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dark souls 2 has A funny dwarf. edit: rewatching hbomb's bloodborne review to clear my mind after that series of insanely wrong posts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC3OuLU5XCw Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Jun 6, 2018 |
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Jun 6, 2018 23:35
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Groovelord Neato posted:dark souls 2 has A funny dwarf. I didn't like Dark Souls 2 enough to really play a whole lot of it. There's a weird sticky-ness to the swordplay that makes everything feel off to me. Edit - To be clear, Bloodborne is the only one of these games I liked enough to really get into and finish.
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Jun 6, 2018 23:38
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John Murdoch posted:Yeah, I'll defend Fallout 3's intro for having narrative momentum and clear purposes. That of establishing a bond with your father, so his sudden exit has more weight and giving you a strong core objective once you enter the gameworld, and acting as a vertical slice showing off all of the different ins and outs of Fallout - important for players who have probably never encountered a Fallout game before. I've heard a couple of arguments (maybe not necessarily serious ones) that the setup of New Vegas doesn't really account for the notion of wanting to steer clear of the guy who shot you in the head for fear that he might do it again successfully. One of the problems with New Vegas in the early game is that you're funneled into taking the long route to New Vegas proper, as the most direct routes north are blocked off by deathclaws and cazadores. I don't really take a lot of umbrage with that, though, because it 1.) it adheres to a general rule with RPGs (stay on the main roads, else you may run into more dangerous encounters), and 2.) roadblocks like the deathclaw quarry give you a 'long-term goal' in regards to something you know can't do from the start, but can return to once you've gotten stronger. Leal posted:I feel that this image is appropriate. Ghostlight posted:This image somewhat over-exaggerates the water chip's importance to Fallout's plot. Something I've picked up on is that RPGs (usually really good RPGs) tend to have their main quest-lines split with lower-stakes initial goal, and a higher-stakes secondary goal. In Fallout 1, you're trying to find the water chip before Vault 13 runs out of water, but then once you do that, you're tasked with trying to stop the mutant army before they destroy the wasteland. Fallout 2 does mostly the same, but with the GECK and the Enclave. New Vegas has you tracking down the man who shot you and the package you were carrying, but then has you take a side in the power struggle for Hoover Dam. Daggerfall started you out investigating why the king's ghost started haunting the town, but after that was done, you were tasked with finding and delivering the control of a super-powerful golem to one of rulers. Mass Effect started out with you hunting down Saren, but then had you trying to stop the Reapers. I guess I see it as a game not starting out with a 'save the world' plot, but mixing it in later down the line. Groovelord Neato posted:what's the point of playing a game if you're just told the story. You'd be surprised by how people clamor for the ability to skip through a game.
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Jun 6, 2018 23:40
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I think a lot of people underestimate the impact that the interactive nature of video games can have on storytelling for people, even if it is a linear story.
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Jun 6, 2018 23:44
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People who play video games for their job ask for “less work” button. Film at 11.
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Jun 6, 2018 23:46
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i can't think of any game that has a story good enough to skip the actual game part. plus it's like reading a plot synopsis of the movie you just bought instead of actually watching it. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Jun 6, 2018 |
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Jun 6, 2018 23:51
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Roth posted:It's me, I'm the guy that found God of War a more compelling narrative than any Souls/Bloodborne game. 
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Jun 6, 2018 23:59
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Groovelord Neato posted:dark souls 2 has A funny dwarf. Dark Souls 2 has two funny dwarves who may or may not be related.
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Jun 7, 2018 00:00
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John Murdoch posted:I think you'll change your tune after you watch all 300 hours of my lore analysis videos. can't believe that guy gets like 5k a month through patreon. that's also not the narrative.
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Jun 7, 2018 00:04
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Roth posted:It's me, I'm the guy that found God of War a more compelling narrative than any Souls/Bloodborne game. God of War has a less compelling narrative than the Burnout games.
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Jun 7, 2018 00:04
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ACES CURE PLANES posted:God of War has a less compelling narrative than the Burnout games. Burnout > God of War > Soulsborne I'm glad we can all agree to this.
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Jun 7, 2018 00:06
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Groovelord Neato posted:i can't think of any game that has a story good enough to skip the actual game part. I can, but it's mostly because they have a good plot and bad gameplay. Personally, I feel like different people like different things and that's why more diversity in video games is a good thing. 
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Jun 7, 2018 00:14
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games with bad gameplay are never a good thing.
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Jun 7, 2018 00:20
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Mark Brown made a video on this a little bit ago and I agree on his take that I think that for accessibility reasons (esp. including accommodating disability) it's positive to encourage games to have modes that allow people to skip or otherwise breeze through content, but also to mark the mode as "not being the intended experience for most players" in some way.
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Jun 7, 2018 00:32
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Groovelord Neato posted:i can't think of any game that has a story good enough to skip the actual game part. I'm sure I could make a list of games that had pretty good and engaging narratives, but were bogged down by the core game being flawed or a chore to play. It's not even that I'm totally opposed to the idea. It's more so the notion behind it. Going back to Dark Souls, I'd totally get why'd someone might turn on CheatEngine and noclip their way through the Bed of Chaos fight or something. "Yeah, I died like 15 times trying to get on that drat branch, and I just wanted to move on to the rest of the game." That I can understand. I'm not going to hold it against someone if they just want to do something like that to make things a bit easier or more to their liking. What annoys me is when I see articles that preach about it as some grand idea that more games should adopt. "Oh, wouldn't it be nice if we could just skip the fighting and leveling and dungeon crawling?" It's like some galaxy-brain nonsense that makes it sound like actually playing the game is a inconvenience. To share a personal anecdote, I've struggled to try and get through the Baldur's Gate games. I finished the first one, but I still haven't finished BG2. I made it to the start of Chapter 6, but I think someone said that I was under-leveled and that I needed to do the other quests and part of Watcher's Keep dungeon before trying to tackle the last part of the story. I've given serious thought to just turning on the 'Story Mode' setting to just breeze through the last half of the game, but I'm still hesitant to do so (be it stubborn pride or whatever). As it is, it's sitting on my hard drive, taking up space. The thing is, I know it's more my fault than it is the game's. I'm still shocked that there are mods to make the game harder, because I struggle to make it through on Normal difficulty. It's a game where the combat is real in-depth with the range of classes, party members, and spells you have access to. Playing it on Story Mode doesn't sit well with me because otherwise, you're essentially cutting out the core of the experience. Now, in the case of Planescape Torment, the highlight of that game was it's writing, but I know that people who are fans of that game have said that the combat in it is terrible compared to other IE games. Because of that, I wouldn't feel bad about playing it in Story Mode.
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Jun 7, 2018 00:45
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ACES CURE PLANES posted:God of War has a less compelling narrative than the Burnout games. Get back to me when the Burnout games allow you to rip off Literally Crispin Freeman's head and use it as a flashlight.
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Jun 7, 2018 00:50
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nine-gear crow posted:Get back to me when the Burnout games allow you to rip off Literally Crispin Freeman's head and use it as a flashlight. You're acting like that scene is a good thing and not gross, mean spirited, and incredibly uncomfortable. Which is a good summation of God of War as a series tbh.
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Jun 7, 2018 00:52
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Roth posted:Dark Souls doesn't have a pair of funny dwarf brothers. andre is basically a very tall dwarf
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Jun 7, 2018 00:57
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ACES CURE PLANES posted:You're acting like that scene is a good thing and not gross, mean spirited, and incredibly uncomfortable. Oh, no argument there. God of War 3 is fantastically mean spirited and uncomfortable and basically destroyed interest in the franchise, but god drat did it burn itself into my brain with how amazingly over the top it went.
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Jun 7, 2018 01:01
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More games should leave a horrifying, lasting imprint. If the next CoD or Battlefield game manages to traumatize me as much as the knife scene in Saving Private Ryan it'll be 10/10. Ssssshhhhhhhhh
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Jun 7, 2018 01:03
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God of War 3 is interesting if you take it as the developers intended you to play as the villain. But, it's still a really dumb game. Like a really bad comic book. Which is why I'm pretty surprised I enjoyed the story of the new God of War as much as I did. It's like if somebody reinvented Spawn and made it was more interesting.
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Jun 7, 2018 01:04
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Max Wilco posted:To share a personal anecdote, I've struggled to try and get through the Baldur's Gate games. I finished the first one, but I still haven't finished BG2. I made it to the start of Chapter 6, but I think someone said that I was under-leveled and that I needed to do the other quests and part of Watcher's Keep dungeon before trying to tackle the last part of the story. I've given serious thought to just turning on the 'Story Mode' setting to just breeze through the last half of the game, but I'm still hesitant to do so (be it stubborn pride or whatever). As it is, it's sitting on my hard drive, taking up space. The thing is, old IE games were really targeted to an audience who had pretty good knowledge of 2nd ed AD&D as a prerequisite, and if you're not that context is kind of lost on you. I'm not saying you won't miss anything by excising the combat; for instance you'll lose small hints like "maybe I should try and resolve this peacefully because this fight is extremely hard and that means I probably shouldn't be doing it", but the game doesn't exactly intend for you to be soft-bewildered by a bunch of THAC0 and weapon classes and hit die min/maxing. CRPGs have never really had a great gameplay/story integration experience. Class imbalance especially also frequently gets in the way of conversations. Especially in older CRPGs where you have a limited number of points and combat skills and speech skills are competing. You also still get the gist of how hard a fight is on story mode because you'll see your characters getting hurt really fast and get a sense of how the enemies move or how long they take to kill. IE games are really at odds with themselves design-wise, and I'm not sure they're the best example of "a story mode cuts out the core of the experience." I think it's fine for people to want different things from the game. I never found BG's combat particularly entertaining despite beating it as a kid, it was always kind of a chore.
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Jun 7, 2018 01:05
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If a game is going to leave a horrifying, lasting imprint, it should do it in at least good and creative ways. So let's talk about Nier, then...
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Jun 7, 2018 01:06
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ACES CURE PLANES posted:If a game is going to leave a horrifying, lasting imprint, it should do it in at least good and creative ways. That isn't a horrifying imprint, thats a straight up depressing imprint 
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Jun 7, 2018 01:07
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Speaking of story vs gameplay, Angry Joe posted his review of Detroit: Become Human which is basically an interactive movie. The video is actually worth watching for the skits alone, they're genuinely hilarious. He seemed to like the game overall, as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiphSNWXIfM Our very own Dan Olson also streamed the game on Monday and, uh, didn't like it as much (mostly for how poorly the story handled its themes and the ridiculous parts of the game's worldbuilding, which Joe mostly glossed over).
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Jun 7, 2018 01:25
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Mr.Radar posted:Our very own Dan Olson also streamed the game on Monday and, uh, didn't like it as much You don't know how happy this makes me. Not because of his playthrough, but because I can make... THIS 
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Jun 7, 2018 01:33
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Linear Zoetrope posted:The thing is, old IE games were really targeted to an audience who had pretty good knowledge of 2nd ed AD&D as a prerequisite, and if you're not that context is kind of lost on you. I'm not saying you won't miss anything by excising the combat; for instance you'll lose small hints like "maybe I should try and resolve this peacefully because this fight is extremely hard and that means I probably shouldn't be doing it", but the game doesn't exactly intend for you to be soft-bewildered by a bunch of THAC0 and weapon classes and hit die min/maxing. CRPGs have never really had a great gameplay/story integration experience. Class imbalance especially also frequently gets in the way of conversations. Especially in older CRPGs where you have a limited number of points and combat skills and speech skills are competing. You also still get the gist of how hard a fight is on story mode because you'll see your characters getting hurt really fast and get a sense of how the enemies move or how long they take to kill. It did seem to me like you had to know some of the intricacies of 2E AD&D to make it through, since I think even if you go through the manual, I think it still doesn't make clear how things like the rock-paper-scissors-esque way in which magic defenses and penetrations work. I'm not sure what you mean by class imbalance and all, but in terms of conversation, I don't recall a whole lot of situations where diplomacy came up. The old Fallout games I thought did much better in letting you utilize non-combat skills to resolve quests, whereas in Baldur's Gate, Charisma feels a bit like a dump stat depending on the type of character you're playing. I find the combat to be a chore as well, but without it, it seems like most of the game would just be 80% shuffling around towns and dungeons. Heck, if there's no need to get stronger, there's no need to go through some of the dungeons, apart from maybe equipment. It also makes it feel like there's no purpose to picking a class, and figuring out its strengths and weaknesses. Maybe I need to actually try it and see it in action, but if you still have to slog through a fight, it seems like it would be faster to cheat and just insta-kill your opponents with console commands. Max Wilco fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 01:34
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Leal posted:You don't know how happy this makes me. Not because of his playthrough, but because I can make... THIS Dan Olson Producteur - Folding Ideas
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Jun 7, 2018 01:45
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Groovelord Neato posted:from's the only ones doing narrative correctly in games so yeah. they've legit ruined the medium for me. Maybe unpopular opinion, but while I love and respect the From games, the Wiki-dump read-every-tooltip method of worldbuilding slash storytelling is maybe not the model that should be adopted across the board.
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Jun 7, 2018 01:50
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FoldableHuman posted:Maybe unpopular opinion, but while I love and respect the From games, the Wiki-dump read-every-tooltip method of worldbuilding slash storytelling is maybe not the model that should be adopted across the board. Hard agree, but that might also be because I don't think the lore of those games is all that interesting in the first place.
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Jun 7, 2018 01:59
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FoldableHuman posted:Maybe unpopular opinion, but while I love and respect the From games, the Wiki-dump read-every-tooltip method of worldbuilding slash storytelling is maybe not the model that should be adopted across the board. I agree, but I also think that it's a very, very good fit for that whole "video game archaology" aesthetic they're going for, where you're kind of trudging around at the end of things. Too many games have adopted it without thinking, but in concept and execution I think it benefits the Soulsborne games.
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Jun 7, 2018 02:03
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I was always under the impression that FromSoft never put a great focus on the lore in their games. The story cutscenes and item descriptions always seemed like they were done as an afterthought, and that their main concern was making a RPG that played well, rather than telling a deep story. Regardless, the way it's presented and how you interact with characters make it so that the games have this weird, disjointed style to them, but in a way that makes it feel very surreal. Interestingly, one of the King's Field games did something similar where instead of it being on the item itself, you took it to a fortune-teller, and she'd give you some background about it. Max Wilco fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 02:22
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FoldableHuman posted:Maybe unpopular opinion, but while I love and respect the From games, the Wiki-dump read-every-tooltip method of worldbuilding slash storytelling is maybe not the model that should be adopted across the board. Yeah, it can make the player a very passive participant in the world, since the main interaction is choosing which lore snippet to read.
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Jun 7, 2018 02:38
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Max Wilco posted:I was always under the impression that FromSoft never put a great focus on the lore in their games. The story cutscenes and item descriptions always seemed like they were done as an afterthought, and that their main concern was making a RPG that played well, rather than telling a deep story. Regardless, the way it's presented and how you interact with characters make it so that the games have this weird, disjointed style to them, but in a way that makes it feel very surreal. this impression kinda implies that they were pretty successful implementing that style of worldbuilding, because it was very much an intentional design choice, miyazaki has talked about seeing english D&D books and fighting fantasy books with all the art and stuff that inspired him, but he couldn't read any of it, and had to kind of intuit a new story, which is something he wanted to capture for demon's souls and dark souls considering the way people talk about the lore and the way it's kinda theorycrafted, it very much feels similar to ways people talking about real world mythology, it's pretty rad
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Jun 7, 2018 02:42
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Remember. No Russian.
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Jun 7, 2018 02:43
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From software games are to normal RPGs as Paradox Games are to normal strategy games. While we probably don't need their level of obtuseness spread across the entire genre, it would be nice if there were at least a few more examples of their mechanical depth.John Murdoch posted:I mean, sure, if you ignore the many, many times champions launched underpowered and had to be patched to not completely suck. But I guess that just means Riot are both money-grubbing AND incompetent, right?
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Jun 7, 2018 02:57
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Groovelord Neato posted:games with bad gameplay are never a good thing. Silent Hill 2. FoldableHuman posted:Maybe unpopular opinion, but while I love and respect the From games, the Wiki-dump read-every-tooltip method of worldbuilding slash storytelling is maybe not the model that should be adopted across the board. 100% agree. 200%. The way the Souls games communicate and handle the direct story is great, but reading items for lore isn't any better than it is in the Elder Scrolls series. Although to be fair, I think games just need less lore period.
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Jun 7, 2018 03:15
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On being able to skip difficult sections of a game, God of War 3 had a feature where if you died enough times the game would just give you the option to switch to easy. The later Uncharted games even had a very easy feature for your friend who just wanted to play the fun interactive action movie game without having to figure out how to get good at the shooty parts. Just let players change the difficult at any time, and have some Baby Easy mode in there if you're concerned about a difficult part of your game alienating people. Edit: God of War 3 is like Avengers: Infinity War, except you play as Thanos and part two doesn't have the heroes defeat him. It just has Thanos get old, grow a beard, and have a kid. Conal Cochran fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 03:43
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Mark Brown had a neat video about Resident Evil 4's hidden adaptive difficulty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFv6KAdQ5SE
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Jun 7, 2018 03:47
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TGLT posted:Although to be fair, I think games just need less lore period.  Nothing worse than starting the game and the opening cutscene is one long blathering mess about how Proper Nouns were crucial to defeating Ominous Name at the Important Battle but in actuality it was all according to the plan of the Other Proper Nouns who had control of the Important Thing and... As someone with audio processing difficulties, it might as well be the Peanuts adults talking for as much as I absorb from that stuff and it's a 50/50 chance whether or not it actually matters once I'm in the game. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 04:02
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