samIamsad on 18/8/2017 at 17:43

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Yeah the second one oft spoilt it a bit. When I first heard about this my head went wild and my thoughts approached this from a more realistic/simulation perspective as well. The Alien freely traveling the station, and you being able to evade it for significant portions of the game, in essence, less scripts, more simulations. Of course in retrospect the game's story justifies it all somewhat that it nearly always hangs around, but in line with the actual (first) movie this is based upon, the Alien wasn't actually on-screen for very long. It's that tension of knowing it's there somewhere, and it could pop up anytime. Problem is that such a design probably could not carry a 10-20 hours game, just getting teased and teased, but I'm that sort of weirdo that would still completely buy in to that. :D (Probably one of the few, sigh). As for the first point, there is still a game based on Aliens to be made here where that balance could be struck, whilst being more faithful to that movie's fiction as well. Without turning to the running and gunning you get from Aliens inspired games typically (last time I saw that movie, it wasn't about Marines kicking butt, but getting their butts kicked, the games miss that completely). Unfortunately, the prospect of any kind of follow-up are slim.



Seeing those oft misleading trailers too makes you cringe, because they make the games look just like that. Kill counts, explosions and over the top stuff everywhere... it's so juvenile. It's the ultimate gaming paradoxon perhaps, it's only the big loud and "dumb" games that oft really justify significant budgets and those which tend to fall somewhere in between are being sold like it. You don't have that anywhere else to this degree in my opinion. The entire crowd funding movement seems to have slowed down a bit, but maybe same as Obsidian there is space for doing different projects of different scope... they are doing their big stuff whilst doing their crowd funded games at the same time, and oft there is a bit of an overlap between audiences, such as when guys who'd never played a "Baldur's Gate"-like get to experience something a bit different, and enjoy it. Does Arkane even have a proper "community" by the way?

samIamsad on 18/8/2017 at 21:25

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Looking forward to it, because that looks like a pretty bright future. The lesser developers or those holding onto nostalgia would naturally ape every single element for all the wrong reasons, never understanding the original intent. Like the majority of adventure game developers, for which making a Point and Click™ has trumped being awesome, partying like it's 1990s whilst forgetting that the standouts of the day such as the first King's Quest were in the context of their time (!!!) perhaps amongst some of the first graphical "3d" open world exploration games ever conceived, etc. Only if you go fully-on retro charming would a successor to Police Quest still play 1:1 like back in the day, rather than perhaps similar to L.A. Noire with a few more brains. It speaks to reason that early 1990s tech placed quite a few limitationsalso on LGS. If you mean "character interaction" with "social interaction", that's perhaps a good example. One of the core reasons why LGS did away with much of dialogue to begin with post Underworld was that they felt dialogue trees of that era wouldn't cut it as far as character/social interaction was concerned, so for System Shock they killed all the guys you could meet off before the game had even started.

Out of that was born the now infamous audio log, which (slightly adjusted) still holds together quite a few nuts and bolts in "Prey" -- some 25 years later (and it still works well in particular on that scenario, but it's still threatening to become formula, and the challenge of possibly better systems not getting tackled.) [If that sounds like criticism, play PREY, because that future isn't here yet, it really isn't, it's also a really good game worth playing]. :angel: If there's a lesson to learn here it's that you never repeat, always surprise, think out of the box and don't shoehorn all the ideas to tightly fit into some "stupid-ass labeled" box before you even start -- in particular if that box is that tiny it barely managed to hold your grandfather's 80386 DX/33 and is attracting increasingly more cob webs rather than still being much relevant. With that mindset, games like Thief or Shock would have never been conceived, turning the world of gaming upside down as they went along. For studios such as Arkane, one day marketing games as the "spiritual successor to X" may lose meaning or pulling power, as even back in the day, those games were neither Doom nor Half Life, as influential as they were also for a generation of then to come developers.

icemann on 19/8/2017 at 04:52

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I thought Fallout's system (not counting Fallout 4) was quite good, where you have a general selection of dialog + extras that would only be available if you met certain requirements (eg having a certain perk, having a skill level of something etc etc).

Shadowrun Returns also used this style of conversation system to good effect.

Pyrian on 19/8/2017 at 16:54

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Is that really anything other than "dialog tree with a extraordinarily terrible way of picking your option"? The old text parser dialogs certainly worked that way (ref Ultima IV+).

Nameless Voice on 19/8/2017 at 19:27

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I think Pyrian was referring to microphone-based conversations, not to the improved conversation trees that FO:NV and V:TM:B use.