I had an idea of a game where you played as a photojournalist documenting the brutality of a near-future totalitarian regime. There would be elements of stealth because you’d have to evade the police to take your photos and you have pretty much no combat ability. You’d use your earnings from selling the photos to gradually upgrade your equipment, maybe starting off with a shitty cell phone camera and working your way up to professional quality full frame SLRs. I’d want it to simulate the workings of a real camera… f-stop, shutter speed, ISO, etc., so you’re challenged with getting good, usable photos in difficult conditions.
You know, that sounds sick actually. Especially if it was more sandboxy than linear, and also had some kind of survival system (pay for food/rent) to add tension and encourage risk taking when snooping around.
This is more or less what I wish Beyond Good And Evil had been. The combat in that game wasn’t good but I liked the idea of having to photograph evidence and getting photos of wildlife on the side to earn some money. It wasn’t nearly as fleshed out as your idea though.
I want to see puzzles that are implemented using the physics engine. And I don’t mean “toss the axe in the proper arc to trigger the gate” physics. I mean “stack the bricks on one end of the seesaw to balance it long enough to make the jump to the next platform”. Or “use the blue barrels’ buoyancy to raise the platform out of the water”.
Yesss and more destruction physics. I miss watching cars crumple and get torn apart like in the burnout games. There was a really old ww2 dogfighting game where the plane wings could get sawn off and you’d see this smoking plane spiralling into the ground while the wing flew off in the opposite direction before the plane exploded on the ground.
Check out Wreckfest. It’s mostly basically rallycross with plenty of damage. The physics is better than in Burnout, afaik. The sequel game was just recently either released or announced.
I think those were mind blowing when I first played hl2, just because real time physics and destruction was novel, but now I think they grind the pacing to a halt. I think they just don’t work in an action shooter IMO.
My opinion is the exact opposite. Narrative games, even action shooters, need to have high action and low action parts in balance. If high action segments are excessive, it can lead to combat fatigue. If low action parts are excessive, the player gets bored and the pacing dies.
Half-Life 2 E1, the “Low Lives” chapter, has probably the most stressful combat in the game because the player has to balance so many things. Shooting the zombies attacking Gordon versus helping Alyx fight. Helping Alyx versus keeping the flashlight charged. Firearms versus explosive props. All of that in oppressive darkness. Combat fatigue sets in. The short puzzle segments, even as simple as crawling through a vent to flip a switch, are opportunities to take a breath, absorb the environment, and prepare for the next segment – especially at the end of that particular chapter, when the player escapes the zombies and has a chance to wind down.
At the same time, puzzles, by their slower nature, are excellent for delivering narrative and player training, and to let the player absorb the atmosphere. Alyx’s first encounter with the stalkers in “Undue Alarm” wouldn’t have had the same emotional impact if the player could just pop them in the head and move on.
In contrast, most of “Highway 17” is just a prolonged vehicle-based puzzle. By the time the player reaches the large railway bridge, they might be sick of driving. I know I was. It’s a relief to finally engage in some platforming and long-range combat while traversing the bridge.
So what are the narrative values of my two examples? The cinderblock seesaw in “Route Kanal” is just player training. A show, don’t tell method to let the player know that physics puzzles will be a factor. It’s also a short break after the on-foot chase, before the encounter with the hunter chopper. In “Water Hazard”, the contraptions serve a larger narrative purpose: they’re the tools of the rebels’ refugee evacuation effort. The player utilizes them like one of the refugees would have.
The best bits of the Half-Life games are the more slow parts. Just taking in the environmental storytelling, solving simple puzzles, etc. Helps to make the more action sequences feel more impactful and intense.
When I was replaying ‘HL2’ around ten years ago, I ran around the whole map looking for where I can get outside of the plot course, especially in the slower parts of the levels. This culminated in me driving the hoverboat up a three-meter-high wooden platform, falling from that platform myself, and not being able to climb up again to get the boat. After which I had to run from the attack helicopter on foot, and swim by myself later on that level.
I use about the same approach in the original ‘Deus Ex’, which I’ve been replaying recently: investigating every nook and cranny, being 100% stealthy, trying to go where the game shouldn’t allow me to be. I actually found an exit from a scripted part of a level where only one path is normally possible — though there was nothing to do outside of that part. The game also gives experience points for getting into some remote or secret places.
I wasn’t expecting this post to bring out this kind of animosity in people. Jesus fuckin’ christ.
Video games are not a public service, there is no such thing as a 100% universally enjoyed video game for a reason. It’s ok that there are different types of video games, folks, be them too hard or too easy for your tastes, it’s kind of stupid to throw these kinds of stones about it.
I mean, is every book supposed to be palatable to everyone? Are we all supposed to feel the exact same way about every piece of art? This is like being mad that Guardians of The Galaxy involved sci-fi and super heroes and wasn’t a WWII documentary because that’s what you’d have preferred to watch.
Some books are written in smaller text than others. Some people have difficulties reading small text. Some people argue the enjoyment of such books is based on the small text. Others disagree and want to be able to experience the book with larger text.
Some texts are too esoteric or hard to understand. Some people argue that the enjoyment of such books is based on the obscure meaning of said books. Others are stupid and should get better at reading comprehension. Git gud, shitter.
Access to color blind mode, input changing, or speciallty is the magnifying glass/fony size change. Dumbing the text down to be more easily understood would be easy mode, dumbass.
Well said, nobody fucks about a book being written too complicated, they just roast readers who don’t understand it while they themself pretend that they understand, after reading interpretations.
Same with games that are hard in my opinion.
And there is a big difference between hard because designed hard, and hard because lazy programmed (stupid hitboxes, glitchy behaviour etc). But same goes for books: a book I would have written would not be hard to understand because it is designed like this, but because I am a confused neurodivergent/ADHS/autism who knows what guy writing my stuff all over the place with dump punctuation.
Games, like movies, are easily consumed but difficult to create. As a result, everyone and their grandma can critique them and publish on the Internet which only further self-selects for the highly opinionated to do so.
But not all opinions are equal. You can be well studied in your field and generally intelligent, but if you don’t have a relevant background in the humanities and the sciences, you can have complex reasoning but without having the depth, the breadth, and the relevance in the analysis.
Case in point the first replier. The analogy is fine and the deductive reasoning is self-consistent, but they didn’t show the relevance to game design. (Ie. Why must the author make the text size bigger for people who can’t enjoy smaller text, and why must the same apply to games.)
That’s why gamers seem to be notorious for having takes that miss the trees for the forest.
(I am aware that I’m very much at risk of committing this very error with my post.)
I’m not trying to disagreeing with you. But that’s the thing, being “good” at a game isn’t among the most important qualifications for insightful analysis which is why gamers tend to make poor takes.
The important qualifications are experience with analysis and formal knowledge in the arts, humanities, and some of the sciences. The YouTuber Noah Caldwell-Gervais is a good example. The guy sucks ass at twitch mechanics (ie. playing games) but he’s extremely well-read and has extensive knowledge on many domains so he makes insightful analysis.
Miyazaki doesn’t even play his own games and probably sucks just as much ass at twitch mechanics but he’s able to consistently direct amazing games because of his extensive knowledge and experience apart from playing well.
I tried Dark Souls, got my ass kicked, tried again, got my ass kicked again, went “huh, guess it’s not for me” and moved on with my life. I truly don’t get this mentality where people think they’re entitled to play a game that was clearly not designed for them.
Welcome to the club! I did the same thing with a meat slicer about 20 years ago. My thumb was flat at the tip of the nail for a long time, but it’s grown back since then.
Turn based games are great for one handed, because you can take your time hitting the buttons. Maybe slay the spire, Inscryption or balatro if you haven’t tried those yet.
I second this is hurt my thumb real bad a few years back. Lot of the old Final fantasy games are great. I ended up most of the way the original VII on the PSX. Lot of the new ones are quick action. Chron Trigger and Earthbound are also good ones as well on the SNES
I did the same! Unrelated to my thumb, but I played through Final Fantasy 4-6 and had a blast. I started 7, but I might be the only person on the planet that doesn’t enjoy it.
Yes! It depends on which Switch games, of course Switch emulation is a slippery slope of diving into drivers, settings and builds. But a lot of games run well!!
Even more surprising was WiiU (since that emulator is quite recent on the scene!), and PS3! WipEout HD: Fury was fun to play!
Little edit: I’ve actually got an article on Eden emulator coming up soon, I interviewed two of the devs, and I’m writing things up now. So if you’re interested in the ‘main’ Switch emulator being built and maintained, then keep an eye out for when I post it! You can just bookmark my author link here and when it’s up, it’ll appear there
the bigger wall with switch emulation on android is that mobile companies are terrible at writing gpu drivers when compared to conventional desktop/laptop graphics vendors. its why for example the older snapdragon gen 2/3 outperform their newer snapdragon elite counterparts in emulation.
theres significantly more setup time on mobile because some of the jank doesnt “just work”
The Snapdragon 865 is the undisputed winner of all for the Switch, even now after so much time has passed. Time will change that, and the community is what drives changes, but it’s definitely a unique scene!
If the SD865 is the undisputed champ does that mean that the Lite version is actually the best for Switch Emulation since that’s the one that ships with SD865?
While it’s outdated, its the divers that make it the better option for Switch emulation! But, with time will come drivers which make the newer upgrades work as well, like 8gen2. Right now, it’s the community support that keeps the 865 being the most stable and the one I’d recommend the most (with Turnip) for Switch emu!
But as for everything else? It’s a weigh up for what is most important to you!
I played 76 a few years after it came out and I thought it was super fun. Idk if it was way worse when it came out or if my standards are just shit but me and my wife loved it
Honestly, I tried it with mates well after release, and it was really grindy and boring. The few quests we did had too much padding and lifeless NPCs, even if the environments were neat. And we were all big BGS fans since Oblivion, yet not overly nostalgic over the old games or anything.
I will say coop always makes games more fun, and AAA tends to skip this.
But there’s also a lot of really awesome 2P coop these days.
Consistent crashing, tons of lag, and lots of additions from BGS that were two steps back for every step forward. Think about what it would be like if half the players at the SBQ disconnected in the fight and make them 4-5 times stronger than when they were last I played (when expeditions were released).
Then you would have quests that gave atoms, the currency you give IRL money to get, that were literally unachievable. The camera ones were the best as they ran for weeks with no camera being available in the game.
There was a raid. Almost no one could do it. The game either crashed or people rage quit.
I wont even talk about Nuclear Winter.
The game is a miracle for what it is but it took a while to be acceptable. Loved the game at one point but now it is too much a reminder of COVID shutdowns.
1 - The first season was already in the south west US, as with… every Fallout game not made by Bethesda.
2 - They are almost certainly going to retcon large elements of New Vegas’ plot and world elements out of existence or into nonsense, as the first season already did with a whole bunch of shit.
They couldn’t even put Shady Sands on the right spot on a map.
They already broke Mr. House’s character and backstory by including him in that rountable corpo discussion.
His… and New Vegas’ backstory in the game are based on House more or less hating all other corpo leaders, determing via statistical modelling that nuclear was was inevitable… and then doing everything he could to build a goddamned ICBM defense shield for Vegas.
He had to act solo precisely because he was kept out of the inner circle of corpos and gov high ups who were much more in the knoe, by the older canon.
But more fundamentally… House has spent almost 200 years looking for the platinum chip, because he was just a few days late in having it delivered, pre-apocalypse.
Why and or how could that possibly happen if he was in the meeting that decided to end the world?
New Vegas as a storyline is literally irreconcilable with the TV show already, its like shitty fan fiction.
The Deus Ex series often have pacificist playthroughs (3rd one definitely does, you can play a pacificist playthrough of the OG game with a few exceptions).
The Age of Decadence has a mostly skill check and conversation playthrough. I forget if it’s fully pacifict though.
It sucks that this is going around too. Because no matter what the “right” choice is the devs are still gonna have to see what should have just been their fun project get thrown around in gaming politic hell
Everyone seems to be more interested in the latest techbro feud so I wanted to highlight what he said about Unknown Worlds staff not being given specifics on what their compensation will be. The statement was quite nebulous on that.
Gods, I hate this culture. Make concrete, public promises to your staff to follow through on your acquisition deal? Nah, can’t have that. Open yourself up to liability by throwing the former execs under the bus, in detail? No problem!
Both are past 100k now! I want to issue a special “fuck you” to all the idiot streamers that tried to kill SKG. And of course a special “go fuck yourself” to PirateSoftware and Asmongold for being fuckwit right wing tools for corporations. You have a special place in my heart as illiterate lapdogs to shitty corporations and right wing shills.
Yep they actively campaigned against the petition and fundamentally misrepresented it.
10 months ago PirateSoftware started a campaign against it starting here-ish: youtu.be/ioqSvLqB46Y
Also 10 months Asmongold did a react video that supported PirateSoftware: youtu.be/AhVsyhjcndw
PirateSoftware refused to acknowledge that he got several things wrong, and even refused to acknowledge it when confronted. He actively bans people with dissenting opinions in his stream so it wasn’t surprising that he refused to acknowledge that he was wrong. About a week ago Charlie (aka Penguinz0) confronted him about it and he still refused respond to basic factual inaccuracies: youtu.be/6sJpTCitKqw
Ross did a video talking about the whole thing last week as well: youtu.be/HIfRLujXtUo
There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the broad strokes. I hope PirateSoftware’s stream keeps declining until he is relegated to complete obscurity. Also, PirateSoftware can eat my entire ass.
Asmonpoop is a moronic bum and people went from “this weirdo is strangely entertaining” to " let me hear what my moronic hobo-idol has to say about this".
It is a little bit like how people supported Drumpf as a joke first.
PirateSoftware is what dumb people thinks a smart person acts like. His audience can’t even pay attention unless he draws boxes in paint. I do understand how he can seem initially likeable, but if you watch him for more than a couple of hours you’ll see his knowledge is shallower than a spilled glass of water.
Still in disbelief people think SKG is going to work. The premise fucking genocides the MMORPG genre. You kill games by implementing this horrible understanding of how games work.
I have never seen more people support games who have no fucking idea how games work and it’s the most frustrating shit ever. Pirate Software is right. It’s not even a debate.
And if a company refuses? They’re dead anyway. This is not well thought out and PS called it out. You have no actionable solution but are calling for one to just appear.
I can literally play WOW private servers right now. I can host my own private server and play it single-player.
What is being required is not complicated or difficult.
If a developer wants to destroy their own project instead of taking the extra week of work it takes to let people locally host then that sounds like a really dumb decision.
No, it’s much more reasonable to make devs put the hosting oprions they use in the code of the game for others to use instead of a community having to reverse engineer the net code and build their own tool.
Your contradictions are destroying your argument dude. This is why nobody takes you seriously.
Lol you not understanding why that can’t happen is what’s sending me. There are so many issues with just the PREMISE of this that you don’t even address.
At what point is a game considered dead? When is a company obligated to provide access? Will the company be legally obligated to release character profiles? If yes, how does one stop third parties from modifying it/cheating prior to hosting? If no, it’s everyone expected to restart ion company death? How will this access be granted or hosted? How long will this need to be available for? Who pays to keep this information hosted for that duration?
There are so many fucking questions unanswered because you seem to think you can just throw fucking LAN ports on a game and it just work. Your brain is stuck in 2004 where all you needed was an IP address and port number. Games aren’t that simple anymore and the ones that are, already fucking have it.
Hold on there buddy! There’s no reason to be derogatory towards hobos like that. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so offended on the internet as to have someone associate my good (user)name with the likes of Asmongold. If you don’t bring that down a notch I’m gonna send the ghost of Woody Guthrie to haunt you until your dying days.
Asmongold does that. Like the dude doesn’t have any real opinions other than what gets views. If he sees the winds changing he’ll pull a 180 in order to take the heat off himself. He also has hoards of followers and youtube minions to make him seem far more centerist than he is. He’s like the personification of the alt-right playbook for dummies.
Asmongold is a megaphone for shitty opinions. Like I posted elsewhere he’ll change his opinion if he gets called out, but the damage was done when he put it on the megaphone in the first place. His take on the “never play defense” is to not have any actual opinions when confronted then just go right back to saying other right wing bullshit.
Hard disagree in my case. But that might be because it’s a new IP. When I play Fallout 4 I can’t stop myself of thinking what was and could have been. I obviously don’t have that with Starfield and found it much more enjoyable
I found Fallout 4 had good gameplay, but the main questline didn’t connect with me at all. I’m currently playing through Starfield at the moment, have like 220 hours playtime, I honestly wish I wasn’t finding it so boring but it’s easily the most bland Bethesda game I’ve ever played.
The story writing seems kinda half-arsed, but my main issue with Starfield is in the environments. Every location feels the same, and the planets are all just barren deserts with a random base and two caves plopped on it. At least Fallout 4’s environment felt hand-crafted, and not just like they rolled three dice.
I thought the main story was pretty enjoyable tbh. I can still remember some side quests really vividly as well, which is a good sign. The batman nod for example, or the 0 g casino. There was a lot of copy and paste, agreed, but the gunplay was fun so I didn’t mind that much. Also I spent hours on ship creation, thatwas cool
every time I got lost in the ship builder, I’d spend an hour on some crazy design, be a piece away from saving it, and the game would just lock up and stop responding to input. Only ever happened in ship builder. I lost like 4 hours to that flippin’ bug!
I like them both, to me starfield just feels like a newer fallout 4, but I also like space and the guns, but at the same time after playing oblivion a ton in highschool all bethesda games just feel like the same thing with a bit less. at least with fallout and starfield you could build up bases and stuff, ive actually been replaying oblivion remastered a ton since I havent really gamed in a long time just because its so familiar but new at the same time after all these years
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