But horror isn’t CoD. I will never be that big. But Konami thinks it can be, and will either sacrifice the quality of the games in order to appeal to a wider audience, or keep the games as scary as they are, and fail to meet their own unrealistic expectations.
The scariness of the games is an additional complication that AAA publishers don’t seem to get.
A bad Call of Duty still lets you click heads and scream slurs in a match lobby.
But make a horror game that isn’t scary? Or even the wrong amount, or type of scary? Complete failure.
If you target hardcore horror fans, your game has to be good enough to scare them, and you’ll never be able to sell to everyone. And if you can’t scare the hardcore fans, you need to be interesting enough for the casual fans to buy in. Getting both is near impossible, which is why indies do so well in the genre. It’s REALLY hard to make horror for everyone. Usually, a horror game interests only a subset of gamers.
And when you have a franchise, every new game needs to figure out how to scare people who have played the previous games. Or else interest them in other ways.
Horror is really easy to overplay. If your game is too long, the scares stop working because the player gets used to them. If sequels just do the same thing as the last game, entire games can stop being effective. And once you start trying to reinvent things every game, they can end up losing their identity (see RE5 and 6).
Doing this every 12 months? Just no.
Resident Evil is an excellent example. Capcom has tried and failed to increase release frequency, but titles that actually sell are about two or three years apart no matter what they seem to do. And that is WITH their new formula of using two completely different styles to reduce the sameness of the titles.
If Konami wants to release more games, they should tap their other IPs, not oversaturate the already crowded horror genre even more.
I feel like another option for horror is to spam the effort. Literally have 5 to 10 studios all making horror games, with a fraction of the budget. One of the big successes in horror is that some of the best ones were made with large restrictions on technology, effects, budget, etc. If you search the “Survival horror” tag on Steam, there’s a pretty large wash of games succeeding in the space now.
You could also note how many “horror-focused” Resident Evil games go through some form of reset where you lose your buildup of equipment, or change pace. They recognize that the genre isn’t well-suited for a constant escalation of power until you fight god, the way JRPGs do. Thus, people who enjoy those games are more likely to munch through them like doritos. Many streamers even have nights where they will buy some half-dozen of the games on Steam and just keep going through them.
i just went and did the tutorial, which i avoid like the plague due to being drained by it.
Yup. God, Starbound has so much missed potential by focusing so heavily on a bad story. It’d be one thing if it were there in the background, but you’re basically forced to play through it every single time. The dungeons are extremely repetitive (this would have been a great chance for some procedural generation), the boss fights are way too easy, and the whole portion of the game where you just search for relics to scan isn’t fun or interesting at all. Not a great design decision for a sandbox game that should otherwise have a ton of replayability.
I think the story is a point where people unfairly criticize the game, personally. After the tutorial dungeon you don’t have to engage with it whatsoever.
The parts where you have to search for relics between each dungeon are meant to encourage exploration and remove the pressure of the story. It’s the game saying “now go do whatever and have fun!” and you make progress toward the story just by playing normally, as you come across settlements belonging to the particular species you need to scan.
If your goal is to speedrun the story and drop the game, then yeah those parts are annoying, but if you want a sandbox game where you are free to do anything you want, then I don’t really understand why people complain so much about those parts of the main story.
Honestly that’s a fair point. It’s been a long while since I’ve played Starbound, and even longer since I played it vanilla. Forced is definitely not the word I should have used, but I do remember feeling constantly pushed towards completing the story because I enjoy fighting bosses. I also remember genuinely hating engaging with it any time I did. Nothing like searching for an hour for floran relics only to find a planet with two less than I needed. The game desperately needs a way to track down a specific species’ settlement. It just wasn’t fun in the slightest, and I would have preferred no story over what the game got. Boss fights are fun (even if I think most of Starbound’s are too easy), and it sucks that you’re forced to progress through the exact same lame and repetitive repeat of the story between each boss.
The tutorial dungeon is the worst though. A true pinnacle of terrible sandbox game design. It ain’t short, it’s the exact same dungeon every single time with the same enemies and loot, and it’s strictly required to make any progress whatsoever.
No disagreement with me there, I think the linear dungeons were a poor choice and the game would benefit from a way to track settlements by species.
Personally I dislike boss fights in these sorts of games (the main reason I don’t like Terraria anymore is the focus on bosses, and everything you do is just to prep for the next boss), so that’s likely a big part of why the story doesn’t bother me since I just mostly ignore it or do it passively. But for someone who enjoys the bosses and seeks them out, I can see why it’s more frustrating.
But I completely agree that the tutorial dungeon is the worst. I hate doing it whenever I play vanilla to introduce a friend to the game, and the “skip intro” option on character creation really should skip right to after the dungeon. Or alternatively it could have been designed to be more fun or interesting on repeat playthroughs
The relics are probably the furthest i’ve ever gotten in the story. I like the settlement portion, but when i get to the story it’s just a slog. If there’s something I absolutely need from it, i just use console commands to skip as much as possible. It’s really the weak point in the game
Man those games are great. I recently-ish tried out one of the decompiled versions of the original after the source code leaked. It's still a lot of fun
What you describe is a huge part of vehicle racing in general. Getting into a flow state is fast. If you can stress an opponent out enough by threatening to overtake or even just keeping up, you can very often push them to start taking bigger risks and to drop out of that flow state
This is how it felt like setting up my homelab. Watching videos or searching for tutorials when you hit some error and trying to figure it out all frantic. Then you sort of just happen to fix it after putting it down for a bit and everything is OK.
I just went through it last night when I saw my syncthing container had a database corruption error after seeing my darktable had an error. I was able to install the darktable flatpak which worked, synced my darktable database had to use flatseal to give syncthing access to that, then had to rebuild the syncthing database and now all is running again.
At first I was all nervous but remembered how I’ve figured things out in the past and its just a matter of time so I wasn’t panicked like previous times
World of Warcraft Collector’s Editions : even though I stopped playing a few years ago now, I still buy the physical copy collector’s editions to add to my collection - I have every one going all the way back to vanilla.
Grand Theft Auto 6 : I have both the PS3 Collector’s Editions for IV and V, feels like getting the same for 6 to finish off that ‘trilogy’ would be apropos.
Honestly, if anything, is overrated. It had a very promising beta that was ruined by further development. And then was further tarnished by the facts of its abusive development coming to light.
I’m not saying that no one should enjoy it. If you like it, that’s great. But it very much didn’t live up to its potential.
Did some digging and I found the unpaid labor scandal and one harassment claim. Nothing about sexual abuse and the harassment claim I was unable to corroborate.
Still bad though. What a sad story to a game with such potential. Really irks me.
I actually played Deltarune on launch when the first demo thing released. It was a fun experience. It does give the vibe though of being a lot more refined. Definitely takes everything he’s learned from Undertale and put it to use in Deltarune
I used to a lot as a kid. It was pretty much the only way to get some more obscure games.
I pretty much stopped in the mid 2000s except for some collectors editions of games that I was 99% sure were going to be great Halo3, Fallout3, New Vegas etc. I still do the same thing now with the odd switch collectors edition xenoblade chronicles, the final fantasy pixel remasters, unicorn overlord but those were games I was 99% sure would be finished at launch.
The rest of the time I wait a year or so until the game is half priced and finished.
Me personally, I’ll never pre-order a game. Pre ordering is different from early access because i actually get the game even in a unfinished state.
All that said, it depends on the game. Timberborn has been the only early access game I felt has been worth it. The Devs are still putting out regular updates and have vastly improved the game since i bought it. Its been very fun to play from the beginning and has only gotten better.
Compare that to something like cyberpunk, yea I’m good. Couldn’t imagine how that must of felt to preorder that and get that mess on release. I think the main difference is the studio. AAA games I rarely buy anymore. Indie games though? Thats where I’m at.
for shooters its very intense. with into the radius I was practicing reload drills, and counting rounds as I shoot them so that I can keep one in the chamber and do it faster. knowing where all my gear is on my body so that I can grab things as I need them in a pinch. dropping clips on the ground as im reloading in a panic. practicing actually holding the gun and aligning the sights quickly.
bone lab had me smashing things over the head with the butt of the gun when they got too close to fire at them.
with a 2d shooter you are pointing and clicking a mouse and pressing r.
First person shooters are crazy. I love Onward and Pavlov for that. Actually aiming, crouching down, and physically reloading are things I can never go back from
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