I agree with the other user who said it’s a writing problem e.g. choosing the immediacy of end of the world plot device. Unless it’s done with very specific circumstances, like Overcooked 1 where the first level is the Spaghetti Monster Apocalypse and then you jump back in time through a portal. I think Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a good example of this exact problem the article raises though. It’s a relatively short game, but there is no end of the world. There are 2 major events, your destiny as the Arisen to fight the dragon that killed you, and the in-world politics of a government and some corrupt individuals working to prevent this event for their own plan.
I mention this game primarily because it uses a mechanic that many completionists tend to dislike - there are “timed” quests. Not all of them, usually ones that make sense to run out of time on (but again, not all of them.) So for example, at one point there is a quest to attend a masquerade ball, which is a permanent main story quest until you choose to attend. This is the exact issue the premise of the article brings up, where time is infinite until you decide to continue.
And yet, at the same time, there are a few quests where you may encounter a random NPC who is asking for help for someone who goes missing, and if too many in game days pass by, well… They die.
Ultimately I had other pacing issues with the story, but I did really enjoy how it goes about “solving” urgency when an in-game world timer exists. I’ve never been the biggest fan of time-managed items, (for example, raw potato, ripened potato, rotten potato over the course of 1-3 days), but Dragon’s Dogma 1 and 2 both did it fairly well since the items that do expire 1) make sense, it’s food, and 2) are in fair abundance. It helps solve the hoarding of your items, gives you a little extra money if you sell it as the right phase, and allows for varied item combinations as well (raw+item = curative, ripe+item = stamina, rotten+rotten = oil for lantern or status effect combinations).
I think really the issue just comes down to what is fun gameplay mechanics? Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu for PS2/Gamecube had timed levels, a mechanic that makes sense for a game centered around saving people before they kill hostages. Star Ocean had an in game timer matched to clocks, so the only way to stop the timer was to turn off the game. After (24?) hours, it’s game over. Quite frankly… timed mechanics are usually seen as gimmicky and are not very popular - they may have moments of appreciation, but I’m not sure if it’s a beloved mechanic.
Which in turn results in, “I have you now Spider-Man! In just 8 hours my bomb will blow New York to high heavens!” And then the player goes to help every child get their balloon back before the main story progresses.
This approach is so common in RPGs it’s like dwarves with Scottish accents; a better question to ask would be whether there’s an RPG that doesn’t do it - one that hurries you up instead?
I mean…Dark Souls is the obvious answer, but that’s almost a different subgenre of RPG. Dark Souls does have side quests, but they are obscure and often incidental to the main quest. They also skirt this problem by having “time” be a loose concept in the lore - in every game, the world is in the process of slowly ending, in a literal way that fucks up the flow of time.
In Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, the world is ending, and the 13-day timer is very real. You basically get told “do as much as you can before the world ends” and let loose. So there’s urgency AND side questing.
And of course you have the opportunity to spend that time doing things that are completely irrelevant to making progress, like collecting silly outfits and forcing Lightning to wear them so that Hope can laugh at her.
Honestly, toughest part of Baldur’s Gate 3 is recognizing how much there is to do despite the fact that you literally have specific characters haranguing you to move the story forward (I’m looking at you Frog Wife, we’ll get to your fucking Creche when I’m ready!), which makes you feel like maybe there’s a time limit. First playthrough I missed massive amounts of the game because I felt rushed by the characters in my party.
On the other hand, maybe there does need to be a time limit so the urgency is real? In the original Fallout, on release, you had something like 100 in-game days before The Master found Vault 13 and it was game-over. They later removed this because it was seen as too difficult… but I actually dislike that it got removed. Maybe change how long the player is given, but still, give them something to press that urgency as an actual, real, urgent thing.
Never update the firmware on devices you have no issues with (if you have the choice). I learned that the hard way when I updated my LG B2 this year and now it has VRR flicker at any framerate below its refreshrate… And ofc I can‘t downgrade.
Updates for big corporate stuff rarely come with useful features or improvements anyway, just with more ads.
I really like my Playdate, and I say this as someone who was very critical of it before it came out ("No color or backlight? Only A and B buttons? Why would anyone pay $200 for that?) and received it as a gift from my very intuitive husband. I am still very critical of the fact that there is no backlight, but the damn thing is so cute and charming. I like playing games on it.
I’m very disappointed that the dock just got shelved and won’t be released. Now I have to make my own or buy an Etsy one. :(
I like the concept of the playdate. I even like the little gimmicky crank. I don’t like the non-backlit screen. And the price is a deal breaking barrier to entry for me.
Make this thing $60, and put a decent color screen on it, and I’m sold.
“Since the beginning, the number one question from Playdate owners has been: ‘When will there be another Season?’” says Greg Maletic, Playdate project lead.
I’m pretty sure it was ‘why is it so damn expensive’.
Because it has a library of interesting and innovative exclusives, making use of an unusual control input. Whether that makes it worth it or not is personal preference, but you can’t disagree that it offers something unique.
Because they are different devices serving different purposes. The r36s is a portable emulator that'll run games from different consoles; the playdate is a portable console that runs games made specifically for the playdate.
eurogamer.net
Aktywne