Emergent gameplay is a big part of what makes video games unique as a medium. I'd say a good example I've played recently is Death Stranding. One of my favorite games of all time at this point, it really is best and worst described as a walking simulator. Or moreso, a delivery simulator. At its core, you'll take on missions involving the delivery of different amounts and sizes/weights of packages to destinations near and far. Sometimes there are invisible ghosts that want to kill you, sometimes there's visible, inanimate landscape that wants to kill you.
What takes it from 'walking simulator' to 'walking simulator' is the fact that the walking is complex. The smoothness or roughness of terrain can directly influence the stability of your character. Even small rocks can be marginally trickier to traverse than truly flat ground. You may find pavement, dirt, rocky terrain, snow, or deep rivers, which require considerations. You can brace yourself for stability to help, and your movement speed, momentum when changing direction, and whether you're standing or crouching all affect your likelihood to slip or trip. Many items help you to move off the beaten path and find shorter routes, with ladders or climbing rope & anchors allowing the scaling or descent of steep cliffs.
Through experimentation, sliding helplessly down a mountain, and having all your important shit get washed away in a river as you scramble around like an infant, you come to understand your mobility and limitations. Enter: the packages and your hubris. You can accept multiple missions at a time. Some missions require few or relatively light packages. Some ask you to move an amount of goods that ought to be palletized. Through understanding your limitations, and attempting to slap different amounts of cargo on your person, you can possess Icarus and fly as close to the sun as you want.
But, there's more than just your person. You can use floating sci fi wheelbarrows that trail behind you, carrying a large amount of goods, but restricting your ability to use climbing ropes or ladders. You could use a motorcycle, allowing for speedy traversal and some light offroading with small storage on "saddlebags", or even a huge ass truck which affords incredible storage potential, at the cost of a squirrelly and incline averse driving model.
And I haven't even really gotten into all of the equipment or strategies required to handle the "ghosts", whose unique abilities and behavior provide an interesting additional challenge where being caught by one could easily mean the loss of your cargo, or even your life. Even in the big ass truck, you aren't truly safe. The intermittent and locational time-accelerating rainfall means even cargo you haven't dropped or bumped can have its durability rusted away given some time.
Though the game, of course, has a story, it sits alongside a story of the player's experience, limited only by the bravery and recklessness with which you, essentially, don't want to make three trips to the car to bring groceries in, so you load up yourself and two linked floating carriers to carry nearly 1,000 kilograms of cargo, and make a winding, manually waypointed journey through the desolate and oppressive landscape, stopping to deliver parts of your massive load as you come to each post-apocalyptic shelter in your list of deliveries.
Your successes and failures within are unique to the way you chose to plan and execute your trips. Shit, man, I like this game.
Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm: DDA generate some crazy plotlines, full of narrative, twists, and character development. How come no writer has converted a character’s story into a novel, yet?
The Zelda timeline is an interesting example of emergent narrative, at least until recently. Before the Hyrule Historia, fans could see underlying clues of a general history of Hyrule and an order in which the games take place, but developers themselves wouldn’t confirm the existence of a definitive timeline. Even so, the fans speculated endlessly about where the games fit in - were all games canon or only some, was there a split or a unified timeline, and were these the same Link, Zelda and Ganondorf or were they continually reincarnated? Finally the Hyrule Historia gave a confirmed canon timeline with not one but two splits, all games canon, and with confirmation of several reincarnations of at least Link and Zelda. Considering how resistant to doing something like this Nintendo and the Zelda team were at first, I’d pretty well guarantee that the release was in response to the emergent narrative that developed and not something they had initially planned from the outset of the series, especially not before Ocarina of Time.
Why are people pretending baulders gate is the only high selling game with no microtransactions as of late? Off the top of my head Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom both released in the last year or so, no microtransactions or dlc as of now.
And they’re staring to have Battle Passes have multiple tiers of cost such as in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and NBA 2K24. What’s next? Multiple battle passes at once like in the free to play Monster Legends? In $69.99 priced games? Where the battle passes cost at least $19.99 per month?
I play new stuff all the time, but currently what I’ve been rotating through is
Chivalry 2: played the first one competitively and fortunately the second one is a lot of the same concept so many skills transfer easily. It’s a fun game once it clicks.
Thronefall: a newer game revolving around base building and surviving waves of enemies while balancing economy and defense
Pseudoregalia: an incredibly fun platformer/metroidvania style game with really really tight and enjoyable movement controls.
For mobile, I’ve been stuck in Magic Survival, and Orna since my job requires a lot of walking so those pedometer games are worth my time now.
Didn’t continue anything at all I was playing last week! On a whim, I decided to give a little try to Dave the Diver. Like 12+ hours invested now (which is relatively large amount for me in a week…) and it’s all I’m playing. I love so much about the game. There are quirks, and things that could be improved (why on earth can’t I sort my diving pick ups while on a dive to pick the heaviest stuff to drop quickly??), but it feels very much like a “greater than the sum of its parts” game. Which is saying something, since there are a lot of parts in this game! There is enough tedious parts that are detracting enough that I doubt this will be on my top 10 of the year list, but it’s not far from it anyways. Definitely planning on finishing the story and definitely recommended!
Obligatory mention of Baldurs Gate 3. Only about 4 hours in and loving it. When I’m not playing that I’m playing Cyberpunk. That’s also good fun, but obviously not on the same level.
Baldurs Gate 3 with friends and Jagged Alliance 3 for single player time. Both are excellent roleplaying games with tactical combat.
I’m kind of bummed out on the hype behind BG3 though since player made characters get voices during creation but don’t use say anything in dialogue, even main quest dialogue.
I’ve been playing brotato, and been enjoying it a lot recently, planning to dip my toes into mod content
I’ve also started playing borderlands GOTY on steam deck , it’s not that optimized with some stuttering but it’s playable And today I ordered a renewed rtx3070 to replace my GTX 1070 , supposed to be here in 3 weeks or 4 so wish me luck
Now if they’d just make it an actual game rather than a story-heavy romp that should have been a movie instead. BG has always aspired to be a Western version of a JRPG, and it’s terrible.
I’ve been playing Hades again. I played it a while back, but only had like 30 attempts and 3 successes. The hype of the 64 heat run and the sequel coming soon got me back into it to hopefully finish the game.
After playing Final Fantasy XVI and Trails into Reverie back to back, I needed a palate cleanser that wasn’t a 60+ hour JRPG before Sea of Stars comes out. So I picked up The Entropy Centre, a first-person physics puzzler where you have a gun that can rewind time.
It borrows its aesthetics from Portal and its puzzle structure from The Talos Principle, and while it doesn’t reach the heights of either, it’s still pretty satisfying to work through. It’s a bit on the easy side, probably because thinking in reverse requires you to hold a lot of stuff in your head at once so the developers were hesitant to put in anything too diabolical.
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