If you are here for branching stories with a lot of player choice you basically have to start with Origins. The save transfers up to the third game and it has a lot of callbacks that could have played out differently if you picked different things in the first two games. It’s basically the only redeeming quality of DA:Inquisition for me.
I really appreciate that in MGSV when you move to first person view for iron sight aiming, the controls change to properly feel like a first person shooter. In contrast GTAV and RDR2 also have first person modes, but you still have the character movement of third person and it feels very wonky.
I’d never play that on PC. It would work on xbox though since quick resume just let’s ju pop out to the dashboard and resume whenever. It’s not foolproof but I’ve only had to restart from a checkpoint a few times.
They’re called management sims, or in the case of Factorio a factory builder.
Rimworld is a colony management sim… check out Dwarf Fortress or Oxygen Not Included for similar games
Rollercoaster Tycoon is a theme park management sim, the obvious suggestions are Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo but also check out City Skylines.
Factorio is a factory builder, I would recommend Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program, there’s a few handfuls of those types of games. If you want to get a little wild look into Minecraft (Java edition) w/ mods - most easily something like the FTB Infinity Evolved or one of the new Direwolf packs, it’s arguably where the factory building craze started.
If your interested in the minecraft Mods, Skyfactory 3 or 4 are both good for this. There is a bit of startup before you get to all the automation though.
I need to try to get back into ONI. It should be something I would really enjoy. But I got hung up on some details.
Actually, I know it’s a defect in my mindset in approaching that game. I shouldn’t expect certain things like conservation of mass and energy… I also took a while to realize that solubility and diffusion just don’t exist in the game. I don’t want to care so much about this but I struggle.
I loved Tekkit/FTB back in the day! Lots of good times setting up factories and controlling swarms of turtles.
To be honest, I’ve never been able to get over the hump in ONI. I play for hours, have a blast but eventually things start falling apart and I’m not usually able to recover. That being said, I know there’s been some updates since last I played so I may go back to it soon.
Back in 2011 or so I got really into Minecraft mods. I think it was literally just Buildcraft and Industrialcraft. It involved many steps, putting folders inside the Minecraft JAR file, deleting meta INF files, etc. I stuck with it for a few years during which the scene exploded. I actually paid to host a website for my friend’s only server that just included links to the specifics mod versions and step by step instructions how to install them. It was around the same time FTB modpacks came out that I fell off, I played one or two SP worlds with FTB Infinity Evolved and had a lot of fun but Factorio and eventually Satisfactory scratched that same itch.
The only reason is hardware limitation. I imagine it’s more difficult to load at any point in the game in a massive game due to how much is stored in your memory.
Let’s say you’re playing a game and there’s 6 NPCs outside and they’re doing their own thing.
If the game has a traditional save system, when you exit the save location it’s normal for these entities to rest let their position. Maybe at best their properties (maybe they were wet because of rain) are saved.
But it’s much easier to just not save any of this info and reload everything from scratch and only save your progress and location.
I think some custom game engines have creative solutions for handling instant saving and loading. For example System Shock has save and load without any delay. But it is a fairily simplistic game at the same time.
One of my favorite things about the DS family was its pick up and play nature. Sure not every game would let you save and quit, but you could just shut the lid and come back later and everything will still be right where you left it.
New to the Deck, am afraid to do that since it screwed up with Cloudpunk the one time i did it, just sent it to sleep with the power button and when it came back it had issues (don’t recall exactly what right now, a black screen i think) and remained until i did a full Deck reboot, feel like it’s a classic PC issue which makes sense, now i don’t send it to sleep until i’ve saved and quit
The thing I fucking hate is when the game doesn't make it obvious when a checkpoint is activated. Then you go to quit the game: "Everything since the last checkpoint will be lost". Well WHEN WAS THE LAST MOTHERFUCKING CHECKPOINT, ASSHOLE?
I hate that even when it is obvious. If I save and then immediately quit and it says “everything since the last save will be lost” I’m always paranoid that it means I didn’t actually save correctly.
I mean, I hate that too. “I’m going to lose 5 seconds of progress?! Oh no!” It ought to be able to see that I didn’t do anything progress-relevant in those 5 seconds and just skip the dialog…
Add counters to progression:
20/180 quests completed
1805/9456 dialogue choices explored
567/568 npcs killed
95/102 areas explored
And whatever else you define as progress
Add this info into your save data. When quitting the game, open the most recent save, read the counters, compare to current values, display a nondescript “you’ve had a little/a lot of/no progress since you last saved, are you sure you want to quit without saving?” Shouldn’t take so long that it triggers a lag spike, I don’t think.
Having well placed saved points and QOL features is absolutely amazing. I'm not interested in spending 10-15m running back / repeating myself just because the save progression system is rubbish. A lot more developers are more respectful of your time in that regard so it's a great improvement
I feel save points themselves are becoming an increasingly archaic design choice. Just let us save anywhere, especially in a single player game. I think most people are just suspending games without expressly saving most of the time.
That’s a large part of why, with older games, I prefer to use emulators, even if they’re available to me in other ways. I love the “save state” option. It’s terribly exploitable, of course, but it sure is convenient to be able to save literally anywhere.
The exploitable argument never made sense to me for single player games. I play Fallout, if I wanted anything and everything with a 100ft tall character, every companion, and infinite health. But of course I don’t do any of that because it would ruin my own fun.
I agree, though I think part of why that is is that so few games make failure interesting. The only one I can think of that truly accomplished making failure compelling is Disco Elysium.
Again, I see the desire to savescum as a symptom more than anything else. If you find yourself reaching for the quickload button, it's because the game didn't make it interesting enough to keep going despite something going wrong.
This is at least the case for choice-based situations, where it's incredibly common for there to be an "optimal route" and for the alternative or failure-state to be much inferior in both rewards and enjoyment.
For games where overcoming a challenge is the primary experience, such a beating a Dark Souls boss, then sure. Being able to quicksave at the start of each phase of a boss would be bad since the point is to overcome the challenge of managing to scrape through the entire fight.
I think that's a matter of preference. I don't think many video games have good writing (even compared to a lot of casual popular "beach read" type books), so I get my story telling from however many audiobooks I can squeeze into 2x 40-50 hours a week. I want challenges in games and I want distinct fail states to punish failure.
The issue from a design perspective is that many players have a tendency to optimise the fun out of the games they play. Meaning that if there is a fun thing to do that you carefully made for them to enjoy but there’s an unfun thing to do that wasn’t the point but is a slightly more effective strategy, many players will find themselves drawn to do the unfun thing and hate playing the game, whereas if they had only had the option to do the fun thing, they would have done, wouldn’t have cared in the slightest about the lack of a hypothetical better strategy not existing and loved the time they spent with the game.
Good game design always has to meet people where they are and attempt to ensure they have a great experience with the game irrespective of how they might intuitively approach it.
So… Not having ways for players to optimise all the fun out of their own experience is an important thing to consider.
I’m this person and god do I wish I wasn’t, sometimes. So many games have been way less interesting than they could’ve been for me because for me, fun is learning to play the game well. I’m not sure what frustrates me more, the way people who don’t have that attitude say “I play games to have fun” as if I don’t, or me looking at the recent LoZ games as failures design-wise because they’re too easy to cheese.
I definitely lean this way too, though I’ve become better able to step away from that mindset in games I want to enjoy without it.
I think part of what has helped for me is, having an awareness of that tendency, I now try to actively feed or restrict it.
IE, I play a lot of games where that is the intended fun experience. Stuff like Magnum Opus (or any Zachtronic’s title), Slay the Spire (or other roguelikes), Overwatch (or other competitive games) are all designed from the ground up for the fun to be in playing the game at the highest level of execution possible (some more mechanically others more intellectually.) I try to make sure I’m playing something like that if I feel like I’m at all likely to want to scratch that optimisation itch with that gaming session.
Otherwise, when playing games where that isn’t really the point, I find it easier to engage with the intended experience knowing that if I want to do the optimisation thing I could switch to something that is much more satisfying for that, but I also try to optimise how well I do the thing the game wants. If it’s a roleplaying game, I might try to challenge myself to most perfectly do as the character would actually do, rather than what I might do, or what the mechanics of the game might incentivise me to do. Often that can actually lead to more challenging gameplay too as you are restricting yourself to making the less mechanically optimal choices because you’ve challenged yourself to only do so where it aligns with the character.
Diablo 4 was a perfect example of this. People were optimising their run to the end then complaining about a lack of content within a week. Then there’s people like me who spent a good 60 hours already with plenty of stuff still to do as I’m enjoying my journey.
One of the more important skills of good game design is to understand that whenever your players are complaining about something, there is something wrong that you need to identify and address whilst also recognising that it’s rarely the thing the players think is what’s wrong (as they just see the negative end result) and that they tend to express those complaints as demands for the solution they think is best to what they think the problem is.
In this case players are yelling at Blizzard “There’s not enough content!” when in fact, as you’ve observed, there actually is plenty of content, it’s just (seemingly, I’ve not actually played it myself to say for sure first hand) that Blizzard made it too easy to optimise your way past all of that content as a minor inconvenience on your way to, uh, nothing.
The answer to the problem is twofold. One you need to plug those holes in your balance so players are no longer incentivised to optimise their way past actually playing and enjoying your game (now I talk about it I think I vaguely remember reading an article that Blizzard are doing exactly that and having a hard time cleanly pitching the benefits of it to the player-base, which is why you also need to.) Two, try to put the horse back into the stable by now, sadly, actually having to create the end game content that players have bursted their way through to because your game design unintentionally promised it would be there (or just write those players off as a lost cause. Which seems like a dreadful idea as they are the ones who were the most passionate early buyers of your product…)
Alternatively… If they’d caught these issues before release (which is often, though not always, a matter of giving the developers and designers the resources to do so) they could simply have caught those issues of optimal builds being too powerful for the content and adjusted either or both to be a better match and ended up with a title that players liked more than they will like the harder to make version Blizzard now needs to turn Diablo 4 into (not to mention, that the work they need to do to introduce worthwhile end-game content could have just gone to a paid expansion for their more well regarded release instead.)
But then the Bobby Kotick’s of the world are boastfully proud of their complete inability/unwillingness to think about the development of their games in that way so here we are…
Love - auto health or shield regen. When I first experienced that in Halo it made me instantly hate other games that didn’t have some form of that mechanic.
I hate managing health inventory items. It breaks gameplay flow with tedious bullshit that isn’t nearly as fun as focusing on the a combat mechanic.
Auto health makes the game oriented around taking as much cover as possible. You just pop out, shoot, and then jump back to hiding again.
The newer Doom games for example uses limited health to force you be that cool action hero who is participating in the action. Health is regained by killing enemies. If they had regen the player would just be back to hiding behind covers like cowards.
Doom was interesting because it was a solution to both of those problems at once. Doom shouldn't be a cover shooter, but hunting for health packs is not action packed or fun, so the enemies became health packs.
The Estus Flask in Dark Souls was great. You couldn’t spam a million of them on a boss fight but you also got them all back when you were safe. There wereots of things to dislike but that was a major positive. And to your point, it’s not buried in a menu either. It’s just right there.
I absolutely loathe double tap to dodge mechanics.
Terraria does this, everyone who played it with me thinks it’s reasonable to fear accidentally dodging into an enemy when trying to walk slowly with a keyboard.
This is 10 times worse on controllers, because dodging just becomes irritating and janky as fuck - if I need to dodge a bullet, I don’t want to fight the kinetic energy of my finger for an entire fourth of a second and hope I am fast enough.
this genuinely made me ragequit cyberpunk 2077 more than once. The game has a double tap to dodge mechanic that you cannot turn off (last I checked, at least) and is active even when crouching, and you dodge like 2 meters forward or a meter in any other direction. This means that stealth is borderline impossible if you’re on keyboard and are not very deliberate with your button presses. One accidental double tap and oops now the ENTIRE warehouse knows where you are (another major flaw with cyberpunk’s stealth system)
There is a way to change this via mods, if you’re still interested in Cyberpunk. I just finished my first playthrough and one of the first things I did was figure out how to rebind Dodge to Alt.
The Silent Silencers mod and Stealthrunnner also makes stealth much more enjoyable.
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Aktywne