That’s a large part of why, with older games, I prefer to use emulators, even if they’re available to me in other ways. I love the “save state” option. It’s terribly exploitable, of course, but it sure is convenient to be able to save literally anywhere.
The exploitable argument never made sense to me for single player games. I play Fallout, if I wanted anything and everything with a 100ft tall character, every companion, and infinite health. But of course I don’t do any of that because it would ruin my own fun.
I agree, though I think part of why that is is that so few games make failure interesting. The only one I can think of that truly accomplished making failure compelling is Disco Elysium.
Again, I see the desire to savescum as a symptom more than anything else. If you find yourself reaching for the quickload button, it's because the game didn't make it interesting enough to keep going despite something going wrong.
This is at least the case for choice-based situations, where it's incredibly common for there to be an "optimal route" and for the alternative or failure-state to be much inferior in both rewards and enjoyment.
For games where overcoming a challenge is the primary experience, such a beating a Dark Souls boss, then sure. Being able to quicksave at the start of each phase of a boss would be bad since the point is to overcome the challenge of managing to scrape through the entire fight.
I think that's a matter of preference. I don't think many video games have good writing (even compared to a lot of casual popular "beach read" type books), so I get my story telling from however many audiobooks I can squeeze into 2x 40-50 hours a week. I want challenges in games and I want distinct fail states to punish failure.
The issue from a design perspective is that many players have a tendency to optimise the fun out of the games they play. Meaning that if there is a fun thing to do that you carefully made for them to enjoy but there’s an unfun thing to do that wasn’t the point but is a slightly more effective strategy, many players will find themselves drawn to do the unfun thing and hate playing the game, whereas if they had only had the option to do the fun thing, they would have done, wouldn’t have cared in the slightest about the lack of a hypothetical better strategy not existing and loved the time they spent with the game.
Good game design always has to meet people where they are and attempt to ensure they have a great experience with the game irrespective of how they might intuitively approach it.
So… Not having ways for players to optimise all the fun out of their own experience is an important thing to consider.
I’m this person and god do I wish I wasn’t, sometimes. So many games have been way less interesting than they could’ve been for me because for me, fun is learning to play the game well. I’m not sure what frustrates me more, the way people who don’t have that attitude say “I play games to have fun” as if I don’t, or me looking at the recent LoZ games as failures design-wise because they’re too easy to cheese.
I definitely lean this way too, though I’ve become better able to step away from that mindset in games I want to enjoy without it.
I think part of what has helped for me is, having an awareness of that tendency, I now try to actively feed or restrict it.
IE, I play a lot of games where that is the intended fun experience. Stuff like Magnum Opus (or any Zachtronic’s title), Slay the Spire (or other roguelikes), Overwatch (or other competitive games) are all designed from the ground up for the fun to be in playing the game at the highest level of execution possible (some more mechanically others more intellectually.) I try to make sure I’m playing something like that if I feel like I’m at all likely to want to scratch that optimisation itch with that gaming session.
Otherwise, when playing games where that isn’t really the point, I find it easier to engage with the intended experience knowing that if I want to do the optimisation thing I could switch to something that is much more satisfying for that, but I also try to optimise how well I do the thing the game wants. If it’s a roleplaying game, I might try to challenge myself to most perfectly do as the character would actually do, rather than what I might do, or what the mechanics of the game might incentivise me to do. Often that can actually lead to more challenging gameplay too as you are restricting yourself to making the less mechanically optimal choices because you’ve challenged yourself to only do so where it aligns with the character.
Diablo 4 was a perfect example of this. People were optimising their run to the end then complaining about a lack of content within a week. Then there’s people like me who spent a good 60 hours already with plenty of stuff still to do as I’m enjoying my journey.
One of the more important skills of good game design is to understand that whenever your players are complaining about something, there is something wrong that you need to identify and address whilst also recognising that it’s rarely the thing the players think is what’s wrong (as they just see the negative end result) and that they tend to express those complaints as demands for the solution they think is best to what they think the problem is.
In this case players are yelling at Blizzard “There’s not enough content!” when in fact, as you’ve observed, there actually is plenty of content, it’s just (seemingly, I’ve not actually played it myself to say for sure first hand) that Blizzard made it too easy to optimise your way past all of that content as a minor inconvenience on your way to, uh, nothing.
The answer to the problem is twofold. One you need to plug those holes in your balance so players are no longer incentivised to optimise their way past actually playing and enjoying your game (now I talk about it I think I vaguely remember reading an article that Blizzard are doing exactly that and having a hard time cleanly pitching the benefits of it to the player-base, which is why you also need to.) Two, try to put the horse back into the stable by now, sadly, actually having to create the end game content that players have bursted their way through to because your game design unintentionally promised it would be there (or just write those players off as a lost cause. Which seems like a dreadful idea as they are the ones who were the most passionate early buyers of your product…)
Alternatively… If they’d caught these issues before release (which is often, though not always, a matter of giving the developers and designers the resources to do so) they could simply have caught those issues of optimal builds being too powerful for the content and adjusted either or both to be a better match and ended up with a title that players liked more than they will like the harder to make version Blizzard now needs to turn Diablo 4 into (not to mention, that the work they need to do to introduce worthwhile end-game content could have just gone to a paid expansion for their more well regarded release instead.)
But then the Bobby Kotick’s of the world are boastfully proud of their complete inability/unwillingness to think about the development of their games in that way so here we are…
My true desire was for this town to never have a direction or goal marker, not even once. It’s intellectually offensive. Who do you have to be thrust a map marker under a free person’s nose, saying "Here is your goal. You’re too lazy and stupid to figure it out on your own, and I am not without mercy towards lesser minds, so I’ll do the work for you. Go there. Go and don’t forget to thank me for choosing your goal for you. Love, The Powers That Be.
Oh you died? Here’s a debuff. Oh you thought you could save scum to get around the debuff? Ha! That debuff is on all your saves.
Why? We’re Russian devs. Life is brutual and hard and so should this game.
And for those who don’t want to play it, but still want to experience its world and themes, HBomberguy made a fascinating 2-hours video essay about the first game: Pathologic is Genius, And Here’s Why about the first game.
The only time I agree with this is with aircraft. Aircraft are extremely vulnerable to small arms fire in real life. But for whatever reason games decide they have the same health as a tank or submarine.
I mean, Battlefield usually has aircraft survive tanking a direct hit from AA rockets, which isn’t very fun to play against. It usually leads to exactly what happens when you join a BF lobby: 1 guy hogging an attack helicopter all game with a K/D of like 145/3. Even when players pick Engineer, the kits are too specialized to provide meaningful ways of dealing damage to both land and air vehicles, forcing you to generally focus on only one. Which are you going to kit for, the land battles, or that one guy that obliterates everyone when he has the heli but can’t do anything against all the other vehicles in the lobby?
Planetside 2 is even worse. There’s a whole AA tank turret you can unlock, and it hardly does damage to anything besides the smallest fighter, and has a spread like a blunderbus.
Infantry have an AA lock-on option that basically works only at point blank and takes a ridiculous amount of time to actually lock. Even the smallest aircraft take 3 or 4 hits to actually die, and that’s only if they don’t have fire-suppression which heals back a third of your craft’s health.
Complain about it and all the flyboys come out the woodworks crying that AA should only be a deterrence, rather than a serious threat. Oh, and skill issues (while fly boys are the ones who farm infantry by hovering above lock-on range abd spam rocket pods).
Don’t forget the freaking colossus, an unobtanium railgun which still won’t one hit liberators or composite ESFs. It’s ridiculous.
But to be fair, skill gap is a huge thing. New pilots get utterly obliterated, while skyknights or good lib/galaxy crews are basically immortal and make aircraft look a little less fragile than they are. And stuff like the A2A lockons being so mediocre doesn’t help.
Also, aircraft in Planetside 2 are all more like attack helicopters, not really “fly by” bomber-droppers like in some other games.
Yeah, agreed. The vehicle whores in BF are awful. You either get a clown driving the vehicle into the convergence of 7 AT/AA weapons and just sitting there getting everyone in the vehicle killed in 2 seconds or you get the unkillable whore who takes hit after hit after hit and won’t die. Not much in between. Really most vehicles are way over-armored in BF, one or two good AA missiles or AT hits should disable or destroy anything, but it’s a game so the vehicle campers get to do what they do.
Part of the issue is the Battlefield flight model, at least in the past, was really shitty. It was an incredibly arcady system where you really can’t travel quickly or be agile. Helicopters in real life can avoid being shot. Helicopters in Battlefield can’t, so they need to survive being shot instead.
There are better games out there that don’t have this issue. Squad helicopters can still take more shots than they should, but they can all be taken down with enough small arms fire (if you hit the right spots). The light helicopters can only take something like 3 5.56 rounds, but they’re really agile and a good pilot doesn’t get shot.
there’s a common last name in some Sioux heritage… Killsenemy and a bunch of years ago a lot of American Indians with the last name were getting their accounts banned but the pale people with the same last name we not.
probably due to the n8v way of pointing out it’s KillsEnemy
Kind of dumb to set the auto-reply to a Welsh text, you’d expect that people needing the services of a Welsh translator won’t be able to understand the text.
For those who wonder, yes, this is OK according to the community rule 6.
Talking about piracy is OK. What is forbidden is directly linking to it. Mainly for legal reason, not because we condemn it.
Nonetheless, OP asked for permission beforehand, which is nice. Authorization was of course given.
Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. Owns Rockstar Games, Zynga and 2K. So if that’s all their games, it includes at least these: Bioshock series, Borderlands series, Civilization series, Grand Theft Auto series, Mafia series, Max Payne series, NBA 2K series, PGA Tour 2K series, Red Dead series, WWE 2K series and XCOM series.
Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the GameBoy Color in the mid-90s. I got to the second temple, and was totally stuck - to progress I needed to learn to jump, which I inferred was in this temple, but I just couldn’t figure out where it was.
Wandered all over the available map, which of course was constrained due to lacking the jump skill and other story-driven tools. Nothing.
Finally bought a game guide, which explained to me that I needed to bomb a wall in one room in the second temple to progress. It was indicated by a small crack, a staple in Zelda games but invisible to me in my first experience with the series.
The cherry on top was that by that point, I didn’t have any bombs to break the wall, and I recall that I didn’t have the ability to buy or acquire any and had to restart the game to progress past the point where I was stuck.
After that point, Zelda: Links Awakening became one of my favorite games of my childhood. It is hilarious how much frustration it caused me before that realization.
Some games really do depend on learned conventions from previous games which can feel a bit unfair to the uninitiated. It’s a double edged sword of avoiding too much tutorializing vs alienating newcomers.
Yeah, well, the original Zelda flagged bomb spots even less, so...
It's weird to me that Simon's Quest gets so much grief for this when Zelda 1 and 2 (and particularly the localized version of those) were full of that exact "defer to the guide" nonsense.
In fairness, some of that stuff comes from trying to play older games out of context, since a lot of tutorializing used to happen in the manual, but not on any of those NES examples.
I’m playing Oracle of Ages for the first time in a while, and it is not great! The level design is flawed. The eighth dungeon is a a dark room, some ghosts, and a hint owl that tells you to “attune your ears to the sound of sword on stone” which, right, standard Zelda fare, good of them to make explicit the reminder. But none of the walls clank! You need to push one of the non-pushable statues out of the way, in the dark, to even expose the bombable wall. I went over the whole place twice, and then thought “oh maybe they’re doing a cool metapuzzle thing and I’ve got to leave the dungeon and bomb a new entrance” so I went out and tested the whole area with my sword and then bombed everything in case I was just misinterpreting the clank sound.
The underwater dungeon had the interesting raise/lower water level mechanic, but I explored in loops for an hour before looking up where to go next. I’m not saying it’s supposed to be easy, I like a challenge, but it felt like the layout was deliberately withholding information, which is bad design.
The Long Hook is an upgrade for the Switch Hook. The improvment is marginal and the puzzles that require it feel confusing (I finally have the tool for this but it’s not working (before you know about the L2 version)), forced (this is the same puzzle but the anchor object is two tiles further away) or frustrating (oh of course I was supposed to know about the offscreen anchor).
The Long Hook has an entire dungeon dedicated to it.
It seems all my fond memories are actually from Oracle of Seasons. I wonder if they had parallel teams working on them.
I sorta had the same problem with Ocarina of Time. Was stuck in the Deku Tree basement. Didn’t know you had to use a stick with fire to burn cobweb. I thought the game was broken and was thinking about returning the game until I accidentally solved it by fucking around. Not sure if Navi explained it or not, but my English wasn’t very good when I was 10 and the game didn’t had my native language as an option.
When I was 5 or 6, my grandmother got a NES and three games. One was Crystalis.
Me and my two cousins played the game in turns, and we eventually got to the first boss, which was quite an achievement because there are puzzle elements to the game.
We could not beat this boss. Several years later, I have my own NES and I borrow Crystalis. I’m pretty sure I got to that boss again and realized something. Hitting him produced a sound that no other monster had. It sounded like hitting solid glass. I finally intuited that I wasn’t strong enough and leveled up to level 3, and wouldn’t you know it, I beat the boss.
It’s one of my all time favorite retro games. It was so ahead of its time. Worth playing if you’ve never tried it.
Back then on my GBA I got stuck in a Zelda Oracles dungeon for quite some time until I looked up what I was supposed to do. Turns out there was a hint, I had read it, but it was mistranslated and was garbled in my language.
It’s supposed to tell you running makes you jump farther. Translated text doesn’t mention jumping and instead sounds like a weird nonsensical idiom about “travelling far”. Specifically travelling in the sense going on a trip, not just going from place A to place B.
I had a similar problem with ocarina of time (and lemme tell you having to run around in not one but multiple times was a… blast…)
It was the first Gannon fight where you shoot the paintings… I’d never played a Zelda game before and it took me ages to give up and look it up (thankfully this was after the internet was born, and walkthrough sites were all over)
I got stuck in the first dungeon, because one room required pushing two blocks together but I didn’t even think any of these blocks could be pushed at all!
Rimworld definitely makes it harder when you’re doing well. You can control the parameters a bit though in the storyteller settings. It depends on your colony’s wealth, number of people, how long it’s been since something ‘bad’ happens (colonist dies or gets injured), etc.
This is advice I’ve given to new Rimworld players, and I hope it was helpful. The game (on most difficulties) is itching to give you the next “scenario.”
Building your wealth in valuable equipment is not very good at the start of the game, because your town’s silver value will go up much faster than its defensive/offensive capabilities. You end up putting a target on your back for raids.
Better to build a surrounding wall and set up trap corridors than to worry about getting everyone a gun.
I’ve had success doing that too. Buttload of traps. The raids that will circumvent your traps are definitely a problem though. Also the raids that just have a bunch of grenadiers can destroy your defenses in no time.
I willing to bet the new console isn’t significantly better hardware (which was already outdated when the Switch released), but just made to have a system the didn’t already have emulators for it. The Switch emulators work perfectly (better than the console). The new one probably is focused specifically at preventing them from working and not being a better device for consumers.
That website was really tempting… until I remembered that these run on AA batteries and don’t have gyro or a touchpad. M$ really selling an 85$ controller without the features of the 50$ ps5 controller
Edit: apparently dualsense are 75$ now?? Wtf. and apparently they’ve never been 50$? Just discard my comment
Its actually a plus for me. I don’t want to use proprietary batteries and rather use standard AA sized (rechargable) batteries. They can be charged with any battery charger, you can have multiple of them and each pair lasts much longer than any builtin battery. I agree on the other parts for missing gyro and price though.
Yeh this one cost me £4 and came with a recharchable battery pack. I’ve always used my controller wired (playing on PC) but now maybe I’ll try wireless!
If latency was an issue for you, I can assure that its not even for competitive gaming. I played years with friends Fighting games in a competitive manner (offline) and since 360 days it was wireless. And in general with modern controller and batteries, a pair lasts for me at least a week if no longer, when I play at least 5 hours per day. Can’t beat that! Replacement is also cheap. Good if you don’t want to rely on original batteries in the future.
Nah I’ve never had issues with latency and don’t play anything competitive I’ve always just prefered wired to be honest. My favourite controllers were the wired 360 controllers that got rid of the massive bump at the back and were a really nice weight. I wish they did an official modern wired only version.
100%! I love controllers that use AA’s. So much easier to replace the batteries. I’m dreading the day I need to go hunt down replacement batteries for things like my DS, 3ds, Playstation controllers, etc. It’s probably not hard to find replacements. But it requires more work than just whipping out some rechargeable AA’s and calling it a day lol
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