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Thoughtless posted:The problem with Fallout 4 specifically doing that is that it's ostensibly an RPG, and in RPGs it's kinda important to not have dumb stuff forced on you, or it might ruin the whole RP aspect. It's a role playing game. You have a role to play. Ta da. Or: You are given a predicament, you are left to role play your way out of it. It's fine. Every game forces you into a story.
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Sep 11, 2016 15:13
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Somfin posted:Even I know not to engage with this line of argument. It's an unassailably pedantic stance based on a literal reading of the name of the genre. It wins by extracting all context and history from the terms. Turns out if you redefine every term in a discussion it's pretty easy to set up a win. Are people seriously shocked that developers pre-roll aspects of your character for you instead of either accounting for every tiny possibility or making the game more shallow by ignoring aspects of your character entirely?
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Sep 11, 2016 20:57
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CJacobs posted:As much as I agree with this, rewarding the player with nothing for any choice they can make, good or not, sucks rear end. In a competently made story, making characters happy / having a good resolution to a conflict should be a reward in itself. It would only become a problem if not getting the extra goodies made the game unreasonably more difficult, but the truth is most RPGs shower you in crap faster than you can shovel it out of your inventory, so... I'd also argue against not rewarding XP, since you should get experience for progressing through the game regardless of what you do.
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Nov 4, 2016 13:49
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RyokoTK posted:Except altruism done right is actually a really bad gameplay mechanic since, while I might help grandma clean her garage because it makes me feel good, I don't have any sort of empathy for video game grandma. See: Witcher. I actually often chose to reject rewards, because even if a quest concerned some stupid peasant and his chicken, the game went into enough effort to make me empathize with him. Bioware and Bethesda are just bad at this.
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Nov 4, 2016 13:52
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I hate it because I know there'll be a bug and the door will get stuck or the game will crash as soon as the elevator stops moving.
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Nov 8, 2016 15:13
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Tiggum posted:If laziness were the true answer, they'd just have said that there's no sexual dimorphism in Argonians and used the same model for males and females. I mean, character models are a pretty central part of the game, unlike ladders. When people cut corners, they do so on non-essential stuff. Also I'm pretty sure creating additional models for Argonians was not much work at all, since the framework was already there, and all the armor meshes were already skinned, they just needed to move around some bones in the character rig for the most part, I think.
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Nov 10, 2016 11:32
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Has there even been a Bethesda-dense sandbox, but with controllable vehicles in them, so you could just run over important NPCs by accident or by design? Uh, GTA?
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Nov 10, 2016 13:23
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Nuebot posted:I literally never did that quest because I just guessed the password because hosed if I'm putting effort into that. IIRC the right letters are the only ones that click when you press them. Also it's the most inept, hilariously embarrassing password ever. Even worse than https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke0nzpMIyNo&t=57s
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Jan 18, 2017 10:49
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In Fallout 3 they claimed that the virus erased all sexual characteristics of the mutants, which kinda renders all finer points of sterility moot. Also it doesn't really make sense. But then again, it is Fallout 3, so not it making any sense is to be expected.
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Apr 3, 2017 11:06
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She's obviously not autistic, but she's definitely a stroke survivor.
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Apr 5, 2017 20:22
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The GOG release of Arcanum works out of the box on all systems with no issues, and the UI etc. is much better than with games like the Baldurs Gates, so it doesn't really need a massive overhaul, imho. Just buy that, it is like always on sale for five bucks. Vampire is broken, but there the issues run much deeper than getting it compatible with modern systems - the whole implementation of the engine is janky as gently caress.
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Apr 11, 2017 22:02
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2house2fly posted:wtf! Lonesome Road has probably the best looking environments that engine was capable of producing, I was wandering around half the time gaping at the teetering edifices on the horizon, and at the end there's the Divide itself, a huge canyon that a city just fell into. Not to mention the places that open up if you launch the nukes at the end; finally a series about nuclear war actually has some scary nuclear impact zones. Lonesome Road has marginally improved urban ruins levels and some nice set pieces - filled with terrible bullet spongey enemies, with an insufferable antagonist constantly trying to chime in. I always liked open space areas better anyway.
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Apr 18, 2017 09:42
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Baldur's Gate 1 & 2: - I get it, you are trying to replicate DnD, but copying hundreds of spells into your game wasn't all that great. Especially when said spells are a pain in the rear end to differentiate because of the simplistic icons that portray them, when accessing spell description is burdensome, when you have to control spell casting for up to six characters at once, and when the combat AI isn't really very advanced and allows only very basic combat scenarios on which the robustness of the magic library is lost. In tabletop DnD I imagine the tempo is more relaxed, players only control one character, and the interpretation of rules and effects is left to the deliberation between players and DM, which makes the wide variety of magic sensible. But here, in a video game, having five hundred spells that have the same effect, except one affects only one creature, another one affects a radius of 10', another gives a slight penalty to saving throws etc. does nothing to enrich the player experience, it forces him to sift through piles of spells that will never be used to find those that are actually useful within the confines of the way the video game system is assembled. The spells should have been reduced to maybe couple dozens with meaningful distinctions. - If your spell effects are going to obscure the screen, you'd better come up with a way to properly highlight enemies who are lost under all those flashing lights, drat it. - I'm under the impression that DnD spells were designed for turn based combat. If you are making the game play as a real time RPG, to a large extent, it becomes really annoying to aim your spells because all enemies will have moved hundred meters by the time even a simple spell is done casting. This is made worse by any lack of indicators of range, visual obstacles, radii etc. that affect spell casting and spell effectiveness, which really has no reason to be omitted since you can graph that poo poo in a tabletop setting, or eyeball it - but not here. steinrokkan has a new favorite as of 07:38 on Apr 27, 2017 |
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Apr 27, 2017 07:33
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I know, I hardly ever let a combat play out for more than a second before pausing. The problem is that with all creatures acting concurrently and huge delays between player input and action, chaos tends to ensue and random factors then decide outcome.
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Apr 27, 2017 11:40
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STALKER: SOC In the final level there is a hole in the wall you must go through. The problem? Behind it is approx. dozen guys armed with the finest equipment in the game, capable of one-shotting you. And they are all at point blank range. And the whole area is heavily irradiated so if you try to take your time, you die of rad poisoning. And saves in this area seem to get corrupted so if you die, some of the enemies may spawn right behind you or next to you, removing all your cover. And the area is really claustrophobic so you can't retreat anywhere - if a guy comes charging at you through the hole, you must hope that you can kill him before you need to reload, which is not guaranteed even with top tier weapons - and sometimes the enemy can kill you even before you can empty a magazine into him. And if they throw a grenade into the room, you can hardly run away - and the escape route forces you to run straight across their field of vision. Also have I mentioned that armor in this game degrades - especially if you get hit by an explosion - and there is no way to repair it? So if you get hit a lot in this encounter, you will have to go through the rest of the map without even the little protection your armor offered at the beginning.
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Jun 13, 2017 12:43
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STALKER Clear Sky The first map that is supposed to introduce you to the setting and mechanics of the game is set in a... swamp. A drab, boring, flat swamp where you can barely see five feet ahead because of reeds growing everywhere, with snaking pathways surrounded by irradiated puddles that slow you down to a painful crawl. Whose idea was that? If this had been my first STALKER game, I would have abandoned it very quickly.
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Jun 15, 2017 09:41
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Guy Mann posted:The entire reason people were even able to discover it in the first place was because when the game went live on Steam they had uploaded a broken unfinished developer version with a bunch of beta and debug features still built into it, so at the very least they knew about it enough to remove the offending text from the official finished retail version that was distributed via other channels. They quickly and quietly patched the Steam release but by then it was already out in the wild and the damage was done. Those are just the first person animations working as intended, which are warped in pretty much in any game to look good in the player viewport. Same as the famous Mirror Edge "third person" camera where Faith becomes a rubber band woman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeA-386t38Q
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Jun 17, 2017 07:22
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STALKER: CALL OF PRIPYAT The ultimate weapon, which is also related to plot progression, is a futuristic sniper rifle with extraordinary damage per shot. Naturally all the final battles after you unlock this weapon take place in cramped, enclosed spaces against jittery enemies that will easily dodge your sniper shots and munch on you before you can reload.
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Jun 19, 2017 20:32
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bucketybuck posted:I recently played Call of Pripyat for the first time and was hugely disappointed with everything after getting to Pripyat itself. It's very much a running theme for these games that they have no idea how to tell a story and have it end in a satisfying way. Shadow of Chernobyl? At best you get a half-baked explanation of the Zone, otherwise you get a random nonsense cutscene that will make you confused. Clear Sky? This game literally has no ending. The final level was obviously put together in a frantic rush to get the game done on schedule. Call of Pripyat? There is a CRPG style ending with blurbs describing the fate of all factions and characters, but the main overarching plot remains where it was left off in the first game. You get more info on the backstory of a generic rifle than you get on any events pertaining to the Zone. STALKER games are great at making worlds that are fun to explore and full of atmosphere, but they suck when you run out of side missions and have to deal with the main missions. I was really looking forward to getting the calibration tools (which unlock the top tier of upgrades to equipment), but then it turned out that completing the game from the earliest point when you could get these upgrades barely involved any fighting at all. What a poor design. At least in Clear Sky I felt like a loving juggernaut walking through the final gauntlet with my fully upgraded HMG, cutting down waves of enemies with ridiculous ease. In Call of Pripyat I pretty much ended up fighting the same enemies I had been fighting since I left the first camp. steinrokkan has a new favorite as of 23:12 on Jun 19, 2017 |
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Jun 19, 2017 23:06
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Triarii posted:A bunch of games seem to make this mistake. You have normal vision mode and "can actually see poo poo" mode, and the latter comes with some "drawback" that mostly just annoys you, like making the game look ugly and desaturated or playing annoying sound effects while it's on. It means that the most efficient way to play Baldur's Gate and similar games is to use your heroes like a herd of pigs sent to clear a minefield so you can disarm the traps they set off quickly after reloading. Which is both annoying and also ruins MAH ImMeRsIoN
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Jun 23, 2017 09:18
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If you didn't like the characters, you won't like them in ME 2. However, the gameplay has been streamlined and stripped of the most pointless aspects, as well as generally de-janked.
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Jun 24, 2017 14:10
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Dragon Age I was the best tactical RPG in years (and there have been few better ones since) saddled with possibly the blandest, least engaging fantasy setting and plot ever. Shame that the sequels gave up on the gameplay, the one thing that made the game stand out, and decided it was the world building that made it successful.
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Jun 24, 2017 22:51
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The last Bioware game I played was DA Inquisition, and that one would barely count as a husk of a game if they took out the dating sim. They know this crap is cheaper to make than polished core gameplay, and that people will slurp it up.
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Jun 26, 2017 12:53
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Telltale TWD games suffer from the same problem as the TV show - it's so set to be grim dark that it becomes painfully predictable and uninteresting. After playing for a bit you just know that the story and characters are not allowed to have a moment of respite, god forbid happiness. So instead of following a story and wondering how it's going to turn out, you know ahead of time that all characters are going to die, all places are going to get overrun etc., etc. There's no real development, no arc, just an endless stream of contrivances with which the writers reset the whole thing every time it starts to get interesting.
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Jun 26, 2017 17:18
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Roleplaying is fine, but in Bioware and Bethesda games the creators seemingly go out of their way to take that possibility away from the player. I don't think the romance plots in Mass Effect games really connect to your main decisions in any meaningful way. Or if you try to roleplay as a renegade, you can at most be a petulant dick who whines but goes along with the flow anyway. Or in Bethesda games - you can blow up a town, or pretty much do anything you want to anybody in FO4, and the world refuses to change, to adapt to your attempts at being evil, even acknowledge it with more than maybe couple sentences if you are lucky. It feels like some sort of Christian parable almost, no matter how hard you hit the game world, it still turns the other cheek. So ultimately roleplaying boils down to a series of isolated incidents, the most notable of which are often romance threads.
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Jun 26, 2017 21:11
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New Butt Order posted:The nice thing about the faction DLC is that you only need to buy them if you want to play as them or play their mini-campaigns. Beastmen, Chaos, Wood Elves, etc. are all still fully fleshed out as AI factions for free. Nice thing? it means all you are paying for is switching the FactionPlayable variable from 0 to 1.
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Jun 27, 2017 11:45
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Have you considered that some people just don't find Simon Says with swords appealing
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Jun 27, 2017 15:56
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All soul games are dull and ugly
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Jun 27, 2017 18:58
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Byzantine posted:In Skyrim, New Vegas, and even Fallout 3 to an extent, you build a character and then bounce them off the world. Fallout 4 flat-out tells you who your character is. Hm, the defining moments of Skyrim for me all have to do with being unable to conform the world to your preferences, or vice versa in a way that would be logical or consistent. You can't work against the assassin guild if you miss one tiny opportunity, even though their quests are immoral. You can only ignore them. You can't fight the evil mead-making family, even though they also order you to murder innocents. You can only ignore them. You can't defy the Deirdric lords in their individual quests, you can only ignore them. Etc, etc. Player choice is effectively only a choice not to play parts of the game.
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Jul 7, 2017 09:35
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RagnarokAngel posted:Fallout 4's premise might have worked if the rest of the game didnt fail at being interesting. Someone else used witcher 3 as an example of what is essentially the same plot, a parent trying to find their child. But nobody gives it poo poo for that because the story hinges on an established character of literature. Fallout 4 doesnt have that to back it up and isnt nearly as compelling for it. And despite using pre-established characters, W3 still gives you a greater freedom in defining your own nuanced attitude to your quest, it in fact actively challenges you to think about your motivation and what finding your charge means for you. Instead of Me find baby, baby mine, baby good!
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Jul 7, 2017 11:19
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"HATE NEWSPAPER" -Pulitzer Award recipient John Fallout
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Jul 7, 2017 17:33
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New Butt Order posted:Divinity: Original Sin I don't remember 100%, but I'm quite sure you are wrong about the water example. The system is pretty obtuse and superfluous, just like any crafting system, but iirc it is pretty good about interchangeability of items, moving contents between containers etc.
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Jul 7, 2017 20:21
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In the Far Harbor DLC the android dude talks about how you don't remember anything from the pre-war era except brief moments immediately before the bombs fell, not even allowing the player to suggest that he might have created some sort of past for himself. It is taken for granted that the character as well as the player never entertained the possibilities of their background. I think that sums up the attitude of Bethesda to roleplaying going forward - if a thing didn't happen on screen, it doesn't exist. You aren't expected to have your own agency and fill in the blanks, you are expected to follow a series of cues and passively accept your character's scripted interactions as you do so.
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Jul 7, 2017 20:57
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It's ironic that as SSDs got cheaper, video game installs ballooned to such an extent that it's impractical to have more than one installed on an SSD at a time
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Jul 9, 2017 13:46
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I didn't have those problems, bye! The DOS combat isn't the most polished thing ever, but I don't remember having problems with lack of indicated information. You probably just need to get a feel for it. However, if you don't like the voice acting and the humor, which I thought were charming, you won't like the game anyway. As for missing quest markers - yes, that is a purposeful decision, since you are meant to explore, and quests are either really easy to solve once you come across the target, or you can figure your own solution for some of the more complex quests.
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Jul 27, 2017 07:22
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Gerblyn posted:Nah, he's right. The game doesn't warn you at all if you're going to move your character over dangerous terrain, it's very easy to accidentally walk over something like Ice or Electrified Water and have your character lose a turn, especially when there's a ton of particle effects everywhere from steam/smoke/fire/whatever. \oh right, now I remember I was frequently annoyed with ice because it's often hard to see if a surface is covered in it.
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Jul 27, 2017 12:18
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The Moon Monster posted:Just FYI you need to do a bunch of "run around and talk to people" quests in the first town or you'll be too underleveled to go to any of the combat areas. It sucks but there it is. Srguably though if your attitude is that running around in the town sucks, you will hate the game because running around and talking to people is its meat and potatoes.
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Jul 27, 2017 12:24
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You want to know the secret behind radiant quests? Todd needed something to give him an excuse for claiming exorbitant play times for his games. Enter Radiant, now every game is technically infinitely long thanks to the magic of repeating grind quests.
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Jul 29, 2017 22:04
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food court bailiff posted:Jesus Christ, I know you're Tiggum and you've got a reputation to uphold but you cannot possibly be this loving stupid. I'm not even talking about the story (although they were much, much better in DX and IW), I'm talking about the actual gameplay at the end of the game. In both the previous titles, the way you have to play the final level is massively different based on who you decide to trust/what plan you decide to enact. The choices all deal with the story and integrate well with the themes, but even ignoring that, they were dynamic and fun to play through more than once to see the different options. I haven't played HR, but I remember that in Deus Ex the ending depended quite literally on pressing buttons with different labels.
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Aug 3, 2017 16:41
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The thing dragging Tyranny down was that it ended the moment it was starting to get marginally interesting.
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Aug 4, 2017 10:39
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