I mean, it definitely helps. The production quality is insane. But the fact that the choices (or mistakes) have actual real impacts on the game going forward are as big as far as I'm concerned. I ended up with my hand being forced into combat early that made an encounter with a potential party member immediately hostile. That sucks, especially since I wasn't trying to do what happened in the earlier encounter. But in terms of a world feeling alive, having it actually react to what you do is pretty damn significant (unless "you're small and irrelevant" is intentional).
It's time developers come to grips with the fact that making choices matter is what makes it a successful game. I'm tired of storylines that don't make any sense except to give you a world to kill people in. Sorry folks, lore is important and that takes writers.
It definitely depends on the game, I’m perfectly happy with a game that has a story to tell, and tells it well. Not everything needs to have branching options and 50+ hour playtime. Some of the best stories I’ve played are short and railroady, WaW and BO1 campaing’s are fantastically interesting and you don’t make a single choice in them.
I don’t think the lack of choices is necessarily a bad thing. The original Doom had no story choices (it barely even had a story) and it’s still pretty good even by today’s standards. Half-Life 1 and 2 pretty much had no story choices as well (there was 1 at the end of the first game) and the first one in particular is considered revolutionizing how stories are presented in games.
What I do think is an issue is when the game presents you with a choice that doesn’t matter. Bioshock Infinite is the first that comes to mind as the game puts quite a few options front and center, but really none of them matter (except the very last one) and the game even implies that the choices deliberately don’t matter because “constants and variables”. Thus those choices, at least for me, detracted from the story because there was never no need to make me make a choice.
In that sense I agree that choices should matter, but I think a better wording is that if you’re going to have choices make them matter or don’t have choices in the first place.
Remnant 2 is brilliant at this and bad at this at the same time! The in-world stories that are told along with the environments are absolutely STUNNING! Everything clicks together so well and a slightly different story is told when re-rolling the map!
Main story cutscenes tell the worst story I’ve ever seen executed. (Worse than Monster Hunter World’s Handler story stuff) I’m glad they’re skippable on another run. Because literally everything is is some of the most classic gaming experience one could have.
There was so much promise in their lore!! I liked N'Erud the best but the rest didn't really lead anywhere other than that you visited, you did something notable, and then you left. Nothing really changed.
I would say if it is all about the gameplay, like Serious Sam or Doom, then the story doesn't need to be that important and dexisions don't need to matter. But if the story is front and center, like Baldur's Gate and most similar RPGs, the story and how choices impact the story need to be well done so it doesn't feel on rails and replaying it is enjoyable.
It gets super confusing when you do stuff in the wrong order though. Missing a clue because you didn’t read the right book or something but then randomly finding the end of the quest and everyone is talking like we know all about it.
Usually it recognizes it. Sometimes it doesn’t though. I’d hope those instances get patches eventually. Even worse though is when something triggers for something you didn’t even do. I’ve had a party member get angry at me for something that I did the opposite of. It’s a pretty solid game, but it’s not totally bug free, which is expected with so much complexity. Who knows, it could have just been a cosmic ray that flipped a bit and not even their fault (though I doubt it).
I doubt that they’re referring to Minthara; you have to make an intentional series of decisions to >!murder a bunch of people!< in order to get her in your party. It’s relatively easy to miss several origin companions if you’re not the type that explores the whole map. And one of the origin characters starts with >!a quest to kill one of the others!<.
I played it a couple of years ago, before a lot of the patches, and still thought it was one of the better games I have never finished.
spoilerThere is this quest line where a character is abducted, raped, tortured and kills herself after you rescue her. Afterwards, the main character and another are on a balcony and smoke, still processing the horrors they’ve witnessed. I had been off the smokes for a few months at that point, but still needed to go outside and do the same.
I uninstalled shortly after. Not out of disgust, I actually appreciated the game making me feel something, but it just felt right to stop at that point.
The whole game has an amazing story, that actually hooks the player’s emotions. It’s fantastic. It’s so refreshing after so many games with lazy writing or voice acting. I also played shortly after release, only experiencing 2 major bugs in my playthrough. I know others had it worse, but it was actually refreshing on that front too.
nasty things people do with AI [trigger warning]> “I went on to this stream because somebody gave me a heads up and I went on and heard my own voice reading rape porn. That’s the level of stuff we’ve had to deal with since this game came out and it’s been horrible, honestly.” Amelia Tyler.
I cannot imagine going into a stream of someone playing a game you have poured your heart and soul into for years, and hear you own voice reading stuff like that
I use jerboa and it is working (I used the toolbar to generate it, but had to fix it because my mobile keyboard is a massive PITA for any corrections and I haven’t had time to find something new).
Anyway, looks like sync and boost are not lemmy-markdown-compatible
JFC what kind of terrible human do you have to be to say something like
"Like, you can say, ‘Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labour,’ right? Or, you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income.
“For them, you know, hearing from their experience, they didn’t feel like they were exploited! They felt like, ‘Oh my god, this was the biggest gift, all of a sudden I could create something, I had millions of users, I made so much money I could retire.’ So I focus more on the amount of money that we distribute every year to creators, which is now getting close to like a billion dollars, which is phenomenal.”
is the same argumentation about stars. 1 in 10’000 people get this status (I just threw random numbers, don’t quote me on that) and the other remaining 9’999 are exploited. So he is justifying exploiting 10k people by gifting one person.
Yes indeed. The PMG video they mentioned in the article dives into that aspect. Highly recommend watching if you want details on how fucked up Roblox is. They also did a follow up video that is great
Honestly, at this point, they should really just save whatever for a sequel. It’s been two years. As a reminder (though there are extenuating circumstances here), Dark Souls 2 was 2014, and Dark Souls 3 was 2016.
I guess the new reality is that it takes six years to make a game and three years between expansions. I think I’d just prefer smaller games and smaller dev cycles.
Armored Core is one of their oldest running IPs and a series I have been playing since 2nd installment. AC6 was without a doubt the best one. Highly recommend.
Why? With a DLC they can expand on weaker areas and introduce interesting advanced mechanics, whereas a sequel needs a lot more groundwork and can’t expand on existing story threads as easily without some repetition.
It’s such a good game that I’d prefer more of it to a sequel, at least right now. Make the sequel it’s own thing that’s not burdened by having to finish all the unfinished stories.
I think it’d be really cool, and they could always make it so that the data never leaves your computer looks at the title and realising it’s EA we’re talking about Oh wait…
And honestly the example you gave is rather a good example of a remake. The PS2 is 20 years old at this point. If the game was well made and the remake/ remaster is well-executed? Why would anyone object to this?
New and exciting games exist. This isn’t an issue. In most cases I’d even say that while money surely is important, in most cases it’s not a lack of money preventing a good game, but rather another issue that might lead to funds running out. If that makes sense.
The current situation is way better than say 25-30 years ago, and those games weren’t exactly trash.
Would be a good one, yes. But currently the trend is getting closer from 1.5 to 1 generation ago
Worst offenders to me are cod, despite a bigger time gap. Force bundling a remake into another live service game that STILL GETS SHUT DOWN AFTER A FEW YEARS FOR THE NEXT LIVE SERVICE.
Yeah, they could’ve done better with the New Game+ for sure, which to me isn’t exactly surprising since it’s their first main line game to have it.
I do appreciate that there are considerable differences to the story on certain replays, but it’s a slog doing basically the same thing every time. I wish there was a bit more variance.
The flying between or into planets/loading screen issue, I think, is entirely due to the pressure from management announcing early, and then a rush to meet the original deadline, and then another rush to meet the Microsoft mandated delay. Fixing it could’ve been worth it, but it would’ve certainly taken an uncertain number of months, which wasn’t worth it to management or microsoft.
I do think it will be remembered fondly eventually just like every other mainline Bethesda game has been, though.
Funnily enough, this is the first time a game’s NG+ actual felt compelling to me with how it’s actually part of the story and the workings of the universe.
Did you try to play stealth my guy. And how much god damn work do I have to put in, how much useless crafting do I have to do so I can just put a silencer on my gun come on man if this doesn’t mean broken what does.
Yeah, my first build was a stealth character, I did it just fine. You’re mostly likely specing your builds wrong for stealth or wearing a million pounds of armor clanking around thinking you’re being stealthy. There’s specific armor pieces meant for stealth, which also help a ton.
The weapon modding isn’t broken. If you find a gun with a suppressor, you can take that off and put it on the same model as yours. I don’t think needing a skill/crafting to make a whole suppressor warrants the game being called broken.
It’s funny how it’s “the game’s are not expensive enough” and not “we don’t know how to manage our or money” or “our profit are too high”. Fuck those capitalists.
Oh the stupid shit head “games are 100 times more expensive to make now” but you sell thousands times more and there no physical media anymore is irrelevant I guess… Assholes…
Whose fault is that, guys? Were those numbers placed on you by a witch’s curse? No. You spent $100M on one game, it made $300M, so you spend $200M on the next game. Games didn’t get twice as hard to make, between those decisions. They didn’t require twice as many people or twice as much time. You’re just treating them like a factory where more capital in means more revenue out.
The original Doom was made in nine months by a team that fits in an elevator. Yeah, it’s simpler than modern games, but they had to make the nearly-unprecedented engine and all their own tools as they went. It’s not like anything’s harder, now. People have basically recreated that seminal title as solo one-week game jam projects. A modern handful of professional computer nerds can pick from a handful of modern high-end toolchains and start banging out content, today.
If the market for video games only supported six-digit budgets - there would still be video games. Big ones, fancy ones, creative ones, whatever. Would they be the spectacles that currently get advertised to death? Nope. But they also wouldn’t produce as many unstable bug-fests as those sprawling mega-projects. Nor would they be announced in 1999, previewed in 2006, delayed in 2017, and launched to middling reviews in 2025.
Studios that aren’t injected with obscene capital and forced to deliver “AAA” money-trees tend to shoot their shot and move on to the next game. That’s how they survived and grew as plucky little private affairs, before some publishers swallowed them whole and turned them into a sequel factory for their breakout hit.
If your games cost too much money to fail, stop giving them more money.
Good, tbh, I think we’ve had to back off Open World RPGs for years now. Smaller scale RPGs can tell a story with far more focus. I think something like Witcher 2 or Baldurs Gate 3 are good examples of balancing exploration and story telling.
Yeah I’ve loved open world games since I first played oblivion as a teenager but being open world isn’t necessarily a good thing in and of itself and being too big often makes you spoiled for choice. Plus I just don’t have time anymore to explore the whole world. For me as long as the story is interesting and it has good systems and mechanics along with new game plus of some kind I can get into a game and play it over and over
I can actually see Horizon working really well as an MMO. It’s already open world, fetch quest-centered with city quest hubs and such. Yeah, you won’t be that one main character, but you could be out there killing robot dinosaurs with friends.
At least two major MMOs have the player being the “main” character, FF14 and WoW both treat the player character (and their friends) as the “hero” (and their party). I’m sure others do the same, but honestly I never get far enough into them to find out.
You’d almost certainly not be Aloy, but that doesn’t mean you’re not the main protagonist of the story in the game.
Another runner played a Mario game on switch using motion controls strapped to his head and feel and then played the in game music on a keyboard at the same time. GDQ was wild this year.
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