Sulphur on 27/7/2023 at 02:32
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
It really wasn't a looter shooter since there's not any loot. Like, the moment to moment gameplay is basically a modern hitscan shooter with level design instead of a big corridor. I'd give the singleplayer a 7/10, the only real issue I had with it aside from the aforementioned hitscan aspect (which is why I'll always prefer games like Descent, Quake, Hexen II, Amid Evil, etc) was the stupid enemy levelling, but in general it was unobtrusive enough that it didn't bother me. If I found an area I couldn't deal with I just went and did something else. And speaking of unobtrusive, the story is "we're in Paris looking for our dad, while we're here let's shoot Nazis because that's fun" which is the best story ever put into a Wolfenstein game. And, unlike TNO, the hub base isn't sprawling and annoying to navigate.
Ah yeah, that's fair - I remember
feeling like it was a looter shooter, but that was because we kept looking for the collectibles and grinding the repetitive side missions. Part of why I don't rate the game for SP is that it gets samey fast; it's not got a lot of levels, it's just the same loop over and over again without a lot of variety, and this is easier to ignore when you've got someone to yuk it up with.
Hard disagree on the story, it's not the best
anything, but it's okay for what it is, irritating characters and all, and great at 'might as well not exist', which is fine if you prefer it to get out of the way ASAP.
Pyrian on 27/7/2023 at 04:54
Quote Posted by Tomi
I finished the game yesterday and I'd sort of like to play it again already, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea. Pentiment tells a great story and it at least gives you an impression that your actions make a difference, but do they
really? Or is it just an illusion? Do I want to break that illusion? No. :D
My silly proposal for a terrible game plot: Have a bunch of "Important Choices", but whatever you choose, the opposite ends up actually happening (or at least something radically different from what you were intending, but still different depending on what you chose). So the whole game feels like you're being railroaded, but it's actually expansive as heck.
Sulphur on 27/7/2023 at 05:11
Eh. For Pentiment specifically, being rail-roaded makes narrative sense because you're never in possession of all the facts, while someone else is (mostly). The expansiveness is there to make your playthrough feel like certain things do change because of your involvement while you don't, at the same time, break the plot.
As an aside, I disagree with the general sentiment that all games that have interactive stories should make you feel like you have agency over the plot, because there should be space for experiences that aren't just exercising your agency to optimise towards a power fantasy or an 'I made all this stuff happen' conclusion.
Pyrian on 27/7/2023 at 06:01
Quote Posted by Sulphur
As an aside, I disagree with the general sentiment that all games that have interactive stories should make you feel like you have agency over the plot, because there should be space for experiences that aren't just exercising your agency to optimise towards a power fantasy or an 'I made all this stuff happen' conclusion.
I'm not sure I'm grasping this. I feel like I live in a world where the percentage of interactive stories that make
me feel like I have any agency whatsoever over the plot are a small roundoff error away from zero. Further, I feel like the vastly more common power-fantasy archetype is tangential; almost every game that uses it, has an almost entirely fixed plotline despite the fact that the player's own actions are supposedly driving that plotline.
Sulphur on 27/7/2023 at 06:10
I didn't say that they do this - I said that people want it. If you read the average Steam review, the usual metric anyone complains about in an interactive story is some flavour of 'my choices didn't make a real difference in what happened', which isn't as important to whether the story is any good or not. It's easy to see that as an extension of their expectations from most other video games, where everything you do is keyed towards the end state of 'winning' the game through your actions.
But you don't win a story, because you don't or can't always optimise towards a 'best' outcome; that disconnect is something people don't grok or like. To which I say, maybe they have misunderstood what stories are.
Pyrian on 27/7/2023 at 06:40
Quote Posted by Sulphur
I didn't say that they do this - I said that people
want it.
But I'm not taking issue with that part, I'm taking issue with the "all games" part. You can't meaningfully talk about "there should be space for" in a world where there's nothing
but space for that. People would like at least
some decent number of games with plot agency, and right now there doesn't seem to be much room for
that.Sulphur on 27/7/2023 at 07:10
That's a matter of definition - when you say plot agency, there's ways to describe it that can be ridiculously granular depending on the kind of game. For simplicity's sake, the platonic ideal that I see people imply is, 'I can make decisions that can completely change where the story goes', which is essentially asking for a) an increasing, exponential number of outcomes from ever-expanding, hierarchical decision trees, or b) authorship or authorial collaboration or c) a combination of both. If this is indeed what you're talking about, then that's clearly impossible to sate unless the creators are generating the game on the fly with your input. Since not all of us have access to a DM at every moment of the day unless it's an agent like AI Dungeon, interactive stories scope accordingly and account for what they feel is the best end experience. Most of them are great at giving you the illusion of agency, which is the best compromise to be made given resources generally available, and is where most developers go.
What I'm talking about is that there should be space for games that don't really care about giving you that illusion, because it shouldn't be that important. Many times you can go ahead and make choices, and you don't have any power over what happens anyway; that's how it goes in life, and games don't need to coddle people over their lack of control, perceived or otherwise.
But let's say we still want higher agency: while you can't realistically have a game that's all about that moment in Witcher 2 - where based on a single decision the entire next chapter changes - this has still been done to varying degrees, with varying results, and the best example I can think of is Alpha Protocol, of all things. It's got a ridiculous amount of reactivity to your choices, but it's also got a plot that's designed to hotswap characters in and out based on what you did, which flavours the narrative accordingly. AP didn't do well for various reasons, but Obsidian also never went back to that kind of game, and I'd expect that's at least partly because it was a ridiculous enterprise to work through. But in the end, while I liked AP's reactivity, I can't say that the overall narrative quality was strong. There are clearly choices that give you better outcomes but worse stories, and vice-versa, and in the long-term that variability just makes for an incoherent experience at worst and an inconsistent one at best.
Thirith on 27/7/2023 at 08:24
On the topic of games, plot and agency, I have to say that the stories I remember most strongly are generally not the ones that focus on me, the player, making momentous decisions, but the ones that lean into relationships more. The Walking Dead has been criticised for offering the illusion of agency while destroying it five minutes later (you spare character A and sacrifice character B, only for B to die anyway five minutes later), but at its best this still worked well for me: in this scenario, B dies specifically because of what I've done, which changes how I feel about the characters, including my own. When done well, these decisions feel more meaningful to me than whether I side with faction A or faction B, leading to an entirely different next chapter: the latter often just feels like the game locking away content, it feels mechanical rather than like actual agency, especially since it feels like the game urging me to replay that decision and do the other thing so can experience the entirely different version of chapter 2 and get my money's worth. By comparison, the small choices that don't change anything major feel more real to me, I own them more.
On a different note: is it just me or does Trek to Yomi control kinda badly? With the gameplay they're aiming for, Trek to Yomi should be like the best of the old-school arcade games in terms of button-presses, timings and results, but somehow it feels like my button presses are interpreted as vague suggestions by the game. Perhaps it's not even the controls so much as how everything plays together: animations, sound effects, the tells the game employs that now you should do this. If everything came together more tightly, this would be so much more fun, but as it is playing Trek to Yomi feels like a chore you have to complete in order to enjoy the visuals and the atmosphere.
Sulphur on 27/7/2023 at 10:46
Quote Posted by Thirith
On a different note: is it just me or does
Trek to Yomi control kinda badly? With the gameplay they're aiming for,
Trek to Yomi should be like the best of the old-school arcade games in terms of button-presses, timings and results, but somehow it feels like my button presses are interpreted as vague suggestions by the game. Perhaps it's not even the controls so much as how everything plays together: animations, sound effects, the tells the game employs that now you should do this. If everything came together more tightly, this would be so much more fun, but as it is playing
Trek to Yomi feels like a chore you have to complete in order to enjoy the visuals and the atmosphere.
No, it's not just you. It's oddly fiddly, so you tend to rely on a few moves in the end that turn out to be reliable-ish. I don't think they had arcade games in mind necessarily, because (
https://gamerant.com/trek-to-yomi-interview-flying-wild-hog-classic-samurai-cinema-homage-tribute/) they subtracted elements like jumping based on how much they wanted 'authenticity' to samurai movies guiding the combat design.
Thirith on 27/7/2023 at 11:27
Even if they didn't want to go for an arcade feel, the one thing I most associate with the samurai classics I've seen is the precision of the combat. There's also the other side, especially in Seven Samurai, the chaos and unpredictability, but Trek to Yomi neither has the precision of the former nor does it have the visceral feel of the latter. "Fiddly" really describes it well, and I don't think that it works particularly well for the game.
