Katana314

Katana314, miesiąc temu

The indie scene has focused on a lot of SNES/NES-style retro franchises, but I’d definitely like to see a return to PS2 aesthetic, especially now that we can render those scenes at 60fps.

I recently played Psuedoregalia, and it was a lot of fun.

Katana314, miesiąc temu

I own Deception 4 on PS4, didn’t know what the original was like. I think there’s a lot of cartoony appeal in luring people into elaborate multi-stage death traps, but it’s tricky to garner appeal out of more than just a lot of animation work for each variety of trap.

Katana314, miesiąc temu

I’d really like to see another time-based drama similar to The Last Express. It had a lot of time-based events where you could run into particular passengers of the train in the hallways, and gained a strong sense of physical “presence” as people pushed past you in the halls using detailed rotoscope animations.

The Invisible Hours comes close - it’s non-interactive, basically letting you play as a ghost cameraman watching the mystery.

Katana314, miesiąc temu

It’s basically impossible to increase the price tag on a game like that, and if you go free, the design pivots to a lot of abusive monetization systems. People run into that at the 10th hour of any free game.

It might be failing for a lot of reasons - I don’t think that one is necessarily their mistake though.

Katana314, miesiąc temu

The funny thing is, I feel like it’s not so hard to navigate Steam for particular problems that consumers would like a solution to, but Valve has been ignoring or considers beyond them. For some people, those individual problems form the root of their buying decision. You’d have to beat them at something before you beat them at everything.

Katana314, miesiąc temu

I’m aware that the PS5 is low on “exclusives”. A big part of the reason I got it was for simple things like being able to run old PS4 games at higher framerates.

We’re past the diminishing returns on visuals for games; not to say games can’t look ugly, but with a decent art direction, the capabilities of current consoles are more than enough. That’s why Nintendo was still able to sell Tears of the Kingdom for $60.

Katana314, miesiąc temu

True - I think I meant to refer to it more as a generational issue; many people haven’t upgraded to either current-gen console yet because they don’t technically need them. PS5 might have few exclusives, but Xbox has basically none. (Many of their heavy-hitters like Sea of Thieves still run on Xbox One)

Katana314, miesiąc temu

Yeah, I distinctly remember rage-quitting Heat Signature. There’s an indie fascination with putting deeper, more complicated consequences on failure that just does NOT work out when players are still trying to understand how the game even works.

Katana314, miesiąc temu

I mean, besides FFXIV’s famous layout, I think it’s not so unreasonable to attach a keyboard to a console for things like chat or the game interface. A few Xbox games even do just that.

Of course, no game can require a keyboard plugged in to play. But given the age of Guitar Hero attachments, a few extras make sense.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

About the game’s endingNever enjoyed this game’s ending being such a downer

I guess that may be at least partly a consequence of its development hell.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

The investigation board didn’t really help me. Basically just said somewhere on this planet is a clue, so spend several loops trying to get into the locked areas. I also got tired of the janky physics and quit, even after successfully navigating the portal bramble place

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

The auto pilot literally steered me into the sun.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

Whether or not it’s a failure, it’s a waste of time. Imagine if a relaxed open world game constantly interrupted you with cutscenes of your character falling over, slowly waking up, and trudging back to where they fell.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

But there HAVE been other games based around time loops that manage to avoid that frustration, for instance by letting you manually restart the loop yourself in a quick way, or giving other starting points.

Famous examples include Majora’s Mask, The Sexy Brutale, and others. I understand Outer Wilds tries to hold the trappings of its story around the loop being more sci-fi than magic/fantasy in nature, but that’s still a goal of the writers to wrap the rules of the world around mechanics that are fun to play.

I can even think of many games that gave themselves minor plotholes and odd exceptions to the “world rules” just so that the player could get through it more conveniently.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

I don’t know if I can agree - there’s enough friction just in being able to explore the world from workings like that, I don’t blame them for changing it. At best it can feel cheap. There’s still plenty of ways to apply vulnerability of the unseen.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

I’m curious if it’s actually a different one. That’s the biblical “source” but I feel like there was a long gap before the indie scene picked up that theme in droves. I’m now unsure what it was that started that more modern trend.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

I don’t think it’s just “being 3D”. Mario 64 put a lot of R&D into particulars of how jumping should work, the camera should work, and what the player’s goals should be. Quite a few games unintentionally copied them, while you could see some games not following their lead early in the 3D days that felt very janky to play. Tomb Raider could arguably be among them with the tank controls, though of course it has its own more niche appeal.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

I remember an old BF1942 mod that had spawn selection; I don’t know exactly how far back the feature went, but it was around for a while before BF2.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

The term I refer to is “hiding behind cover” singular - so when I hear “hiding behind covers” I think of the COG seeing locusts, getting scared, and wrapping themselves up in blankets. Lol

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

Goldeneye got it functional, but it was janky. Try playing 4p with the old N64 controllers and you’d sorta struggle to move and aim.

Halo updated the standard with something usable in modern games. I think a few games in that genre also set the expectation that weapons should have no aim penalty while strafing, since console players would use small strafing motions to do light aim correction.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

I’ll admit: I play games that are sexualized in a cringey way. But I don’t want those themes aggravating people that just want a fun zombie apocalypse, forced to play as a hero that randomly reverts to a horndog at random times.

That said, saying it now I wonder about Snake’s personality in the MGS3 remake, since every bit of that game is classic…

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

Something that I think is a good criteria is whether an inclusion negatively affects the experience of someone who’s, let’s say, “normal”.

Ex: A female streamer plays Resident Evil 4, really enjoys the characters for Leon and Ashley. Then, Leon for some reason tries to peek under her skirt in a cutscene. Even if some people find it funny, it makes the streamer feel uncomfortable - both for a character she likes getting violated, and for making it clear “Even if you like fighting zombies, this game was made for horny BOYS. Not for YOU.”

Contrast that with players, in gameplay, spending time at a ladder with a sniper rifle to set up a curious angle. That requires specific player intention, and once it’s clear the player is involving themselves with that stupidity, it’s perhaps more appropriate to quickly lampshade it.

That said, I’m glad the remake had enough creativity it wasn’t invested in remaking tired jokes like that. You could say Lollipop Chainsaw is perhaps more ready to keep those elements given that the intention is clear from its cover art.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

This really feels like a cop-out answer. I understand it’s the same feeling as when difficulty is too high for a game. But I think it’s different when someone has an opinion like “This game feels exactly like what I wanted!…Except for this one big issue.”

Sexualized scenes that make people really uncomfortable (or just un-immersed) can be one of those issues, and high difficulty can often put a barrier on content.

In this case, I genuinely cannot think of too many open-world zombie swarm evasion games that work quite like Dead Rising, complete with its arcadey aesthetics. Having that “one thing” can exclude some people from that exact type of game, even if that doesn’t affect many people. And for those seeking sexualized scenes - the same could be said. No one is outlawing them, just ensuring people get what they’re expecting.

And, to be clear since I brought up difficulty, Dark Souls has so little in the way of direct storytelling, people arguably wouldn’t find much interesting if the game had a story mode that skipped/trivialized gameplay. So in that case, the “one thing” isn’t really a barrier to much other than the credits.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

So, to be clear: The idea of Leon doing that in a cutscene was theoretical. The only thing the first game had was an Easter egg triggered from looking at Ashley via low angle, which as described takes specific intentions to pull off.

Luis, a sleazy side character, does say something raunchy to her, and that was removed in the remake. It’s a little more fitting because he’s painted as untrustworthy and imperfect; but, I also realize with how many people like Ashley, it’s the sort of line that has no good response to let her be cool. In the original she just pouted “How rude!!”

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

It does feel like there’s a lot of writers out there that see a lot of “X” and aim to poke fun at how much “X” we see…but don’t realize that media is so pervasive that they’re aware of their own faults, and able to play around them.

A long time ago there was an attempt by a comedy show to make fun of comic books, by having The Joker tell jokes and make fun of Superman’s underwear-on-outside…not realizing he does exactly that in the comics.

Really, I think a lot of writers just need to go back to basics on recognizing what constitutes an original idea. It’s certainly not easy.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

But given how hard it is to convince people to move off of that generation, “last” could start to have other meanings.

If you’re developing a chill, low-graphics indie game in Unity these days, there is still basically no reason to target the PS5.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

The point being, you can target the PS4 for that though.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

Sadly, even if I’m moralistically in favor, there is so much insane computer science logic (and proprietary mechanisms) behind the process of compilation, especially on certain embedded systems where this issue comes up, that I doubt that could ever be pushed into law.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

FFXIV has headed in the opposite direction of your claim. They’ve recently been making a lot of changes to major story dungeons so that the experience relies as little as possible on online communities. Right now, playing requires a subscription. It’s more and more believable to see that requirement removed if the game was somehow dead and that ‘had’ to happen.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

Very interesting; thanks for the link.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

Others have mentioned existing efforts to form reproducible results. So, this might be irrelevant now; but I’m fairly sure if the mindset was “open source compilers are always better than extremely expensive ones”, the expensive ones wouldn’t have a reason to exist.

That could be an old mindset. (Of course, binaries made way back in that age are part of how we got in this mess)

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

Just think of all the poor indie games filtered from my findings because of my “Exclude: Roguelike” filter.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

Doesn’t Bloodborne use a pistol as a parry mechanic?

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

Pretty sure that’s the joke.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

Given its open world nature, I would bet the difficulty of the game varies greatly depending on where someone randomly decides to explore.

And, any repeat attempts won’t reveal much because on a second go the player will have experience with systems that will keep them safe or at least better conditioned around their losses.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

This once again tires back in with patience and recognizing which parts are hard by comparison.

“Time to try Elden Ring! Hm. This first area I’ve spent 20 minutes in is too hard. I’ll go somewhere else. Actually, this other area I spent half an hour in is also too hard. I’ll go somewhere else. Hmm…actually…”

Not to mention, understanding the stat systems enough to respec can be hard itself. And, summoning people to help you often means you’re not learning or engaging with the game mechanics yourself (or, getting slaughtered by invaders - patience again)

There’s genuine reasons why those things as a form of difficulty adaptation do not work well for everyone. People get an inconsistent and unreadable experience, and conclude simply “The game is too hard.” Often, that statement is made with incomplete information, but that’s what they’ve got from trying to learn it themselves. Obviously, if you look up walkthroughs it’s boringly easy and has no sense of discovery.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

This was the reason I left. Don’t fire your flagships.

It’s one of those pieces of advice like “Don’t lie on the ground naked next to a fire ant colony” but I guess some people really are that stupid.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

TANGO

Tango Tango Tango.

Confused? Search “Xbox Tango Gameworks”

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

The case I see is like this: Many publishers increasingly argue that they don’t have a strong monetization plan for big epic singleplayer games unless they have a dozen forms of microtransactions. For Sony, the monetization plan for God of War is the PlayStation 5 - and all of the residual purchases that come after someone owns one. 80% of those purchases will be of games that are on both Xbox and Playstation - but went to the latter because God of War and Spiderman are awesome. With that in mind, the teams making those games can sorta just aim for awards, not perfect profitability.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

I feel this way about Back 4 Blood too. It got a taste of backlash for not living up to the hopes of Left 4 Dead players - but, it has plenty of its own enjoyable elements (Left 4 Dead doesn’t really let you run a “build” that “specializes” in one thing and accepts a set of weaknesses). The developers announced they were going to stop updating it - but that only means it doesn’t file into the category of junky “Live service” noncompetitive games, which to me is fine. People shouldn’t necessarily avoid it on sale, the servers are up and it’s still fun.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

I like the reactiveness of RTS, but if they can somehow negate the need to be “FAST” about it, I’d enjoy it more. It’s the eternal struggle of, if pressing a button does a good thing, how do you avoid a meta that involves hitting 8 buttons a second.

Something that could have potential is putting an in-game “communications limit” that limits/punishes you for enacting too many Actions Per Minute, and encourages you to find ways to delegate broad tasks to your AI units. eg: “Please make a base at this spot, focused on building Archers”

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

Unfortunately, I feel like only console developers that long ago released their games for arcane bi-flagonal deprucified CPUs get to put out expensive anniversary editions. Everyone who owns Steam copies can still run it just fine.

(Yes, those words are made up)

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

I think RPGs are a lot better at telling a story, but many of them don’t have interesting stories to tell. It’s also admittedly hard to develop that hook. So, while my most memorable games are RPGs, I usually get drawn more to FPSs.

The one exception to this feel is Half-Life 2. Something about the lack of ceremony behind level transitions, lack of objective markers or excess UI, and being “in” the environment in which characters are trying to accomplish their goals helps it feel more immersive. Sadly, not many AAA games have aimed to have expressive faces during gameplay since then to help sell the visuals.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

This same person will claim that Dead Rising, a series that’s had hot twin sisters battle you with katanas, is not sexualized.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

I definitely play a few horny games, and don’t recommend them to anyone. In the other hand, I have actually skipped certain games, and hated some others, because they were trying to tell an engaging story and got hung up on cringey sexualization of their female leads.

As you said, it’s all up to consumer preference. It isn’t just watch-dogging and shaming of sexualization, it’s also that there’s a lot of people that find lazy sexualization to be disengaging and hardly unique. Plenty of the time getting the characters to look unique and interesting is also a challenge; and diversity often helps with that.

Katana314, 2 miesiące temu

I’ve stopped using my Xbox entirely since Tango Gameworks was murdered.

Katana314, 3 miesiące temu

Supposedly the real-life SAS has had a very successful nonlethal career going many deployments without any shots fired. Their main way of operating is to flood a building with CS Gas and go in with masks - I don’t know if that makes for a good game though.