You want someone to test your games for ways to break it? I know just the guy!
“Hey there, it’s Josh. Today we’re checking out The Milgram Experiment. Thank you devs for the complimentary game code. This is a horror/moral choice simulator. And we all know how trustworthy MY morals and choices are! But enough about that, it’s time for NEW GAME!!!”
20 minutes later
“Well, everything’s on fire. Everyone’s dead. And the frame rate is a staggering 3 frames per year! So that seems like a great place to call it a day. I hope you had fun, I know I did, and I’d like to thank the devs for this copy of their broken game. I’ll see ya next time!”
I do admire his line of reasoning. Just every time. Like I used to do silly things in the sims and theme park, but his natural curiosity is next level. HOLD PLEASE.
I think that all comes down to how the travel, visual appeal, and POIs are handled. As well as a personal interest in the gameplay loop. The following are my general opinions on a few games for why I think they do or do not work.
Daggerfall would be way too big, because the POIs are few and far between and there is no visual interest between, but it worked because it had fast travel.
Each of the successive TES games had more visual interest to them and wel spaced POIs and I spent a lot of time walking on first playthroughs without fast traveling anywhere.
Similarly No Man’s Sky could seem too big at first blush, but if you like the gameplay loop it’s infinitely fascinating. For anyone wanting to move further in it’s also helpful that there are gates to help make large jumps, without them being a requirement to enjoy things.
Cyberpunk 2077 was very visually interesting and had a ton of POIs and was fun to traverse on foot and in a vehicle. I thought the size was fantastic on my first two playthroughs. The third time the badlands areas got a little frustrating though.
Stalker and Stalker 2, are very fun to traverse by foot for me despite being very large. They are visually very interesting, especially 2. There are plenty of things you can stumble on and explore. In fact on my first playthrough of Stalker 2, I didn’t even realize it had a fast travel option for over 60 hours because I didn’t feel the need to look for one to use. Loved the huge size of those.
WoW was horribly oversized, as are many MMOs. WoW was(and imo still is despite many upgrades since I played, just not a fan of toony looking games) completely uninteresting visually, had no “on the way” POIs and had no motivation to look around. Long travel was a chore on top of a burdensome gameplay loop. I hated WoWs size. It felt big just because it would take people longer to play. I can’t express how fucking boring it was to me. And exploring had zero reward. I remember wandering into the water and swimming for like 30 minites to get behind some massive tree or something (all I remember was it was a brown gradient that’s how dull the visuals were) and I get behind it and there was fuckall. That was the last time I played I think. More brown gradient and uninteresting light blue water gradient stretched off into a foggy white gradient. Fucking hated WoW but especially its size. MMOs like that are the equivalent of having a rail shooter that’s more train ride simulator than shooter. It works for other people, I just couldn’t stand it.
Outward is a fantastic game but it’s world feels a little too big sometimes. I don’t really enjoy wandering it that much even though I enjoyed the game on the whole. Just felt I got to the point of sprinting from one objective to the next because I was tired of traversing the map.
So it’s really game dependant imo. If they nail some key aspects, size doesn’t seem to matter.
Nah, Fromsoft has great vibes. But the worldbuilding and story is all deliberately obscured because of Miyazaki’s love of sci-fi he couldn’t properly read. That makes it a trove for obsessives but it can’t really be called good.
It’s definitely good and it is done in a way that can only be done in video games. Too many video games depend on passive exposition instead of finding actual lore in the world.
Do you consider it being “spoonfed” to you when you read a book and the plot and everything is just written down?
Do you consider it positive that you have to “work for it” if every fifth word is written in Chinese and you have to translate them?
Making it hard to understand does not make it good. Making it easy does not make it bad. Is there an aspect of it you like that isn’t just that it’s hard to understand? Because that’s all you mentioned.
Right, so if making the plot and lore obvious in a book is fine, it’s also fine in a game. Using pejoratives like “spoonfeeding” criticises this without giving any reason.
From games are particularly bad because most of the lore is on item descriptions that are often themselves locked behind random drops and easily missed questlines. This is not good world building, this is purposefully obscure world building. People mistake “hard to put together” for quality, but it’s the opposite - making this stuff harder to get makes it worse, because players are less likely to get it! If you feel too communicate the lore to most players, that’s not good!
I hope you don’t mean Baldur‘s Gate when you say Larian and BioWare. edit: downvotes seem to forget that the Forgotten Realms worldbuilding wasn’t done by the licensed games.
Of course she won; she had a literal second set of hands to help her. It’s the same reason that Goro is the best character in MK. I obviously never win when I play as Goro, but that’s because everyone else is cheaters.
/s
I wish Steam would put the 3rd-party requirements nice and obvious above the buy button. Along with "uses AI content", "in-app purchases" and "always online requirement" banners too. And more too, every game should be shamed before users get to the buy button.
Best advice would be to forget it exists. There are actually thousands of other games out there that are almost exactly like Battlefield, I doubt the Next New Thing™ will be worth giving up a little bit of sanity over.
That’s fair. Battlefield is the most basic of all three. COD being even more basic with the elimination small maps. They all have a class system, military assets, and the same basic concept of teams. The difference is in the realism/depth of how far you want to go. Now, what OP is asking for is not practical from a business standpoint. You need deviation to separate your product. So there is going to be that deviation to the point of it being worthwhile to compete with the battlefield. But never to be what OP is asking for. It isn’t smart business.
Sometimes, the only way for players to get the developer’s attention is by doing something drastic like that. Not always, but many times. Because developers and publishers think Steam Review Scores are important for game sales (and I mean, they are, but maybe not as much as they seem to think).
Sometimes this comes from players in a different language complaining about bad translation or something.
Review Bombing, the term, is almost used to discredit when people have negative sentiment for something, and does nothing to explain why players may be doing it. Sometimes it is warranted, sometimes it isn’t. But most people are going to read that term and think “Ah, its just a bunch of whiney children,” only to later feel frustrated at the things those negative reviews were talking about.
Why bother with ethics or morality? I’ve been pirating what I can half of my life now, just because I’m a poor and stingy bastard. Let people with finished mortgages and nice cars pay those companies.
Yes, that’s true, poor people just want to have some fun, but society try to make it wrong, you need to follow all the guidelines of morality. But nobody talk about rich people destroying the world, spending on luxuries, exploring workers, and doing this kind of crap with the gaming industry.
I’ve been playing Ratchet & Clank (something-or-other-about-booty) via RPCS3 on my Steam Deck, and I’ve been loving that! Totally forgot R&C got their start on PS2. Thanks!
The hell does "piracy against big companies" even mean?
Man, pirate what you can't afford if you must, just... you know, be honest about it. I'm always annoyed by people doing the thing they wanted to do anyway and presenting it as activism. That's not how that works.
For the record, while I think there's plenty to be critical about in modern gaming, "DLC", "game has a launcher" and "game is ported from other platforms" are not that. "A game I played on the PS3 was too expensive when I wanted to rebuy it" is somebody giving you bad value up front, not some ideological stance you're taking.
For the record, I also didn't buy it because I also didn't think their launch price was right. In fairness, it has since been on sale for 30 bucks multiple times, which is a lot more reasonable.
And again, I'm not saying don't pirate it. Do what you want. Just don't be weird about it.
It's a "me" problem in that "I" think the indies vs AAA lines are increasingly inconsistent and nonsensical. "I" also find the concept of "pirating against" to be extremely disingenuous, which is why there is a whole post explaining that after the line you quoted.
There are levels to coop. Of course in something like Chained together you have to wait because your character is literally chained to the other character. But I think most people would agree that Valheim is designed with coop in mind. If someone goes to the toilet others can still collect wood, expand the base etc. The more open-ended the game is the less it becomes a requirement to stop the game for everyone else.
That is of course if you’re not some kind of a coop purist. If you are then there’s no room for nuance here and this discussion is irrelevant.
If I recall correctly, Starcraft 2 has a pause in online match. Other players get pause screen and can unpause the game. It all comes down to both(all) players agree on pause, and can be useful if correctly implemented.
Payday 3, if all players enter the pause menu, the game actually pauses. Anyone can exit the menu at any time, and re-enter it - which again pauses the game, if all other players remain in the pause menu.
It’s nice because it lets players loot and plan while others are away, but if they too need to afk, the team isn’t screwed by a guard coming around a corner with nobody to react.
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