I never understood why people bitch about reading in games. Like, you do know people read books for fun, right? JRPGs are some of the most beloved games ever and a good chunk of them are pretty much just reading a ton of dialogue and descriptions.
idk, i kind of can’t stand this format of visual novel.
i love books. i love story driven games. virtual novels like this somehow manage to capture the worst aspects of both. like, it’s a book that forces you to read it slowly, or at least at a somewhat fixed pace. i hate being locked to a computer to read, i hate having to either continuously click to advance to the next slids after every 2 sentences or less or have to read at a fixed pace, i honestly hate having low quality badly mixed sounds effects in my ear while I’m trying to read.
these aren’t low gameplay games. these are just extra tedious books. I’d so much rather just read a manga every time.
As a counter I find the fact that VNs sidestep having to describe all sorts of setting and character related things by just showing you them instead with beautiful art work and at times voice acting.
To me that actually increases the pace instead of slows it down, if you think about what you're not having to read. I do also dislike reading VNs at a computer, though, so I'll only get them on portable systems unless it's REALLY good, like Slay the Princess, and that game would simply not be the same if it were a book, it's extremely reliant on choice.
eh, I’d rather choose either art or voice. manga ot audio book. i tend to lean towards Audio books because it leaves my eyes and hands free to do other things.
for me it’s just a struggle. it requires me to give it all of my senses, like a movie, but it does so little to hold them. a single still image that changes once ever like 20 lines holds my interest for maybe 2 seconds if it’s a good one. then the dialogue goes on for 5 minutes. it’s almost always bottom of the barrel voice acting. I’ll admit, having been completely put off by the biggest mainstream ones having no choices and just being shitty books, so i haven’t tried any with choices, but the fact that the most popular ones don’t really have choices… you just can’t avoid a medium being defined by its biggest representatives. those are the ones that draw people in and hook them. clearly the choices aren’t the thing fans of the medium like.
again, i just can’t imagine having anything but an infinitely better time reading a manga. fate had me frustratedly dragging myself through it by the end. I’ve never actually managed to finish any others. if was so many hours of me begging it to be less slow. even with all the modern mods and fixes to make it as customizable of an experience as possible. it made me want to pull my hair out at times because of how tedious it was. like maybe if i ate 1000mg thc gummy i could melt into enough, but it’s just so painfully slow otherwise.
You are correct in some ways, such as dedicating all your senses while giving you less on average to engage them, but are also over generalizing by saying it's always terrible voice acting, which just isn't true, it can be anime hammy, but I happen to really love well done over the top anime voice acting, which is a whole different style compared to something extremely realistic like The Last of Us. And if you don't like that style, that's okay, but it's not terrible.
I feel like biggest representatives could go to things like Danganronpa, Phoenix Wright, or Persona, which all feature choice and gameplay, and I'd say Danganronpa and Persona have good voice acting, with Persona's as excellent. I feel like generalizing that fans of the genre don't care about choice is just not correct for all fans, I personally dislike most of the choiceless VNs because they then rely extremely hard on story, for example I disliked House in Fata Morgana because that's a "reading a linear book" style of VN with no voice acting, and it's really long, and the soundtrack was not super amazing (compared to Phoenix Wright, Danganronpa, and Persona, which have OUT FUCKING STANDING soundtracks, and with a manga you're not getting a soundtrack that emotionally engages you and brings you back to listen to them long after completing the games as I have with those series.
i would consider persona to be a different genre. it’s closer to Pokemon with a lot of dialogue. i guess I’m defining visual novels partly as things that don’t have much gameplay. if there is a significant other portion of gameplay with complex mechanics outside of dialogue that’s just a different thing in my book.
I… don’t love persona, but that more because i can’t get into the teenage highschool drama. the number of times i felt myself internally screaming “holy shit i don’t care, you won’t even remember this in 5 years” made me eventually realize I just wasn’t having a great time. liked the Pokemon fights though. I could see myself loving a different game that plays similar with a more mature story.
I enjoyed Class of 09, one of few VNs designed around English VA and auto-continuation, as well as having very tight comedic timing.
That last one is key that so many games utterly fail at - waiting until the line is completely finished from the VA’s laborious delivery and they’ve completely trailed off before reading the next one.
Gameplay really is about how much agency you have. Visual Novels are usually not games, as plenty of them have zero user agency. You’re just reading a comic book at that point, not playing a game.
I’ve been reading a ton of these things the last few weeks. I can’t bring myself to say “I’m playing these games” over “I’m reading these novels.” Because most of them have had literally no choices to make, or the choices you make have zero effect on anything and are just there as a joke.
It’s absolutely not subjective. A game is literally pursuit of a definite objective. All the color and flavor that isn’t a mechanic in itself is just extra.
“Videogames” is an incredibly varied art form, ranging from things that border on books or movies, to things that are more similar to sports, to abstract sandboxes that have no goal besides just messing around, to everything in between and a lot more I haven’t even touched on.
“gameplay” not “videogames” ya goalpost moving twat!
“Gameplay” is a distinctly difference facet from storytelling and is very objectively defined.
Get over your artsy fartsy bullshit and use your head. Tell me the plot to tic tac toe. You can’t, can you? You can however, define the objective, strategies, and means of interacting with the game state. That’s where game is and story isn’t.
I’m so sick of people missing the point for not even looking because they think they’re just here to win a prize.
Hope you find someone. I played it with my wife, and didn’t expect too much, but it was actually one of the better games I’ve played. Truly fantastic level and puzzle design.
This is actually a few different design paradigms you are talking about.
The first is the exploration map transitioning into a battle map during encounters. The second is randomly spawning encounters. The third is forcing players to fight those encounters. Games like Zelda 2 had a exploration map transition into a battlemap, but the encounters are visible on the exploration map and could be avoided if you want so they were never forced or random. On the other hand games like Shining in the Darkness had exploration and battle on the same map; there was no transitions and the view perspective did not change, the game just randomly forced you to fight encounters while you walked around. Then you have something like Vermintide 2 which is a realtime first person action rpg/shooter where random monsters are spawned in at random times on random places on the map to attack you, but the monsters only spawn out of sight in places you are not looking at, and you are not forced to fight them.
IMO battle transitions and forced encounters are outdated mechanics designed around the technical limitations of 8 bit era systems, while random encounters are a great way to improve exploration and overall replay value of a game.
Good point. I guess it is 2 things I’m talking about.
I think battle transitions are a tradeoff. They free combat but at the cost of interrupting flow. If you don’t do anything with the freedom they give you and you just make the same tired pokemon style choose from a menu combat it’s not worth it.
Aye. Like all design paradigms, there are places where they can be useful or can be used to achieve a certain feel.
I actually hate “choose from a menu combat” but have thought of a few cases where it would make sense - for example a Legend of Galactic Heroes style space warfare game based on hyper-realistic combat between massive fleets of 20,000+ ships each, which according to lore, line up in nice neat firing lines and shoot at each other for 12+ hours until one side has won via attrition. There is no way to simulate that in real time and be fun, and the ranges at which combat happens in deep space means that there is basically literally no room for maneuvering once the battle has began…
I have not yet played Return of the Obra Dinn, but it is always high up on the list when I look for games like Outer Wilds. I’m a huge fan of Outer Wilds, so maybe the recommendation can work in reverse
From what I have heard, the deduction is not as intense as in Obra Dinn, but there is very little hand holding, and the whole game has been brilliantly designed so that it is driven entirely by your natural human curiosity. Once you get through the initial “tutorial” section (probably the roughest part of the game, push through!) the whole game is wide open. See something weird orbiting a distant planet? You can go straight there and start poking around. If you follow the leads that turn up there, you will eventually even figure out what it is, and why it is there. Do that enough and you’ll eventually figure out the strange mystery of your home solar system.
Can’t recommend it highly enough, but you only get to play it without knowing the secrets once, so go in as blind as you can. It took me 20-30 hours to “solve” the main game, maybe another 20 for the DLC, which is also well worth it
This. Go into Outer Wilds knowing as little as possible. It’s an incredible experience if you go in blind.
To paraphrase a description I gave in another thread about this game, at first it will feel like you’re just fumbling around with no clear idea of what you’re doing and why. The game presents itself as just this sort of open ended sandbox with no real purpose. That’s OK, just explore and have fun for about the first half hour or so.
Because about half an hour in, more or less, is when The Event will happen. Do not ask what The Event is. You will know when it happens. It will be, clearly and unambiguously, The Event. And once it happens everything will click, and you’ll go “Oh, that’s what this game is about.”
After The Event, go look at the computer in the back of your space ship. That will become your most important tool throughout the rest of the game.
I really enjoyed the game until The Event. I played a few more loops and was constantly irritated at The Event getting in the way. Like, I get it. I understand that is the point. It just ruined it for me. I don’t want to race a clock when I am exploring.
It can be hard to encourage people to only do this for the obscure - and can sometimes lead to moments of “Witcher 3 / Factorio Unknown Indie Darling” moments. The dream is for threads like this to not contribute to successes that are already basically “lightning in a bottle”, but focus attention where developers haven’t seen so much of it.
Fair points, but I can’t participate in this thread because I’m on an instance that doesn’t allow down votes. The up vote solution is at least a bit more inclusive
Wait, I thought that only applies to communities on that instance, not to a case like this, where you are on another instance? Are you using an app or a browser based way to access the fediverse?
Kinda wild to see nobody mention System Shock, the game that invented audio logs. It may seem quaint in retrospect, but at the time all shooters were in the vein of Doom, and story in a shooter was considered “like story in porn.” System Shock was not only the first to communicate the plot and next steps to the player through found audio logs, but it also filled the player in on side stories and provided characterization to the survivors on Citadel station.
The game recently got a remaster, and despite very few gameplay changes, still holds up really well in 2024. You can really see the bones of later games in it, such as story focused shooters like Bioshock or F.E.A.R. and I’d really recommend it to anyone interested in playing a great retro game.
They also said popularized, though. System Shock never really got beyond cult classic status, so while it invented them, I’d say BioShock popularized them.
They might be closest, but they’re still pretty far off. One of the core pillars of Arkham combat is that it would punish you for button mashing by dropping your combo, meaning you not only gain fewer points at the end of combat but also lose access to your instant finishers, which are all too valuable for taking out the toughest opponents. Spider-Man is happy to let you mindlessly mash, and it’s far worse off for it.
Might just be because I’m just starting out, but Spider-Man’s combat is much more punishing for me. Could just be the higher emphasis on using specific combos on certain enemies, which I have some difficulty keeping straight.
yeah i don’t care so much about ease, i care about how it feels. Arkham’s combat was fun, but the insane distances you could instantly travel made it feel like the game was playing itself. mordor’s solution is better imo. but it obviously comes down to personal preference.
I felt it was more about the “free flow” in the free flow combat system in Arkham. You want it to all chain together, and Arkham made sure you only hit the buttons you needed to exactly as many times as you needed to. Mordor let you keep your combo going even though it had been like 10 seconds since the last time you did anything, which wasn’t exactly flowing at that point. That combo system was a great fit for Batman, and it would fit in nicely with Jason Bourne or John Wick as well, and I’m not sure Lord of the Rings was the best fit for it, but it doesn’t seem like many are trying to do that combat style anymore.
I wouldn’t post the login for random people to copy and paste. Still do all that other stuff to remove all traces of yourself from the account, but ask around and talk to people and when you find someone you want to offer it to, send it discreetly.
Be careful and double / triple check on help.steampowered.com/en/accountdata what information is stored on your account, especially chats, payment information, purchases, subscriptions and so on. But I agree regarding TOS if they ever find out the account will be locked most likely.
If a little extra jiggle was crucial to the vision, then I’d say they need a better vision, but that’s just me. The commentary I heard around this case in particular is that ratings boards around the world impose a ton of different criteria, and getting around all of them is no easy feat, so that could be to blame.
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