I hate when games are open world just cause. I only ever enjoy an open world when there’s an insane amount of lore like in Skyrim or Fallout, but in most games I prefer a linear gameplay or semi-open (Mass effect, Dragon Age)
At some point something happened and literally every game has to be open world now 😭
A Plague Tale is an incredible example of what can be done with a linear design. Both Innocence and Requiem were amazing.
Open world games like the Witcher 3 leave the player with this really weird interaction with plot urgency. I’m looking for someone but just barely missed them? Hurry to the next town so I don’t miss them again? But then zero consequences when I ignore that quest for twenty levels.
And that Halo game I can’t remember what it’s called, but there’s an open world Halo game and it’s awful.
The biggest problem in that game, and in general, is the fact that, yeah it’s an open world game, but there isn’t really a lot to do, so you have to run around through the level, which is usually boring, to get to the actual next bit of the game.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they just teleported you to the next bit. Then the open world aspect could be played around with on your terms, but you could also just ignore it if you wanted. But they never do that because they’ve made an open world, and they want you to look at it.
While I don’t mind openworld games, they definitely feel off, esp. with regards to the main quest. Can’t save the world, gotta get this granny laid.
One of the only games with a open world that actually REQUIRED it for the game to make sense is Paradise Killers. It’s a detective open world game on an island. The open world makes a lot of sense, because a detective has to find their clues. It’s not a detective game if there’s a counter of “clues found” or there’s a linear progression. The game never tells you that you’re done finding clues. Like a real detective in a real open world, you have to decide whether you’ve seen enough.
I mostly dislike open-world games because of the lazy travel systems. Either you have to run everywhere or you free fast-travel from any point, too any point.
There is no middelground.
I miss games like Morrowind, where you not only had to pay for fast-travel, but it functioned more like an actual transportation system. Like, you had to go to this city and take a Strider to that town and then a boat ride to get to your destination.
Giving the world some infrastructur and natural money drainers helps with immersion and facilitates the need to go do some side-quests every now then. You get fast-travel, but you also get to see the world that was build for you. And you don’t run around as the richest douche in the world by level 10 with the best gear available because nothing costs anything.
Bethesda skipped this aspect entirely back in Oblivion and never looked back. Making your characters golden gods from the get-go, with no reason to interact with anyone or do anything except screwing around and collecting trinkets.
There’s more to it, ofcause, but this is the biggest pet-peeve I have.
Here’s one I genuinely love and hate at the same time. In Dark Souls and Elden Ring, you drop your souls/runes (currency) on the spot where you last died, and if you die again before recovering them, they’re lost forever. You get souls and runes by killing enemies and generally progressing, so this leads to some interesting scenarios.
One one hand, it incentivizes you to spend your currency (to minimize risk of losing it) instead of just sitting on it, forcing you to make decisions on how you spend it, and whether to take the risk to save up to get more expensive items or level ups. It also forces you to play very deliberately, since there’s a penalty, but only if you die twice.
But… it makes me scared to progress, because I don’t know what to expect, and I don’t want to risk losing my souls/runes. Unless I have just recently lost everything and I have nothing to lose, I feel pressured to play overly carefully and never take risks and play the game in the most fun way possible, out of fear of loss. And even when I DO die and lose my currency, the freedom to play in risky ways only lasts for a short time, because as I kill enemies I start to build up my souls or runes again, and then I’m back in the same situation of not wanting to lose them.
I think that’s the main reason why I haven’t finished Elden Ring despite getting so close to the end. That overly careful playstyle is not very fun, but I can’t get over that fear of losing my runes in order to enjoy the game more.
The run back to your body helps you build up runes too, where a game where you’re loading a save it reverts progress. The souls style allows death to create progress for people struggling. If you’re dying then you’ll be forced to build runes up and can then go level or upgrade gear.
Usually you shouldn’t be too worried about losing souls though because they’re fairly easy to come by. It’s a bit of a trap in souls games to value your souls too much. There are many ways to farm them that don’t take much time or effort, including just going exploring side content and finding new equipment. Once you level up yourself or your gear a few times, the part you were struggling with will be easier. That’s how Elden Ring especially, but even Dakr Souls, is supposed to be played. If you’re struggling and don’t want to be, just go somewhere else. There’s plenty of content to do.
This is definitely one of the things I originally didn’t like about Souls games that have come to realize is a pretty cleverly designed mechanic. Earning enough souls to purchase something shouldn’t take very long and it if is, then it means you already have what you need to be succeeding in your current area. The ‘git gud’ joke is worn out, but genuinely you just need to learn how to face off with enemies (or run past them) until they stop being scary.
The game will not let you progress without learning how to engage with the systems it presents to you. There are typically several or many viable strategies, you just have to figure out what works for you.
By the time you’re dragging yourself through a toxic poison swamp you’ll realize that your level is just a number and nothing lasts forever.
I have several hundred hours across the 3 souls games and ER, and I totally get that it’s a well designed mechanic, which is why I love it. and yeah, I know that valuing souls too much is a mental trap that prevents me from enjoying the game, but I just can’t shake it in Elden Ring for some reason, despite doing so more easily in souls games. (though, it especially sucks in DS2 because of soul memory but that’s a whole can of worms)
The souls series is one of my favorite game series of all time, and I would definitely not change the blood stain mechanic whatsoever because I think it’s about perfect. Especially with rings of sacrifice (or the weird twigs) and homeward bones to give you chances to mitigate the penalty when you really think you need to. It’s excellently designed and forces you to improve at the game.
Despite that, it still causes me hesitation and demotivates me from playing the games sometimes. I have to be in a specific mood to want to improve at a game, and I’m in that mood less often as I have more things I need to spend my time on, and usually play games just to relax and have an easier time nowadays. I still love Elden Ring to death and it’s genuinely one of the best games ever made (in my opinion), and yet I have a love/hate relationship with death mechanics in these games.
I would like a language learning video game which is set up as a MMO, and you “reverse” level. You start with massive equipment because you need it to be able to fight the learning monsters, but as you get more proficient you get hit less(fewer mistakes) and do more damage (faster language entry) so you can start dropping equipment. So the monk running around in a loin cloth is the goal. All sorts of multi-player interactions are possible around setting up conversations, handling larger readings, etc.
this sounds awesome. I don't know if it's on your radar but there's a game coming out called Newcomer that looks like a half decent language learning video game.
That's the one I was trying to remember, I'd heard about it back when it was just starting out! Unfortunately, it still doesn't support türkçe, and I'm not exactly in the position as a learner to help add it or I'd be all over that :(
Hex based rouge like deck builder. If we’re taking indy gems, this one’s probably a nice Amethyst. Not quite the most polished (the game kind of just throws you in without much of a tutorial and the story’s pretty bare bones), but overall a solid B. If Slay the Spire and Into the Breach are your jams it’ll be right up your alley.
CYOA - Choose Your Own Adventure. It’s a genre for interactive stories where you get to make decisions that affects the story. It’s also a tag on Steam
It was good in many ways. And it expands on dead space in many ways mechanically, it just didn’t follow through in some aspects.
The guns are cool and there’s a very satisfying melee system.
But the melee system is overpowered, which means monsters are less scary. The sound-based stealth sections where you go through rooms full of blind monsters that allegedly react to sound, have the monsters being completely deaf to melee kills, which means you can just walk up to them one by one and clear the room.
And you’re right about the story. The game should have had LORE, but it’s just the bare minimum generic excuse to have a horror setting.
It was just what I understood went wrong with the game.
That it’s a good game on it’s own premise, but when compared to the games it was supposed to be compared with, it just seemed mediocre. It’s just hard competing with an established franchise. Especially one that is as beloved as DS is, not to mention that DS’s own reboot also fell short as the OG games are still as grand as ever.
With exception of the graphics looking a little dated, Deadspace 1 holds up just fine even when compared to newer games. From atmosphere to mechanics, UI and story… It’s all perfectly within parameters for the type of game it is.
I think we’re likely gonna see some of same with the Silent Hill 2 Remake. There’s a lot of marks to hit. Even the old tank controls adds to what makes the game intense and updating the combat system to something less clunky could potentially take away from the game rather than improving it.
It doesn’t really even manage that. It’s not bad, there’s a lot to like, but playing it I ran into a lot of stuff I wish was there, but wasn’t.
The story was one thing, but it completely fails at bulding tension. DS1 fills you with adrenaline at regular intervals, but in Callisto Protocol the second I realized the “sound-sensitive” blind enemies don’t react to the noise of melee combat, it was like all the air went out of the balloon.
That’s a perfect microcosm of the whole game. Really neat ideas, really good execution, but only to 90%. And that last 10% matters. A LOT.
The combat system is great, but it doesn’t lean into it at all. The final boss is just a bullet sponge that makes no clever use of any mechanics, and the game is so obsessed with trying to be DS (and TLOU) with boring stealth sections and puzzles.
You end up spending a lot of time wishing combat was happening.
I feel like a Callisto Protocol 2 that leans into the things worked, and fixed just a couple small things that get near working, could be amazing.
Know what was actually really, really good?
The tie in podcast. Great production value, great voice actors, and really great story, character development and pacing!
I grab Calisto Protocol off Epic, but only because it’s free. I watched some reviews and gameplay footage, and it’s…kinda meh. From what I saw of gameplay, the story is a bit reductive, and, unless they fixed it the melee combat is a bit of a joke.
I think that trying to please everyone is generally a bad idea, especially when it comes to niche social justice issues and identity, because everyone thinks their personal rules are universal these days.
With that said, body type over gender is step in the right direction.
Again, I feel like it would be if this wasn’t just “Gender Binary with feel-good buzzwords to fake inclusivity where little is present”
I just believe that you need more than “If we just don’t say the M-Word/F-Word then we’ve solved transphobia forever” for this to be a proper step in the right direction, as it stands it just feels like “Don’t say Latina/Latino! Say Latinx!” all over again, and we now how well THAT went.
You simply need more than a couple of rainbow pins on your jacket to make meaningful change.
Second this. It’s a puzzle game that is all about communication. One player is in the room that has to solve the puzzle, the other player is in a different room that has the solution to the puzzle.
This is a game that you don’t play being able to look at each other screens.
Just a warning, I’m a wimp and got scared in one specific scene/puzzle. It’s a very minor horror theme, ended up having to have my husband sitting on the floor next to me facing the other way to complete it cos I got too scared. Loved the series though, amazing games.
There’s just not many story mode games that compare to Larians for co-op. Besides take two/a way out, I haven’t found any RPGs that are worthwhile (borderlands was the closest I guess but the gameplay is boring)
Yeah, you’re right to highlight warcraft although I don’t think it’s a clean line with Warcraft between dune 2 and c&c. C&C was probably around 2 years into development by the time Warcraft came out, and my assumption is most of the actual game design was pretty finalised by that point. Though I’m sure some minor influences made their way in, I don’t think Warcraft massively affected the kind of game we got in the end.
But yeah that’s not to diminish the contribution of warcraft to the genre, there’s loads of games that followed copying the Warcraft style of RTS, even as part of the c&c series in the end with Generals.
Towards the end of the decade Total Annihilation would be released and it’s modern day fan made remake, Beyond All Reason, is really good. Sad there’s no campaign though, I really loved the TA campaign
gonna be real, WC1 was not a huge title at the time. I think a lot of people look back, rightly, at WC3 being one of the greatest RTS of all time and then think the whole series was lauded at release, but Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was just okay.
Oh my God this is so much nicer. I was getting so sick of trying to navigate the category and having the same live action free to play games appear every time. I have some games that I can remove from my ignore list now
Absolute size isn’t really in the criteria for a planet though. Pluto isn’t a planet because it shares its orbit with lots of other icy bodies in the Kuiper belt.
Do you mean the Trojans? They’re excluded from the mass calculation of ‘clearing the neighbourhood’ because they’re in a resonant orbit - their orbit is a consequence of Jupiter’s mass.
I don’t know. I don’t think we should make excuses for Jupiter just because of its size. Pluto’s doing the best it can. Could any of us do any better, so far out from the sun?
Thanks to your comments, I went looking at more about Jupiter’s influence on us and read that most of the other planets are more in line with Jupiter’s orbital plane than the Sun’s equatorial plane (which sounds impressive, but maybe only makes complete sense since the planets would have all initially formed from the same disk). Anyway, thanks
That’s really interesting!
I just discovered a theory about the cause of the ‘late heavy bombardment’, which is thought to have delivered water to earth via comets.
Essentially the gas giants all orbited much closer, but Jupiter and Saturn got into resonance and flung Uranus and Neptune way out (and Saturn too). Uranus and Neptune flew out into the path of a heap of ice, and their gravity pulled the ice into an orbit that collided with the terrestrial planets.
There are entire genres that I think in many ways have passed younger gamers by.
Point and click adventures were the biggest thing in the world at one point. The classics are the Lucas Arts entries, like Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis, The Dig (both based on unused Spielberg pitches), the Monkey Island games, Full Throttle, Day of The Tentacle and Loom. You’ve also got Myst and Riven (Riven being the far superior of the two), and my personal favourite, The Longest Journey, which has an absolutely stellar story and really compelling protagonist with a lot of depth to her. Also, positive queer representation in a nineties game, holy shit.
The next lost nineties genre is the space sim. The kings of the genre were Wing Commander and X-Wing/Tie Fighter. Then you’ve got Privateer and later Freelancer. For the Wing Commander games read a summary of 1 and 2, then jump in with 3, the first to feature FMV with Mark Hamill as the player character (genuinely an excellent performance too, he took the role really seriously and saw it as every bit as important a scifi property as Star Wars). John Rhys Davies (Gimli) and Malcolm McDowell also make appearances.
And of course, the classic nineties FPS, a genre that feels very, very different from modern FPS games, though there have been some good attempts to recreate it. You know Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D (the latter does not hold up; the former absolutely does), but also check out Heretic, Hexen, Rise of The Triad, and most importantly, IMO, the Marathon games. These were the precedessors of the Halo series, and they combined really solid action with a genuinely amazing story. It’s the kind of big, high concept that you rarely get in movies, TV shows and games, with a world that the writers clearly put a tonne of thought into, and some characters who will stick with you long after the game is over.
Finally, some stuff that doesn’t really fit any of the above. Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret are isometric action shooters with some fun storytelling and LOTS of explosions. If you get them on GOG be sure to download and read all the supplementary material, it really fleshes out the world and the characters. System Shock probably doesn’t even need mentioning with the recent remake, but the originals truly hold up, especially with the UI and controls polish Nightdive added. Syndicate and Syndicate Wars are very hard to explain, but they’re really fun (That said, I’ll give an even stronger recommendation to their modern spiritual successor, Satellite Reign, which deepened the gameplay significantly while still retaining all of the spirit).
There’s plenty more, obviously, but that’s what immediately comes to mind as worth checking out.
Oh yeah, the Crusader games were fun. They probably also aged well. OK, their controls are really annoying and weird, and you kind of have to “cheat” a bit in that game at some points (e.g. by shooting an enemy outside of the screen, so it can’t shoot back, otherwise some situations are really hard). But yeah, fun games, great action, many explosions and mayhem. And since it’s isometric 2D graphics there’s nothing really bad about them either. Except maybe for resolution or aspect issues. Also good sound/music.
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