Social and conversational engines (think Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing) tend to make me feel a lot lonelier than straight NPC dialogue. I think it’s because NPCs are shallow enough that I don’t see them as people, just people-shaped quest dispensers, but when you add social systems on top they’re inevitably going to fall short and that friend-shape turns into an NPC and my brain realizes I was playing alone the whole time. I’m really looking forward to the integration of language models into games so I can actually socialize with these characters, even when they’re more shallow than real people.
I think it’s fun to work down a questline for an NPC, but I agree that attempts to make it more that a simple branching dialogue tend to fall a bit flat. I also tend not to like the gift giving grind a lot of games do. I much prefer to go do things with an NPC and often that forms a better bond than an NPC with more dynamic dialogue.
If you want to save, you gotta be able to take the current state of everything and serialize it, then read what you’ve serialized and put it back. If you only do checkpoints, you can make assumptions about game state and serialize less.
Generally, it is much easier to develop AI and such when you never have to pull it’s state out and then restore it, because if that is done improperly you get bugs like the bandits in STALKER forgetting they were chasing you after a quicksave-quickload because their state machine is reset.
With checkpoints, you can usually say “right, enemies before here? Dead or dealt with. Enemies after here? they’re in their default state. Player is at this position in space. Just write down the stats and ignore the rest.”
And autosaves just make it one less menu to fiddle with.
I really dislike being set back far when I die or mess up. I can handle a fair bit of repetition, but replaying the exact same thing over and over because I died is frustrating and boring.
Which means that I particularly dislike when games have lousy checkpointing or save systems. I also dislike when games are too difficult and I can’t turn the difficulty down to at least get past whatever is giving me a hard time. And of course, unskippable cut scenes right after a checkpoint are a classic pain in the ass.
Examples:
I just finished Outer Wilds and found that game’s checkpointing to be pretty frustrating. So many boring trips to Brittle Hollow because I lost my footing. I almost gave up because it was so bad.
I never finished GTA 4. I got stuck in some mission where there was like a 5 minute drive and then some difficult combat. I kept dying and having to redo the very boring drive over and over killed my motivation. I don’t even know why it was so hard. I played GTA 5 twice with no issues.
I tried Dark Souls once. Lol, lasted maybe an hour before giving up. Now I’m very wary of any game that doesn’t have configurable difficulty levels. Thankfully, most games these days are actually progressing to more granular or meaningful difficulty levels.
GTA 4 is definitely such a big motivation-killer because of these issues. Apparently it used to have no checkpoints, but then when the PC port was released they added just one checkpoint per mission apart from the bank robbery which has a whopping two checkpoints. And in typical rockstar fashion like 99% of the missions start with really long walking or driving sequences, so I agree that it got really tedious on the harder missions.
The worst thing is that it’s often just that one specific mission that has shitty checkpoints. The rest is generally fine, but then you hit that wall and you want to do PHYSICAL VIOLENCE. At least that’s been my experience.
I’m actually new to this whole “Federated” thing, so I did not hear about it here, but it’s good to see people discussing it. How do I access that link from the instance I’m currently in? I click it and it asks me to make a Beehaw Account.
The way I did this was going to Communities, searching Gaming so I would get gaming@beehaw.org, and clicking Next until I found the post. That’s how I found the post on Beehaw, too.
There may be a more efficient way to do this. That’s just how I did this.
I just want a high quality horse game. Is that so much to ask? :( Apparently so.
And I mean, specifically focused on the horses, not an adventure game with unusually well done “horses as cars” like RDR2 or Zelda BOTW. A “girly” horse game, like one where you take care of and breed horses and participate in horse jumping or whatever, or one where you ride a horse around a forest and it has an actual personality and acts like an animal and not just a mode of transportation (Shadow of the Colossus is the one game I can remember feeling anywhere close to this, and even that was very minimal).
It’s maddening because the minute someone makes one it’ll sell like hotcakes - there are so many horse enthusiasts dismayed by the lack of quality horse games just waiting in the wings - aaaaand yet here we are. Sigh.
I’m not sure if you’re bringing this up because of the new Sims 4 expansion, but I thought Sims 3 Pets did a pretty good job with the horses and comes close to what you’re describing, but I’m guessing you want something more in line with a traditional RPG.
Have you seen www.themanequest.com? It’s aimed at people like you trying to find a high-quality horse game. Tons of reviews of horse games on that site. I’m not even into horses but the website captivated me anyways.
I stopped playing Resident Evil 7 because I’d decided that the setting that I was on was too difficult and wanted to knock it down a level. It wouldn’t let me do that without restarting the game so I stopped playing.
I don’t understand why they made that decision at all.
Does sound like laziness. I get the impression it’s because some things change in the game depending on difficulty, like number of items, etc. So, it can’t exactly go back and turn the 3-ammo pile you picked up into 8 ammo.
I was a day one buyer. I gotta say i miss the old game, before it became multiplayer. The loneliness was great. Black holes used to mean something. Now you can just teleport anywhere you want to.
Corvettes are one of the cool things they added, and somehow halfassed it. I don’t mean that in a horrible way, just that the ship partss are all over the place. But that got old pretty quick.
If you’re interested, No Clip, a YouTube channel, made a 4pt documentary about Dwarf Fortress. He’s not my favorite documentarian, but I still thought it was interesting.
I just wanted to post this, personally I really like NoClip and this is one of the most personal documentaries they’ve done, so far, I think. The Dwarf Fortress brothers seem really cool, so humble and unpretentious (and giant nerds, obviously 😸)
Same for FF but also no tactical shite either, turn based is fine but the damn chessboard shit was enough during the 3DS era, so many great stories ruined by the gameplay.
I haven’t played the tactics games yet (Ivalice right?) but you just broke my heart. I love tactics games man, and I feel like there’s not a lot of them outside of the Fire Emblem series. I haven’t gotten around to many to be fair though.
Larian’s next game is the teased statue that Keighley tweeted, so they’ll have something to announce tonight. The only thing they said it isn’t is Divinity: Original Sin 3, but it could be a different Divinity RPG, or a looter like the old-school Divinities, or a new Dragon Commander, or a new spin-off entirely. They’re also a multi-project studio now.
Starfield was undoubtedly inspired by Interstellar and such, which is extremely my style, but even though it had some ideas here and there, the execution was what bothered me, and that’s why I’d like to see Larian’s take on the same kind of setting.
Nah, Larian will jump the gun, release too early and have another bug infested game. They need to reduce their scope, actually take their time and make a great RPG. BG3 was too much for them, a smaller more refined experience would have been amazing, they shouldn't chase "bigger is better".
Ignoring all the problems, sure. You could get through it, but there were lots of bugs and inconsistencies. I played again recently after all the patches and while it was much better, it still had it's fair share of issues. The overall game, lore and story is very good, though I think DOS combat is far superior for a video game than DnD.
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