nicked on 27/7/2023 at 18:22
I think the issue is not so much how much agency the player has in any given game, rather it's the way it's sold. If you sell a game as "Your choices really matter and make a difference to the outcome!" and then they inevitably don't really, it's underwhelming. More honest marketing would solve that problem.
Starker on 28/7/2023 at 07:08
It's tricky, though, since a lot of game design is smoke and mirrors. You essentially have to trick the player a little bit to make the game conform to player expectations of how things should feel like. It's like the game stretching a jump just a little bit further to reach a ledge, even if the physics would dictate the player should fail. It just feels much better to play and people don't notice the cheating anyway, though they might get angry later, if they found out about it. Valve in particular is a master of a lot of these little moments, like making the soldier enemies in Half-Life behave far more convincing than even some of the far more sophisticated AI enemies today by some clever scripting and voice lines.
And it's not a lot different with storytelling -- for example, a suggestion that your choice matters when it really ultimately doesn't might come to bite you in the ass later, but in The Walking Dead it's also a significant part of making the moment to moment storytelling work by having it as a sort of a framing device when you're dealing with Clementine and the various group dynamics. "Clementine will remember this" is not really a promise that things will have consequences, it's more like a non-diegetic reminder that you're being observed by this character, adding some extra weight on the things that you do. And sure, some people will feel betrayed when it turns out to not matter all that much in the end, but that's all in retrospect. For a lot of people it works for what it does and some people will even put in extra effort to make it work, building basically their own world out of scant clues and suggestions, with the result being far more impressive than even the designer intended.
EvaUnit02 on 30/7/2023 at 05:38
I've taken a gamble and pre-ordered that (
https://store.steampowered.com/sub/886314/) MGS "remaster" collection for Xbox as a gift for my more normie friend. The PC version already sounds like it'll be a lazy ported, minor dumpster fire, but hopefully the console versions turn out okay. Aside from the Steam page advertising a lack of KB+M support, there's also been rumblings of ports only displaying at default rendering resolution. The latter is BS that can be fan-modded within like a day, but that means such a lazy product shouldn't be financially supported at anything beyond a steep discount.
I bought the Batman Arkham trilogy for Xbox digitally, for the same friend. Return to Arkham remasters of the first two games do sound like messes: 30fps for Arkham Asylum, 45fps for Arkham City w/ frame pacing issues. Apparently at launch they were 60fps, but were quickly capped to 30fps in an early patch cuz the Xb1/PS4 family of consoles weren't powerful enough for them or something. Thus an unpatched physical copy is the best way to play these, since the current gen consoles can easily play them through BC. I can't be bothered, my friend says he can't even tell the difference between framerates anyway.
Arkham Knight is stuck at 900p/30fps on Xbox. No XbSeries BC emulation voodoo that boosts framerates or resolution sadly. For no given reason Arkham Origins is only BC through a physical copy on Xbox. The game is still sold digitally on PC to this very day, I wonder what the console roadblock is?
mxleader on 30/7/2023 at 06:25
I must be getting old because I went back to just playing Thief series fan missions from the early days and some of the new releases. I was playing a lot of GTAV but every new thing is just more of the same.
henke on 30/7/2023 at 11:04
How do you do, fellow olds? I am too playing a Thief 2 FM, The Matriarch, released earlier this year. Really cool 3-part mission with good storytelling and some unexpected twists and turns.
Also playing Far Cry 6, which is certainly just "more of the same", but it's a very satisfying "same".
Jason Moyer on 30/7/2023 at 17:26
I've been playing Grim Dawn finally. So far I'm enjoying it, as far as mindless clicking and looting goes. Mechanically it improved on Titan Quest, which already had a pretty great character system, but I massively prefer TQ's "fighting mythical monsters in ancient Greece" setting and kinda wish they had done something that inspired with this, instead of the usual Diablo "evil is afoot" thing. Then again, stuff dies in a pleasing way and I'm getting just enough green and blue loot to keep the dopamine chugging. I can't remember if TQ had this issue, but it's hilarious how much boss enemies telegraph their attacks. I just beat some guy around 8 levels higher than me by spamming AoE defensive stuff on my RMB to slaughter his trash mobs and then clicking about an inch to the side every time he wound up to fire a spell at me. I guess it beats the usual thing where I just hold the mouse button down until they die because I can deplete their health faster than they can mine, but it still feels kinda silly.
WingedKagouti on 30/7/2023 at 22:17
Currently playing Remnant 2, which is basically more of Remnant with some tweaks to how classes work. The shooting feels much the same, as does the melee combat. My current thoughts are something like:
"Get it if you liked the first (when the price matches your wallet). But if you didn't like the first, you're not going to like the sequel."
Thirith on 31/7/2023 at 07:31
Since I'm about half an hour away from finishing Trek to Yomi, I finally gave in to my urge to start an RPG: Divinity: Original Sin 2. And my first impression is... not that great? I can definitely see the potential, but I kinda dislike the game's use of isometric perspective together with the way its graphics early on are surprisingly indistinct from that perspective and the clutter that the early environments have. I'm finding it quite difficult to distinguish which characters and what objects might be relevant - which can be fine, because I don't want quest givers to have big glowing exclamation marks floating over their heads, but if I can't even tell from looking at them whether this is a character I've already talked to or not, it's not ideal. It also doesn't help that with one pretty important early character I can easily start a conversation that ends with unavoidable combat, for reasons that I couldn't anticipate in any way, nor could I get out of the conversation. Then there's the thing that I don't feel like I have much to go on with any of the quests early in the game: for instance, I'm supposed to look into the theft of some goods, and I can ask a bunch of people *one* question, but none of those questions tell me anything more, so I basically default to randomly clicking on everything and everyone available to me, in the hope that something will work.
I don't want the game to give me tons of quest markers and hold my hand... but some guidance in the first hour or two would be good, if only to get used to how the game works. Give me a reasonably clear quest to ease me into things, give me leads that I can follow up on, and don't give me drastic and unavoidable consequences early on, because it makes me distrust the game. Should I talk to this NPC? I might end up killing them in a scripted conversation that I have no influence over.
Renault on 31/7/2023 at 15:09
I finally got around to playing Oxenfree on my Steamdeck while on vacation last week, I thought it was pretty good. Some of the dialogue options got a bit excessive at times, and often you really just wanted to get through them as quickly as possible to move the story along. It'd be interesting to play through it again at some point and see how making some different choices would actually affect the game and the ending. Cool thing is it's short enough that you can do that without much hassle. But overall the voice acting was good, and the plot had some cool freaky/scary stuff that kept my interest throughout.
Also, just wanted to mention that Oxenfree 2 (which just came out about 2 weeks ago) is available on Netflix, so basically free if you're already a subscriber. I had no idea that Netflix was doing games these days. You are forced to play on a mobile (tablet/phone/etc, no PC or TV), but it's a nice plus knowing it's an option if you want to check it out.
henke on 1/8/2023 at 12:49
Playing the Heavenly Bodies DLC, which has you rebuilding a damaged space station over 7 days. What could I possibly say about it that'd explain it better than just looking at it. Just look at how this baby MOVES!
[video=youtube;uxncjwQCvxs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxncjwQCvxs[/video]
