Maybe make dialogue between “Find the dwemer puzzle box, it’s… uhhh… somewhere” and “GO [fast travel] TO PLACE X, KILL Y IN ROOM NUMBER 6 AND DONT FORGET TO COME BACK WITH THE EVIL SWORD OF DARKNESS [automatically picked up by your character] [a yellow marker appears on your minimap and field of view, with a magic trail leading you to the quest location]”
I agree with the article. Why cater games towards a crowd that doesnt want the game. Just stop it. Fuck EA and fuck companies like Activision/blizzard for dumbing down RPGs so Normie’s might like them. You’re ruining the experience for people who want to an RPG and making it “tolerable” for people who dont. The end result will always be a mixed bag, a mixed bag of shit.
Just let them play call of duty or FIFA and let the people who enjoy RPGs play RPGs with good story and RPG elements. You’re not doing anyone a favor by making an unenjoyable mediocre bag of shit.
I mean, good creators don’t? There are still AA and indie devs pouring their heart into stories they want to tell?
This article is basically just bemoaning that AAA develops for the lowest common denominator, which I can understand as a gripe, but it’s a very old gripe. If you start really digging into AAA, you’ll get other similar ones like “Why are these gameplay loops made for people who don’t like gameplay” or “How come perfectly serviceable story focused games get mandatory crafting systems added onto them.” When you’re trying to make something to broadly appeal to as many people as possible, you stop making art, so I don’t know why people keep expecting AAA to produce artistic experiences.
I agree, AAA games are long dead. However there was a time where AAA games were amazing, maybe around the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era. Back when devs were allowed creative freetom to make the games they actually wanted and try new things. I think a lot of people with these complaints miss that level of catered quality from back then
the industry has also be caught in the grips of budget gigantism by an influx of investor cash for the past decade.
Outside investors saw dollar signs with the rapid growth of the market, and also huge financial successes like fortnight. So they were willing to put up a lot of funding in hopes of outsized returns. Pressure from investors and management meant appealing to the largest audience possible, and also chasing the latest trends. Despite the huge budgets, the games were unfocused and bad, both from trying to appeal to too many audiences, and constantly changing direction during development to chase trends.
This article is basically just bemoaning that AAA develops for the lowest common denominator, which I can understand as a gripe, but it’s a very old gripe.
And an easy one to fix: Don’t fucking buy AAA games!
Hear hear! This is such a plague on games and media right now. I don’t blame developers that much, because lack of friction is super commonly taught in game design courses, and it’s not always bad. It can be done waaaay too much though.
there probably shouldn’t be a lot of friction for things the player isn’t supposed to be focused on, like say the interface should be unobtrusive and easy to navigate, a player probably shouldn’t have to use moon logic to figure out how to open a door. Things that aren’t the focus shouldn’t require the player’s focus.
but a story driven game should have the player focusing on the story, not actively encouraging them to ignore it!
Players who don’t care about the story would probably be better served by a different game altogether.
Yep, exactly. That’s the good use of lack of friction. The philosophy I have is just that it shouldn’t be seen as always good no matter what. It changes the experience to remove friction, so any decision to do so should be thoughtfully done with the experience in mind.
It comes from a good place. Make things have more quality of life. Makes things feel smooth and responsive. Don’t make things obtuse and confusing.
The problem is that while some friction kind of sucks (I don’t think many would want clunky movement or controls), lots of experiences get thrown out with the bathwater when this goes too far.
My philosophy is that friction needs to be seen as a tool. It does something to the experience, and it needs to be considered whether removing it will improve the experience, and if so, what is being lost in the process?
I feel like stories have never been my go to. I always find myself playing games with excellent gameplay, rather than story (Mindustry, Balatro, Galaga, etc). I love a good story don’t get me wrong, but gameplay is my main attraction to games, and I feel thats where games started. If you look at retro games like Dig Dug or Adventure, or even modern indie titles like Balatro the attraction is basically 90% gameplay
I think that’s kind of the kicker, a lot of studios and franchises got big based on the quality of their story telling, but did poorly with audiences that were just there for the gameplay. The gameplay in these games is there to serve the story, to support it and facilitate it, not to shine by it’s own merits. But if you’re just there for the gameplay and don’t care about the story, then the gameplay will be boring.
So they’ve sanded down the story to make it easier for people who don’t care about it to follow what’s going on, and thus make the gameplay work for them…
But now you have a story built to serve gameplay, and gameplay built to serve the story. Nether is good on its own merits, so no one really likes it.
To me it feels like there is a fundamental dissonance in the video game industry. Where major publishers and studios can’t seem to internalize that there are two things that people might come to a game for; Video games as experiences, narratives, things to be explored; and video games as … well games, a set of mechanics to be interacted with, to be challenged by. This isn’t to say a game can’t be good at both, but many games are weighted one way or another.
Factorio is a truly absorbing gameplay experience, but it doesn’t really have a story beyond what is needed to frame and flavor the gameplay.
“Vampire the masquerade: bloodlines” is a classic of atmosphere, character interaction and role play, but just about everyone who played it will tell you the combat is serviceable at best, and there is one level in particular that most people just remove with a mod because it’s just combat, with no dialog or interactions with other characters.
So many major studios and publishers seem to routinely focus on the wrong elements of previously successful games. Taking the wrong lessons and misunderstanding what made previous title’s a huge success.
People are not coming to your story based RPG to play it mindlessly while listening to a podcast or audio book. If people are doing that, then clearly they’re not coming to it for the story, and the solution to that issue is to write a better story or refocus around what ever they are coming for.
This concept of a second screen show is so unbelievably fucking moronic… It’s your own damn fault if you’re not paying attention!
I have a second monitor that I play things on, and it’s either a stream of someone playing something similar or the same game, or it’s a show I’ve already watched and know the story of.
If I’m watching something new, then I’m watching it. To have stories dumbed down, or just butchered to suit tictok brainrotted people completely devoid of attention spans is so freaking depressing and only exacerbates the issue. But in the end I guess I get it, you’re out for a profit and it hurts to have a plethora of idiots rate you poorly because they weren’t paying attention and didn’t understand the story… Ughh…
I loved the servers that were 24/7 metro, no drags etc. some of those were (and still are) my favorite. Or pistols only, no Glock 18. When you get rid of custom servers you get rid of that custom experience.
The amount of time I’ve spent playing online games has fallen off a cliff after forced matchmaking, particularly SBMM. They’ve legitimately ruined my enjoyment of games.
I got into Overwatch for a bit, but the SBMM meant that at lower levels it was basically a coin flip if I would get a team that wanted to play as a team, or a bunch of kill whores who only cared about their K/D ratio. I don’t want to have to drop hundreds of hours int mastering the game just to have actual teamwork.
Oh, I love skill-based matchmaking. Without it, if you’re having a good time, it means your opponent is almost surely having a bad time, rather than keeping the matches close. At low ranks, often times a single piece of knowledge can escalate your play to a higher level, which can make those low ranks feel kind of swing-y, but I don’t know that that’s a problem that can really be solved unless you remove the asymmetry. That said, I no longer wish to substitute matchmaking for the likes of a server browser.
The big problem with matchmaking is that in the long run, it kills game. When people start to move on to a new thing, the population that stays because they're attached to the game gets fucked over by matchmaking.
The less people they are, the worse it works. That's when a server browser and the ability to run community server becomes crucial. It will keep a game alive for a decade after its last update.
Matchmaking puts people into a limited number of servers. Yeah, you get the problem of realizing that those folk have been playing Tribes 2 for over twenty years at this point but you also have people to play with on that one 24 player server. Versus twelve servers with 2 players and a bunch of bots (if the game has them) each.
I always would rather both options. But from a game health standpoint… hoppers tend to have clear advantages at most player counts.
I think the general idea is that if I want to spin up a server for my friend group that’s been gaming together for 20 years, we can buy the game and do just that. That’s opposed to the money I spent on the game being useless when they decide they want to stop paying for servers.
That’s perfectly acceptable justification to shut down gameservers and profit from people moving to the next version of the game. Gone are the days of private servers, especially with client and serverside mods, that kept people engaged with an older game for years. That’s not profitable.
Still, DICE insists the Portal browser will satisfy. It does have some qualities that simulate a classic server experience, like how you can earn full XP in Portal matches as long as the house rules closely resemble the vanilla ones.
The community “servers” aren’t persistent though. They’ll only stay online as long as someone is online and using that instance. If that last person leaves the server shuts down - as far as we know, it still seems a like murky, but without being able to rent servers I can’t imagine them just leaving all of them online for free
So in 2042, if you had the premium battle pass, you could set up one persistent server. It was hosted by them but didn’t disappear without players. I don’t know how it will work for bf6.
I think the most important feature is that we have persistent lobbies that don’t disband after a game like matchmaking. That they “stay online” while nobody uses it is really not the important part imo.
Vote with your wallet and don’t buy this. Many years ago we’ve got dedicated servers and free map builders. Nowadays we get matchmaking and 3 maps and additional 3 for 20 bucks.
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Aktywne