pics myself. I knew the other image was from The Dutchy, but it took a while to find that image in particular.
Titanfall 2: You have a titan as a companion for most of the game (there are segments where you’re on your own though). And it’s a fantastic single player campaign.
Welcome to capitalism. Big gaming companies do not care about games anymore, they care about how to maximise profits. Their games are manipulative and developed together with psychologists solely to get your hard earned money at any opportunity. They got so good at it, that they are able to release pieces of software which are looking like games but actually are milking machines and no games at all.
You just have to take a step back and you will be able to easily differentiate between products of corporate greed and games.
Games once were supposed to be entertaining and even art. And there are still some, mostly indies.
I never played Alan Wake through to the end until recently when I got the second one.
Then I played through the first one, followed by Control including the DLCs and then Alan Wake 2. I can’t recommend this enough, it’s an incredible ride.
Yep, they also made me want to rewatch X-Files and Twin Peaks, two obvious inspirations (plus Stephen King particularly The Dark Tower, another kind of house that is the linchpin of universes).
I can also recommend The Lost Room mystery series from 2006. It’s use of magical, but mundane objects and a timeless hotel room also seems to have been a direct inspiration.
Damn, I knew about X-Files and Twin Peaks, but I had no idea about the others. It’s honestly a rabbit hole I’d love to go down if I ever get the time. Adulting sucks :(
Right?! I can’t run it at the moment so I’ll need to upgrade first, but damn literally every frame I’ve see of Alan Wake 2 is just peak Remedy goodness. The not being able to run it part actually kinda works out for me though because I wanna buy it once it hits Steam (although they seem to be taking their sweet ass time, it’s like they hate money or something).
Remedy’s one of the last handfull of studios still making actually good AAA games that aren’t compromised for monetization’s sake, or to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
AW2 is published by Epic, so I wouldn’t hold your breath about it coming to Steam. When you’re about to run it though, I highly recommend it. It’s the only game I’ve bought on EGS, and I’d do it again.
Thank goodness Remedy will be self-publishing going forwards. Control 2 can’t come soon enough.
Like the other poster said, Epic financed and published AW2 and paid good money for exclusivity. I doubt you’ll see it on Steam anytime soon. The only way to play it without Epic Games Launcher and all that is on console.
The game is worth it though. One of my most memorable gaming experiences over the past few years. And if you’re planning on upgrading I’ll tell you it looks absolutely gorgeous. One of the few games where ray tracing actually has a noticeable impact, too, in my opinion.
1 month ago, I know, sorry. I ended up upgrading and AW2 was like 70% of the reason. Can’t do RT and still hit 60 but even without it, what an incredible looking game, and that’s only the beginning. I don’t think I’ve ever played anything like this. It’s your basic (albeit bery solid) survival horror sure but the tone is PITCH FUCKING PERFECT and the story’s interesting in a way very few are. I’m only a few chapters in but it feels like playing through a novel more than a game.
I’m on the non-epic PC version right now (shhh) but I’m 100% buying it once I get the disposable income because even though I hate Epic, god damn Remedy deserves to make money off this.
I’m so glad you’re enjoying it! It’s a damn shame BG3 took the world by storm last year, as I felt AW2 truly deserved more awards, including Game of the Year. BG3 is good and all but at the end of the day it’s just a really well made RPG. AW2 is doing something bold and interesting with the video game medium in a way that deserves to be celebrated. It topped Jacob Geller’s yearly list for a reason, and I think he put it the best in his video:
“Is Alan Wake 2 the best game I’ve played this year? No. But it’s the most excited I’ve been to be playing a video game this year.”
Also it should have won the Game award for best soundtrack and I’ll hear no arguments.
It’s a damn shame it was overshadowed by BG3. Feels like an lesser version of the Titanfall 2 situation. Bought it on discount the other day because I want them to make money from it.
With that said, it’s always insane to me how 99% of the time, paying for a game is a worse experience than pirating it. I bought a single player game that I now cannot play because epic’s servers are down and it’s not letting me use offline mode because I tried to login when it prompted. Can’t even run the exe because the launcher force closes the game. Why tf is this offline game being treated like an always online game?! At least Steam lets you login offline if it knows your credentials from before. I’m actually considering refunding because I can’t guarantee I’ll be online the next time it logs me out.
Epic is just terrible. I wanted to bypass the launcher by using Heroic instead, but it wouldn’t recognize me having the Deluxe edition without actually installing the game through Epic and being logged in through their launcher. Garbage.
Complete and utter trash really. Just a horrible experience all round. I’ve used Epic before and I thought offline was a thing. After I was finally able to login, you can imagine my surprise when I learned that I can NEVER play offline. Logged in correctly, ran the game online fine, closed off everything, unplugged ethernet and tried to play - got hit with that “this game requires an internet connection” dialog.
I was willing to look past an outage since I figured maybe it’s because it was the second or third time launching it and it needed keys or whatever, but online only? We get internet and power issues like crazy here, that’s an actual deal breaker.
Genuinely didn’t wanna but I ended up refunding it. Remedy, if you’re seeing this, hmu when it’s on steam and I can actually play offline. Paid for it once, willing to again :)
Not to mention the fucking notifications for Epic Games Achievements are loud as all fuck and default to “on” every time you open the launcher so you have to manually turn on Do Not Disturb every time you launch the game or your immersion gets ruined every 5 seconds by an Epic Achievement notification ding (and visual on screen popup btw!)
It’s so funny you mentioned it because I was actually worried about that too. Achievement popups in a game like this (even on steam tbh) can really take you out of it. And AW2 has qute a few too sheesh. Not sure if steam offline mode still has em. Good to know I’m not insane though haha
I honestly thought it was just an asset flip that turned out to be kind of funny and so was tolerated I didn’t realize that it was made by the same people that made Satisfactory.
It’s all you said, but it’s also a product of it’s time. Iirc when it release there was an increasing amount of simulator games, and goat simulator pokes fun to all of those while having tons of silly references to the contemporary things.
The successors don’t have much of s point to me tbh.
Honestly, I’m more into the progression planning than the fighting itself. I would not like a game where I have to put too much effort in the fight part of the game. Even soulslike games have ways to cheese them and any proper diablolike arpg should have ways to destroy enemies with little thought on the combat.
It IS gory stardew valley, I see no problem in that though? The only reason I don’t play stardew is that the feel of the game is too slow, not because I dislike the gameplay loop.
I’m all for the cultivation part, but not when games make it so planning it wrong means starting over and grinding a hundred hours more. To keep the analogy, if your farm is not going too well you can just change things after the next harvest. Experimentation is something that helps these games stay fresh.
It’s not a hundred hours, I play multiple character for less than 20 hours epr season of PoE.
Sure, if you lack the knowledge it sucks, but that why there’s so much content on guides.
I enjoy having to investigate the best ways to plan and having tools to emulate planning scenarios to be able to take informed decisions in game. It’s cool if you don’t enjoy that but then this genre is not for you.
I’m guessing you are referring to the passive respects of PoE. Honestly, I pseudo respec and tweak my tree a lot per character and spend a lot of currency for it. But it’s fine, I’ll just farm more currency. Having to start over happens only when I decide that it’s best to do whatever with a different class, that’s the only truly non respeccable part, but that’s really basic, right? Having an inefficient tree is not that big of a deal honestly, it’s usually more about gear and other big decisions that break characters.
And that’s entirely valid; like I say, stardew gameplay is immensely satisfying in and of itself.
I just feel like all these other mechanisms in arpgs are thrown on top to try and disguise the nature of the thing, and it’s that disparity that leaves people jaded.
Stardew doesn’t have an endless progression of increasingly fell and eldritch vegetables that need you to constantly grind for upgrades just to tend to them. You water things in one click all the way through, and that feels good; you don’t need to chase a sawtooth pseudo-progression in order to be satisfied.
Stardew doesn’t make you do NP-complete multi-knapsack-problems in order to even have a viable character, or drown you in overly complex interactions so you can’t usefully plan in your head; there’s complexity there, but of the kind that opens up more options.
It manages to be fun without those things, but ARPGs seem to overwhelmingly rely on them in order to be engaging at all.
Why is that?
Why does gory-stardew need all those external obfuscations, when the normal kind doesn’t?
How could you make a gory-stardew that’s comfortable in its own skin?
You call them obfuscations, I call them fun. Having different ways to scale my killing machine is fun. having to design different and new ways to becoming a mowing machine is fun. I’m with you with the “endless progression” thing, that’s what I prefer from D2 and PoE, once you reach the top tier content there’s no infinite content.
Stardew doesn’t make you do NP-complete multi-knapsack-problems in order to even have a viable character
Oh come on, you don’t really need to optimize that much to have a viable character!
drown you in overly complex interactions so you can’t usefully plan in your head
You don’t plan for all, you just pick the ones that are useful. I enjoy using out of game tools to optimize my in game characters.
It manages to be fun without those things, but ARPGs seem to overwhelmingly rely on them in order to be engaging at all.
It’s a different kind of fun. Stardew is fun not really because of the farming gameplay loop, but the farming gameplay loop within a town with character interactions and tbh, I haven’t really finished all the content it offers because its simplicity bores me.
What you need to ask yourself is not how to remove those obfuscations, but what each game offers to the player. I assure you that neither SV, PoE, LE, GrimDawn, even D2 are designed to offer you the simple gameplay loop of “mowing the field of vegetables and monsters and getting the produce aka loot”. Stardew offers a chill experience with a simple gameplay loop so you don’t feel pressured into being good at it, alongside with a story around the townspeople and the farmer. D-clones offer a multi layered toolset with complex interactions to prepare better for the mowing, a big big part of the fun is in the preparation, for a lot of people the “mowing” process is more there to test the machine than to enjoy the game.
I honestly think that if you don’t like the layered design space that most ARPGs offer, it’s not your genre.
Obviously ideas of fun vary; people are allowed to enjoy things I don’t like :)
Also I’m not rampantly disagreeing with you here, just picking at the edges for discussion because it still doesn’t sit quite right in my head.
It’s just… sometimes I feel like the implementation of complexity in these things is just kind of lazy, comparable to adding difficulty by making enemy bullet-sponges. It’s certainly more work to defeat them, but is that work rewarding?
Consider the annoyance that triggered this whole post.
In grim dawn, mid way through elite. I had some gloves with fairly miserable specs for my level, but they were providing most of my vitality res. Can I change them out?
Well there’s some with better overall specs but no vitality but they do have a lot of fire res, so I could swap those in, then the ring I was getting lots of fire res from could go, and there’s one with some vitality but unfortunately no poison, so let’s see, I do have a helmet that …
spongebob_three_hours_later.jpg
… but now my vitality is three points too low to equip the pants, oh fuck off. How is this fun?
Finding a reasonable solution doesn’t make you feel clever, and making an awkward compromise doesn’t feel like a justifiable sacrifice, it feels like you finally got too exhausted to search through more combinations and gave up. You can’t really look forward to getting better gear to fill a gap, because you’re going to have to go round and round in circles again trying to build a whole new set around the deficiencies that come with it.
It’s like debating against a Gish Gallop - taxing to keep up with but without any real sense of achievement.
And honestly it doesn’t feel like that’s really intended to be the real gameplay. If the genre is really a build-planning-combinatorics game with a bit of monster-bashing on the side, where’s the quality-of-life UX to go with it? Where’s management tools to bring the actual problem-domain to the fore? Where’s the sort-rank-and-filter, where’s the multi-axis comparisons? Where’s the saved equipment sets? Why is the whole game environment and all the interface based around the monster-bashing, if that’s just the testing phase? And if navigating hostile UX is part of the the challenge, then again I say that challenge is bad game design.
And all the layered mechanics across the genre feel like that: bolted on and just kind of half-assed, keeping the problem-domain too hard to work on because of externalities rather than the innate qualities of the problem itself. I know, let’s make the fonts really squirly and flickery so you can only peer at the stats for five minutes before you get a headache, that’ll give people a challenging time constraint to work with.
Did you ever play mass-effect: Andromeda, with the shitty sudoku minigame bolted on to the area unlocks? You know how that just… didn’t make the game fun?
That.
Also it seems to me that if the prep-work was really the majority drawcard, we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for. Build your character, let it bot through the map (or just do an action montage), then come back with a bunch of loot and XP to play with before sending it out again.
I think an ideal game would hit all three kinds of satisfaction: tactics/graaagh, exploration/harvesting and mastery/optimisation. And ideally, each of those three targets would be free of external complications and left to focus on their own innate challenge and rewards.
I know that’s easy to say and hard to do… I’m just surprised that we haven’t got signficantly better at it in the last couple of decades.
Regarding your grim dawn complaint, did you not have enough level for augments? Augments and the crafted thingies you put on itels are what usually caps you until you reach suepr endgame in grim dawn. You don’t really need to be 100% capped anyway, I usually pick strong gear and augment/enchant it with resistances where I can to cap myself. The typical constellation paths also have resistances.
Dunno, I usually decide to lose that resistance and risk taking the damage and something else drops, it’s grim dawn, where most mobs die in 2 seconds and you can recover damage very fast.
I think you should try “The slormancer”. It got the gear quality of life stuff solved. You can go pretty much any spec of whatever you want and make it work. Just have to work a bit to get there :)
You described the garlic-like genre. Which has gotten VERY big. “we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for.” They are MAKING THEM it’s VAMPIRE SURVIVORS lmao
Most of your complaints about obfuscation make me think you haven’t played Last Epoch and don’t know there is a solution: simply put the information someone would alt+tab or otherwise leave the game to find it IN THE GAME! LE has a robust in-game guide with info on everything from weird status effects down to how elemental resists work against elemental penetration and reduction.
A large portion of the issue is the ever eternal Minecraft Problem imo, it seems like you (and many people in general) have trouble setting your own goals when it comes to why you’re making the character more powerful. ARPG have different approaches to this: diablo 3 hasn’t got much stuff to “distract” you from pushing greater rift levels, while Path of Exile gives you a 12 boss checklist in different dimensions and you need to finish a LOAD of content, then fight 4 of them to fight the bigger bosses after them (and content beyond even that). Without knowing which bosses or how to find them, some players get lost.
TL;DR the genre is evolving as people ask these kinds of questions and you’re slightly behind the forefront of questioning here. Not a knock, just worth mentioning that what you’re looking for (an ARPG with sparkling information clarity) already exists, and the thing you’re thinking might exist in the future (streamlined ARPG with less mechanical intensity) also already exists.
That’s the big reason why I loved Diablo II, but was lukewarm on the following two. The skill tree was fixed and a had nice synergies between the skills. I used to keep a notebook with plans for different builds that seemed fun and was primarily interested in the skills rather than items.
In Diablo III, the skill tree was much more limited, and you could swap things out at any time. So planning out a build and starting a new character was pointless. You could just swap the active skills.
It also didn’t seem to have any hard spots. If you followed the main quests, your character improved just fast enough to keep the challenge throughout consistent. So I never really felt a need to grind. I mean, I hate games that are all grinding, but I also like it when there are walls that you have to spend some time and effort to move past.
Diablo IV was even worse for this as the areas adapt to your level. So no matter where you were, the challenge was the same.
Neither of the two were awful, in my opinion, but they dropped the parts that made Diablo so exceptional to me. So I really didn’t spend too much time with either of them whereas I played Diablo II for about 10 years.
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