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In Ocarina of Time there's a puzzle where you have to play the wind song to make a windmill turn. I got stuck on this until I found out you have to play the song inside the windmill. In Dark Souls 2 you have to burn a windmill at one point. I kept falling off and dying while trying to light the wooden blades on fire. Turns out you're supposed to walk up to the metal cylinder in the center and... uh, set it on fire? There's a cutscene with the big metal cylinder bursting into flames, it's really weird. I just feel like these games are penalizing me for having a rudimentary understanding of windmills man
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May 26, 2014 19:59
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scarycave posted:My Ico disc stopped working when I was trying to solve some windmill puzzle. Thanks, but that doesn't bother me, because it isn't flagrantly in violation of my (admittedly limited) knowledge of windmills.
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May 27, 2014 20:43
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Your Gay Uncle posted:Well you weren't a Big Daddy like in the first one, you were an Alpha Series. You are basically wearing a leather jumpsuit and an old diving helmet. Definitely not something that should be super fast, but nowhere near the hulking, armored monstrosity that the BS1 Big Daddies are. You actually fight a few in one of the levels and they go down pretty easy. I think one of the audio logs mentions how they decided to upgrafe the armor to iron, seeing as how the Alpha series went down fairly easily. Haha drat, the designers wanted to make more interesting choices, but they couldn't because, duh, you're an Alpha Series
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Jul 14, 2014 03:25
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mind the walrus posted:Yeah but video games are usually very spatial in their mechanics, and designing non-spatial conflicts and resolutions relative to good old fashioned spatial combat is really hard. Factor in how much more marketable, visually engaging, and presentable spatial conflicts are and it's kind-of a no brainer why developers go for combat so often in games. Yeah for real. Plus that kind of content emerges from the parameters of the game, but narrative content (dialogue, cutscenes, scenarios) has to be created by hand for all possible permutations and set in stone before the player ever gets there. I guess Dwarf Fortress procedurally generates its story but you couldn't do the same thing with every conversation voiced and everything presented cinematically. The amount of people you kill in those games does seem ridiculous. The thing is, they do offer other solutions a lot of times, but you naturally learn that fighting is usually the best way, because a) the only interaction that will always be available and viable, with any and every NPC, is killing them, and b) there's no NPC so dangerous that you can't get strong enough to kill them easily
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Jul 15, 2014 01:05
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Tiggum posted:No one's really saying all unlocks ever though. Like, no one wants to play Deus Ex: Human Revolution and be able to use all the augs immediately right from the start. But there are plenty of games that mainly exist to play against other people that have a single-player mode, and if you want to have all the options when playing against your friends then you have to play a lot of single-player. And that's bullshit. Or fighting or racing games where maybe you do want to play single-player, but not have to finish the story mode in order to access all the characters/cars/tracks/whatever. There were characters in the original version of Street Fighter 4 that had to be unlocked by beating singleplayer with every other character. Imagine being the guy who has to unlock everyone on every console for a big tournament like EVO or something. It'd be like those cartoons where Porky Pig smokes a cigarette and suddenly gets dragged down to cigarette hell and forced to smoke 1000 cigarettes
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Jul 30, 2014 17:49
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SpookyLizard posted:The PSX had a solid gamepad to begin with, but they added the sticks, and then didn't move the other face buttons to somewhere where you could use them AND retain use of the only really good thing about gamepads (the sticks). Face buttons and thumbsticks are both operated with your thumbs though. You only got so many thumbs. That's what the triggers are for.
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Jul 31, 2014 20:41
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That's a good post. I played Ultima 2 and didn't love it but one thing I appreciated was how the gameplay objectives were mostly open from the start (there are, what, two real progress gates? Getting the ship and getting all the stuff to enter the final dungeon?) and the story unfolded basically as like... the story of what I did in the process of getting those Marks, you know? It didn't feel like Final Fantasy or something where "grinding mobs" was this disconnected busywork that the characters pursued in silence between dramatic beats. Brogue and roguelikes in general do the same thing. Shadow of the Colossus does too though that's not an RPG. AngryRobotsInc posted:I think a lot of the weird lore in the background is sort of a hold over from ES's origins in tabletop RPGs. It's very easy to have this weird, awesome stuff when you're just describing it. Like the planes in D&D. Not so easy when you're trying to bring it across in a game. The lore that other guy just quoted was extremely visual and topographically descriptive though. It reads like it was written to guide game designers. Maybe it was, I mean whoever wrote that knew they were writing for a game.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:30
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Spooky Lizard I don't think a single person here disagrees with, or even doesn't already know, what you said about New Vegas. The contentious part is "more games should be like this instead of action set-pieces" and it's like, why, in what way are these things competing with each other, why shouldn't they be able to coexist
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Aug 7, 2014 21:16
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Strategic Tea posted:They joined the army, they turned to banditry, they're travelling to find their lost uncle. Give them that specific of a goal though, and it suggests there's some kind of normal life that they came from and will return to, which seems like it should be true but doesn't match up with the player's experience. I once read this article about how fantasy worlds have a weird ironic relationship to the "heroic" deeds that take place in them, because they're not designed for anything else. Especially in games, where the extraordinary stuff you do as the hero may be literally the only thing that happens in the world-- everything else is just referred-to, by canned dialogue or text or whatever. Expand this to the scope of something like WoW and heroic questing starts to look like some kind of digital sharecropping, to the point where players will literally farm their adventures out to Chinese sweatshops because they're just too loving boring. It's surreal. There's probably some kind of life lesson about how fantasy can't shoulder the burdens of reality but i'm not gonna try to think about it now.
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Sep 8, 2014 18:14
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I forgot how bad the actual fighting in Secret of Mana is. The unpredictable hit queue and weird invincibility frames and the fact that spells stop all the action and can't be avoided, okay, I remember all of that, but it's just absurdly sloppy on every level. So far I've fought two bosses (mantis ant and spiky tiger) whose non-magic attacks were all straight unavoidable too, not because they're flagged to be like magic but because there's simply no way to get away from them. After that, you have magic, so the problem doesn't really get fixed but you can steamroll everything until the final boss with pure attrition.
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Sep 18, 2014 01:35
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The tank fights in Peace Walker are too god drat long. I thought maybe they were balanced for multiplayer but the one time i found a co-op partner the number of enemies nearly doubled, so it's not that. There are four enemies "protecting" the tank at any given time, but they're actually useless and can barely see in front of their faces, whereas the tank commander has perfect sight and hearing. You can fight the tanks too but it's way unintuitive, it seems like the only way to reliably avoid their missiles is some kind of weird circle-strafing. Not cover, because they can just overshoot you and kill you with splash damage. It's frustrating
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Oct 1, 2014 19:11
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SpookyLizard posted:The trick to making the vehicle fights easier is to stealth the gently caress out of them. Sneakily stealth and capture every soldier, fulton them away (or let the tank roll them over), and then the tank commander will pop out in short order if you haven't been spotted yet. Then tranq him, and the mission is over. That's how i ended up doing it but the tank guy having perfect hearing and infinity vision range is still dumb. I guess it bothers me because the in-fiction reason for the troop escort is because you can't see very well from inside a tank, so to have it work the opposite way in practice just clangs. Same thing with how circle-strafing when the tank commander yells out his attack like he's in Dragonball Z is the right way to dodge the missiles; it makes perfect sense for a video game but your real-life knowledge is saying "no that looks way wrong"
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Oct 2, 2014 03:04
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DStecks posted:The problem with guards being too good at parkour is that it's pretty much the only workable solution to the design choices they made. They decided that parkour would simply be a matter of holding the parkour button and moving in a direction, which means that the very act of parkour is not engaging to the player, and this, I believe, is the critical mistake that belies the whole system. If parkouring from building to building is not in of itself a challenge, then some challenge must be introduced, since parkour constitutes the majority of playtime. It's the worst. I stopped playing that poo poo because everything that looked awesome or fun about it was actually so easy it was trivial, and the challenge came down entirely to tedious little details. This is so weird and bad and such a betrayal of the idea of play in favor of spectacle that I don't want to support it anymore
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Oct 15, 2014 18:39
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That feeling of pure badassery when your guy hovers across the floor like a roomba while rigor mortising into the form of a man in a leotard covered with ping pong balls stabbing the air with a dowel rod
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Oct 15, 2014 22:00
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TheSpiritFox posted:I know everyone hates Soul Memory and I do too, It causes an enormous amount of problems but mainly it's just so sloppy, so poorly considered, that it prejudices me to think of everything else I don't like about the game as stupid mistakes by people who didn't get it
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Oct 16, 2014 17:54
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Tiggum posted:The thing I absolutely hate about games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines or Dragon Age: Origins (all games I otherwise love and have played multiple times) is that I have to go on the internet to find out where all the side quests are because I don't want to miss any of them. It annoys the poo poo out of me that there can be a quest you never even know exists because you didn't talk to this one NPC or didn't pick up this item. If I'm enjoying the game, why would I want there to be bits I didn't get to play? I don't know man. For a game world to feel rich and reward exploration, there has to be good, interesting content in places where the player might not find it. I don't see why being able to learn about stuff that wasn't obvious on GameFaqs instead of having it served to you on a silver platter is the problem, rather than the solution.
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Oct 21, 2014 19:27
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It sounds like we're just playing different kinds of games. I was thinking about stuff like finding the hidden dock with the sniper rifle and killing The End early in Metal Gear Solid 3, which if the game pointed you towards it would defeat the purpose. But yeah if you're doing the Collect 100 Greebles missions in some open world game I can see how that's not fun. I would recommend not playing games that aren't fun to you.
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Oct 23, 2014 19:29
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Let's discuss who is good or bad with regard to what video games they like, as if you can't click over one forum and see that every single video game has a 500 page megathread filled with mouthbreathers who can't get enough of repeatedly posting the same opinions and jokes about the game they like (e.g. "[thing from video game] is a hell of a drug  ")
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Nov 5, 2014 19:35
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Are there any Ubisoft games (Rayman excluded) that aren't incestuously made? It seems their every major release has the same DNA: skill trees that hardly impact gameplay, a non-customisable DudeBro protagonist in a shallow sandbox that barely lets you influence the story, mandatory Uplay, egregious amounts of DLC and collectibles coming out of your ears. It really isn't necessary to ram so much optional content onto a disc as most players get bored of open-world box-ticking by the three-quarter mark. They kind of pioneered that style though, and it's working for them. I hope there's a backlash against this joyless, metric-driven monetization in games, but if that's all the AAAs offer and people keep buying them, welp v  v
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Nov 16, 2014 01:05
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RyokoTK posted:Haha what kind of Stockholm Syndrome nonsense is this? That's definitely a qualifier for this thread right here. The controls for the older games were this very idiosyncratic japanese action game style layout-- the first one came out before there was a standard FPS control scheme for consoles-- and the camera controls were set up like a more limited version of Mario 64. As innovations like dual thumbsticks and radial menus and that kind of thing became standard, the Metal Gear games started to incorporate them. That's why it's cool, if you play the games in order you see the same basic gameplay concept evolve over 20 years of changing industry standards. swamp waste has a new favorite as of 22:00 on Nov 20, 2014 |
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Nov 20, 2014 21:56
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Morpheus posted:What games are you referring to? Yeah I'm curious about this too. It seems like if a modern 3D action game had you dodging attacks by running away at full speed like an NES character it would look and feel super weird. Remember all the Double Dragon type beat-em-up games from the late 80s? When I play those now they feel really foreign cause most of the challenge is from trying to outmaneuver fast-moving things at a leisurely walking speed. Ninja Gaiden, the arcade one, is the only one I can think of with a dodge move and it makes a big difference.
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Nov 21, 2014 18:48
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I know what the dude is saying. Walking into the water temple especially it's like drat I am going to spend so much time laboriously swimming clockwise around these three floors of rooms that look identical on the map trying to remember WHERE the thing I just picked up somewhere else in the dungeon is supposed to go. A lot of the dungeons have nasty circuits of puzzle rooms that terminate in points of no return, even if you've solved the puzzles already, so you can end up backtracking because oh poo poo you were supposed to go through the left door instead of the right one or whatever and now the bars drop behind you and you're gonna have to backtrack to get to where you previously started backtracking and you begin to wonder what skill this is testing besides your ability to not lose focus while bored
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Dec 6, 2014 23:43
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oldpainless posted:you're in a village and you need a chainsaw to cut a chain That's kind of genius 
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Dec 14, 2014 20:05
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Mokinokaro posted:It wasn't really their fault: Square jumped in partway through develop and massively slashed the budget in favor of Final Fantasy VIII. Because we really needed THAT game, apparently. I don't know man, Xenogears is already twice as long as any other RPG from that era and insanely huge chunks of it are devoted to stuff that is not interesting or relevant to the story. This is a game with multiple hours of sewer levels, in which the antagonist (God, from the Bible) is introduced at roughly the 40 hour mark. I don't think this game was ever going to be finished until someone from corporate turned off the money faucet.
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Dec 18, 2014 19:17
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ArtIsResistance posted:I have strong feelings towards the actions of these fictional characters in children's entertainment. Very strong The thing is it's not supposed to be children's entertainment, there are hookers and exploding heads everywhere you turn. But the moral sophistication of video games is maybe not too high overall and lower still in a genre where you're playing as a spreadsheet with a disembodied gun arm. In regular fiction (or in life) you can't see all the paths the protagonist could have taken but didn't, and where they would have led. In a video game where you can do that, where being able to do that is a selling point, the designers have to "bake in" the results of all those choices, passing absolute judgment on which ones are more right or wrong than others. When you have a faction whose motivations are too despicable for the player to join in on-- i.e. since the game does not include rape or crucifixions as something the player can do-- it simplifies things but also makes the player's choices seem false or obvious. It's a balancing act for sure.
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Dec 26, 2014 03:05
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Sleeveless posted:To rub it in every time you grab a collectible Rex will make a quip like "Why am I collecting this crap?!" or "I'm collecting poo poo to unlock poo poo that I buy with more poo poo, how the gently caress does that work?!" or "At least I'm not collecting feathers." Haha great. (walking down a corridor) Protagonist: Why am I doing these bullshit activities? (discovering a side room with a shotgun and health items) Protagonist: Ha ha, yeah. As if. (shooting a zombie in the head) Protagonist: This is loving gay.
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Feb 12, 2015 02:19
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DrBouvenstein posted:In the vein of "Unnecessarily long tutorials sections," Twilight Princess holds a special place. For some reason they're REALLY adamant about not letting you do Zelda stuff until an hour or two into a new Zelda game. Maybe they wanna open up with a chunk of busywork to let kids who are new at it learn how to move around fluently in 3D but man for everyone else I truly can't see the appeal of delivering groceries for 90 minutes before they give you the sword Nuebot posted:I think I have a new least favorite thing in pretty much any game ever. Random critical hits. Crits can be cool if you get them for hitting a weak point, or if you have a skill that gives them to you. But when I lose a fight because the RNG just decided to give the enemies a string of random blows that destroyed me, or if I win a fight literally just because I got lucky. It takes the fun out of the game. I don't like it when my game is decided for me purely by luck. This I kind of get though, at least in turn-based rpgs. There's not much play or dynamism in those games, there needs to be a certain randomness to move the excitement level closer to gambling than to math homework
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Feb 18, 2015 01:30
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Curdy Lemonstan posted:Skyrim is like a klepto-simulator. Its all about sucking up endless amounts of lesser soul gems and coins (32) and metal bars and everywhere you go you clean the place. Go through every bookcase. An infinite amount of everything, the game is like a cycle. Yeah What's that video where the guy is showing his mom how to play Skyrim and she's like "why does it keep telling me to steal everything?" On one level it's funny that she confuses an instruction for a command but on another it shows how the only freedom the open world offers you is the freedom to steal everything and kill everyone, to double down on the solitariness of your video gaming pursuit and act with total disregard for even these little virtual furniture-people who exist solely for your entertainment. This actually bums me out if i think about it but i'm not sure why
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Mar 1, 2015 21:07
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The Blue Pyramid posted:What I really loved about Far Cry 3 was the sheer amount of things there are to do in the world that are completely unrelated to the story. The game has 180 little statuette things to collect that are in no way shape or form necessary to the game itself. Yet if you took the time to explore and find all of them, you ended up seeing all these things the developers put into the world that made it really feel like a living open world. Villages, shacks, mountaintop shrines, caves, grottos, secret waterfalls, all this awesome stuff that most players would never find, that are completely independent of the story, and that help populate the world and give you plenty to do and explore even if you've done everything else already. I really felt Far Cry 3 did open world right, and I'm curious when I finally get 4 to see how it compares. See I'm just the opposite. To me the game world only feels as big as it is dense with meaningful gameplay stuff to do. Like Mario 64 or Dark Souls feels "bigger" to me than an actual open world, because all the optional stuff is as well-crafted and gamelike as the main game. Exploring a huge open world to collect all the greebles because that's the only thing you can do there feels somehow bad to me.
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Apr 5, 2015 19:58
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poptart_fairy posted:Sure, actions and words have consequences but I just find it hilarious how ridiculously heavy handed and disproportionate it is next to the other stuff you can do in the game. I get it though. Video games are mostly made by and for middle class technophiles and the more they try to flesh out their world the clearer you can see that. Truly bad things happen to other people, who aren't so important, and the player tends to have Letters to the Editor sort of moral quandaries where the question is really "what kind of dude do you want to see your character as." it makes sense that a game would punish saying something that would get you in trouble with HR at the game company much harder than doing something that is too monstrous for a guy who has the wherewithal to make videogames to connect with his own experience of life. I can't really talk poo poo because when game morality gets too close to reality, where being moral really IS disincentivized bigtime, it can be legit stressful. Like Papers Please or that conquistador game, where if you try to do the right thing the game is absolutely willing to go "OK cool, you lose then"
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Apr 14, 2015 02:45
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Alignment can be great for a collaborative story, like a D&D campaign, exactly because it is so loaded and so ambiguous. It gets people into character, they start developing their own goals and motives, there's friction, stuff happens. No kidding there's no objective definition; it's about how the player wants to think about their character. The same things that make alignment work in the format it was created for make it a bad fit for the very different format of video games.
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Apr 16, 2015 04:38
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It's important in game design that an optimal strategy not be boring or trivial. I think singleplayer sandbox type games can get away with breaking this rule because that's kinda what the audience is there for? But Persona is all about using tactics that protect your weaknesses and attack the enemy's and if a thing just lets you bypass that, well, that seems bad.
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Apr 20, 2015 02:01
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Cleretic posted:If that bit wasn't a leadup to the introduction of the best party member in the game, I would hate it unequivocally. I still don't know what the point of it all was, it's a complete non-sequitir that only exists so that Ultros can reappear, and Setzer gets a welcome. And it's not like Setzer couldn't have turned up in some other way; he's the Wandering Gambler, not the Wandering Opera Fan. I mean what's the point of anything. No time for charming little moments of humanity, we have to grease the gears of whatever gay rear end plot has been propped up like a fence made of broken pallets around the necessity of fighting monsters for 30 hours before the credits roll
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Apr 23, 2015 01:59
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zidane13 posted:Isn't that how a game is supposed to be? I hope not
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Apr 25, 2015 20:59
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RyokoTK posted:So, shoddy programming? No it's like when you get into a big chase in GTA and the action develops as the AI responds to what you do, as opposed to one of the regular missions where someone sat down and planned out where all the cops and cover and event flags were going to be.
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May 8, 2015 03:20
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It does seem weird to complain about pandering in a game where you're the biggest badass in the world and you walking around solving everyone's problems with violence because you can always win any fight.
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May 27, 2015 02:09
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See I liked that those places were self-explanatory. I don't need or even want a whole thing of "lore" explaining why the snow-covered coal mining town in the mountains has steam heating pipes everywhere. If a thing is there in the game for you to experience I don't see the need to recapitulate that in text too.
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Jun 12, 2015 21:11
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mind the walrus posted:You know I only remember you even exist when I see you making a smarmy comment about me or some other poster. Do you just haunt my post history waiting for opportunities to be a dingleberry, or are you naturally that much of a bottom-feeder? You're constantly in video game threads saying really obvious poo poo in a long-winded, spazzy yet condescending way. I think more than one person has noticed this.
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Jun 23, 2015 20:55
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Krinkle posted:I really did not respect the overarching threat of caesar in new vegas I thought centurians were pointlessly silly like goddamn. Did you have to scrape the barrel so deep for fascist imagery? Roman helms would probably be very hard to make and be pointlessly hot to wear in the desert. Unless you raided a wax museum of literally only ancient rome why would you ever make ancient rome your new gang's "thing"? If you're gonna clash themes with my post apocalyptic adventure so loving badly at least make it worth it. The whole thing felt like a history major was constantly elbowing me in the ribs expecting me to get references to rubicons and ides of march but I didn't see any references so it was doubly frustrating as my innate sense of inferiority made me wonder if I knew history better I'd appreciate this more. Its a joke about caesars palace in vegas
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Jun 30, 2015 20:42
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Though now that i think about it the extent of the joke is 100% clear at the first second you encounter them, and from there on out it's wikipedia level trivia about rome til the credits roll so that is kind of annoying When you research something for writing fiction there's a high risk of being bowled over by how much cooler and more complex the real thing was than whatever cornball story you were thinking you were gonna do. It takes some restraint to build out your own ideas on that framework instead of just dumping it all into your script and realizing after it's too late that google search replaced your creative process halfway though e: Dark Souls transcended this problem by attaching every discrete thing in the game to a wiki page of itself, which is okay I guess swamp waste has a new favorite as of 20:50 on Jun 30, 2015 |
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Jun 30, 2015 20:47
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