Not every design choice fits every game (obviously). With that in mind, rarely is any specific design choice always 100% good or bad.
I think rather than just taking a vote, it is more useful to think about what makes a good random encounter, and what kinds of game designs work well with them.
I enjoy CRPG styled games. Often in these random encounters happen when moving through an overworld. This kind of design doesn’t disrupt exploration, since once it is over, you continue on your way. It does disrupt when you are going between known points and just trying to tie something up. That can be annoying. Ways that I think can make random encounters enjoyable for CRPG styled games:
Not every random encounter has to be combat. Some can be combat, some can be social, some can be vendors, and some can just be flavor. Non-combat encounters can be used as sort of optional bonus content for players to learn about the lore or explore, and they might even feel special since it is a random occurrence the player gets.
The ability to put points into some kind of skill that gives the player the option to avoid a random encounter and/or start a combat encounter with a bonus.
Encounters should be tied with regions of the overworld in a way that makes sense. Put tougher encounters in endgame areas to discourage players from poking around too early. Make encounters in certain areas tied to the main faction or location in that area.
Ease up on certain kinds of encounters as the game goes on, so they don’t outstay their welcome. For example, in the early game if there are lots of low level bandits attacking in random encounters, it can be fun, but it gets old once you are powerful enough to rip through them and are just trying to get bigger things done. Solve this by, for example saying that routes between major hubs are secured thanks to player actions. Now the player can travel between main routes without getting hassled.
Be very thoughtful about combat random encounters triggered by NPCs after the player due to player actions. These tend to be more annoying since these are usually higher level NPCs that pack more punch. Making their appearance totally random can be very annoying. It also often feels like a grind if the encounter happens repeatedly. I would prefer the consequences of player actions to firstly always be telegraphed so they know a certain action means a revenge squad is after them. Second, I would prefer this encounter to be scripted- either concretely in a specific location where the game knows the player hasn’t yet been by virtue of the trigger happening while certain areas are still locked by the main story, or in a floating fashion where one of various possibilities is chosen by the game based on whatever triggers first. Once the player defeats whoever is after them, they should never be chased by an identical kind of threat.
These are all CRPG ideas, but I think mostly translate to action RPGs conceptually.
I haven’t played any CRPGs and I’m not familiar with them. Any recommendation of an intro to the genre?
But many of your points are still familiar. Trivial encounters feeling like an annoying waste of time, items or abilities that control the encounter rates, etc.
I think making regions safe is a great idea but I would want it tied to a challenging side quest. Like maybe you can intentionally fight a harder version of an area’s enemies to make it safe?
Wasteland 3 is a good CRPG style game with modern presentation. There is backstory from the first two games, but the third one is self contained enough that you won’t be confused by the story.
I think making regions safe is a great idea but I would want it tied to a challenging side quest. Like maybe you can intentionally fight a harder version of an area’s enemies to make it safe?
That’s one way to tackle it. The point is that there is something to prevent the experience of being super high level and getting mugged by guys with rusty shivs. I’m throwing out many ideas, which could be refined by specific games.
When it comes to random mobs, a game which relies on them is Kenshi, as an example. Without wandering random mobs to encounter, the game loses a lot of flavor. Kenshi does a few things uniquely, with the main one being that many random encounters that end in defeat don’t end in death. Rather than it being a case where a random mob annoyingly forces a start from a previous save, Kenshi can often be played past the defeat with the player now enslaved, in jail, or injured. The emergent story telling from those fights is what makes the game.
creation engine quests are too easy to break as the game gives you lots of freedom to mess with progression and characters, eventually someone finds another edge case
if you dont test the fuck out of them they will bug out in some way
The original Resident Evil was pretty revolutionary and terrifying for me, but the 100% scariest I’ve played is the original Dead Space.
More recently, The Outlast Trials is really good, and I would HIGHLY recommend any of the Dark Pictures Anthology games, but my favorite is Man of Medan.
I really loved it. But way too early i realized what was up. I remember reading about the gas leak incident in some comic i read when i was a kid in the 80s, and my mind made that connection rather early. I still enjoyed it throughly, and I’m always waiting for whatever Supermassive is up to next.
Two years of content seems plenty reasonable. Especially when they said from the start that it would be two years. Games don't need infinite updates forever and ever and ever. Especially when it's not a live service being sustained by microtransactions.
You’re right, I hadn’t actually answered your question - my bad. I don’t expect them to continually update the game; only that they don’t lock out customers from multiplayer. I believe any manufacturer of a given multiplayer game whose official servers are being closed, have a responsibility to release server software, and add a server browser to the game.
I can still play Counter-Strike online, and even Quake 1 and Doom. What gives?
Oh, did you think the headline meant they were shutting S3 down? Servers will remain up for the foreseeable future, and they'll even still run seasonal Splatfest and Big Run events. They're just done with content updates.
As I see it, the difference is that we now have capable game engines freely available. Indie studios can, for the most part, offer the same quality of gameplay. AAA studios can only really differentiate themselves by how much content they shove into a game.
In particular, this also somewhat limits creativity of AAA games. In order to shove tons of content into there, the player character has to be a human, the gameplay has to involve an open world, there has to be a quest system etc…
I noped out of Destiny during 1, but it isn’t dissimilar from most live games.
Some people want that endless content drip. They are the ones who tend to bounce between live games and so forth.
But for a lot of us? It is about the journey, not the destination. We played Elite Dangerous because we like flying and scooping and not because we want to buy every single ship. We play Warframe because we enjoy the movement and gameplay and not because we need to make our MR even higher. And so forth.
And for them? Hopefully there is new content at some point if only for Bungie’s sake. But even if there isn’t? They are still playing a game they enjoy.
Because back in the before time? I probably logged 30 hours on CTF-Face alone back in UT. I played and beat Freespace 2 at least a dozen times. Hell, I have basically an annual replay of DOOM 1 and 2 that I have been doing for longer than most of you have been alive. Sometimes you want something new to experience. And sometimes you just want to have fun playing a game you like.
You can’t even play without spending hours scrolling Reddit and Twitter to figure out WTF is even going on. Eventually I was spending more time reading about the game than playing it and that’s when I quit. Since then Reddit and Twitter have become an absolute dumpster fire so I was even more glad I quit when I did.
You may be interested in Aska. It asks the question “what if valheim was also a colony sim?”. It’s a bit less chill then Stardew/Portia, but it is a classless, moneyless community building game.
I think they’re falling into the same trap Bioware fell into, whereby they have a couple of critically acclaimed franchises under their belt and are universally praised and all is well, but then obviously that can’t last forever so as soon as the wheels start to wobble a bit, they start over-thinking, over-developing and over-managing their games because the next one needs to be a massive hit, but then what inevitably happens is they end up sabotaging development as they keep throwing out ideas and polishing all the rough edges off. So you actually end up with something that feels under-developed and bland because it’s all designed by committees and middle-managers, and built by underpaid devs on a crunch who just want to be done with it.
Also Microsoft bought them in the meantime, which can’t be helpful.
Little Nightmares 1 & 2 get my vote. Also, Alan Wake 2 is a lot of fun and not exactly a horror game since it doesn’t take itself seriously, but it has a fantastic spooky vibe.
Horror comedies are definitely a thing, but tbh I’d still consider Alan Wake 2 an outright horror even with the lighter stuff! Very spooky elements, with great writing and story crafting. Bonus points if you play Remedy’s other games for the Easter eggs
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