Every open world game has turned into the same “do this x times to get y reward that has no relevance whatsoever to the game”
I miss the days of games on rails. I could sit down, enjoy a game and play it through to the end in 10-20 hours. Now it seems like every game is trying to milk 100+ hours of gameplay time out of even the most basic of stories and mechanics.
Open world is really only good if it’s something like an MMO where the content is built up over the course of years and there are multiple story lines.
Aside from that, it works well for racing games not much else.
I tend to agree but then I also have moments where I get lost in the world for a few hours and it’s great. Death Stranding is probably my favourite where I walk everywhere and I spend an hour doing one delivery!
I also miss story driven games such as Uncharted games, playing several open world games in a row can be exhausting, I kinda feel it for game reviewers and such.
I found the three newish Tomb Raider games to be a great mix of a sort of open world feel at times where you have things to explore, while being very much on rails. Each arc in the story gives you an area to explore and your actions in that area progress the story. You get some weapon and ability upgrades throughout. I came in not expecting much and couldn’t put the first one down. I think I finished Tomb Raider 2013 to 100% in about 20-25 hours and it was excellent. Will probably do another playthrough at some point, still haven’t played the third.
I agree there. At the very least with the first of them. The 2nd and 3rd started to add a lot of crafting mechanics, but I really enjoyed the first one (and have played all 3 to completion)
Zelda breath of the wild - it’s one of the worst Zelda games I’ve ever played and I’ve played so many. There were so many bad decisions made with this game from weapons breaking to getting rid of traditional dungeons. It’s a great open world game but a terrible Zelda game.
The Horizon series by Guerilla Games - These games are good for the most part, however they suffer from long stretches of boring open world where you have to fight robot dinosaurs with underpowered weapons. The whole point of the combat is to find weaknesses with the enemies and exploit/attack those weaknesses, but the game never at any point explicitly explains that concept or focuses on that concept. It expects you to just understand what to do. Not to mention the absolutely stupid grinding for mats to make new weapons and armor. Melee combat is terrible, the story for the most part is pretty good but man does it take forever to pick up, it overstays it’s welcome. They are technical powerhouses but just so grindy and boring.
I agree with all you said about Zelda BOTW. As a Zelda game I was really disappointed. But if you set aside the Zelda part it was actually a pretty fun game for me. I really enjoyed the exploration and it was the best open world game I played so far. But too easy forgettable dungeons and too easy bosses and darn weapons breaking really bothered me so I’m not even interested in the TOTK. I’ll wait for the next Zelda game and keep my fingers crossed.
Pretty sure they’ve stated Zelda games will lean closer to the two recent entries going forward, so those of us who think like this really can only cross our fingers that something resembling previous Zelda titles returns.
What I love about the Zelda games is that they try out something new with each title. So who knows, maybe they’ll eventually do a Zelda that’s geared more to fans of the older titles.
Weapon breaking is controversial but I see it as a mechanic with positive impact on the game. Just because your weapons were not permament it actually added choice into which weapon do you want to use in the battle
It does not add any choice. All it did was encourage me to speed run my way to the master sword and essentially go down the line of weapons I had in a boss fight until I ran out. There was no strategy, just a sense of never wanting to use any of the good weapons and hoarding them. It was so bad I marked a spot on the map where weapons would respawn every blood moon so I could at least have some good weapons. Guess what that’s called in every other game? A repair mechanic. Don’t even get me started on the master sword “breaking” for no thematic reason.
I’m on the disagree side on this. As much as I did use whatever garbage the game threw at me, there was no incentive to use your best weapons tactically, because unless you were fighting a boss, breaking a good weapon would not bring an equivalent reward… and then the major bosses were weak to the Master Sword anyway.
It also felt incredibly unrewarding to explore and open chests only to find yet another disposable weapon rather than some permanent upgrade like the heart pieces used to be.
Around the time I felt like Horizon Zero Dawn did more to encourage smart use of multiple weapons than Zelda did, by giving them different funcions and making it so enemies had different defenses and weak spots.
I felt the same way about the first Horizon game. I was playing on normal, barely making any progress because A) I couldn’t be assed to care about any of the characters, and B) the combat was really finicky.
I mean, I get it you’re fighting giant killer machines with a bow and arrow, but still. I had a way more enjoyable time when I turned the difficulty down and got a couple mods (just ammo and carry capacity upgrades so I didn’t have to stop to collect resources after every single fight).
I couldn’t get into the souls games themselves but fell hard for Bloodborne and Sekiro. Elden Ring has been hard to get into. The open world really detracts from the game which is disappointing because everything else is really polished.
I also hate souls games and Bloodborne didn’t feel much different.
I think the key issue is that Hidetaka Miyazaki is a masochist and I’m very much not. I don’t enjoy fighting the same boss dozens of times being taken down in 3 hits. Even when I win, I feel more tired than satisfied. I’d rather play a more traditional hack’n slash or some other action RPG where if some boss is too much of a pain I grind a little then stomp them.
I enjoyed Dark Souls 1 and 2 a lot, having played through the first one multiple times. I never tried the others with the exception of Elden Ring, and the difficulty just put me off. Something about the first game made it much more tolerable for me. I think it was the overall speed at which enemies move and their combos being more predictable.
They are extremely tedious, needlessly arduous games.
I think that is in part why I loved them all. It brought me into a different mental state where I wasn’t going to be able to rush. I enjoyed that aspect.
My mind can often wander on to various subjects as well, so there was this perverse meditative aspect because of the tension of knowing that I had to constantly focus on the game or it would just kill me in one of its various, unfair ways.
I wanted to like it, but the gun play was underwhelming and gameplay kind of boring.
Worst of all was the progression. Upgrades were tiered in ways that made 1 a clear best choice. Perks were uninteresting passives or actives with bizarre activation requirements. No way to upgrade flares or pickaxes. And I’m not a guy that cares about cosmetics, so it just didn’t work for me.
I’m happy for everyone else that got a GOAT experience though.
I think it depends on how you upgrade it though, slight time increase, colors just for the fun of it, range on how far you throw. None of that Crosses over with the flare gun too much.
I have tried on multiple occasions to get into 4x games and my brain is just too simple.
The 4x elements have to be secondary and not the primary focus. Age of wonders planetfall and Warhammer 2? Great. Imperator Rome and europa universalis? Might as well look at a fucking spreadsheet lol.
Wish I could get into the micro and efficiency of numbers but it doesn’t do anything for me. Even with an interest in Rome.
That aside, I've been giving it a look again lately but haven't dove in just yet. I'm in an odd mindset atm where I don't know if I'm down to wrap my head around RTS mechanics, but I'm really impressed by the looks of the game!
Also wanna highlight that this is a great rabbit hole to go down for other open source RTS games via Zero-K, Spring Engine, OpenRA, etc.
If you’re going to dive into any RTS I would definitely recommend this one. With any of them you have to familiarize yourself with the units and the interface which can seem like a lot at first till they become like your best friends and you know them by heart. A lot of other RTS’s that have been around are somewhat losing steam for entry-level players and might not be worth the investment. If you want more “hero” types of RTS I would probably recommend something like Stormgate but if you’re interested in military/army battles then BAR is a winner.
I don’t know why I didn’t link the website lol, guess in my head I didn’t want it to come across as sponsored or something and anyone who was super interested would just look at the links in the videos or search it. I’m just very entertained atm so figured I would share the videos that got me to this point. Thank you for the Zer0-K and other references, looked it up and now realizing there’s a whole slew of projects and remakes I’ve missed out on.
You made me pause for a while and contemplate my RTS gaming history. I was never really enthralled with medieval or time period rts’s (even though I’ve definitely sunk a lot of time into some of them like lord of the realms) but C&C I absolutely loved when it first came out. The cool live-action cut scenes, expanding what I was familiar with playing Dune, even had family members that also really got into the series. I slowly drifted away from it, I realize it was because of the excessive never-ending expansions being released and an absolutely bonkers story of a political drama it was. I just couldn’t keep up with all the releases as a broke kid and the characters/story lines did nothing for me.
Old school Blizzard did a great job with Warcraft cinematics for the time, the mystery behind the world you inhabited was left to your imagination at the beginning. They did a banger of a job with the Starcraft lore when it came out as well. I still remember pouring over the game booklet with the origins story before and after getting to finally play it. Human prisoners lost in space like some kind of 30th century Australia stuck in cryo-sleep and only awake to find they can never return home? Fascinating. Zerg Hive mind with specialized broods with their own lore? Baelrog Brood is legendary to me still. Protoss was just so fascinating and everything connecting the universes stories together just seemed mystical. Though I feel like they just completely botched it, Brood wars story was too rushed with a million things going on, SC2 was just abysmal and generic story telling but I do appreciate that something did happen after sc1 as I would be complaining for different reasons if they had just dropped it and moved onto a different game lol. Sorry for the wall of text, was nice to get this fleshed out from my mind though.
No worries on the wall of text! Also fwiw I'm familiar with RTS games, which is why I mentioned not being in the mindset for them currently. They're a lot to take in, even on a good day! 😅
Nevertheless, when I'm of the right mind for'em, I really enjoy'em. Building up outposts, assembling a bunch of units, and fending off enemies, it can be a bunch of fun!
Lately I've been more interested in peaceful builders/strategy games though. Still, BAR and the like remain really impressive!
The learning curve does look really brutal but it made me realize I was falling into a gaming rut. I thought I was a decent gamer but it’s just that I’ve been playing the same “base” games with fancier graphics for so long. I’ve been mostly into sandbox games lately because I can vary my goals but with this game I think I’ll really be able to expand into any type of tactic or strategy to scratch that never ending itch.
The game is great and the learning curve can be tricky, but it has a whole load of scenarios which gradually ramp up the difficulty and introduce new concepts to help you learn how to play. I’d highly recommend checking out the game!
You will find one but it´s all manageable. I recommend focusing on one faction and one or two unit types at the beginning and learn just those tech trees first, to avoid getting overwhelmed by the abundance of units and go from there. Vehicles and/or Bots are good unit types to start with. Just let your team know what unit types you will go for at the start of a match, choose a fitting starting position and it should work fine.
League of Legends. I don’t understand the appeal at all. It’s just ugly and not fun. I really tried to get into it too. An old group of friends I played games with all play it. For over a decade it’s been practically the only game they play. They never seemed like they were having actual fun either but they keep coming back. I miss those guys ☹️.
I’ve found games like that too filled with super serious gamers. DoTA is the same but the community is a bit friendlier.
I have ZERO patience so I’ll just storm ahead into battle and try to fuck things up but that’s not a great way to play cos you keep dying and lose time on the board. I tried to get into Heroes of the Storm when it started and the more casual players were a lot more fun but over time it developed the usual crowd of hardcore addicts that ruined it.
Well, with that memory unlocked, it’s time to go pull out my Dune II CD and fire that one up again. House Ordos! In the meantime, I guess I’ll check out BAR.
Oh you’re in luck, with the original CD you can play the remake people have been working on! (requires some files from the original game but has been upgraded)
Dune Legacy - Dune Legacy is an effort by a handful of developers to revitalize the first-ever real-time strategy game. It tries to be as similar as possible to the original gameplay but to integrate user interface features most modern realtime-strategy games have like selecting multiple units.
Open source and cross platform
Modern display resolutions
Modern RTS controls like selecting multiple units and right-click commands
Original campaign with Harkonnen, Atreides and Ordos
Super Dune campaign with Fremen, Sardaukar and Mercenary
Multiplayer support
Map editor
edit: @gmr_leon listed below the OpenRA which also has a Dune 2000 rebuild on it if you’re interested.
At their best, the originals were about a hyper-competent adventurer who always had a plan and was unapologetically confident. She was like Xena and Indiana Jones combined.
It was already a pretty tired cliche at the time to make a gritty origin story when the first game came out. We got an uncertain, untrained, and unprepared Lara with a whimpering attitude.
By the third game they tried to act on the feedback about this, but instead of something closer to the original, she became Rambo, covering herself in mud, hiding in the shadows, stealth killing hordes of enemy soldiers.
I think the Uncharted series did what Tomb Raider remake series should have done.
The enemy ai in those games was so bad that i couldn’t get into them. Especially after coming off of playing the last of us. That game ruined a lot of other games for me. Lol
Hell yeah, love BAR. The discord group slowly started falling apart as we all fell out of love with SC2 but we’re back to regular matches every night now that they’ve been getting converted to it.
I am more of an AoE or SC2 style RTS player, as opposed to the Supreme Commander/Planetary Annihilation/BAR style but BAR really just makes RTS feel so good it doesn’t matter.
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