millie

@millie@beehaw.org

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

millie, (edited )

There definitely is a lot of crap that came out back in the day that we tend to forget, but there were also very different popular strategies for game making.

One of the most significant for me is the degradation of choice in RPGs. Many, certainly not all, of the RPGs I played as a kid and as a teenager would have elements of their story that could diverge to some degree based on your actions. The most typical results were things like a different ending or an otherwise hidden scene. Silent Hill was a good example of this. But you’d also have a lot of games where your choices immediately and totally altered the way things play out, like Planescape: Torment or Baldur’s Gate. Your choices could affect not only the ending, but a whole lot on the way. Hell, the first Fallout game served up some major unforeseen consequences for an action that on the surface seems like a pretty straightforwardly good idea.

But ever since Mass Effect I’ve noticed an emptiness in choice making, and recently I saw an article that showed me why.

If you follow the branching choices in those early games like a flow chart, the choices on it were often significant divergences that don’t ever meet back up with the original iteration of the quest. But modern design techniques try to be efficient, so you’ve got a branching point at the point of choice, then it rejoins the main quest, and then later on it branches off briefly to check what you did and react to it, before going back to the main quest as though nothing happened.

It’s such a letdown. If you only play once and never save scum it’ll seem fine, but the lack of depth becomes readily apparent so quickly. It’s not like nobody’s still doing big branches too, but you can tell when they default to this and it feels so empty.

I’ve enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3, but one of the things I notice, especially in act 3, is how slapped together some of these branching choices are. Also, as cute as the die rolling mechanic is, the constant clear and random success/failure state of all branching choices just leads to endless save scumming. The game doesn’t handle it like a divergence in one way or the other, it straight up tells you you failed.

In D&D the die rolls are fun and tense, but they don’t become this totally separate gambling subgame. Sometimes it’s important to get a bad die roll, and sometimes the result in terms of fun is way better than getting a good die roll. I never got that impression from BG3. It felt like a bad die roll meant missing content rather than getting different content, and I think that’s largely because of the literal framing of the die rolling UI and the associated sounds. A more neutral UI where you don’t know the DC of what you’re rolling for and it doesn’t scream at you that your roll wasn’t good enough might let people RP out the failure a little better. Comedy doesn’t hurt either, and is a great tool for DMs seeking to alleviate some of the pain of a bad roll.

Anyway, point being, I think there are some problems with modern game design philosophy that stem from seeking efficiency and greater visual fidelity and audio complexity over engaging game design. Shitty graphics and limited processing power mean you have to make decisions to bring the player into the world and get them to forget that their character’s head is like 8 pixels or whatever. So they have to exploit humanity’s adeptness at pattern recognition, but they also have to make what they’ve got count. They’re not overloading it with bloat and random branches just for the hell of it. A branching story was a branching story because they really wanted it to be.

I’m probably like 50% talking out of my ass, but I feel like if we had Tim Cain here with us he’d agree with me.

Though indie games do seem perfectly capable of avoiding this corporate optimization shit.

But in a word: no.

You are not.

millie,

I dunno. I pulled Septera Core out of a bargain bin shoved together with some forgettable mech game for $10, and it was pretty great.

I don’t think effort is what makes the difference. Games now are designed increasingly in ways that are less ‘risky’ in terms of corporate measures of user satisfaction than they used to be. It’s the kind of measure of satisfaction that sees a quest marker constantly showing your destination as clearly preferable to having to actually look at the world and find your way around.

I’ve run into this with friends of mine who are into modding before. When they see one mechanic that negates another mechanic, or that degrades the output quality of another mechanic, they see it as wasted code. To me, that’s the essence of the tension and release in a game. You create a state the player wants to get to, then you put shit in their way and provide them with various ways of solving your obstacles. That’s basically narrative driven gaming in a nutshell, an interaction between barriers and ways of negating those barriers.

But like, I think that may be part of what’s missing sometimes in pushing these more like real-world convenience-oriented features akin to a GPS app. If you’re making a GPS app, you want it to work perfectly, but in a game it’s kind of more fun if it’s got a little bit of jank in it. Not the actual code, obviously, but the player’s interaction with the mechanic in the game world. A straightforward trip from point A to point B isn’t much of a story.

Honestly, I think it’s just more of the kind of watering down that’s inevitable as you get too much money wrapped up in a project. Corporate infrastructures and IPOs aren’t conducive to art. Or quality in anything else, for that matter. It doesn’t just affect what decisions are made in a game’s development, either. It affects how people are educated, who gets hired, how labor is divided.

There’s definitely something to be said for the effects of nostalgia and survivorship bias on the appearance of retro gaming in a modern context, but there also have been major changes that aren’t just about the decisions of individual companies.

millie,

Only the ones that don’t get cracked.

Thankfully there’s a small army of anti-capitalist heroes preserving media through the era of corporate destruction of literally everything.

millie,

If they’re bring ripped and preserved, it doesn’t really matter if they work yet, in an archival sense.

millie,

This looks adorable. The character models are a little weird looking, but I wanna play a little hobbit skipping around the Shire! :D

millie,

This person has zero IMDB credits. Call me after making literally anything even remotely approaching the quality of anything Bethesda has ever sneezed out.

Does he maybe have some semblance of a point about NCR and New Vegas? Sure, but if that makes it a ‘bad show’ that ‘no one will watch’, please let me point you at Star Wars, which jettisoned its own extremely substantial extended universe to the chagrin of long time fans and is doing fine.

Can’t you just, like, look at it like anime or like Douglas Adams?

Yes, we get multiple iterations of more or less the same story in different mediums. No, they aren’t exactly the same. Is that a problem? Does the Ranma 1/2 TV series have to match the OVH or they’re both shit?

Do I have to choose only the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide books, or the radio series, or the show, or the movie? Am I not allowed to enjoy them all?

Is it really more economically viable to make a living being an entitled and cynical jackass about other people’s work than to go make your own?

millie,

I couldn’t wade through the first episode of the Last of Us. I watched this entire thing in one sitting and have now seen most of it twice. It deserves a decent score on RT.

millie,

You might really enjoy DayZ. The public servers are pretty brutal, but if you find a comfortable RP server you can settle in and really enjoy exploring the landscape. Once you’re used to the mechanics it’s so smooth.

Stereo headphones or even like monitors make hunting a lot of fun, listening to distant sounds trying to find a deer or boar is a lot of fun. And once you’re used to dealing with zombies and the sthough.l mechanics, crafting and all that, it really opens up.

Plus the ability to expand it with modding is pretty extensive. We’ve got some neat stuff on our own server (though not much pop atm), and I’ve seen others that do some next level stuff like player vampires and werewolves and stuff.

Even just the vanilla game is absolutely gorgeous though. If you like exploring, scavenging, and crafting, especially with friends, it’s kind of perfect.

Conan Exiles has a somewhat similar vibe but a bit clunkier and in a low fantasy setting. It’s also got a lot of D&D roleplay servers.

millie,

It seems like they’re not just profiting on children, they’re setting up a system in which work is exchanged for a roblox company scrip and then charging them that same scrip to advertise their game. They also take a cut. So if a game gets a little traction but doesn’t immediately blow up, there’s a built in incentive to put the money right back into roblox.

Shady. Is it not enough to brush uncomfortably close to child labor laws with an army of child modders creating your value? You really have to turn around and loop them into an exploitative model where you get paid like 3 times before they see a cent? And even then they hold their money hostage until the kid manages to save $1000 rather than spending it on ads and more roblox stuff, that or they need a premium subscription so roblox gets paid 4 times.

Like, it’s illegal to have child labor so therefore it’s a foregone conclusion that whatever you’re doing won’t be child labor, so you might as well do some crazy shit that an employer could never get away with?

Honestly tracks with modern-day capitalism.

That said, like, it would have been cool to learn lua scripting when I was 12. Maybe if it weren’t for the obsession with constant growth we could have the nice thing without the shitty thing that supports it.

Can we eventually learn this lesson please and move on as a species? It’s literally the problem in every news story.

millie,

Also, like, with every game with private servers, the private servers are pretty much universally better than the public ones. Someone close to the server has to care enough to put the thing up, which goes a long way past some company opening a few hundred for money.

millie,

Isn’t that more of just part of interacting with people, though?

Like, if you play some kind of real-life game with no regard for anyone else, that’s generally considered poor sportsmanship. That wasn’t invented in online gaming, it’s been a concern as long as people have been coming up with games to play together. We accept that if you sit down and play a game of chess or golf or pool or D&D or paintball, you’re going to try to not cheat or blow the game off or be a jerk about it. Some people are better sports than others, but the general idea is that we accept the wins and losses and the game going in different directions, because otherwise there’s no game.

What’s an aberration is this concept that people you meet with over an electronic connection aren’t real, don’t matter, and are never owed anything.

millie,

Ahh, that makes sense!

millie,

I mean, the subreddit was originally called KotakuInAction, because it was specifically highlighting perceived nepotism and ragebait at Kotaku.

millie,

I’m not sure that’s the danger you think it is, or that arguing against them is a panacea.

Arguing with them or loudly pointing at them makes a spectacle, bringing people to the issue on both sides. Just an argument isn’t super likely to bring people around if they’ve already made up their minds, but it will certainly organize the opposition.

In the mean time, unless you’re actually able to sway the thing you’re arguing over, there’s now just a big visible and time consuming turf war going on over things that nobody in the discussion has any ability to change, because they all pertain to the opinions of others.

Compare this with disengaging. Suddenly the loud opinion has nothing to reverberate off of. It’s alone, yelling into a void that doesn’t care. It’s not even a blip.

The right knows this, which is why they DARVO. We need to learn this, but to use it honestly instead of using it to become better manipulators. Disengaging doesn’t just prevent the triggering of massive opposition organization, it saves energy for where it can actually be useful. Then you can just go do the thing without making a spectacle of people with shitty opinions who otherwise wouldn’t even matter to the progress being made.

Stop giving them something to fight about day in and day out and they’ll get bored and go back to looking at big trucks instead of paying attention to politics.

millie,

Could be, I guess. I found the whole mess through SubredditDrama, which was already a bit of a cesspool of its own. To me it initially just looked like part of the whole back and forth between a lot of the notable players and subs that tended to make a sport of fighting one another. Then it was suddenly this whole other thing.

millie,

I’m almost 40 and I bought a Baba Yaga skin to play fortnite like twice. But I mean, it is the Baba Yaga, and we did win.

millie,

Limitations don’t get in the way of creativity, they produce it. Listening to people who have no clue how to make a good game, though, will definitely stifle creativity.

millie,

Among Us can be a lot of fun with a big group, and it goes up to 15 people. Or if you want something a little more focused on the sneaky and investigative part you could check out something like Town of Salem.

Games of low-stakes lying and finger pointing can be a lot of fun. And trying to be the baddie in one of them without giggling like a fool in an internet cafe and giving yourself away sounds amusing.

millie,

So keep control of your own indie and don’t do shared ownership. Check.

millie,

I feel like Fitgirl is more trustworthy than any corporation of any size.

millie,

Seems like a good time to go indie. Big game companies are bloated and unhealthy. Specialization is so niche that there clearly isn’t the kind of interdepartmental communication there ought to be, and it’s pretty obvious that the money people have their hands in way too much.

That doesn’t seem to me like an environment that’s conducive to art.

millie,

Cyberpunk is literally full of what amount to dialogue based quicktime events.

millie, (edited )

I just did a replay recently and it was a lot of fun. They really nailed environments, sound, really the whole look and feel of the thing. Gameplay too; I did a monowire netrunner build this time and it was wild. Unlike anything I’ve played before, really. But I did have to cheat a bit to get there.

There used to be a monowire you could go grab out of a box right from the start, but they took it out and locked access to any monowire behind street smarts. I added a console to give myself one and added some cyberware while I’m at it, because why not chrome up?

This was, in fact, totally fine. The locking out doesn’t seem to have anything at all to do with balance.

I did have to spawn myself a bunch of these new shards to increase my cyberware limit, though, because they decided to cap them out and add an item to unlock them. Again, my going crazy with it really didn’t disrupt balance at all.

So why? Because someone in some department somewhere sees game mechanics as a commodity, and they’re treating them like dlc. I get an infinite sea of generic weapons, but try to do the cyberpunk things and the game wags its finger.

Aside from treating game mechanics as a commodity and meting out little scraps, it really doesn’t seem to have any concern for player autonomy when it comes to a lot of the quests. At one point they shoved me into a hideous green snake skin pantsuit and I stopped playing for a week. The game repeatedly forced me to use a pistol, turning what would have been fun quests into obnoxious slogs while I waited to be allowed to play the game again.

Hell, even a pivotal moment in the DLC literally forces a gun into my hands and glitches out if I try to do anything it doesn’t expect. I had a character literally glitch its hands through its head to shoot at me when I tried to run behind it. That’s not even mentioning the numerous points where going off the rails just immediately kills you and forces you to reload. Not because of anything actually dangerous or bad, but just because you’re not supposed to go that way. Rather than making some obstacle, they literally just pick you up and put you back on the path. Could have invented literally anything to explain it away, maybe a security shield or something that kills anyone with a head computer who tries to leave the area, but they just didn’t bother. Telling the player ‘no’ is enough for them. Cool. Fun.

It’s a fun game overall, but it could have been a way better game with a little more inter-departmental communication, a few less money people, and a little more respect for player agency.

millie,

Utterly pointless comments like this make me wish I could downvote here. Surely you have something better to do?

Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski

apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...

millie,

Sounds like a terrible business model that deserves the problems it runs into. If a company doesn’t prioritize the quality of its offerings, why should anyone give them a cent?

Warcraft 2 / Starcraft type games ( or clones, or engine recreations )

Im missing a lot of charm that w2 and first starcraft games had, and i did not see any open engine recreations, nor clones that lived to this day. With warcraft 3 i only ever finished half of the game, by the time sc2 came out, i was already too old to even bother trying.

millie,

If you’ve never played Dune 2 or Dune 2000 or whatever other iterations and remakes of the Dune RTS series, I strongly recommend it. It seems like a lot of Warcraft’s DNA comes from Dune.

millie,

Yeah, seems like. Like when I was a kid and I played Dune 2, then played Warcraft a few years later, the one seemed to inherit most of its ideas from the other.

But I didn’t like go look up the dates or exhaustively check that no other game came up with the format first. I know the first Age of Empires is somewhere vaguely in that same time span too, but I’m not certain of the order.

Thus seems.

millie,

He can’t be a knight, 'e ain’t got no armor on!

millie,

Think their new game will be packed full of racist dog whistles too?

millie,

Even just modding I’ve noticed a lot of extremely confident opinion-giving that’s equally uninformed. I think people just like to feel like they have some special insight, so they tend to run with whatever the first narrative they hear is and stick hard to it. It reminds me of all those little bullshit factoids people love to repeat, like that daddy long legs are the most venomous spider but are incapable of biting people.

The big obvious example in DayZ is the myth of the ‘alpha wolf’. People have for ages been claiming that one of the two wolf textures (usually the white one, but I’ve heard both) is an ‘alpha’ wolf that’s stronger than the others and will cause the pack to run away if you kill it. This is a complete myth with no basis in the code of the game. One wolf type is a child class of the other and the only difference is their texture.

And yet some people will get extremely offended if you mention this. Even if they literally have never even peeked under the hood of DayZ and are well aware that you’ve been actively developing mods for it.

millie,

There’s a big difference between looking at a game and saying there seem to be some performance issues versus baselessly pretending that you know what the specific cause of those issues is.

millie,

I mean, you kinda do, though. You have no idea what’s going on under the hood in Divinity versus Baldur’s Gate. Even if the graphics are similar and the UI looks the same, there could well be much more complex systems involved. Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.

millie,

Why would a company with multiple blockbuster franchises completely scrap the engine they’re made in?

millie,

Weird that they keep hitting the ball out of the park.

millie,

So in other words, they’ve found a viable business model that incentivizes the next generation of developers to get their asses into gear?

Hmm… I’m not seeing the down side.

millie,

Yeah, exactly. They’ve created a viable ecosystem for themselves. They have a highly moddable engine and they tend to leave a lot of abandoned code in the game that modders find and make use of. People eat it up and they use it as a starting point to get into development.

I’m on exactly that track right now. For me it’s been all about very open ended kinda buggy games that you can mod the hell out of. Wanting to change or tweak a little something here and there leads to wanting to implement more elaborate ideas. Eventually it starts looking appealing to make something of your own, or to make a bigger contribution to other projects. Personally, I don’t really want to work for a big company (or anyone other than myself), but a modding portfolio can certainly be a foot in the door.

My first mod for a game was a thing to shut up the Longs in Fallout 4. Super simple, literally just broke the link to their idle audio files. That was ages ago, and my own journey has been more related to getting DayZ to do what I want and now using Conan to further explore game design and more involved elaborate systems, but Bethesda was still that first step.

They’re not perfect, and their IP in some cases has certainly been watered down a little, but they make great games and have a workable business model that isn’t as toxic as some others. They’ve done a good job fostering creativity and innovation.

I don’t really get the complaints by people who’ve never made anything even remotely approaching a Fallout or an Elder Scrolls acting like the developers are trash and they know better. Let’s see your blockbuster open world rpg.

millie,

To be fair, Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 came out in the 90s.

millie,

Why is everyone so worried about what other people play? Weirdly controlling.

millie,

Piracy is literally the only method by which a lot of media is preserved in the era of subscription services and abandoned properties. It’s a public service that ensures that some of the most significant art of the last century isn’t lost.

The archives of pirates are a digital museum for a culture that can’t be bothered to preserve its own legacy.

millie, (edited )

I could understand putting this kind of time in for a passion project of your own, but for like, a job for somebody else? Worse, a salaried job? That’s way too much.

Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun? (kbin.cafe) angielski

Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.

millie,

We had a few cartridges for our Colecovision that I could never figure out how to get to do anything very game-like. I don’t really remember the names of the bad ones. I’d be hard pressed to remember the names of the good ones other than like Donkey Kong. They were pretty hit or miss in general and the controller was really weird, but it made a memorable introduction to gaming and a great starting point to watch it all grow from.

I think the worst game I’ve ever played was the Dragonlance game for NES. There are other equally bad games that are even bad in largely the same way, but I’m a big Dragonlance fan and when I finally got a copy of this I was very excited for about 5 minutes. It’s just bad. I have vague memories of throwing Tass into a hole a bunch of times and like maybe a little bit after that, but it was a mess. Maybe if I’d been able to get past the controls I’d have found a gem in there somewhere, but it just wasn’t there. I feel like if a pizza company can knock out a class A platformer, TSR should have been able to manage.

It’s odd, because D&D crpgs have usually been innovative for their time, using the D&D rules and hitting the ball out of the park. The Dragonlance game didn’t come that long before the Black Sun game they made, and I’m pretty sure they had been making similar crpgs previously. I feel like I remember playing another early one on our 8088. But they decided to make some half assed platformer instead. Huh?

But Dragonlance always seems to get shafted on adaptations. I remember Tracy Hickman talking on Palace in the late 90s about making a live action Dragonlance movie with Aaron Eisenberg as Tasslehoff, but it seemed to just evaporate and instead we got that kinda weird but cool to see very stylized cartoon. I do like that it looked like the book covers, but it was a long way from what we’d initially expected to see.

Some day Dragonlance will get some real love. Maybe Baldur’s Gate 3 will help.

Denuvo security is now on Switch, including new tech to block PC Switch emulation (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski

The first of the tools Denuvo is offering to Switch developers is Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection, a “revolutionary technology to protect games launching on Nintendo Switch from piracy”....

millie,

Welp, I guess we’re going to be getting a DRM-breaking emulator accompanied by some weird new rant by Empress.

millie,

Kotaku out here dutifully defending the status quo. Maybe these complex, top-heavy, primarily commercially motivated hierarchies aren’t a good environment for the development of decent games. If those top people have a vision and a passion for their art, it’ll show. If they don’t and all they care about is money while throwing figurative scraps of creative freedom and control to their actual development and art teams, that’ll show too.

What Larian did right, more than anything else, is retain artistic integrity. They didn’t hold back to stuff anything behind a paywall or try to figure out how to design their game to appeal to whales. They had something they wanted to make, a franchise they wanted to do proper justice, and they knocked the ball out of the park.

Not because it’s perfect, because it isn’t, but because it is incredibly clear that they didn’t sell out their artistic integrity. It couldn’t have been made if they had.

That, I think, is what some development studios are worried about. Ultimately though, that’s a good thing. It offers the potential of changing the nature of the business to one that’s less about Skinner boxes and more about creating an enjoyable and maybe even profound experience.

Please do use Baldur’s Gate 3 as a weapon to cut money grubbing corporate filth out of the industry.

The Steam Deck is changing how normies think of gaming PCs.

Just thought I’d share something I thought was pretty interesting. I have a mother in law who is… well let’s just say she’s a stereotypical older mom who doesn’t own a computer, just an iPad. During the pandemic, she started getting into Nintendo games and bought herself a Switch. Fast forward a few years later and...

millie,

I mean, why not? Women play games and gamers do in fact sometimes breed or even adopt.

millie,

I loved the dialogue system in Shadowrun for SNES. It was pretty simple, didn’t really have any branches or anything, but it feels autonomous in a way that’s hard to match.

Basically, wherever you talk to someone, certain words in their lines will be in bold. Once you’ve seen one of the bolded keywords, you can ask any other character about those words. Most of them will spit out a canned response specific to that NPC unless you ask about something relevant to them, but the list of keywords is long. It makes it more than possible to play the game several times through and miss certain things. There are runners you can only hire if you get the right keywords, even parts in the main story where it takes a little wandering around trying different things to get the keywords you need or figure out where to use them. Some keywords are basically dead ends, only mentioned one or two times, maybe only in the conversation they’re found in, but others will come up again and again.

Shadowrun in general felt very open as a game. Even though it had some barriers to progress before being able to go everywhere, there’s a huge amount of freedom in general.

For its time the amount of freedom and depth in the same package was not at all the norm.

millie,

It literally says “Skip” right underneath the thing you’re complaining about. If you’d taken the time to look at the screen, you’d have seen it itself.

millie,

I’d start with 6 (sometimes referred to as 3 in the US). The writing is solid, there are plenty of choices to make and characters to play with, and it moves along nicely. You can put a bunch of time into maxing everyone out and grinding out the highest difficulty areas, but you don’t have to.

Great story, great characters, and one hell of a female lead especially considering the era it was released in.

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